principles of creative problem solving

Principles of Creative Problem Solving

Dr. Michael McNamara

 Key Insights: ◦ Attributes of Creative Products

 Novelty, Utility, Surprise, Beauty

◦ Creative Thinking(?)

 J.P. Guilford’s Stanine Project

 Divergent Thinking

 Alternative Use Tests

 Fluency, Flexibility, Originality, Elaboration

◦ Creative Confidence

 Openness (Experience, Risk)

 Choosing Creativity (Deliberate)

 Action (Tinkering, Experimental Mindsets)

 Purpose of the Unit: ◦ Introduce you to the different ‘modes of

thinking’ we utilize to solve our problems.  Type 1 and Type 2 Thinking Systems  ‘Incubation’ in creativity  Associational Thinking  ‘Dual process theory’ of creative thinking.

 Tasks for the Week: ◦ Watch my lecture on “Creative

Cognition” ◦ Complete your first “Creativity

Assignment” (Due Friday at 11:59pm Week 4)

◦ Review Sowden, Pringle, and Gabora’s 2015 article; “The Shifting Sands”

◦ Join us for the Debrief Meeting

 Have you ever paused to consider the ease at which you follow daily, weekly, and annual routines?

 Try New Things: ◦ Overcome Fear ◦ Know yourself better ◦ Stimulate Creativity (paradigm

tweaks) ◦ Neuro-plasticity: ability of the

neural networks in the brain to change through growth and reorganization

Foreign living experiences contain many of the critical elements necessary to stimulate the creative process

1. Living abroad can allow individuals access to a greater number of novel ideas and concepts, which can then act as inputs for the creative process.

2. Living abroad may allow people to approach problems from different perspectives (the same form may have different functions in different cultures)

3. Experiences in foreign cultures can increase the psychological readiness to accept and recruit ideas from unfamiliar sources, thus facilitating the processes of unconscious idea recombination (Schooler & Melcher, 1995) and conceptual expansion (Leung et al., 2008; Ward, 1994)

 “Executive Attention Network” (Attentional Network): ◦ Ability to concentrate ◦ Effortful, deliberate and controlled

 Rationality (logic to think through a problem)

 Associative (making associations between given subjects)

 Cause-and-effect reasoning

 Reality monitoring (distinguishing imagination from reality)

 Metacognition (reflect on one’s own mental activities)

 Executive functioning (mental control and self-regulation)

 The ”LOOKING OUT NETWORK”

 Performs slow and sequential thinking (aka. “Thinking Slow”). ◦ Correlates with general intelligence (testing)

 If Bob sold 15 apples in a working week, what is the average number of apples he sells each day?

 Examples of “Rational thinking” Q’s:

 The “Default Network” aka. “IMAGINATION NETWORK” ◦ Mental structures that influence

thought and actions outside conscious awareness or control.  Independent of input from the

conscious mind (executive attention network)

 Effortless, fast, and spontaneous thinking: ◦ Intuition ◦ Emotions ◦ Reduced latent inhibition ◦ Cognitive shortcuts (or heuristics) ◦ Automatic associations ◦ Future thinking/scenarios ◦ Evolutionarily evolved instincts

 Looking INWARDS

 1+1= ?

 Count the number of ‘F’s’ in the sentence below. Take your time, but only count once.

 FINISHED FILES ARE THE RESULT OF YEARS OF SCIENTIFIC STUDY COMBINED WITH THE EXPERIENCE OF YEARS.

 If a baseball and a bat cost $1.10 together, and the bat costs $1.00 more than the ball, how much does the ball cost?

 Think about all the work you have to complete… not only this term- but also next term.

 Now, remember that you also have earn some money, pay rent, buy groceries, maintain healthy relationships, eat right, stay active, groom yourself, sleep, get to class on time, and prepare yourself for the next 45 years of work.

 How are you feeling?

 Neuroscientist  Jazz musicians and

other artists into an FMRI scanner.

 During improv, executive attention activity turned down/off; heightened default activity

Toggling between Type 2 and Type 1 Thinking

 Decision-making is complex. ◦ Two families of cognitive operations

 System 1 (intuitive): reflex system, which is “intuitive” and “experiential” or “pattern recognition”.

 Triggers an automated mode of thinking (“gut feeling”).  When an individual is more dependent on System 1 thinking (for example,

HALT: “hungry, angry, tired or late” or under conditions of illness, substance abuse or emotional distress), the accuracy of decision-making can be adversely affected.

 System 2 (analytical) thinking: deliberate, effortful processing, logical judgment and a mental search for additional information acquired through past learning and experience.

◦ Systems 1 and 2 thinking are useful and complementary.  Together, they promote greater efficiency in thinking, decision-making

and action, and help bring order to chaos and uncertainty.  Whether to use Systems 1 or 2 thinking in a given situation depends on

the complexity of the situation in relation to the individual’s capabilities, past experiences, and self-confidence (toggling)

 Incubation: process of unconscious recombination of thought elements that were stimulated through conscious work at one point in time, resulting in novel ideas (Kihlstrom, 1996)

 Fixation & Functional Fixedness: getting ‘stuck’ on the fact that a certain object can only be used/represented a certain way ◦ Dunker’s Candle Problem (1946)

 Incubation- taking a ‘mental break’/ we are distracted and are no longer consciously thinking about the problem releases the fixation and gives the unconscious space to find more creative combinations/ solutions representations (Kihlstrom, 1996).

 Creswell’s “Incubation” Studies  Group A had to make an immediate decision.

 Group B were given time to make a considered decision.

 Group C were distracted for two minutes before making a decision.

◦ His fMRI results for group C show that specific brain regions that are active during encoding new decision information reactivate while the brain is busy thinking about other unrelated tasks, and that this “unconscious neural reactivation” helped group C achieve a better decision- making performance than both other groups. (Creswell, 2013)

 Scott Barry Kaufmann  Controlled (Type 2) and spontaneous (Type

1) processes are both valuable, but at different times during the creative process ◦ Type 1/Spontaneous processes play the largest

role during the generative phase of creative thinking

◦ Type 2/Controlled processes: the exploratory phase of their use/assessment  First, we focus  Second, we tend to loosen and diffuse our

attention and then consciously refocus that attention when it’s time to figure out how to make those ideas fly

 Rely too heavily on one or the other, and you risk certain cognitive pitfalls.

 Finding a balance of these thinking styles is critical to achieving mastery in any creative field

Week 4 : Divergent Thinking, Incubation, and Convergent Thinking Topics: Divergent Thinking Convergent Thinking Lateral Thinking Preparation Incubation Illumination Verification

Required Readings: You Can Generate Better Ideas (Innovation in the field of Thinking by Design: A Short History.), New and Improved. Course Text-Creativity Unbound, pages 21-23