CREATIVITY: GENIUS, TALENT, SKILLS
Introduction
California State University, Northridge
From Human Motivation,
3rd ed., by Robert E. Franken:
- Creativity is defined as the tendency to generate or recognize ideas, alternatives, or possibilities that may be useful in solving problems, communicating with others, and entertaining ourselves and others. (page 396)
- Three
reasons why people are motivated to be creative:
- need for novel, varied, and complex stimulation
- need to communicate ideas and values
- need to solve problems (page 396)
- In order to be creative, you need to be able to view things in new ways or from a different perspective. Among other things, you need to be able to generate new possibilities or new alternatives. Tests of creativity measure not only the number of alternatives that people can generate but the uniqueness of those alternatives. the ability to generate alternatives or to see things uniquely does not occur by change; it is linked to other, more fundamental qualities of thinking, such as flexibility, tolerance of ambiguity or unpredictability, and the enjoyment of things heretofore unknown. (page 394)
From Creativity
– Beyond the Myth of Genius, by Robert W. Weisberg.
- …“creative“ refers to novel products of value, as in „The airplane was a creative invention.“ „Creative“ also refers to the person who produces the work, as in, „Picasso was creative.“ „Creativity,“ then refers both to the capacity to produce such works, as in „How can we foster our employees‘ creativity?“ and to the activity of generating such products, as in „Creativity requires hard work.“ (page 4)
- All who study creativity agree that for something to be creative, it is not enough for it to be novel: it must have value, or be appropriate to the cognitive demands of the situation.“ (page 4)
From Creativity
– Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention by Mihaly
Csikszentmihalyi.
- Ways that „creativity“ is commonly used:
- Persons who express unusual thoughts, who are interesting and stimulating – in short, people who appear to be unusually bright.
- People who experience the world in novel and original ways. These are (personally creative) individuals whose perceptions are fresh, whose judgements are insightful, who may make important discoveries that only they know about.
- Individuals who have changed our culture in some important way. Because their achievements are by definition public, it is easier to write about them. (e.g., Leonardo, Edison, Picasso, Einstein, etc.) (pages 25-26)
- The Systems Model of Creativity: (pages 27-28)
- the creative domain, which is nested in culture – the symbolic knowledge shred by a particular society or by humanity as a whole (e.g., visual arts)
- the field, which includes all the gatekeepers of the domain (e.g., art critics, art teachers, curators of museums, etc.)
- the individual person, who using the symbols of the given domain (such as music, engineering, business, mathematics) has a new idea or sees a new pattern, and when this novelty is selected by the appropriate field for inclusion into the relevant domain
- Creativity is any act, idea, or product that changes an existing domain, or that transforms an existing domain into a new one…What counts is whether the novelty he or she produces is accepted for inclusion in the domain.“ (page 28)
- Characteristics of the creative personality: (pages 58-73)
- Creative individuals have a great deal of energy, but they are also often quiet and at rest.
- Creative individuals tend to be smart, yet also naive at the same time.
- Creative individuals have a combination of playfulness and discipline, or responsibility and irresponsibility.
- Creative individuals alternate between imagination and fantasy at one end, and rooted sense of reality at the other.
- Creative people seem to harbor opposite tendencies on the continuum between extroversion and introversion.
- Creative individuals are also remarkably humble and proud at the same time.
- Creative individuals to a certain extent escape rigid gender role stereotyping and have a tendency toward androgyny.
- Generally, creative people are thought to be rebellious and independent.
- Most creative persons are very passionate about their work, yet they can be extremely objective about it as well.
- The openness and sensitivity of creative individuals often exposes them to suffering pain yet also a great deal of enjoyment.
AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION:
THE SCIENCE OF CREATIVITY
Use these empirically backed tips to capture your next big idea:
Stress is a well-known creativity killer, says psychologist Robert Epstein, PhD. Time constraints are another, he says. Unfortunately, graduate school has both in spades, and that can sap the inspiration of even the most imaginative students.
„When you’re in graduate school, there are so many constraints on you. It’s detrimental to creative expression,“ says Epstein, author of „The Big Book of Creativity Games“ (McGraw-Hill, 2000).
Yet it’s almost impossible to conquer any graduate school activity without at least some innovative thinking. Collaborating with other researchers, finding a subfield that excites you, maneuvering your way through an unexpected set of findings, and balancing the demands of your work and home life all require creative problem-solving.
Despite the widely held belief that some people just aren’t endowed with the creativity gene, „There’s not really any evidence that one person is inherently more creative than another,“ Epstein says.
Instead, he says, creativity is something that anyone can cultivate.
Routine creativity
Epstein, a visiting scholar at the University of California, San Diego, has conducted research showing that strengthening four core skill sets leads to an increase in novel ideas.
„As strange as it sounds, creativity can become a habit,“ says creativity researcher Jonathan Plucker, PhD, a psychology professor at Indiana University. „Making it one helps you become more productive.“
Epstein recommends that you:
Capture your new ideas. Keep an idea notebook or voice recorder with you, type in new thoughts on your laptop or write ideas down on a napkin.
