Gifted, Talented, Addicted

Creativity is not a special “faculty”, nor a psychological property confined to a tiny elite. Rather, it is a feature of human intelligence in general. It is grounded in everyday capacities such as the association of ideas, reminding, perception, analogical thinking, searching a structured problem-space, and reflective self-criticism. It involves not only a cognitive dimension (the generation of new ideas) but also motivation and emotion, and is closely linked to cultural context and personality factors [3]. A creative idea is one which is novel, surprising, and valuable.

There are three main types of creativity, involving different ways of generating the novel ideas. Each of the three results in surprises, but only one (the third) can lead to the “shock’ of surprise that greets an apparently impossible idea.

The first type involves novel (improbable) combinations of familiar ideas. Let us call this “combinational” creativity. Examples include much poetic imagery, and also analogy-wherein the two newly associated ideas share some inherent conceptual structure. Analogies are sometimes explored and developed at some length, for purposes of rhetoric or problem-solving.

The second and third types are closely linked, and more similar to each other than either is to the first. They are “exploratory” and “transformational” creativity. The former involves the generation of novel ideas by the exploration of structured conceptual spaces. This often results in structures (“ideas”) that are not only novel, but unexpected. One can immediately see, however, that they satisfy the canons of the thinking-style concerned.

The latter involves the transformation of some (one or more) dimension of the space, so that new structures can be generated which could not have arisen before. The more fundamental the dimension concerned, and the more powerful the transformation, the more surprising the new ideas will be. These two forms of creativity shade into one another, since exploration of the space can include minimal “tweaking” of fairly superficial constraints. The distinction between a tweak and a transform is to some extent a matter of judgement, but the more well-defined the space, the clearer this distinction can be.

Many human beings-including (for example) most professional scientists, artists, and jazz-musicians-make a justly respected living out of exploratory creativity. That is, they inherit an accepted style of thinking from their culture, and then search it, and perhaps superficially tweak it, to explore its contents, boundaries, and potential. But human beings sometimes transform the accepted conceptual space, by altering or removing one (or more) of its dimensions, or by adding a new one. Such transformation enables ideas to be generated which (relative to that conceptual space) were previously impossible.

The more fundamental the transformation, and/or the more fundamental the dimension that is transformed, the more different the newly-possible structures will be. The shock of amazement that attends such (previously impossible) ideas is much greater than the surprise occasioned by mere improbabilities, however unexpected they may be. If the transformations are too extreme, the relation between the old and new spaces will not be immediately apparent. In such cases, the new structures will be unintelligible, and very likely rejected. Indeed, it may take some time for the relation between the two spaces to be recognized and generally accepted. (Een goed voorbeeld zou de transformatie zijn van Newtonian physics naar Einstein's Theory of Relativity.)

Common sense would suggest that the more one knew about a given domain, the more creative one would be, yet creative ideas in a domain often come from people who would not be characterized as experts. The longer one has been in a field, the more of an expert he or she is going to be and the older he or she is also going to be. Yet creativity shows an inverted-U relationship with age (Simonton 1984). A person cannot have creative ideas before he or she has learned at least some of the crucial facts, theories, and problems in a domain. In mathematics and the physical sciences, the ages of peak creativity are twenty-five to thirty-five. People at these ages would be amateurs turning into experts. An expert can solve problems because he or she knows what is relevant and-the disastrous part-what is irrelevant. A creative solution is one involving ideas that were previously thought to be irrelevant. Creative ideas often involve taking ideas from one discipline and applying them to another.

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Blind Variation and Selective Retention
D. T. Campbell (1960) argued that there may be nothing special about creativity at all. We all think about 16 hours per day. Campbell argues that these thoughts are not random but quasi-random. If our thoughts are of no interest, we do not remember them. Just by chance, one may think of something creative.

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Campbell's theory gives us a possible way of explaining how creative ideas arise, but it does not shed much light on the psychological processes involved. To have a creative idea, one obviously has to be conscious of it. That is, the elements to be combined have to be in the focus of attention. Mendelsohn (1976) proposed that differences in attentional capacity can explain individual differences in creativity. As he put it, "The greater the attentional capacity, the more likely the combinational leap which is generally described as the hallmark of creativity." Consider someone who can attend to two idea&-A and B-at the same time. At any instant, the person has a chance of thinking of a creative combination AB. A person who could attend to three idea&-A, B, and (-simultaneously has three potentially crea- tive combinations: AB, AC, and BC.

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Several lines of experimental evidence support Mendelsohn's contention that creative people tend to have less focused attention than uncreative people (Dykes and McGhie 1976; Mendelsohn and Griswold 1966).