Yea I find anecdotal support for your claim, which indicates that indicates both ways of thinking can lead to creativity. Look at John Von Neumann's wikipedia page:

"At Princeton he received complaints for regularly playing extremely loud German march music on his gramophone, which distracted those in neighbouring offices, including Albert Einstein, from their work."

So those two geniuses were opposite in this way, and I would describe their thinking verbatim as you claim!

That is, in this case, von Neumann being a "surgical thinker", he might have needed external noise sources to achieve breakthroughs ...