The Creative Mind

What do we mean by the ‘creative mind’? Generally speaking, it is the mind that generates novel solutions to problems.

Throughout human history, we have encountered particularly creative minds such as that of Mozart, Leonardo daVinci, Einstein, Poincare, Archimedes and Coleridge.

There are some really interesting things about the creative experience. Most creative solutions, for instance, are generated when a person is not consciously working on the problem. Instead, they are generated when the person is focused on something else.

This is somewhat contrary to what most people assume which is that creative solutions occur when the person is at rest. In fact, it is almost a necessary condition that the person is preoccupied with a different subject but that there needs to be a subject of focus rather than a so-called ‘resting’ state.

Another interesting thing about the creative experience is that the solution tends to be the result of information coming together from previously uncoupled or dissociated knowledge domains, which is one of the reasons for the novel nature of the solution.

A common misconception about the creative process is that the creative solutions appear to come ‘out of nowhere’ with the implication that one cannot assist or predispose oneself toward a creative solution. What has been observed, however, is that people who have a wide range of expertise tend to be more creative in their thinking probably because they have a wider and deeper knowledge base to draw upon.

It is observed that by giving a problem a lot of thought, creative thinkers keep exploring and deepening their knowledge base, encouraging more information to come into more frequent contact. When the thinker then turns their attention to another subject, the information is given greater freedom to interact thus giving rise to the so-called creative solution.

Have you had a creative experience? How does it compare with what you’ve read here?