The Heritage of Meaning: From Bisociation to Biosemiotics

I still remember my first encounter with Arthur Koestler's idea of bisociation. I was deeply immersed in humor research at the time, trying to understand why certain jokes work, why a punchline surprises us, and why incongruity triggers laughter. Humor scholars had long written about incongruity, but Koestler gave that phenomenon conceptual clarity that struck me: the idea that creativity, humor included, emerges when two previously distant frames of reference meet. Two matrices collide, and the connection sparks something unexpected. That spark may be laughter, but it may just as easily be insight, creativity, or a new way of seeing.

Bisociation, I realized, was not just a theory about humor. It was a way of understanding meaning itself.

As I worked on humor, the questions I cared about grew larger and more layered. I found myself drawn into semiotics, to the study of how signs create meaning, how humans interpret their world, and how communication works beyond the words themselves. Semiosis fascinated me because it mirrored what Koestler described, the meeting of systems, the weaving together of modes of perception and interpretation. And then, almost by accident, I stumbled onto a field that felt like a hidden library tucked behind the known ones: biosemiotics.

Biosemiotics widened every frame. It suggested that communication is not an exclusively human phenomenon, but a living, ecological one. Trees communicate. Fungi communicate. Seaweed interprets currents, light, and salinity. Species exchange signals constantly, participating in ancient, adaptive dialogues we rarely notice. Signs are not the privilege of human language because they are the foundation of life.

Suddenly, Koestler's bisociation wasn't simply about humor anymore. It became a conceptual bridge: a way of understanding how meaning jumps between worlds, how one domain can illuminate another, how life interprets life. Humor was merely the doorway into a world that could so easily escape me.

Around the same time, I began to understand heritage more deeply, not as an academic topic, but as something lived, embodied, inherited, felt. Growing up in Romania, surrounded by landscapes shaped by the Danube, the Carpathians, the Black Sea, and centuries of pastoral movement, heritage was never an abstract word. It was in the rhythm of the seasons, in the foods, gestures, folklore, migrations, and everyday practices that memories were carried across generations. My grandfather's work on the endangerment of the sturgeon species, his research, his connection to the river, and his collaboration with Jacques Cousteau were their own kind of heritage, a link between ecological life and cultural memory.

Later, my work in New Bedford with seaweed and in Vermont with maple syrup revealed something even more profound. Cultural heritage is not only human, but also deeply rooted in the natural world. It is ecological, relational, and multispecies in nature. Tangible and intangible heritage coexist in ways that defy academic categories. I began to see these landscapes as a kind of living diorama, an interconnected scene in which seaweed, maple trees, fungi, rivers, and human communities shape one another through signs, cycles, and memory. An ecosystem can carry memory just as a story can. A species can hold cultural significance. A landscape can speak.

And here again, I saw Koestler. Heritage itself is a bisociation: the meeting place where biological signs intersect with cultural narratives, where ecological processes are woven into identity, where meaning is co-created across species. What we call tradition often begins with this kind of intersection: a river cycle, a sap flow, a tidal rhythm interpreted through human ritual, skill, and story.

Looking back, it feels almost inevitable: humor led me to incongruity, which in turn led me to bisociation, which opened the door to semiotics, and ultimately led to biosemiotics, transforming how I understood heritage. Each step was not a departure but a widening, a deepening, a reorientation. The more I studied meaning, the more porous the boundaries became between human and nonhuman, between the symbolic and the biological, between culture and ecology.

My epiphany was simple but transformative. Interspecies communication is not a metaphor; it is reality. Meaning is not contained within the human world. It circulates across bodies, environments, and histories. And heritage, in its fullest sense, is the living archive of these connections.

What began as a theory of humor became a philosophy of life, a recognition that creativity, understanding, and cultural meaning emerge when two worlds meet, when an unexpected connection forms, when bisociation occurs.

It is at those intersections that we learn to see the world in a different light.

And it is there, in the space between disciplines, species, and stories, that my work continues to grow.