If we can all be creative, why is it so hard to come up with truly original ideas?
It's because creativity is mysterious. Just ask any scientist, artist, writer or other highly creative person to explain how they come up with brilliant ideas and, if they're honest, they don't really know.
But over the decades psychologists have given ordinary participants countless tests, forms and tasks and conducted hundreds of hours of interviews. From these emerge the psychological conditions of creativity.
It's because creativity is mysterious. Just ask any scientist, artist, writer or other highly creative person to explain how they come up with brilliant ideas and, if they're honest, they don't really know.
But over the decades psychologists have given ordinary participants countless tests, forms and tasks and conducted hundreds of hours of interviews. From these emerge the psychological conditions of creativity.
Six scientific principles of creativity:
- Knowledge - explores the dangers of expertise.
- Problem construction - how creative problems should be approached.
- Emotion - explains which types of emotions are most creative.
- Combining concepts - why the raw materials are already out there.
- Abstraction - how to see your creative problem more clearly.
- The wandering mind - reveals how to think flexibly.
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