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Our fourth, and uniquely human, learning system is our ability to be creative.
Creativity is the outcome of consciously applying our imagination to ‘create’ in our mind, new knowledge, ideas, concepts and concept frameworks that have value.
What do we expect when we ask someone to be creative? How do they interpret that request? While it may be a universal question, creativity is almost impossible to explain with clarity. Despite our lack of understanding and clarity, creativity happens for us all, every day. Every prediction we make requires choosing from a range of options and while that has the potential for creativity, it does not guarantee that the outcome is creative. It is our imagination that allows us to be creative. To say “I am not creative!” is tantamount to saying “I am not human!” Everyone can be imaginative and therefore by default everyone can be creative; we all have that potential. But how are we creative?
Being able to comprehend the process of creativity is an entirely different capacity to being able to explain to someone what they do in their mind to be creative. The difficulty in explaining what is happening in our mind when we are being creative is due to the absence of a reasonable analogy or metaphor that we could use to describe how we are being creative.
Defining Creativity
In an insightful study, highlighted in the book Breakpoint and Beyond69, a group of 1,500 people were tested via a standard NASA creativity test. They were asked to find as many creative applications of an object, such as a paperclip, as they could. Those that could come up with more than 50 applications were operating at a genius level of creativity.
Interestingly, the 1,500 people in this study were all preschool learners, and in a stunning result, 98% of these preschool learners were found to be operating at a genius level of creativity. In a longitudinal study, the same learners were then reassessed at the ages of 10 and 15. At age 10, 50% were found to be operating at a genius level, and at age 15 only 28% were found to be still working at that level.
Resource 17: The demise of creativity relative to age
68 The chapter 6 summary video can be found here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZzW5dRDLRpY if you are reading the book, otherwise click on the video icon at the top of the page
69 Land, G & Jarman, B. (1998). Breakpoint and Beyond. Harper Business.
Our Learning Systems:68
4. Imagination and Creativity
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