Where does creativity or human creative potential go? Human creative abilities: their limits and conditions

One can agree with the idea of ​​V. Hirsch that the assessment of genius and its originality depends on the external environment surrounding the genius, on the perception of it by society. Indeed, when assessing genius (as well as talent), external criteria are taken into account - the significance of the creative product for society, its novelty, but not the potential of the creative mind. Numerous examples can be given from the history of science.

This raises the question: how to measure genius?

Genius activity in general is never different in nature from the activity of an ordinary person, and the matter is always only about different degrees of intensity of general psychological processes, modern scientists believe. Consequently, the differences between the ordinary and the brilliant are not qualitative, but only quantitative. An interesting fact noted by researchers: many more gifted people are born than those who were able to develop their abilities. That's why society should be interested in studying the conditions for the formation of genius. Was created Psychobiography ( Greek psychê - soul and Greek. biography - biography, life story; life) is a method of psychological analysis of biographies and personalities of specific historical figures and the corresponding genre of biographies, which pays special attention to the mental factors of people’s lives and creativity.

IN psychologist in his work V. N. Druzhinin gives the following “formula of genius”:

Genius = (high intelligence + even higher creativity) x mental activity.

Since creativity, he writes, prevails over the intellect, the activity of the unconscious also prevails over consciousness. It is possible that the action of different factors can lead to the same effect - hyperactivity of the brain, which, in combination with creativity and intelligence, gives the phenomenon of genius, which is expressed in a product that has historical significance for the life of society, science, and culture. A genius, breaking outdated norms and traditions, opens a new era in his field of activity.

The effect of genius seems to many researchers of creativity to be beyond any schemes or measurements.
2. Creative abilities and types of giftedness
As for creative abilities, they are divided into general and special.

“Special” abilities are associated with certain activities (musical, visual, literary, managerial, pedagogical, etc.). Special abilities have a high proportion innate inclinations. The second, which is logical, correlates with the more general conditions of the leading forms of human activity. General creative abilities indicate the individual’s readiness for successful activity, regardless of its content. Common creative abilities include the ability to be variable, hypothetical in the process of solving problems, the ability to improvise in various situations and the ability to transfer as an opportunity to act in new non-standard conditions. However, modern researchers believe that the presence of general abilities is more declared than proven.

Any activity presupposes the need to think, but this does not mean that each person’s different intellectual abilities are equally developed and used in different types of intellectual activity. Researchers distinguish between practical and theoretical minds, since one is “strong” in everyday affairs, but cannot boast of success in mental work at work; the other, on the contrary, is successful as a scientist, but “stupid” in everyday life.

Famous scientist H. Gardner is an outspoken opponent of IQ and general ability. He put forward the theory of multi-intelligence, according to which there are nine types of intelligence:

logical-mathematical,

verbal,

spatial,

musical,

bodily-kinesthetic,

intra-personal and inter-personal,

natural and spiritual.

Each individual, to one degree or another, is endowed with all types of intelligence, and the question of the presence or absence of abilities as such should not be raised ( Take the iq test http://www.iqtestmen.ru/sem.htm )

Recognition of the presence of both general and specific components of each ability and giftedness cannot serve as the basis for the observed tendency to designate abilities by the type of activity that they “serve.” One can agree with the researchers B. M. Teplov and V. D. Shadrikov, which emphasize multifunctionality of abilities, i.e. their involvement in various types of activities. At the same time, we can talk about the musical, literary, artistic (drawing) talent of a person, and correlate it with types of activity.

Types of giftedness

German psychologist and philosopher, one of the pioneers of differential psychology and personality psychology V. Stern distinguished two types of talent - reactive and spontaneous. Children who have the first need to be stimulated from the outside every time, and practical activities are more inherent in them, while those with spontaneous giftedness are more prone to intellectual, theoretical activities. Reactive talent, according to Stern, is lower than spontaneous, theoretical, since it exists in animals, savages and small children; Spontaneous talent is inherent only in man and, moreover, at the highest stages of development.

What do we mean when we call a child or teenager gifted? The term was once used only to refer to children in the Terman Longitudinal Study with an IQ of 140 or higher.

ABOUT However, modern definitions of giftedness are broader, and now Not only are people with high IQs considered gifted, but also those who have exceptional talent in specific areas such as music, art, literature or science.

