Why Being Sleepy and Drunk Are Great for Creativity | Wired Science
Here’s a brain teaser: Your task is to move a single line so that the false arithmetic statement below becomes true. Did you get it? In this case, the solution is rather obvious – you should move the first “I” to the right side of the “V,” so that the statement now reads: VI = III + III. Not surprisingly, the vast majority of people (92 percent) quickly solve this problem, as it requires a standard problem-solving approach in which only the answer is altered. What’s perhaps a bit more surprising is that nearly 90 percent of patients with brain damage to the prefrontal lobes — this leaves them with severe attentional deficits, unable to control their mental spotlight — are also able to find the answer. Here’s a much more challenging equation to fix: In this case, only 43 percent of normal subjects were able to solve the problem. Of course, this doesn’t mean you should take a hammer to your frontal lobes. This helps explain a new study led by Mareike Wieth at Albion College.
Creativity Activities
Creativity is divided into five different categories: fluency, flexibility, redefinition, originality, and elaboration. On this page you will find an explanation of each along with some creative problems for you to try. At the end of this page you will have the opportunity to participate in the Creativity Challenge. The Creativity Challenge will allow you to come up with your own fluency, flexibility, redefinition, originality, or elaboration problem and then submit it to Ms. Sanchez. Be sure to check out the Creativity Challenge below! Creativity Menu What is Fluency in Creativity? The ability to think well and effortlessly in order to generate a quantity of ideas, responses, solutions, or questions. Fluency Problems List all the things you can think of that are blue or have the word “blue” in them. Creativity Challenge Are you interested in the Creativity Challenge? (Back to Top Menu) What is Flexibility in Creativity? Flexibility Problems What are other uses for a napkin? Rules
The Creativity Crisis - Newsweek and The Daily Beast
Back in 1958, Ted Schwarzrock was an 8-year-old third grader when he became one of the “Torrance kids,” a group of nearly 400 Minneapolis children who completed a series of creativity tasks newly designed by professor E. Paul Torrance. Schwarzrock still vividly remembers the moment when a psychologist handed him a fire truck and asked, “How could you improve this toy to make it better and more fun to play with?” The accepted definition of creativity is production of something original and useful, and that’s what’s reflected in the tests. In the 50 years since Schwarzrock and the others took their tests, scholars—first led by Torrance, now his colleague, Garnet Millar—have been tracking the children, recording every patent earned, every business founded, every research paper published, and every grant awarded. Nobody would argue that Torrance’s tasks, which have become the gold standard in creativity assessment, measure creativity perfectly. The potential consequences are sweeping.
How Creative Are You?
The man nicknamed “the father of creativity” was psychologist E. Paul Torrance. In the 1940s he began researching creativity in order to improve American education. In order to encourage creativity, we needed to define it — to measure and analyze it. Torrance drew on contemporary research that related creativity to divergent thinking — the characteristic of coming up with more answers, or more original answers, rather than deriving a single best answer. But there’s a problem.
The Science of Creativity in 2013: Looking Back to Look Forward
23Share Synopsis Amid growing interest in creativity in the lab and on the pages of popular books and magazines, these recent studies stand out. In 1950, the American psychologist Joy P. Unfortunately, Guilford’s ideas did not give rise to widespread research in creativity. The 21st century is witnessing a renaissance in creativity in both the lab and the pages of popular books and magazines. The most newsworthy research came from cognitive psychologists researching creativity “boosters”. The neuroscience of creativity is flourishing. Cognitive flexibility, the ability to switch between thinking about two concepts or consider multiple perspectives simultaneously, is also a popular topic in the neuroscience world. Paul Silvia is a Professor of Psychology at the University of North Carolina who researches creativity and aesthetics, among other topics. Countless popular psychology books that either focused on or mentioned creativity were published in 2012. I’m optimistic about next year.
