Now reading | Fostering creativity. A model for developing a culture of collective creativity in science.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1808036/
This article on fostering creativity is truly fascinating. It was hard for me to know which paragraphs and quotes to highlight as the entire article had my rapt attention. Growing up in an academic home with a father who is a Ph.D. in Chemistry, I have always loved the connection of science to creativity. Working with scientists in the creative process is always an interesting experience because they approach ideas and concepts in completely new and innovative ways. It’s refreshing. Scientists are always seeking out new relationships and connections. They, too, depend on a conceptual shift in thinking to get to breakthrough ideas. This quote did not surprise me: Scientists would value a culture of interaction and mutual inspiration more highly than access to technology, although the latter is essential for their experiments.
Creativity is central to human activity and thought, and has been the driving force for all innovations throughout human history. However, it has long eluded precise definition and scientific study, although the literature abounds with many explanations ranging from the mundane to the highly complex. One of the most useful definitions states that a creative idea cannot be produced by the same set of generic rules as a familiar idea, thus indicating that creativity depends on a conceptual shift in thinking.
Creativity has been traditionally associated with art and literature but since the early twentieth century, science has also been regarded as a creative activity. In contrast to art and literature, in which it is usually sufficient to create an original work, a creative scientific idea requires both originality and appropriateness; creativity in science not only generates novel ideas but also aspires to produce a verifiable representation of an objective truth.
Apart from this distinction, how similar is creativity across different domains such as science and art? A study comparing the works of Albert Einstein and Pablo Picasso suggests that their creativity was based on strikingly similar elements both strived to understand the underlying properties of space and how different observers experienced it. Furthermore, both had a strong sense of aesthetics, further suggesting that the mechanism and psychology of creativity is similar regardless of the discipline. Other studies have shown that various personality traits—including a high valuation of aesthetics, a broad range of interests, an attraction to complexity, and the ability to deal with conflicting information—are often found in creative individuals in very different domains.
Measurement of brain activity showed that creativity correlates with two brain states: a quiescent, relaxed state corresponding to the inspiration stage, and a much more active state corresponding to the elaboration stage. The quiescent state has a lot in common with some stages of sleep and dreaming, indicating that concentration on its own is not enough to generate creative breakthroughs, but must be combined with periods of low activity. Highly creative individuals seem able to switch back and forth between active and quiescent brain states. This explains the observation that periods of ‘incubation’ or rest can enhance creativity. { see previous blog post on incubation }
Creativity can be described as an emergent phenomenon in which the whole—the creative process—is larger than the sum of its parts—the conditions, facts and assumptions that started it. Both creativity and emergence are nonlinear phenomena: the emergence of a new steady-state in a dynamic system occurs abruptly as it crosses a particular threshold. This behaviour—sometimes described as the ‘tipping point’–is highly reminiscent of the abrupt and spontaneous nature of the creative insight.