Creator of the materialistic doctrine of higher nervous activity I. P. Pavlov distinguished two types of people - “artists” and “thinkers”. The former are distinguished by the predominance of visual-figurative thinking over verbal-logical thinking (the predominance of the first signaling system). The latter, on the contrary, have a predominance of verbal-logical thinking over figurative thinking (predominance of the second signaling system); Generalizations and concepts play a leading role in their thinking. It has now been proven that these types of giftedness are associated with functional asymmetry of the cerebral hemispheres: among “artists” the right hemisphere predominates, and among “thinkers” the left hemisphere predominates. From this we can conclude : Some people are more gifted in artistic creativity, while others are more gifted in science and invention.

Currently, Western psychologists distinguish between several types of giftedness:

• 
  general intellectual;
• 
  specific academic;
• 
  creative: artistic and performing arts;
• 
  psychomotor;
• 
  leadership;
• 
  social.

Criticisms are increasingly being heard against researchers of creative thinking and intelligence. Without denying the importance of experimental psychological studies of creativity, some researchers believe that their results are of little use for understanding the real creative process, because, firstly, they deal with artificially created situations and, secondly, they do not take into account the peculiarities of the problem being solved by a person, the subject field in which the search for the desired solution is carried out.

Indeed, experimental problem situations and the research activities that a scientist is engaged in in his daily work have completely different motivational potential, that is, an incentive to action. Consent to participate in an experiment and the process of solving an experimental problem are motivated by motives of a completely different kind than professional scientific activity and the development of a serious scientific problem. Under these conditions, some subjects quickly lose incentive to work: as soon as their curiosity is satisfied or the feeling arises that they have already done enough for the experimenter.

The scientific problem is a different matter. As a rule, it is formulated by the scientist himself, who proceeds from the results of previous research, his own scientific interests, and an assessment of the prospects for developing this problem, including for his career. But even if it arises under the influence of social orders or other external factors, in any case the researcher nurtures it, adapts it to his interests and perceives it as his own brainchild. The solution to the problem is included in the general system of motivation for scientific activity that exists for a given person, and the career, prestige, and future of a scientist sometimes depend on success in solving it.

Scientific activity is also guided by such powerful incentives as interest in the problem, passion for the very process of cognition and research. In addition, a scientist not only solves this or that problem, but every time he proves to himself and others what he is worth as a professional, and therefore the assessment by other scientists of the result of his work directly affects an important component of a person - his self-esteem. The motive of maintaining self-esteem is an important additional factor stimulating any professional activity.

This motivational component of scientific creativity cannot be simulated in an experiment. It manifests itself only in real research activities, and therefore any experiment to study creative thinking is always immeasurably poorer than the actual creative process. But this is only one side of the problem. Another is that the thought process is to a great extent directed and regulated by the content of the problem situation. A problem with six matches is one thing, and a problem from the field of quantum mechanics is quite another. They differ not only in the level of difficulty and the number of variables that must be taken into account, but also in the degree of uncertainty under which the researcher works.

As a rule, real research problem situations imply the possibility of not one, but several solutions, and the “correct” solution - if it exists at all - is not known to anyone in advance. You don’t need to have special knowledge to understand that the strategy and tactics of action in both cases will be fundamentally different.

Researchers emphasize that if psychology wants to get a truly real, three-dimensional picture of creativity, it must necessarily include in the scope of its analysis the study of how different types of tasks, features of the object or phenomenon being studied influence the process of creative thinking.

Author of TRIZ-TRTS (theory of solving inventive problems - theory of development of technical systems), author of TRTL (theory of development of a creative personality), inventor and writer. G. S. Altshuller rightly notes that questions like “how should I hunt?” or “how to play musical instruments?” will immediately raise counter questions: who to hunt? what instrument to play? Why is it permissible to study creativity, a much more complex process, regardless of the nature of the problem being solved, and to extend the conclusions obtained in particular situations to the entire field of solving creative problems? This can lead to the deepest misconceptions in understanding the mechanisms of the creative process.

A person creates and thinks, unique in his own way, possessing only his own inherent characteristics of intelligence, thinking style, personal history and experience. But she always thinks about a very specific task, which modifies and, as it were, adapts existing strategies and tactics for solving, provokes the development of new heuristics, and directs the process of searching for new information.

