Correlates of creativity

by | Monday, July 20, 2009

Just came across this on the Ph.D. design list (a listserv for discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design) from a posting by Charles Burnette. He quotes Donald MacKinnon, author of a large study on creativity in the arts, sciences and professions:

If I were to summarize what is most generally characteristic of the creative [individual] as we have seen him (sic), it is his high level of effective intelligence, his openness to experience, his freedom from petty constraints, and impoverishing inhibitions, his aesthetic sensitivity, his cognitive flexibility, his independence of thought and action, his high level of energy, his unquestioning commitment to creative endeavor, and his unceasing striving for creative solutions to the ever more difficult … problems he constantly sets for himself.

The question to ponder is, how many of these correlates of creativity are amenable to teaching (i.e. can be taught / nurtured) in the classroom or other contexts and how many are completely outside of our control?

Charles Burnett also provides a couple of references to MacKinnon’s work:

MacKinnon D W. (1962). The nature and nurture of creative talent. Amer. Psychol. 17:484-95.

MacKinnon, D. W. (1978). In Search of Human Effectiveness: Identifying and Developing Creativity. Creative Education Foundation.

Topics related to this post: Art | Biology | Creativity | Design | Learning | Personal | Psychology | Research | Worth Reading

A few randomly selected blog posts…

Total eclipse of the sun: An experiment with visual AI

Total eclipse of the sun: An experiment with visual AI

In a previous post I explored some of the visual capabilities of ChatGPT. This is a continuation of those experiments, where ChatGPT helped me identify the date and time of a solar eclipse based on a photo I took decades ago, as a graduate student at the University of...

The more things change…

I had posted earlier about a recent commercial that, though arguing at one level that technology can fundamentally change education, seemed to stick to the standard-lecture (albeit in different and cooler modes of transmission). Just how little the discourse around...

Self-similarity in math & ambigrams 3/3

Self-similarity in geometry is the idea of repeating a similar shape (often at a different scale) over and over again. In other words, a self-similar image contains copies of itself at smaller and smaller scales, such as the image below of the word "zoom."...

Dr. Karin Forssell, New TPACK dissertation

I met Karin Forssell back in 2008 at the Las Vegas SITE conference when she was a doctoral student at Stanford University. She came and asked me if I was working with anybody at Stanford and I said, something along the lines of "not yet, but send me an email,...

ON@TCC: Do not toss aside lightly…

One Night at the Call Center is the second novel by Chetan Bhagat. I picked it up from the library, since I had read nice things about it on some website somewhere. What a tragic waste of time. This is a terrible novel - maybe the worst I have read in a long, long...

TPACK & the moon OR why I love the web

I recently blogged (here and here) about the experiment conducted by students in Italy that allowed them to use publicly available NASA audio recordings from the moon landings to determine the distance between the earth and the moon. I bit more online research led to...

Slumdog night (and Rahman)

Slumdog rolled into the Oscars tonight. More important to me were the two Oscars for A. R. Rahman for original score and song. It is time that the world recognized his genius. Here is a cartoon by Kaladhar Bapu from his site Point Blank A.R. Rahman by Kaladhar Bapu

Creativity in Las Vegas

I was recently invited to present a keynote address at the 21st Century Instructional Technology Conference (titled Elements of Technology) at the Clark County School District in Las Vegas, Nevada. Clark County is the 5th largest school district in the country with...

1 Comment

  1. Sreeja

    Yes, this is a good pointer. Very interesting quote of a creative person, if you note most of the artists are typified as being absent minded, or unaware of mundane things in life (unless it concerns them artisitcally) or being slightly out of touch with the world – all of it is the output of being the kind of person described above – in their own world. Right?

    Reply

Submit a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *