Creative Thinking Journal 1

For my Creative Thinking class we need to keep a weekly journal. This is the first one I did:

In reading the articles this week, it wasn’t surprising that creativity has been neglected as a field of research, or that creativity is difficult to study. Last semester I took CCT’s psychology course, and one of the lessons I learned from the course was how difficult it is to document and quantify the complexities of human experience. Although researchers have made many efforts to deepen our understanding of the human condition, the more complicated an area, the more difficult it is to quantify and categorize.

Creativity certainly seems complicated and multi-faceted. Creativity can be expressed in so many different ways, in so many different fields and endeavors, narrowing it to something concrete and objective must be a daunting task.

As our reading also touches on, there are also aspects of creativity that might make it seem inappropriate to study. The reading discusses creativity in association with spirituality. I think creativity is also often considered something either inconsequential OR ingenious; both perspectives discourage it from being taken seriously. If creativity is something that geniuses have, then there’s not much point in “normal” people thinking about it. On the other hand, many “creative types” (artists, actors, etc.) seem flaky and unstable.

Either stereotype, of the creative genius or the flaky artist, makes creativity seem like something that happens to “other people,” not something that applies to all of us. These unhelpful stereotypes, combined with the research challenges, mean it’s not surprising that there isn’t more support for creativity as a legitimate field of study.

It was exciting to read about the confluence approaches to the study of creativity, because they seem to have made real progress in the area, despite the challenges. The confluence approach looks at creativity as something affected by a range of complex factors, including personal traits and external influences. This broad perspective allows creativity to be examined from many dimensions, and begins to break the complexity down into manageable chunks.

I was also struck by the idea of recognizing the difference between thinking “well” and thinking along new lines. This reminded me (again) or psychology last semester, when we studied how the brain worked. Some people think faster or slower, some can think about more things at once than others, some process decisions in unique ways. Both the biology of the brain and learned habits/approaches to thinking affect how we process information and ideas. It makes sense that these factors also affect our experiences with creativity.

In psychology we discussed that these differences in how people process aren’t necessarily better or worse. Instead, they’re just different. One person might think about one idea slowly, examining it carefully and in a focused way. Someone else might bounce around between topics and thoughts. Although any style, taken to an extreme, has down sides, in general they all have value, and having people with different thinking/processing styles working together can lead to some wonderful results.

That definitely resonates with my thoughts about creativity. There’s no one right way to do it, and multiple approaches can lead to great outcomes. That complexity makes creativity hard to study, but it also makes is exciting and full of possibilities.

I’m looking forward to learn more about both the study and practice of creativity. Learning the science of creativity will give it a concrete foundation, and studying the practice of creativity will just be inspiring.