Despite the fact that studies of thinking and intelligence by scientists, philosophers and psychologists have not led to the solution of the set tasks in understanding the nature of scientific creativity, it has become clear that creativity is not reducible to creative thinking, just as creative ability is not reducible only to the characteristics of intelligence, because it is inherent not in the intellect as such, but in the personality as a whole.

Thus, the search for the specific characteristics of a man of science was carried out in parallel in three areas, although at different periods of time the emphasis was shifted to one or the other: 1) the process of thinking; 2) the structure of intelligence and the level of its development; 3) personal traits themselves.

1. 
   Altshuller G.S. Invention algorithm. -
2. 
   Altshuller G.S. Find an idea. Introduction to TRIZ. - http://www.koob.ru/altshuller/
3. 
   Girsh V. Genius and degeneration.- http://www.koob.ru/girsh_v/
4. 
   Gordeeva T.O. Motivational prerequisites for giftedness: from G. Renzulli’s model to the integrative model of motivation // Psychological Research. - 2011 - N 1(15). - http://www.psystudy.ru/index.php/num/2011n1-15/435-gordeeva15.html

1. 
   Druzhinin V.N. Psychology and psychodiagnostics of general abilities. - http://www.bronnikov.kiev.ua/book_1_109.php
2. 
   Stern V. Mental giftedness: Psychological methods for testing mental giftedness in their application to school-age children. - 1997. - 128 p.

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Introduction
People do a lot of things every day: small and large, simple and complex. And every task is a task, sometimes more or less difficult.
When solving problems, an act of creativity occurs, a new path is found, or something new is created. This is where special qualities of the mind are required, such as observation, the ability to compare and analyze, find connections and dependencies - all of which together constitute creative abilities.
Among the first researchers of creativity was L. Thurstone, who drew attention to the difference between creative abilities and learning abilities.
J. Guilford created a concept based on the fundamental difference between two types of mental operations: convergence and divergence. Guilford considered the operation of divergence to be the basis of creativity, which he explained as “a type of thinking that goes in different directions.”
J. Guilford's concept was developed by E. P. Torrance.
Creativity was viewed by Torrance as a natural process that is generated by a person’s strong need to relieve tension that arises in a situation of discomfort caused by uncertainty or incompleteness of activity.
Creativity covers a certain set of mental and personal qualities that determine the ability to be creative. Based on the scientific literature, it was found that creativity, as a personality characteristic, is a complex integrative formation. The composition of creativity determines the totality of various abilities that determine the implementation of the creative process. Based on the reviewed studies of the structure of the creative process, it has been established: in the dynamics of the creative process, phases or stages can be distinguished when the development (further implementation) of creativity is determined to a greater extent by some dominant ability. In other words, in the process of creativity, the abilities that make up the content of creativity are consistently updated, while remaining a single system.
The formation of creativity involves the creation of diagnostic tools that make it possible to identify a person’s creative potential. Recently, in our country, practical psychologists (including school psychologists) have begun to actively use various psychodiagnostic tools, which include creativity tests (foreign methods for measuring creativity by E. Torrance and S. Mednik have been adapted to the Russian-speaking sample and have become widespread). But the problem is that traditional test procedures, according to a number of scientists, do not allow us to present a sufficiently complete picture of the creative capabilities of the people being examined, B. Simon, M. Wallach. This is explained, in our opinion, by the fact that when identifying creativity one has to deal with a psychological phenomenon characterized by uncontrollability and spontaneity of manifestation.

Chapter 1 The concept of human creative abilities
Creativity is the individual characteristics of a person’s qualities that determine the success of his performance of creative activities of various kinds.
Creativity is a fusion of many qualities. And the question about the components of human creative potential remains open, although at the moment there are several hypotheses regarding this problem. Many psychologists associate the ability for creative activity, first of all, with the characteristics of thinking. In particular, the famous American psychologist Guilford, who studied the problems of human intelligence, found that creative individuals are characterized by so-called divergent thinking. People with this type of thinking do not concentrate all their...

“Abilities call for their use and cease calling only when they are used well.”

