Question:
How can we know someone is creative?
Best Answer - Chosen by Asker:
First, understand: everybody is creative. Some of us just don't exercise our creativity as much as other folks to.
Just as some folks don't exercise their abs or pecs or biceps or quadriceps as much as others. So these muscles just don't develop. If they are never exercised at all, they can shrivel or even atrophy.
Creativity is a muscle of the mind. You might think of the 7 Neglected Muscles of the Mind: awareness, enthusiasm, optimism, empathy, wonder, tenacity, and creativity. Everyone has all these muscles, but if we don't use 'em, we lose 'em (or at least they grow weak and dwindle away).
Remember, the body has over 600 muscles. Some of them are involuntary and work whether we are aware of it or not (stomach muscle and heart muscles, say). Memory and perception are such muscles of the mind. But others--the so-called striated muscles--you know, those pecs and abs--can be exercised and trained and developed. OK, maybe not everybody can be an Arnold Swarzenegger of the mind, or would even want to be. But everybody can be creative.
So what is creativity? How can we know it when we see it?
First, the creative thinker is a divergent thinker. Divergent thinking is simply coming up with a number of different ways to do something or to solve a problem. Inventors are divergent thinkers. Convergent thinking, on the other hand, is coming up with the one right answer, the one correct solution to a problem. People who are good at working jigsaw puzzles are exercising convergent thinking: they are coming up with the one right answer, the one correct solution to a problem. People who like to play with legos or erector sets, coming up with many different structures, then taking them apart and doing it again--these people are using divergent thinking.
All young children are divergent thinkers. Watch them play with their toys (or sand at the beech, on empty bottles in your kitchen, or pebbles from a creek, or buttons from a sewing basket).
But when they start to school, their teachers and parents may put most of the emphasis on finding the right answer (the answer in the back of the book, the way to pass the SAT). Youngsters who get too involved in divergent thinking may be labeled as "different" or even castigated as "oddballs." Divergent thinking may not be exercised.
Second, the creative thinker is a synthetic thnker. Synthetic thinkers are always putting things together that don't seem to belong together. On the other hand, analytic thinkers take things apart, to see what they are made of and how they work. In school, "synthetic thinking is the ability to draw on ideas from across disciplines and fields of inquiry to reach a deeper understanding of the world and one's place in it." But school doesn't always reward synthetic thinking. "This is math class;" we sometimes say, "that's history class; and the other one is biology. Don't get them mixed up in your mind."
Children are naturally synthetic thinkers. They're always seeing things that surpise us adults, maybe even embarrass us. The story of Noah from the Bible reminds them of Spiderman on tv or the way they play naked in the bathtub, or the way their border collie in the backyard chases delivery trucks, or the way Dad swears when he hits his thumb with a hammer. Maybe all of the above. Who knows why? Dad swearing may be Noah, or Yahweh, or the kangaroo in the ark--or the crow. That's just the way synthetic thinkers put things together.
Of course, there are other kinds of creativity. But these two are a good beginning. We should watch for it in children; encourage it; provide exercises to help it develop, and feed it properly (good books, trips to the zoo, looking at the stars, walking on the Katy Trail). Just as we should also attend to those other neglected muscles of the mind, like wonder and empathy. Well, that's go beyond that. We should watch for it in ourselves. It will make for more well-round human beings and happier, more fulfilling lives.
OK, maybe we won't all become Mr. America. Nor can we all become Picassos or Edisons or Oprahs or Bill Gates. (How can we know someone is a creative genius: now that's another question).
But, you know, I'll bet we can all at least come up with several different ways to write those "Christmas letters" every year (please!). Or I'll bet we can apply something that we learned from Nova on PBS to the way we think about frying hamburgers. Well, maybe that's a little far-fetched. But you gotta let me exercise those divergent and synthetic muscles.
Maybe if we called them div's and syn's, we might give them as much attention as we do delts and quads.