What is Creativity?

Creativity remains a poorly defined construct within the sciences that study it. Creativity is not easily distinguished from intelligence, wisdom, ingenuity, insight, or intuition, all terms used to describe creative behaviours. Guilford's (1966) distinction between convergent and divergent thinking has perhaps had the most influential effect on how our understanding of creativity has developed. Convergent thinking leads one to arrive at a correct, conventional answer whereas divergent thinking involves generating many novel answers and solutions. Since Guilford, many other components have been included in our understanding of creativity. Here are some creative thinking abilities assembled by Bowd, McDougall, and Yewchuk (1994, pp 150-151):

• Fluency: The ability to produce many responses to an open-ended question or problem, such as "how many uses can you think of for a paper clip?"
• Flexibility: The ability to generate ideas that are unconventional, or to view a situation from different perspectives.
• Originality: The ability to produce unique, unusual, or novel responses, relative to one's reference group.
• Elaboration: The ability to add rich and elaborate detail to an idea, and to develop and implement it.
• Visualization: The ability to imagine and mentally manipulate images and ideas, so as to see them from different internal and external perspectives.
• Transformation: The ability to change one thing or idea into another, to see new meanings, applications, and implications of something already in place.
• Intuition: The ability to see relationships or make connections based on partial information.
• Synthesis: The ability to combine parts into a coherent whole.

Creativity in language

Perhaps one of the most "unobvious" acts of creativity is the use of language. Beyond early childhood the use of language, both recognizing it and producing it, is a highly automated ability. The nature of language is such that the vast majority of utterances produced or heard are done so for the first time. Most of what we hear and speak are created rather than recalled from memory. Language is stored as knowledge of speech sounds, of word patterns, and of rules for creating words and stringing them together. Having developed these automated skills and knowledge, language use becomes almost entirely subconscious and almost entirely creative.

Criteria of creativity

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A Characteristic of the creative personality

• creative people seems to harbor opposite tendencies on the continuum between extroversion and introversion.
• creative individuals have a great deal of energy, quites at the rest
• creative people to to observe thing and alternate between imagination and fantasy at one end and rooted sense of reality at the others.
• Most creative people are very passionate about their work, and yet they can be extremely objective about it as well.
• The sensitivity of creative individual often exposes them to suffering the pain and yet a great deal of enjoyment.