Abraham Maslow

Every day people do a lot of things: small and large, simple and complex. And every task is a task, sometimes more or less difficult. But with all their diversity, all cases can be divided into old, already known, and new. Everyone knows well how to solve old problems (whether professional, educational or everyday). We sometimes even do them mechanically. For example, the driver, while continuing to drive the car, announces stops and talks. But when some unforeseen situation arises (be it a breakdown or an unexpected incident on the road), a new task arises and, although it is not very difficult, it can be classified as creative.

The range of creative tasks is unusually wide in complexity - from solving a puzzle to a scientific discovery, but their essence is the same: when solving them, a new path is found or something new is created, that is, an act of creativity occurs. This is where special qualities of the mind are required, such as observation, the ability to compare and analyze, combine, find connections and dependencies, patterns, etc. - all that together constitutes creative abilities. Let's take a closer look at the main qualities.

Convergent and divergent thinking. There are two ways, two strategies for searching for a solution to a particular problem. American psychologist J. Guilford, summarizing the research conducted in this area, identified two types of thinking: convergent, necessary to find the only exact solution to the problem, and divergent, thanks to which original solutions arise.

Let's explain with an example. Some people believe that there is only one right solution and try to find it using existing knowledge and logical reasoning. All efforts are concentrated on finding the only correct solution. This kind of thinking is called convergent thinking. Others, on the contrary, begin to look for a solution in all possible directions in order to consider as many options as possible. This “fan-shaped” search, which most often leads to original solutions, is characteristic of divergent thinking.

Unfortunately, almost all of our training is aimed at activating convergent thinking. Such a bias in pedagogy is a scourge for a creative person. For example, it is known that A. Einstein and W. Churchill found it difficult to study at school, but not because they were absent-minded and undisciplined, as the teachers believed. In fact, this was far from the case, but the teachers were simply irritated by their manner of not answering the question directly, but instead asking some “inappropriate” questions like “What if the triangle was upside down?”, “What if we replace water on...?”, “And if you look from the other side””, etc.

Creative people usually tend to think divergently. They tend to form new combinations of elements that most people use in a certain way, or to form connections between two elements that at first glance have nothing in common. Try to come up with some kind of drawing based on a circle. Well, what comes to your mind?, Man?, Tomato? Moon? Sun? cherry... These are the standard answers that most people give. How about “a piece of Cheddar cheese” or “a footprint of an unknown animal” or “a swarm of viruses under a microscope in a drop of water.” This is already non-standard. In other words, these are creative responses.

Vigilance in search of problems. On a spring morning in 1590, a man climbed the famous Leaning Tower of Pisa with a cast-iron cannonball and a lead musket bullet in his hands. He threw both objects from the tower. His students, standing below, and he himself, looking from above, made sure that the cannonball and bullet thrown by him touched the ground at the same time. This man's name was Galileo Galilei.

For two thousand years, since the time of Aristotle, there was a belief that the speed of a body's fall is proportional to its weight. A dry leaf torn from a branch falls slowly, and the full fruit falls like a stone to the ground. Everyone saw it. But more than once we have seen something else: two boulders falling from a cliff reach the bottom of the gorge at the same time, despite the difference in size. However, no one noticed this, because looking and seeing are not at all the same thing.

In a stream of external stimuli, people usually perceive only what fits into the “grid” of existing knowledge and ideas; the rest of the information is unconsciously discarded. Perception is influenced by habitual attitudes, assessments, feelings, as well as adherence to generally accepted views and opinions. The ability to see something that does not fit into the framework of what was previously learned is something more than just observation. This freshness of sight and “vigilance” are not associated with visual acuity or retinal features, but are a quality of thinking, because a person sees not only with the help of the eye, but mainly with the help of the brain.

Even A. Einstein argued that “whether you can observe this phenomenon will depend on what theory you use. Theory determines what can be observed." And the great G. Heine noted that “every century, acquiring new ideas, acquires new eyes.”

Galileo Galilei's experiment was stunningly simple: no fancy devices, no special devices. Anyone could climb onto the roof and drop two loads of different weights, but no one thought of it during the 19th centuries. Galileo saw a problem where for others everything was clear, sanctified by the authority of Aristotle and two thousand years of tradition. Galileo doubted Aristotelian mechanics. This is where the idea of ​​experience came from. The results of the experiment were not unexpected for him, but only confirmed the already emerging hypothesis about the independence of the acceleration of free fall from the mass of the falling body.

