[MUSIC]
What is creativity?
Creativity researchers tend to define creativity as both originality and
meaningfulness or utility in your daily life.
So if something is just original but it's not meaningful,
people may consider it a bit bizarre.
If it's just meaningful or make sense to people but it isn't novel,
people don't tend to call that creativity.
So creativity tends to involve that combination of both originality and
meaningfulness.
And then sometimes, some creativity researchers also say surprising,
has to be a part of creativity now as surprising to you, but
surprising to a field that you work in.
But what are the greatest predictors of creativity?
Well, to try answer that question, the creativity researcher, E Paul Torrance,
looked at three local elementary schools in the in the 50s.
And he took the time to really get to know the children.
So he gave them interview questions, he gave them IQ tests,
he looked at their standardized achievement test scores, their GPA.
And then he wanted to follow them up, 30 years later,
to find out as adults what were the best predictors of creativity.
And he found that a set of characteristics that he called the Beyonder
characteristics did the best job differentiating those who ended up
becoming the greatest creative achievers.
Versus those who, he called them the sociometric stars,
those who just did really well in academics in school.
So here's the list of the Beyonder characteristics.
So he found that those who were the Beyonders as adults, those that went
beyond others in their field had a love of work when they were young children.
They had persistence, they had purpose in life,
they felt like they had some sort of purpose.
Now, to the extent to which an elementary school student could have
a purpose in life.
But you could see the little seeds of their interest or
their future passions were even at play in elementary school.
Deep thinking, it's really important here to note that deep thinking is not quite
the same thing as fast thinking.
The kind of thinking that we measure on IQ test for instance.
So deep reflective thinking.
Tolerance of mistakes, openness to change, risk-taking and
feeling comfortable as a minority of one.
So ask these kids, if you were the only one in the classroom with an idea that you
really believed in and all the other students didn't believe in this idea or
they made fun of you.
Would you be okay with that?
He found the extent to which these elementary school kids said yeah,
I'd be okay with that.
And that predicted the lifelong creativity even better than IQ test scores.
So it's really interesting that really taking the time to get to
know a child can really give us better prediction.
Maybe some of these simpler questions than huge, long academic batteries that we give
people that we expect are the best markers of potential.
Torrance found that the most important factor in predicting life
on creativity was the extent to which children fell in love with a future image
of themselves in adulthood.
And that seem to carry them throughout the whole creative field.
This is a quote from Torrance towards the end of his life.
He wrote an article called The Importance of Falling in Love With Something,
and this is a quote from that article.
Life's most energizing and
exciting moments occur in those split seconds when our struggling and
searching are suddenly transformed into the dazzling aura of the profoundly new.
An image of the future.
One of the most powerful wellsprings of creative energy, outstanding
accomplishment, and self-fulfillment seems to be falling in love with something.
Your dream, your image of the future.
Now, modern day creativity researchers are extending this research in showing just
how important it is to imagine the future, imagine your personal future.
But also imagine the future of everyone else for creativity.
And recent years, there's been discovery in the field of cognitive neuroscience
of what's called the default mode network or wait, I like to call it or
refer to as the imagination network.
Because I believe a lot of the cognitive processes and behaviors that
are associated with this network are related to imagination in some way.
So I'm going to go down a list of some of the cognitive processes that have been
associated with this brain network in recent years.
And I just want to make clear when I say network,
it's not something to be intimidated by, or you don't have to be a cognitive
neuroscientist to understand what a network is.
It's just you have different areas of the brain that operate as team players, and
they communicate with each other to solve a particular task or
to solve a particular problem.
So all of these processes that I'm about to show you are recruited by
this brain network to help solve this process.
So you find the imagination network has been associated with daydreaming,
how many of us out there are huge daydreamers, myself included?
Imagining and planning the future, mostly your personal future.
Retrieving deeply personal memories, like your first kiss or
the first time you were in a school play, these deeply personal memories.
This brain network is associated with retrieving them.