Transcript TCC315/Psych 418 - University of Virginia

TCC315/Psych 418
Creativity and Intelligence
Larry G. Richards
February 28, 2002
Creativity Questionnaire
A few more questions
Can creativity be taught?
Yes_______
 No________

Comments
A few more questions
Can creativity be learned?
Yes_______
 No________

Comments
What is creativity?
A mysterious gift?
A unique talent?
An ability?
A learned skill?
An attitude?
Who Studies Creativity?
Psychologists
Artists
Scientists/engineers/mathematicians
Writers
The Creativity Literature
Experimental research
Case studies and case histories
Philosophical speculations
Media accounts, popular press
“How to” books, shows, and courses
Case studies of creative
people
Wertheimer: Einstein’s thought
processes
Csikszentmihalyi: 100 creative
individuals
Shekerjian: 40 MacArthur Award
winners
What psychologists know
about creativity
Theresa M. Amabile Creativity in
Context, 1996
Howard Gardner Frames of Mind
Robert Sternberg Successful
Intelligence
Robert W. Weisberg Creativity: genius
and other myths, 1986
David Perkins The Eureka Effect
Theresa Amabile
Three basic ingredients
Domain skills (becoming an expert)


Talent
Practice (10 years)
Creative thinking skills (next slide)
Intrinsic motivation


Passion
Self directed activity: tasks are done for the
pleasure of doing them
Creative thinking skills
(Amabile)
Find novel possibilities; imagine a
diverse range
See it through; be persistent in tackling
the problem
Have high standards
Be an independent person
Willing to take risks
 Has courage to try something new

Expertise and Exceptional
Performance
For most domains, there is an age of
peak performance.
To become an expert requires 10 years
of necessary preparation.
Deliberative practice (typically 4 hours
per day) is required fro constant
improvement.
Expertise and Exceptional
Performance
This practice is mediated by cognitive
processes – it involves attention and
analysis. For experts, practice is not
automatic repetition.
The role of talent is vastly over-rated.
Practice can overcome initial
deficiencies. Adaptive changes result
from extended practice.
Expertise
There are some “natural “ limitations
Michael Jordan
 Willy Shumaker

On becoming an expert
Gradual accumulation of
Knowledge
 Experience
 A collection of “solved problems”
 Reasoning strategies

Stages of skill acquisition
(Dreyfus and Dreyfus)
Novice
Advanced beginner
Competence
Proficiency
Expertise
An Expert has
Complete or comprehensive knowledge
of an area
A corpus of solved problems
Flexible, creative problem solving skills
The ability to predict or infer outcomes
The ability to solve “hard” problems
The Paradox of
Expertise
The more competent domain experts
become, the less able they are to
describe the knowledge they use to
solve problems.
Seven intelligences
Howard Gardner
Language
Mathematics and logic
Spatial reasoning
Music
Movement
Interpersonal intelligence
(understanding other people)
Intrapersonal intelligence

(understanding oneself)
Criteria for defining
multiple intelligences
(Gardner)
Potentially isolatable by brain damage
Special individuals in the domain


Prodigies
Idiot savants
Core set of information processing operations
Distinctive developmental history in the life of
the individual
Criteria for defining
multiple intelligences
(Gardner)
Set of specifiable end states indicating
expert performance
Exhibit an evolutionary history
Evidence from experimental psychology
Psychometric findings support it
Encodable into a symbol system
Multiple Intelligences
(examples)
Language
Pablo Neruda
 Ernst Hemingway
 Leonard Cohen
 Rita Dove

Multiple Intelligences
(examples)
Math and logic
Carl Friedrich Gauss
 Rene Descartes
 Bertrand Russell
 Paul Halmos
 Patrick Suppes

Multiple Intelligences
(examples)
Music
Mozart
 Bach
 The Beatles
 Aaron Copland

Multiple Intelligences
(examples)
Spatial reasoning
Einstein
 Leonardo DaVinci
 Michelangelo
 Alexander Calder

Multiple Intelligences
(examples)
Movement (bodily-kinesthetic)
Michael Jordan
 Suzanne Ferrell
 Jhoon Rhee

Multiple Intelligences
(examples)
Interpersonal
Ghandi
 Martin Luther King

Intrapersonal
Sigmund Freud
 Steven Covey
 Dan Millman

Robert Sternberg:
Successful Intelligence
Analytical intelligence
Creative intelligence
Practical intelligence
Weisberg
Appeals to familiar psychological
processes
Rejects both the “muse” and “genius”
views of creativity
Creative activity proceeds incrementally
in small steps based on past experience
and efforts through the exercise of
conscious mental processes.
Weisberg
Anyone can be creative.
Stages in the creative
process
Immersion (preparation)