And yet Einstein’s judgment cannot be absolute. He noticed a feature of cognition that does not exhaust all the laws of this process.

Observations by psychologists show that during the perception of visual images, connections are established between the perceived signs and words, i.e., the so-called verbalization of visual experience occurs. Most likely, it is verbalization that determines the minimum portion perceived as an information visual unit. Anthropologists' observations support this view. It was discovered that the North American Indians from the Hopi tribe, whose language has a word for “green” but no word for “blue,” are unable to distinguish the color green from blue. But those of them who speak English can perfectly distinguish between these two colors.

Probably, before discovering something new that is not noticed by other observers, it is necessary to form a corresponding concept. Most often it is formed using words. Other information codes may also be used.

To develop vigilance in searching for problems, it is important to learn to analyze a problem situation. The easiest way to develop this ability is in tasks where you need to rerank the selected factors of the situation (that is, arrange them in order of importance).

The ability to curtail mental operations. In the process of thinking, a gradual transition is needed from one link in the chain of reasoning to another. Sometimes, because of this, it is not possible to grasp the whole picture in one’s mind’s eye, the entire reasoning from the first to the last step. However, a person has the ability to collapse a long chain of reasoning and replace it with one generalizing operation.

The process of collapsing mental operations is only a special case of the manifestation of the ability to replace several concepts with one, to use increasingly information-rich symbols. There is an opinion that the avalanche-like growth of scientific information will ultimately lead to a slowdown in the pace of development of science. Before you start creating, you will have to master the necessary minimum knowledge for a very long time. However, the accumulation of scientific information has by no means led to a slowdown or cessation of scientific progress. Keeping up with it is possible partly due to the human mind's ability to collapse. Using more and more abstract concepts, a person continuously expands his intellectual range.

For example, to learn arithmetic division in the Middle Ages, you had to graduate from university. Moreover, not every university could teach this wisdom. It was absolutely necessary to go to Italy. Mathematicians in this country have achieved great skill in division. If we remember that Roman numerals were used in those days, it will become clear why division of millionth numbers was accessible only to bearded men who devoted their entire lives to this activity.

With the introduction of Arabic numerals, everything changed. More precisely, the point is not in the numbers themselves, but in the positional (in this case decimal) number system. Now nine-year-old schoolchildren, using the simplest set of rules (algorithm), divide both millionth and billionth numbers. The amount of semantic information remains the same, but more advanced symbolic designation allows processing to be carried out quickly and economically.

Economical symbolic designation of concepts and relationships between them is the most important condition for productive thinking.

Clear and concise symbolic notation not only facilitates the assimilation of the material. An economical recording of already known facts, a laconic form of presentation of the developed theory is a necessary prerequisite for further progress, one of the essential stages in the progress of science. To introduce a new elegant way of symbolization, to elegantly present a well-known method - such work is also creative in nature and requires non-standard thinking.

Guessing, and then inventing various riddles, puzzles, etc., helps a lot in developing this property.

At the first stage, you can consider logical problems, the solution of which will help with symbolic notation. For example: Five girls - Vera, Tanya, Nadezhda, Sofia and Lyubov invited Semyon to visit their dormitory. Arriving at the hostel, Semyon saw a corridor and six rooms, which were located as follows:

Semyon knows that Vera occupies one of the first three rooms, Tanya lives between Faith and Love, Vera’s room is in the middle between Sophia’s and Nadezhda’s rooms, and that Nadezhda is Tanya’s neighbor. Answer the following questions:

If we assume that Tanya lives in room 5, then which room is empty?

If we assume that Lyubov lives in room 5, then which room is empty?

If no one lives in room 5, then in which room does Vera live? Lyuba? Tanya?

Ability to transfer experience. In 1903, the Wright brothers built an airplane. But one problem remained unresolved: they did not know how to stabilize the aircraft after turning in the air. The decision came when the brothers watched the flight of a bird - a buzzard. They made wings whose trailing edge could be bent - the prototype of the modern flap.

Of course, the transfer does not necessarily take place from a “biological object” - analogies can be found anywhere.

