Being habitually creative requires far more than original thinking.
Published on March 29, 2012 by Jeffrey Davis, M.A. in Tracking Wonder
The right-brained creativity myth isn’t the only limited notion of what creativity is, what it requires, and how it happens. Again, let me be audacious enough to mention another one: the creative thinking myth. And you tell me what you think. (I certainly appreciated every contribution to the previous conversation.)
Myth: being creative means mostly thinking in novel and original ways.
Many creativity studies in the mid-20th century started with this premise. Metaphorical thinking, associative thinking, flexible thinking, divergent thinking. How many uses for a brick can you come up with? What does this grasshopper wing look like? The work of Paul Torrance, Edward de Bono’s Six Hats and Lateral Thinking, the Remote Associates Test, and others have contributed profoundly to our understanding of how people can engage in non-discursive, non-linear thinking that might or might not contribute to being creative.
