Creativity???

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We all crave creativity.  No, I don’t mean we all want to be artists, writers, or song composers.   Although, I am pretty sure those choices sound “cool”.

No, we want to create elegant solutions to the problems we have at work, to develop creative solutions to societal problems, to invent great new products and concepts. creative

The problem is that we can recognize creativity when we see it- but we don’t really know how to define the process. We certainly lack the knowledge of the neurological processes involved in creativity.

We also seem to divide creativity into two pots- Big C (eminent level creativity) and Little C (children’s creativity).  The Big C stuff is what we call what our creative artists develop, the brilliant designs of a Ray Loewy (industrial designer), or the elegant math solution.  The Little C is not just what our kids product, but the more mundane things we see in our everyday lives.

The Federal government concluded a conference (last year) about creativity.  It was held in conjunction with with the Santa Fe Institute last July (that’s 2014), and just released the report (How Creativity Works) on the conference.

This entire conference was part of the “BRAIN” initiative that was instituted in 2013. The primary goal of that initiative is to foster public-private partnerships to develop new therapies for brain disorders (Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, Traumatic Brain Injury [TBI], Post Traumatic Stress Disorder [PTSD], and autism).  But, the BRAIN initiative is not limited to medical therapies; hence this examination of the creative process.

To my dismay, great results were not obtained.  Why would I say that?  The conclusions in this report leave far more questions than answers.   (By the way, one of the findings was that our understanding of creativity is surprisingly elusive.)

Conference on Creativity

Obviously, the need to develop tools that can assess and ascertain creativity in individuals has been an ongoing issue for decades.

Or, that we need to have interactions between psychologists, neurobiologists, artists, and educators.  The goal of these interactions are to examine the conditions and causes of creativity.   (Did we not just have this conference to do just that?)

Then, there was the issue of “flow”, that state that may or may not exist when we exude our “creative juices”.  We don’t know if this state (if it truly exists as a state) is linked to changes in the subject’s prefrontal cortex.  (If this does exist, then imagination and a loss in self-consciousness may be related.)

So, I guess we have to revert (at least for now) to “I’ll know it when I see it…”

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