Restorative Reminders
What is Creativity and What We Found About It?
- Anugrah
What is Creativity?
Creativity is the use of imagination or ideas to invent something.
Creativity is this simple. You don’t need to overthink it. Just imagine and create something.
And here is what we found more about it.
Type of Creativity
Neuropsychologist Arne Dietrich created a four-square matrix for types of creativity. It may not be the only way to see creativity yet a helpful way to know all of us fall in some category or other.
- Deliberate and cognitive creativity arises from hard work and putting in long hours in a particular area like Thomas Edison.
- Deliberate and emotional creativity arrives from sitting quietly and reflecting on their situation and then reaching a eureka, also called as the ah-ha moment!
- Spontaneous and cognitive creativity primarily matures in stages, taking its own time. You may be struck by a problem for some days and then come back sometime later to solve it.
- Spontaneous and emotional creativity has emotional (from the amygdala) creative moments that seem like an epiphany.
What Researchers Found About Creativity?
Prior to the 20th century, it was theorised that creative people came from troubled, conflicting families and their brokenness led them to create something. Then somewhere in the late 20th century the Hungarian-born American psychologist Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi examined more than ninety men and women who either produced works that were publicly recognized as creative or impacted or affected their culture in some significant way.
His finding showed that these creatives had, for the most part, “experienced normal childhoods and grew up in families that provided them with a solid set of values.”
This research also identified that creative folks were quite unsatisfied about their school experiences because for them the more crucial learning occurred outside their classrooms. They attributed their creative muscles to their mentors and significant teachers who were around them. Csikszentmihalyi’s study showed that many creative people had followed unconventional paths to their careers.
What was most notable was the way they grabbed upon whatever opportunities and dared resistance and constraints that crossed their way to fuel their creativity. In general, they shaped not-so-ideal circumstances to walk on till the end and showed little evidence of being stopped by events they could not control.
It appeared that the excitement and satisfaction of pursuing their creative goals motivated these individuals to surmount barriers and persist through difficulties.
“The great tests of faith don’t usually happen in dramatic moments with dozens of people watching what your next move will be. They come on an ordinary Tuesday morning, standing before a regular discipline or task that has become lifeless, tired, and boring. Small decisions to persevere in the face of weariness and discouragement make a lifetime of faithfulness. But it doesn’t appear to be so at the time. The reward isn’t visible. But it’s on the horizon.”
-Father Jack King
Related article: How Constraints Can Fuel Your Creativity?
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