In ancient Egypt, water was raised to the fields using a continuously rotating chain with buckets. In 1783, the Englishman O. Evans used this idea to transport grain in mills. He made a “transfer by analogy” from a liquid to a solid. The analogy is simple, but for thousands of years no one noticed it.

The ability to apply the skill acquired in solving one problem to solving another is very important, that is, the ability to separate the specific “grain” of a problem from that non-specific one that can be transferred to other areas. This is essentially the ability to develop generalizing strategies. Transferring experience is one of the most universal methods of thinking and the ability to transfer is an important condition for productive creativity.

Widely distributed attention increases the chances of solving a problem: “To create, you need to think about it.” By analogy with lateral vision, the English physician E. de Bono called lateral thinking the ability to see the path to a solution using “extraneous” information. Examples of such thinking are widely known: I. Newton and the apple that fell on his head, which helped to discover the law of attraction. Archimedes and the Golden Crown. While lying in the bath, Archimedes found a way to compare the volumes of different bodies. Which, in turn, was the impetus for painstaking work to study the conditions of floating bodies, the result of which was subsequently the famous law of hydrostatics,

Lateral thinking turns out to be effective and helps to find a solution to the problem under one indispensable condition: the problem must become a stable goal of activity, become dominant.

The idea of ​​a dominant focus, or dominant, belongs to Academician A. A. Ukhtomsky. This idea arose from an experiment. The dog developed a conditioned reflex to withdraw its hind paw by combining a blow to this paw with the sound of a metronome. Then a piece of filter paper moistened with a solution of strychnine was placed on that part of the cerebral cortex that serves as the “cortical representation” of the left forepaw in the anterior gyrus. And when the metronome sounded again, the left front paw bent more than the back one. The lesion, excited by a chemical agent (strychnine), became dominant. All irritants were attracted to him. They no longer caused the same reaction that they had caused before, but one that was associated with the dominant focus.

Ukhtomsky identified two main properties of the dominant: the relatively increased excitability of a group of nerve cells, due to which stimuli coming from different sources are summed up, and a persistent delay in excitation after the disappearance of the stimuli. A concept, idea, thought, problem can become a dominant, attracting all external stimuli to itself. It is interesting to recall in this regard the observations of Charles Darwin: “... music usually makes me think hard about what I am currently working on.” The mathematician L. Lagrange came up with the idea of ​​the calculus of variations while he was listening to the organ in the church of San Francesco di Paola in Turin.

The ability of the brain to form and maintain for a long time in a state of excitation a neural model of a goal that directs the movement of thought is, apparently, one of the components of talent.

Ready memory. Try to solve the problem: empty room. There are pliers on the windowsill and two pieces of string hanging from the ceiling; you need to tie their ends. But the length of each string is less than the distance between the attachment points.

Analyze how you solved this problem. There may be several logical chains when solving it, but in any case it is necessary to remember the properties of a swinging load and relate this knowledge to the problem. (The solution is to tie pliers to the end of one of the strings and make a pendulum.) The advantage in the decision will be given not to the one who has richer erudition, but to the one who quickly extracts the necessary information from memory. In such cases, they talk about intelligence, but one of its components is the readiness of memory to provide the necessary information at the right moment.

Memory is sometimes spoken of disparagingly, contrasting it with thinking abilities. There are many tales about absent-minded professors, etc. But the words “bad memory” are too vague. Memory includes the ability to remember, recognize, reproduce immediately or delayed. When a person solves a problem, he can only rely on the information that he currently perceives and that he can retrieve from memory.

The form of recording, classification, address system and search system are essential. Let's imagine a machine that contains information about all possible objects, different in shape, color, taste, smell, etc. We need to find out whether there is an object that simultaneously has four properties - round, heavy, green, sweet. And if it exists, what is it? You can go through all the round objects and check them based on color. Then check all the round and green ones to taste. Finally, check everything round, green and sweet by weight - and find a watermelon. You can act differently: store information that has already been classified according to a combination of characteristics, that is, have reference data about which objects are round and sweet, green and heavy, etc. But this option of recording in the brain is unlikely. Most likely an associative network. Watermelon is associated with the concept of “round”, “sweet”, “green”, etc. from the moment the concept of “watermelon” was formed in the brain.

