Alan Kay said something similar back in the 90s, framing it as ants living on the "pink plane" and the "blue plane". What he said at the time was an ant crawling on the pink plane can do a lot of pink plane things, but he won't think about the kinds of things he can do on the orthogonal blue plane, because he's never been there so he doesn't have those thoughts. Innovation in PLs comes when someone from the pink plane travels to the blue plane and brings back all they have seen, which causes people in the pink plane to start thinking new (bluer) thoughts.

  I'm going to use a metaphor for this talk which is drawn from a wonderful book called The Act of Creation by Arthur Koestler. Koestler was a novelist who became a cognitive scientist in his later years. One of the great books he wrote was about what might creativity be.—Learning.—He realized that learning, of course, is an act of creation itself, because something happens in you that wasn't there before. He used a metaphor of thoughts as ants crawling on a plane. In this case it's a pink plane, and there's a lot of things you can do on a pink plane. You can have goals. You can choose directions. You can move along. But you're basically in the pink context. It means that progress, in a fixed context, is almost always a form of optimization, because if you're actually coming up with something new, it wouldn't have been part of the rules or the context for what the pink plane is all about. Creative acts, generally, are ones that don't stay in the same context that they're in. He says, every once in a while, even though you have been taught carefully by parents and by school for many years, you have a blue idea. Maybe when you're taking a shower. Maybe when you're out jogging. Maybe when you're resting in an unguarded moment, suddenly, that thing that you were puzzling about, wondering about, looking at, appears to you in a completely different light, as though it were something else.