Novelty


Novelty is the quality of being new, or following from that, of being striking, original or unusual. Novelty may be the shared experience of a new cultural phenomenon or the subjective perception of an individual.
From the meaning of being unusual usage is derived the concept of the novelty dance ; the novelty song ; the novelty show ; and novelty architecture. It is also this sense that applies to a novelty item, a small manufactured adornment, toy or collectible. These, in turn are often used as promotional merchandise in marketing. The chess term, novelty, is used for a move in chess which has never been played before in a recorded game.
The term can have pejorative sense and refer to a mere innovation. However, novelty in patent law is part of the legal test to determine whether an invention is patentable. A novelty effect is the tendency for performance to initially improve when new technology is instituted.
The philosophy of mind concerns much about how novelty occurs in the world. The progress in the philosophy of mind inspired by quantum mechanics indicates that symmetry restoration occurs in the mind at the moment when new creative thought arises, "symmetry restoration denotes the moment when one’s cognition leaves ordinary internalized mental schemes such as conceptual categories, heuristics, subjective theories, conventional thinking, or expectations. At this moment, fundamentally new, original thought may arise."