As someone who's always loved synthesizing ideas and having lightbulb moments, I find the headline flattering. I wonder, though, if there's any more rigorous and general analysis (hah!) of the complexity of these two modes of thought.

EDIT: Fable 5 turned up some relevant references:

[1] Richardson, D. (1968). "Some Undecidable Problems Involving Elementary Functions of a Real Variable." Journal of Symbolic Logic, 33(4). — Differentiation is a simple recursive algorithm; deciding integrability in elementary terms is undecidable in general.

[2] Risch, R. H. (1969). "The Problem of Integration in Finite Terms." Transactions of the American Mathematical Society, 139. — The partial recovery: a (semi-)decision procedure for a restricted class.

[3] Guilford, J. P. (1967). The Nature of Human Intelligence. McGraw-Hill. — The divergent vs. convergent thinking distinction, the classic psychometric cousin of synthesis vs. analysis.

[4] Anderson, L. W., & Krathwohl, D. R. (Eds.) (2001). A Taxonomy for Learning, Teaching, and Assessing (revision of Bloom's taxonomy). Longman. — Moved "Create" (synthesis) to the top of the cognitive hierarchy, above "Analyze."

[5] Aaronson, S. (2011). "Why Philosophers Should Care About Computational Complexity." arXiv:1108.1791. — Argues complexity asymmetries (verification vs. generation, P vs. NP) bear directly on questions about cognition.