Creativity

Creativity (or creativeness) is a mental process involving the generation of new ideas or concepts, or new associations between existing ideas or concepts. The products of creative thought (sometimes referred to as divergent thought) usually have both originality and appropriateness. Although intuitively a simple phenomenon, it is in fact quite complex. It has been studied from the perspectives of behavioural psychology, social psychology, psychometrics, cognitive science, philosophy, history, economics, design research, business, and management, among others. The studies have covered everyday creativity, exceptional creativity and even artificial creativity. Unlike many phenomena in science, there is no single, authoritative perspective or definition of creativity. Unlike many phenomena in psychology, there is no standardized measurement technique.

Creativity has been attributed variously to divine intervention, cognitive processes, the social environment, personality traits, and chance ("accident," "serendipity"). It has been associated with genius, mental illness and humour. Some say it is a trait we are born with; others say it can be taught with the application of simple techniques. Although popularly associated with art and literature, it is also an essential part of innovation and invention and is important in professions such as business, economics, architecture, industrial design, science and engineering.

Despite, or perhaps because of, the ambiguity and multi-dimensional nature of creativity, entire industries have been spawned from the pursuit of creative ideas and the development of creativity techniques. This mysterious phenomenon, though undeniably important and constantly visible, seems to lie tantalizingly beyond the grasp of most people.

"Creativity, it has been said, consists largely of re-arranging what we know in order to find out what we do not know." George Keller

"The problem of creativity is beset with mysticism, confused definitions, value judgments, psychoanalytic admonitions, and the crushing weight of philosophical speculation dating from ancient times." Albert Rothenberg

Creativity in psychology & cognitive science

The study of the mental representations and processes underlying creative thought belongs to the domains of psychology and cognitive science.
Creativity has also been studied from the perspective of cognitive science
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Creativity has also been studied from the perspective of cognitive science

A psychodynamic approach to understanding creativity was proposed by Sigmund Freud, who suggested that creativity arises as a result of frustrated desires for fame, fortune, and love, with the energy that was previously tied up in frustration and emotional tension in the neurosis being sublimated into creative activity. Freud later retracted this view.

Graham Wallas, in his work Art of Thought, published in 1926, presented one of the first models of the creative process. In the Wallas stage model, creative insights and illuminations may be explained by a process consisting of 5 stages:

(1) preparation (preparatory work on a problem that focuses the individual's mind on the problem and explores the problem's dimensions),

(2) incubation (where the problem is internalized into the subconscious mind and nothing appears externally to be happening),

(3) intimation (the creative person gets a 'feeling' that a solution is on its way),

(4) illumination or insight (where the creative idea bursts forth from its subconscious processing into conscious awareness); and

(5) verification (where the idea is consciously verified, elaborated, and then applied).

Wallas considered creativity to be a legacy of the evolutionary process, which allowed humans to quickly adapt to rapidly changing environments. Simonton[6] provides an updated perspective on this view in his book, Origins of genius: Darwinian perspectives on creativity.

Guilford performed important work in the field of creativity, drawing a distinction between convergent and divergent production (commonly renamed convergent and divergent thinking). Convergent thinking involves aiming for a single, correct solution to a problem, whereas divergent thinking involves creative generation of multiple answers to a set problem. Divergent thinking is sometimes used as a synonym for creativity in psychology literature. Other researchers have occasionally used the terms flexible thinking or fluid intelligence, which are roughly similar to (but not synonymous with) creativity.

In The Act of Creation, Arthur Koestler lists three types of creative individual - the Artist, the Sage and the Jester. Believers in this trinity hold all three elements necessary in business and can identify them all in "truly creative" companies as well. Koestler introduced the concept of bisociation - that creativity arises as a result of the intersection of two quite different frames of reference.

In 1992 Finke et al. proposed the 'Geneplore' model, in which creativity takes place in two phases: a generative phase, where an individual constructs mental representations called preinventive structures, and an exploratory phase where those structures are used to come up with creative ideas. Weisberg argued, by contrast, that creativity only involves ordinary cognitive processes yielding extraordinary results.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creativity