Intuitive instant solutions to a problem are possible because there is a large number of associative connections that provide quick access to the necessary information.

Memory readiness can be trained, for example, by playing the following game:

Remember or imagine yourself on the beach, try to see the long waves rushing onto the shore, hear how they, rolling back into the sea, rustle on the pebbles, imagine how you enter the wave and dissolve in it. You yourself have become a wave. You roll onto the shore with force and, tumbling, scatter into a thousand small splashes, become foam, run back and, gaining strength, fall onto the shore again.

You feel the sand, the stones, and see the beach. The one you were before you were transformed into a wave decided to take a swim. He runs and jumps into the sea...

Describe what unusual you feel when you see yourself from the outside?

Integrity of perception. This term denotes the ability to perceive reality as a whole, without fragmenting it (as opposed to perception in small independent portions). I. P. Pavlov pointed out this ability, highlighting two main types of higher cortical activity - artistic and mental: “Life clearly points to two categories of people: artists and thinkers. There is a sharp difference between them. Some - artists of all kinds: writers, musicians, painters, etc. - capture reality entirely, completely, completely, living reality, without any fragmentation, without any separation. Others - thinkers - precisely crush it and thus, as it were, kill it, making some kind of temporary skeleton out of it, and then only gradually, as if they collect its parts again and try to revive them in this way, which they still fail to do. "

The division into thinkers and artists is associated with the predominant participation of the right or left hemispheres in human mental activity. This observation was made back in 1864 by the English neuropathologist H. Jackson. There is now evidence of the role of the left hemisphere in analytical thinking, in which speech and logic dominate. The right hemisphere dominates perception when it is necessary to combine simultaneously or sequentially perceived elements into something whole. For example, the functions of the right hemisphere are related to the perception of musical images (combining a sequence of sounds into a melody); the left hemisphere is directly related to reading notes.

I. P. Pavlov came to the division into artistic and mental types by observing children; It was with them that he first noticed an artistic type of perception, without highlighting details. And it’s not surprising: when the second signaling system is still weak, every child is “right-hemisphere”: he perceives the world in images, and not analytically. Over the years, the second signaling system becomes stronger, and the role of the left hemisphere increases.

Thus, the terms “left-brained” and “right-brained” should not be taken literally. Both hemispheres work, but one of them dominates in relation to certain functions, creating a predominantly artistic or predominantly mental type of cortical activity.

The “thinker” as a type of higher nervous activity is by no means the ideal of a scientist. Of course, science requires meticulous collectors and recorders of facts, analysts and archivists of knowledge. But in the process of creative thinking, one needs the ability to break away from the logical consideration of facts in order to connect elements of thought into new systems of images. Without this, it is impossible to look at the problem with a fresh look, to see something new in what has long been familiar.

The ability to perceive and manipulate images is the most important ability of the brain, so let's talk about it in more detail. The only channel established by experience through which information about the world around us comes to a person is the senses. And the way to transmit information from the senses to the brain is through nerve impulses. Frequency modulation of pulses is a way to transmit the entire variety of information about the world to the brain.

Impulses travel along numerous pathways - both from different sensory organs, and from a given sensory organ along different fibers. Spatial and temporal summation of impulses, excitation and inhibition in the cerebral cortex is the physiological basis of human thinking.

However, processing and summing up impulses is not thinking. It is necessary to form spatial and temporal configurations of pulses in which noise is filtered out and a structural constant is isolated. It lies at the heart of the images. Thinking begins from this level.

The ability to recognize patterns is one of the fundamental properties of the brain. Its biological significance is obvious. In order to survive the struggle for existence, an animal must respond in the same way to similar objects, regardless of individual differences. (So, the hare must recognize all wolves equally).

A person recognizes a printed word regardless of the type of font, color, size of letters, etc. Words are recognized by ear regardless of the volume, pitch and timbre of the speaking voice. The physical characteristics of signals can vary widely; Neurophysiological events in the brain are also different. But in the cortex there is a mechanism that highlights the image that lies behind all the changing visual, auditory and other stimuli. Information processing implemented in this way is the content side of thinking.