Seek out challenging tasks. Take on projects that don’t necessarily have a solution—such as trying to figure out how to make your dog fly or how to build a perfect model of the brain. This causes old ideas to compete, which helps generate new ones.
Broaden your knowledge. Take a class outside psychology or read journals in unrelated fields, suggests Epstein. This makes more diverse knowledge available for interconnection, he says, which is the basis for all creative thought. „Ask for permission to sit in on lectures for a class on 12th century architecture and take notes,“ he suggests. „You’ll do better in psychology and life if you broaden your knowledge.“
Surround yourself with interesting things and people. Regular dinners with diverse and interesting friends and a work space festooned with out-of-the-ordinary objects will help you develop more original ideas, Epstein says. You can also keep your thoughts lively by taking a trip to an art museum or attending an opera—anything that stimulates new thinking.
A study last year in the Creativity Research Journal (Vol. 20, No. 1), found that working on these four areas enhances creativity. Seventy-four city employees from Orange County, Calif., participated in creativity training seminars consisting of games and exercises developed by Epstein to strengthen their proficiency in these four skill sets. Eight months later, the employees had increased their rate of new idea generation by 55 percent—a feat that led to more than $600,000 in new revenue and a savings of about $3.5 million through innovative cost reductions.
Happy, rested and bright
Many practices that lead to better overall well-being also boost innovative thinking. For instance, creativity researchers suggest you:
Sleep on it.
In a 1993 study at Harvard Medical School, psychologist Deidre Barrett, PhD, asked her students to imagine a problem they were trying to solve before going to sleep and found that they were able to come up with novel solutions in their dreams. In the study, published in Dreaming (Vol. 3, No. 2), half of the participants reported having dreams that addressed their chosen problems, and a quarter came up with solutions in their dreams.
„We’re in a different biochemical state when we’re dreaming, and that’s why I think dreams can be so helpful anytime we’re stuck in our usual mode of thinking,“ Barrett says.
A 2004 study in Nature (Vol. 427, No. 6,972) also shows just how powerful sleep may be in helping people solve problems. Researchers at the University of Lübeck in Germany trained participants to solve a long, tedious math problem. Eight hours later, when participants returned for retesting, those who had slept during the break were more than twice as likely to figure out a simpler way to solve the problem than those who had not slept.
Collaborate—in writing.
Plucker notes that much psychological research has shown that we overestimate the success of group brainstorming. Instead of working together to generate great ideas, group members often fail to share their ideas for fear of rejection. Yet research led by psychologist Paul Paulus, PhD, of the University of Texas at Arlington, points to the surprising effectiveness of group „brainwriting,“ in which group members write their ideas on paper and pass them to others in the group who then add their own ideas to the list. In a 2000 Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes (Vol. 82, No. 1) study led by Paulus, an interactive group of brainwriters produced 28 percent more possible uses for a paper clip than a similar group of solitary brainwriters. This may be because group members tend to build off one another’s ideas, leading to increased creativity and innovation. The effects of group brainwriting may even extend to groups that collaborate via e-mail, Paulus notes.
Let the sunshine in.
Research by Washington State University professor of interior design Janetta Mitchell McCoy, PhD, suggests that spending time in natural settings may boost creativity. In a 2002 Creativity Research Journal (Vol. 14, No. 3.4) study led by McCoy, high school students designed more innovative collages—as judged by six independent raters—in a setting high in direct sunlight and natural wood than in a space mainly finished with manufactured materials such as drywall and plastic.
Get happy.
A 2004 Creativity Research Journal (Vol. 16, No. 2.3) study with undergraduates found that sadness inhibits new ideas. This may be because when people are sad, they are more wary of making mistakes and exercise more restraint, says study author Karen Gasper, PhD, a social psychology professor at Penn State University.
Past research also supports the creativity boost gained from happiness. Compared with people in sad or neutral moods, those in happy moods are better at coming up with unusual word associations, developing patient diagnoses, solving moral dilemmas, generating story endings and writing numerous answers to divergent thinking tasks, Gasper notes.
To avoid being overly cautious and stagnant in their work, Gasper recommends that students remember to have fun. „Take a walk, see a comedy, go out with a friend,“ she says. „These breaks may help you feel better and see your work in a new light.“
Study the information in the project.
Make additional research to find more examples of people with unique mental and manual skills who achieved the remarkable.
Prepare a speech on „Creativity in the Context of the Western World“.
Western culture is highly sophisticated and complex. This is what all the other projects have shown.
The idea of this one is to demonstrate that it is in fact the interplay of genius, talent and skills in all possible fields of human activities interacting with each other, which creates luxury of unparalleled standard and quality.
This project should lead to a reflected conclusion that all the members of the Western civilisation can and should contribute to its permanent creation, as all are endowed with some talents and skills, even if not many have a brilliant mind of a genius.
This is how one can become a cocreator and how the future is made. The key is to recognise one´s own potential and role.