Learning about, or defining, the problem
Incubation (time for ideas to develop)
Insight (illumination)
Evaluation (verification)
Elaboration
Evaluating Creativity
products/performance
process
people
Don Johnson :
Dimensions of Creative
Achievement
intellectual leadership
sensitivity to problems
ask questions
 identify problems
 open new areas of thought

originality
ingenuity ( neat, surprising)
Don Johnson :
Dimensions of Creative
Achievement
usefulness
appropriateness
breadth
unusualness
There are multiple
styles of thinking
propositional
verbal
 sequential
 discrete

pictorial
visual
 simultaneous
 continuous

Split Brain Metaphor
due to Roger Sperry
real split brains
injury or disease
 two independent consciousnesses

right and left hemispheres
hemispheric specialization
Left Brain
verbal ( words)
notational
logical
linear, sequential
discrete
Right Brain
visual ( images )
presentational
intuitive
simultaneous
holistic
There are individual
differences in dominant
style of thinking
visualizers
verbalizers
However, any given individual will reflect
skills in both styles of thinking.
Gordon Hewes
“ To an overwhelming extent, science
has advanced by finding means to
visualize relationships and events. “
Roger Shepard
Scientific theories and inventions as
externalized mental images
Stages
visual representation of the problem
 experimentation or playing with the visual
images
 sudden, often unexpected, realization of
the solution

Voices from the edge
Roger Schank
Douglas Hofstader
The Creative Attitude :
Roger Schank
Learning to ask and answer the right
questions
“ I have stressed that being creative
requires having a creative attitude “
Schank’s Maxims
Look for anomalies
Listen
Find data
Classify, and invent new classifications
Make rash generalizations
Schank’s Maxims
Explain
Refuse to learn the rules
Reject old explanations. ASK WHY.
Let your mind wander
Fail early and often
The Eleventh Maxim
Reject all the above maxims.
Essential Abilities for
intelligence (Hofstader)
To respond to situations very flexibily
To take advantage of fortuitous
circumstances
To make sense out of ambiguous or
contradictory messages
To recognize the relative importance of
different elements of a situation
Essential Abilities for
intelligence (Hofstader)
To find similarities between situations
despite differences which may separate
them
To draw distinctions between situations
despite similarities which may link them
Essential Abilities for
intelligence (Hofstader)
To synthesize new concepts by taking
old concepts and putting them together
in different ways
To come up with ideas which are novel
Klukken, Parsons and
Columbus
interviewed eight professional engineers
selected for their reputations for
creativity
about their creative experiences
in practice ( industry )
They found four “clusters of experiential
themes”
Desire and Fulfillment
motivation
these engineers seek opportunities to
be creative and try to find innovative
solutions even to mundane problems
Autonomy and support
environment
they thrive in settings that encourage
creativity and allow taking risks
Openness and
Knowledge
tools
they are experts in their domains but
are receptive to new approaches and
information
Engrossment and
Connection
process
they enjoy the subjective experiences of
challenge and innovation
Some generalizations
about creativity
There may be a threshold of intelligence
above which creativity is not correlated
with IQ
Any student in this class has enough
intelligence to be creative.
Creativity requires functioning at a
certain level of abstraction.
Creativity occurs when previously
independent systems of ideas interact.
Gruber, 1972
Programs designed to foster real-life
creativity should exist in the context of
rigorous instruction in a specific content
area.
Keating , 1980
The first rule of innovation is pleasure.
Peter Lissaman
Educating for creativity
Divergent thinking
content knowledge
critical analysis
communication skills
Overcoming barriers to
creative thinking
lack of thinking time
belief that creativity is rare and difficult
Mental Blocks (von
Oech)
The right answer
That’s not logical
Follow the rules
Be practical
Avoid ambiguity
Mental Blocks (von
Oech)
To err is wrong
Play is frivolous
That’s not my area
Don’t be foolish
I’m not creative
Facilitating creative
thought
develop visual skills
provide environment for capturing and
manipulating your ideas
minimizes constraints
Tools for Personal
Creativity
Belief that you are or can be creative
Absence of judgment in generating
ideas
Precise observation
wonder of a child
 precision of a scientist

Tools for Personal
Creativity
Ask penetrating questions
“The only dumb question is the one you
don’t ask.”
Paul
MacCready
 “What good question did you ask today at
school?”
Richard P. Feynman

A Litany ( from Peter
Lissaman )
challenge assumptions
view differently
perceive patterns
make connections
construct networks
exploit chance
take risks
Importance of
Mentors, role models
Product orientation
Persistence
Follow-through
Documentation
Inventor’s notebook
 Journals
