learning creativity reflection
Process
Nathaniel Barr, PhD
What is creativity, anyway?
“Creativity is the ability to produce work that is both novel and appropriate”
~ Sternberg & Lubart
“Humans are animals that specialize in thinking and knowing, and our extraordinary cognitive abilities have transformed every aspect of our lives. In contrast to our chimpanzee cousins and Stone Age ancestors, we are complex political, economic, scientific and artistic creatures, living in a vast range of habitats, many of which are our own creation.”
-Cecelia Hayes
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Systems view of Creativity
Hennessey & Amabile, 2010,
Annual Review of Psychology
“The term ‘cognition’ refers to all processes by which the sensory input is transformed, reduced, elaborated, stored, recovered, and used. It is concerned with these processes even when they operate in the absence of relevant stimulation, as in images and hallucinations... Given such a sweeping definition, it is apparent that cognition is involved in everything a human being might possibly do; that every psychological phenomenon is a cognitive phenomenon.”
Ulric Neisser, 1967, Cognitive Psychology
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Spontaneous or deliberate creativity
Spontaneous: Insight
Deliberate: CPS
Meliorism
“humans can, through their interference with processes that would otherwise be natural, produce an outcome which is an improvement over the aforementioned natural one”
In order to interfere with processes and improve them, we need to know how things work…
Understanding your mind
Interfering with the natural way you think
Improvement of performance
Deliberate creativity
J.P. Guilford’s 1950 APA Address
“The neglect of this subject by psychologists is appalling…I examined the index of the Psychological Abstracts for each year since its origin. Of approximately 121,000 titles listed in the past 23 years, only 186 were indexed as definitely bearing on the subject of creativity.”
-Guilford
J.P. Guilford’s 1950 APA Address
“In other words, less than two-tenths of one per cent of the books and articles indexed in the Abstracts for approximately the past quarter century [1925-1950] bear directly on this subject.”
-Guilford
Intelligence
“Some of you will undoubtedly feel that the subject of creative genius has not been as badly neglected as I have indicated, because of the common belief that genius is largely a matter of intelligence and the IQ.”
-Guilford
Galton, Cattell, Cox, Terman, Spearman
Not just intelligence
Guilford’s address marked the “the emergence of a wider psychological interest in the non-intellective components of cognitive performance.”
-Shouksmith, 1970, p. 205
Increased attention
In decade following Guilford’s address, more than 800 records exist
-Arons, 1965
1927-1950: 4.5 papers per year
1950-1960: 80 papers per year
Ways of thinking, not just raw ability
“It took the genius of thinkers like Alex Osborn, an advertising executive, and Sidney Parnes, an academic research, to realize that making the problem-solving process explicit– rather than strictly intuitive– could help people improve their problem-solving abilities. It could help people come up with more creative solutions to problems.”
-Creativity Unbound, p. 8
Creative problem solving
CPS = the deliberate and intentional pursuit of creative solutions to a problem in a formalized staged process
CPS foundational assumptions (Treffinger & ISAKSEN, 2005, p. 342-343) http://www.cpsb.com/research/articles/creative-problem-solving/Creative-Problem-Solving-Gifted-Education.pdf
CPS approach depends on the following assumptions based on what we know:
Creative potentials exist among all people
Creativity can be expressed in many areas/subjects, perhaps infinitely
Creativity is approached/manifested according to interests, preferences, or styles of individuals
People can function creatively, while being differentially productive
Through personal assessment and deliberate intervention, in the form of training or instruction, people can make better use of their creative styles, enhance their level of creative accomplishment, and thus realize more fully their creative potentials
CPS foundational assumptions (Treffinger & ISAKSEN, 2005, p. 350) http://www.cpsb.com/research/articles/creative-problem-solving/Creative-Problem-Solving-Gifted-Education.pdf
“The CPS framework builds on a long tradition that emphasizes the cognitive, rational, and semantic dimensions of creativity.”
