Some people still believe that creativity is a mysterious or magical skill that only a few individuals possess. However, creativity is a human thinking skill that anyone can develop (Boden, 2010). Thus, as a mental product, the study of creativity entails the understanding of the cognitive process that allows the expression of an original and useful idea in a given context.
Unfortunately, the understanding of this creative process is not possible through mere introspection. For example, many artists and scientists often mention that they do not know how their original came about. This lack of awareness and absolute control occurs in all complex thinking. This is because so much information needs to be handled at the same time, that our working memory is unable to maintain. Therefore, the information is manipulated automatically using past knowledge.
The science of creativity is not intended to make creative thinking predictable, since the intrinsic nature of creativity is fundamentally unpredictable. However, it is possible to find thought patterns that facilitate this creative process. The neuroscience of creativity allows us to study not only the parts of the brain involved in this process, but also the information that is being processed at each moment.
The study of these cognitive patterns facilitating creativity has led to the discovery of three fundamental forms of manipulation of information: by association or combination, by emergence and by transformation. We will talk about these different ways of processing the information in a future post.
Mayte Vaos / creativity and science
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