Scientists have been fighting over the mystery of creativity for a long time. Mainly because it took them a long time to realize that such a secret exists at all. Many ancient cultures, including the Greeks, Indians and Chinese, did not even have a word for this special ability. They thought of creativity as “discovery,” believing that all ideas came from the gods and that mortals simply “discovered” them. So what is creativity? We tell you from the book Impossible as Strategy.
The Four Stages of the Creative Process
During the Renaissance it came to be believed that divine ideas originated in the minds of great men. In the eighteenth century, we finally gave the phenomenon a name, developing an understanding of the imagination, which is essentially “a process that generates images under conditions where nothing affects the senses.
And at the turn of the 20th century, French mathematician, mechanic, physicist, astronomer and philosopher Henri Poincaré expanded this concept. Interested in how his mind solves complex mathematical problems, Poincaré realized that insights do not come out of nowhere and always follow the same cycle. A few years later, Graham Wallace, a professor at the London School of Economics, after carefully studying Poincaré’s cycle, decided that two of its five stages could be combined into one, and published the results of his research.
So, according to Wallace and Poincaré, the creative process begins with the preparation
stage. In this stage, the problem is identified and the mind begins to estimate its dimensions.
Next comes the second stage, incubation, in which the problem is transferred from the conscious to the unconscious and the pattern-recognition system is activated. The third stage is insight
; here the idea returns to the category of the conscious, often through an experience called epiphany or insight.
The cycle ends with verification
(verification): the new idea is consciously revisited, tested, and applied to problem solving.
In 1927, the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead gave this cycle a name – creativity – which became commonplace in 1948, when one of the founders of the famous advertising agency BBDO, Alex Osborn, published his bestseller, Your Creative Power.
Divergent Thinking
Then psychologist Joy Paul Guilford observed that some people – precisely the creative type – often scored lower on IQ tests, not because they couldn’t solve problems, but because their approach to solving generated multiple choices. For the thought process they used, Guilford coined the term “divergent thinking,” which means a non-systematic approach to problem solving, open to different ideas and in some sense illogical, which was actually the problem. IQ tests were developed to assess its opposite, convergent thinking, because the sequential search for a solution through a series of logical steps limits our abilities.
Guilford realized that divergent thinking is distinguished by four characteristics.
Fluency-the
ability to generate many ideas in a short amount of time.
Flexibility
– the ability to approach a problem from multiple perspectives.
Irregularity
– the ability to come up with really new and unexpected ideas.
Elaboration
– the ability to systematize and put ideas into practice. The identification of these characteristics was a major scientific breakthrough.
They transformed creativity, a concept so strange that even the ancient Greeks could not find a name for it, into a measurable quality. For example, by gathering people together in a laboratory, giving them tasks and counting how many ideas each person came up with, and then comparing and contrasting the answers of the test subjects, one can determine which ones are similar and proposed by many, and which ones are original. In short, Guilford gave us not only a tool for measuring creativity, but also its generally accepted definition as “the process of developing original ideas of value.”
In short, we understood what creativity was–at least for a while.
Unfortunately, as we have since discovered, virtually nothing in our understanding of it is true – or quite true. And that has put us in a strange position. Research confirmed that creativity was at the heart of high achievement and high productivity, but we couldn’t say what it really was. Fortunately, it was around this time that neurobiologists came into play.
At the broken trough?
Once on the scene, neurobiologists made at least one important discovery: creativity is diverse. And its former interpretation immediately became irrelevant. For example, quite often creative solutions do appear in accordance with the Poincaré cycle, but this is not always the case. Sometimes we skip stages or shorten the duration of individual periods.
As for Guilford’s four characteristics of divergent thinking, although they have survived, they have undergone endless revisions, renaming and reorganization, and no stone has been left unturned on the idea that the right cerebral hemisphere is responsible for creativity and the left for logic. It takes the whole brain to manifest creativity, and there is no evidence that a person cannot be creatively logical or logically creative.
This does not mean, however, that we are at a broken trough.
Diversity of choice
Creativity, in terms of brain organization, has to do with diversity of choice. This is one of the reasons why it has been so difficult to conceive of. This implicit ability is hidden within our most ancient skill – researching and executing action plans. When research and reflection culminate in a typical plan, we act instinctively (in other words, efficiently) but not creatively. When we develop something new, on the other hand, we are creative, though perhaps ineffective. Sometimes the plan turns out to be both revolutionary and effective (in other words, useful and valuable), which brings us back to the standard definition of creativity as “the process of developing original ideas of value.
We have recently developed an understanding of exactly how the brain generates such ideas. Simply put, creativity has turned out to be a recombinant process.
Redistribution occurs when the brain receives new data, combines it with old information, and uses the results to create something completely new.
In addition, this process usually requires the effective interaction of three overlapping neural networks: attention control, imagination, and significance assessment. And by understanding how they work, we can try to amplify their effects and perhaps learn how to train creativity.
For more details, see the book Impossible as a Strategy.
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