“We have learned that problem-solving style– one’s personal orientation to change, one’s preferred manner of processing information, and one’s preferred way of making decisions– has direct and important implications for learning and applying CPS”
Two big rules
DEFER JUDGMENT:
Whatever idea comes to mind, go with it. Don’t evaluate ideas while you are generating them. The ideas can be evaluated later.
BE AFFIRMATIVE:
Behind every creative act lies affirmative judgment. Even in convergence, it’s important to discipline yourself to think “what’s good about it?” before succumbing to the “no way!” reflex. Look for what you want, not just for what you don’t want.
Stages of FourSight
Clarify
Ideate
Develop
Implement
Spontaneous creative Processing
1926
Wallas’ stages in creative thinking
(i) preparation (preparatory work on a problem that focuses the individual's mind on the problem and explores the problem's dimensions),
(ii) incubation (where the problem is internalized into the unconscious mind and nothing appears externally to be happening),
(iii) intimation (the creative person gets a "feeling" that a solution is on its way),
(iv) CREATIVE INSIGHT (where the creative idea spontaneously bursts forth from its preconscious processing into conscious awareness);
(v) verification (where the idea is consciously verified, elaborated, and then applied).
Mind wandering
“Introspective evidence is often suspect; yet, certain mental phenomena are so self-evident their existence can hardly be questioned. Our propensity for mind wandering is such a phenomenon. We all experience our minds drifting away from a task toward unrelated inner thoughts, fantasies, feelings, and other musings. Although mind wandering is ubiquitous in mental life, it has largely escaped the interest of mainstream psychology.”
Smallwood & Schooler, 2006, The Restless Mind
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Mind wandering
“the evidence suggests that mind wandering may be one of the most ubiquitous and pervasive of all cognitive phenomena. Across a diverse variety of tasks, verbal reports have indicated that between 15% and 50% of a participant’s time is spent mind wandering.”
Smallwood & Schooler, 2006, The Restless Mind
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Remote associates task (RAT)
Participants are given 3 words that are unconnected to each other, but share a common word they are all connected to individually.
Number of problems solved is an index of ability to make creative connections.
Solutions often arrive via insight
Remote associates task
piece/mind/dating
GAME
Remote associates
stick/maker/point
MATCH
Remote associates
over/plant/horse
POWER
Kounios & BEEMAN
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7uyw5y_tHEM
9:16-
Aha moments/insights in creativity are:
-associated with increased activity in right temporal lobe (which has more wide branching dendritic connections)
-associated with disengagement from external world and shutting down of visual cortex
-can be predicted by scientists via analysis of brain wave activity, even before the person knows the insight is coming
“the real-world implications of these findings are potentially
of substantial importance. The fact that the tendency to
solve problems with insight is influenced by multiple processes
operating at varying time-scales suggests that there are a number
of ‘‘vulnerable’’ points in the cascade of processes that result in
an insight. These points potentially represent opportunities for
influencing the course of reasoning. We expect research will
eventually result in a systematic technology for facilitating or
entraining creative insight.”
Improving odds of insight
“positive mood biases cognitive control mechanisms in ways that facilitate insight, with anxiety having the opposite effect.”
Having an insight is like…
ANALOGY AS THE CORE OF COGNITION
One should not think of analogy-making as a special variety of reasoning (as in the dull and uninspiring phrase “analogical reasoning and problem-solving,” a long-standing cliché in the cognitive-science world), for that is to do analogy a terrible disservice. After all, reasoning and problem-solving have (at least I dearly hope!) been at long last recognized as lying far indeed from the core of human thought. If analogy were merely a special variety of something that in itself lies way out on the peripheries, then it would be but an itty-bitty blip in the broad blue sky of cognition. To me, however, analogy is anything but a bitty blip — rather, it’s the very blue that fills the whole sky of cognition — analogy is everything, or very nearly so, in my view.
What is Analogy?
