The Paradoxical World of The Creator

The Paradox of Creativity

Since the dawn of human history, our lives on this lonely planet have been greatly influenced by the creative contributions of people living in different cultures across the world. These creative contribution range from the cupboard-sized refrigerator, which enables us to store our food overnight, to the desktop computer, which allows us to edit our document with ease. These invention have vastly improved our lives. Unfortunately, at the same time they have opened up many potential areas of human conflict. For example, the discovery of nuclear fusion paves the way for our world to meet it’s energy needs indefinitely, at the same time that it threatens us all with a nuclear holocaust. Because creativity has a great impact on our lives - for better of for worse - scientists have long been interested in it. By storing up our scientific knowledge on creativity, two things can be achived. First, we can make better and more efficient use of this precious human resource. Second, we can guard our selves against it’s more negative and destructive impulses. However, our scientific research into creativity is hampered by a lack of agreement on what exactly creativity is. As Mumford and Gustafson have commented, an extensive review of the scholarly literature on this topic leaves one feeling like Lewis Caroll’s Alice in Wonderland, who, upon reading Jabberwocky, remark, “Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas only I don’t exactly know what they are”.

Creativity As a Way of Solving Problems

A common understandings of what creativity is has been slow to emerge, because creativity is a multidimensional concept, which is understood by researchers in different ways. In other words, what you mean by the term “creativity” will depend on which approach you are using to study it. There are at least four theoretical approaches to the study of creativity. They include the cognitive, personality, social psychological and systems approaches to creativity. Each of these four approaches will be outlined in turn.

From the cognitive perspective, when we say that a person behaves in a creative way, we mean that he has come up with a novel, innovative and practical solution to a certain problem. The creator’s solution meets a fell need in the situation. For example, a clever scientist develops a new scientific theory to explain a certain aspect of nature which has puzzled the rest of the scientific community. Or a humorous individual in a sluggish work group cracks a joke to liven up the group atmosphere. Or an imaginative artist paint an evocative image which stirs up a powerful feeling in everyone who looks at it. This process of coming up with a novel and innovative solution to a certain problem is know as creative problem - solving. Creative problem - solving makes certain demands on the creator, which isn’t found in ordinary problem - solving. One of them is the ability of the creator to adapt to an ill – defined situation. In such a situation it isn’t immediately clear at the outset what the exact nature of the problem is, i.e., what are we trying to achieve in this situation? What can we do to reach our goals? What information do we need to gather in order to solve this problem? To deal with this ill - defined situation, the creator engages in problem - finding, i.e., he defines the problem to be solved, how he should go about solving it, as well as what information he should gather, instead of dealing with the problem in a routine and conventional way.