New Post (103) : Can creativity be learnt ?
Look for these characteristics in your self and in people you are associated with:
1. Ability to see or sensitivity to problems
Can state difficulties or deficiencies in common products or in social institutions, make judgement that desired goals in a described situation have not been achieved.
2. Fluency of thinking
Able to think well and effortlessly
---Word fluency
Can easily state words containing a given letter or combination of letters
---Associational fluency
Can easily state synonyms for a given word
---Expressional fluency
Can easily write well-formed sentences with a specified content.
---Ideational fluency
Can easily produce ideas to fulfill certain requirements, for example to name objects that are hard, white and edible, or to write an appropriate title for a given story.
3. Flexibility of thinking
Can easily abandon old ways of thinking and adopt new ones.
---Spontaneous flexibility
Can produce a great variety of ideas. For example in suggesting uses for a brick, subject can jump among categories, from building material to weight to missile to source of red powder.
---Adaptive flexibility
Can generalize requirements of a problem to find a solution. For example, in a problem of forming squares using a minimum number of lines, can abandon the usual idea that all squares have to be the same size.
4. Originality
Comes up with ideas that are statistically unusual
---Remote associations
Forms associations between elements that are remote from each other in time, or remote from each other logically
---Responses are judged to be clever
5. Redefinition - gives up old interpretations of familiar objects and uses them in new ways
Which of the following objects could best be used to make a needle: pencil, radish, shoe, fish, carnation? (fish - use bone)
6. Elaboration - can fill in details given a general scheme
Given a general task, fill in the detailed steps. Given two simple lines, draw a more complex object/
7. Tolerance of ambiguity
Willingness to accept some uncertainty in conclusions, not using rigid categories
8a. Interest in convergent thinking
Thinking towards one right answer, as in solving a mathematical problem stated in a textbook
8b. Interest in divergent thinking
Open-ended thinking, where there is not a single right answer
These were found to be common properties of creative individuals.
I suggest you use this listing as a sort of ready reckoner. To pick out the creative sorts. Associate with them. It will provide the environment to fire up your own creativity.
I (do) believe (that) creativity can be "learnt".
Charlie Brown
