We can perceive information with our senses: eyes, ears, fingers (skin), nose, tongue (sight, hearing, touch, smell and taste). According to Wikipedia, perception is the organization, identification, and interpretation of sensory information in order to represent and understand the environment.
Without going too technical, this information goes to the brain, which interprets it and decides what to do with it. I like a sentence from "The little workbook of meaningful listening", from Nerea San José, that makes reference to Dr. Robert Scharber stating: "We hear with our ears but we listen with our brains".
According to NLP once we perceive something, our brain filters this information and it can be deleted, distorted or generalised. Then we interpret that information according to our past experiences, our expectations, our beliefs, This is like when in CBT different people can hear the same sound and think that could be different things and act accordingly. What we hear can be influenced for what we believe or think automatically, so we can listen something different and react according to it.
All this is relevant because it shows how the information we receive can be perceived in different ways, what can affect our creativity.
There are many ways in which we change the information and play with it, and according to the laws of perception, the communication model of NLP and the cognitive distortion in CBT, we tend to build a picture based on the little bit we can see. It is like the story of the blind men and the elephant, where different people explain what they belief they are holding according to what they perceive. As they are blind and the elephant is big, each of them is holding a different part of the body of the elephant and interpreting something different.
Also we can misinterpret what somebody is saying as we are again building the meaning of what the other person is saying, having heard just a bit of it.
Due to our short attention span we tend to create concepts, to work with mental representations. This happens with images, conversations, and when we are defining problems and we can add our own bit of information to the reality. This is good on one side because it allows us to work with the information we have in an efficient way. On the other side is bad because it tends to distort the reality and takes us to make assumptions that can be wrong.
The same way that we can make problems bigger or smaller than they really are, we can make judgments that are not very accurate. Ideas can be modified using different level of abstraction, different physical properties, different meanings for different people or environments. As I have mentioned in some of my books, a "house" can be mentally represented in a very different way by somebody living in a house, in a flat in a sky scrapper, in an igloo, in the forest, etc. So, when solving housing problems, different people will think about the problems in different ways.
To remember this important topic about perception and creativity, to mention "Ceci n´est pas une pipe" or "This is not a pipe"the famous painting with a pipe (as it is really a painting and not a pipe).