Analogy is the cognitive process of transferring relational information from one problem to another new one that needs a solution
-Jiang & Thagard, 2015
an important special case of role-based relational reasoning, in which inferences are generated on the basis of patterns of relational roles
-Holyoak, 2012
Understanding analogy
…creative and not
4 term analogies
A is to B as C is to D
Creative and Not
All analogies must have common relations amongst elements
…but can vary in the extent to which superficial similarity exists between them
Within vs. cross domain
uncreative analogy example within domain
bracelet is to wrist
as
ring is to finger
Uncreative analogy
kitten is to cat
as
…
EVERYONE GENERATE A WITHIN DOMAIN ANALOGY
Washington Post worst analogies
Her eyes were like two brown circles with big black dots in the center.
He was as tall as a six-foot-three-inch tree.
The red brick wall was the color of a brick-red Crayola crayon.
John and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who had also never met.
creative analogy example cross-domain
bracelet is to wrist
as
moat is to castle
creative analogy
lion is to pride
as
…
EVERYONE GENERATE A CROSS DOMAIN ANALOGY
creative analogy
lion is to pride
as
student is to class
Added value by crossing domains!
“Scientists use analogies to form a bridge between what they already know and what they are trying to explain, understand, or discover. In fact, many scientists have claimed that the use of certain analogies was instrumental in their making a scientific discovery and almost all scientific autobiographies and biographies feature an important analogy that is discussed in depth.”
Dunbar & Fugelsang, 2004
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Thomas Kuhn
(1922 - 1996)
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Creative Cognition in Social Innovation (Jiang and Thagard, 2014)
“solutions by means of reasoning, association, analogy, and conceptual combination”
Prison reform
Teach for America
Hospice care
Partnership housing
Microfinance
Education
if an atom were expanded to the size of a cathedral, the nucleus would be only about the size of a bee.
https://abstractcritical.com/article/painting-and-reality-art-as-analogy/index.html
Music/poetry
Montana of 300
“Just like vending machines, I’m stacking chips”
history
“Yuen Foong Khong… defines historical analogy as “an inference that if two or more events separated in time agree in one respect, then they may also agree in another…” Analogy is thus used to predict possible outcomes of certain policy decisions and provide prescriptions.”
-Franz-Stefan Gady, 2011
politics
“Politicians are not born; they are excreted.”
-Cicero
Importance of Analogy
the limits of analogical applications are roughly coextensive with those of human imagination
-Holyoak, 2012
analogy is everything
-Hofstadter
Analogies important for creativity in:
Science
Literature
Art
Journalism
Film
Music
Education
LIFE
“My mama always said, life was like a box a chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get.” -Forrest Gump
“Life is like a game of cards. The hand that is dealt you represents determinism. The way you play it is free will.” -Jawaharlal Nehru (P.M. of India, 1947-64)
the brain…
How is it that we can engage in such creative analogical reasoning?
dual-process theories
| Type 1 “intuitive” processing | Type 2 “analytic” processing |
| Fast | Slow |
| Automatic | Controlled |
| Low-effort | High-effort |
| High-capacity | Low-capacity |
Evans (2012). in The Oxford Handbook of Thinking & Reasoning
Creative and uncreative analogies
evidence that type 2 processing required to comprehend creative analogies, whereas uncreative analogies can be grasped intuitively and automatically
Behavioural Evidence (Barr et al., 2015)
Behavioural Evidence
Brain-based evidence
Brain-based Evidence
As creativity of analogies increases, frontopolar activation increases
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Brain-based Evidence
“the frontopolar cortex (Brodmann's area 10)… is disproportionally larger in humans relative to the rest of the brain than it is in the ape's brain…”
Dreher, 2008
“…some researchers suggest that [analogy] is the crucial cognitive mechanism that most distinguishes human cognition from that of other intelligent species.”
Gentner & Smith, 2012
Brain-based Evidence
“It is perhaps not coincidental that the most advanced reaches of the evolved human brain should mediate function at the most advanced reaches of human cognition.”
Green et al., 2006
How to be more creative
Override intuition that no connection exists between two concepts, and reflect on deep inter-connections between different ideas
“Man is a machine, but a very peculiar machine. He is a machine which, in right circumstances, and with right treatment, can know that he is a machine, and, having realized this, he may find the ways to cease to be a machine.”
PD Ouspensky, 1950, The Psychology of Man’s Possible Evolution