The same physiological processes can convey different content. In the ancient world, thunderstorms were explained by the wrath of Zeus; we consider it a manifestation of atmospheric electricity. Meanwhile, there is no reason to think that the physiological processes of the Hellenes and our contemporaries are somehow different. The difference is not at the level of impulse processing; it begins with the formation of images and increases at higher hierarchical levels of abstraction.

The physiological basis of the image is a neural model or a set of nerve cells and their connections, forming a group that is relatively stable over time. Any event occurring in the external environment and perceived by a person is modeled in the cortex of his brain in the form of some kind of structure. In this case, a correspondence is assumed between real objects and their models in the nervous system, i.e. code. This is one of the conditions for the objectivity of cognition (we recognize objects, even if we see them from an unusual angle). The neural excitation patterns that arise are not identical, that is, they do not coincide with all of their elements. But a constant structure can be identified in them, which allows an object to be identified by the probabilistic coincidence of excited neurons. There are two types of structures: spatial and temporal. A musical melody has a temporal structure; the same melody in musical notation - spatial. A printed book has a spatial structure, but when read aloud, it has a temporal structure.

It would seem that there is nothing in common between a letter and its phonetic sound. But spoken and printed texts are identical in terms of information (if we neglect the information conveyed by intonation). Obviously they have structural similarities. It is in this sense that we can talk about the similarity of the structure of the neural model with the structure of the reflected object. At the level of individual elements of the model, a one-to-one correspondence is quite sufficient. But at the level of the model there is certainly structural similarity, or isomorphism of the model. A model of an object can be a reduced or enlarged copy of the object, made from a different material, and work on a different time scale. If we are talking about a model of a changing object, then it is necessary to determine the functional features, patterns of change and development. A model in the brain is essentially information that is processed in a specific way. Exactly identical nerve impulses, grouped in time and space, form models of ever-increasing complexity, reflecting reality more and more fully, endlessly approaching it, but never exhausting it.

The creation of a neural model corresponds to what is commonly called representation formation. The movement of excitation and inhibition, their transition from one model to another is the material basis of the thinking process.

You can develop this ability with the help of a simple game: you need to take an ordinary postcard and cut it along randomly drawn smooth lines. In this game you need to learn to imagine what objects the outline of the cut edge of a postcard looks like, but you need to do this with your eyes closed.

Convergence of concepts. The next component of creative talent is the ease of association and remoteness of associated concepts, the “semantic distance” between them. This ability is manifested, for example, in the synthesis of witticisms. A. S. Pushkin also noted that “we don’t call jokes, so dear to our cheerful critics, wit, but the ability to bring concepts together and draw new and correct conclusions from them.”

Thinking operates with information that is previously organized and ordered (partly during the process of perception). Associated images and concepts are the specific form in which they are stored in memory. The nature of associative connections determines, limits and predetermines the course of the thought process, interacting with current perceptions.

Research has confirmed this position. A. N. Luk describes the following experiment: the experiments consisted in the fact that the subjects were asked to listen to phrases recorded on tape. One of the words of each phrase was accompanied by noise, so it was impossible to understand it the first time. I had to listen to the recording several times.

There were two types of phrases: reasonable and absurd. An example of the first type is “light was falling from the window.” An example of the second type is “there was a hippopotamus on the plate.” The words “window” and “hippopotamus” were covered in noise during recording, and the noise level was the same. The subjects needed five to six repetitions to understand a “natural” word through the interference, and to understand an “absurd” one, they needed 10-15 repetitions, i.e. two to three times more. In similar experiments, it turned out that in patients with certain types of schizophrenia there was no difference between meaningful and absurd words: they perceived both with equal difficulty through interference.

These simple experiments point to the fact that in the memory of a normal person, words are grouped into “clusters,” associative templates that are used in the process of perception and, apparently, thinking. Probably, ready-made associative templates “save money”. At the same time, these patterns make thinking less flexible. The absence of such preparations leads to fragmentation and randomness of thinking, i.e. to a disruption of the thought process.

There must be an optimal range of associative strength. Going beyond this range in one direction leads to rigidity of thinking and its trivial standardization. Deviation in the other direction will lead to pathological fragmentation, fragmentation of thinking, loss of control over the course and content of one’s own thoughts.

In the optimal range of association strength, there are several gradations: connections are more or less strong, more or less easily aroused. This is the material with which thinking operates.

The thought process differs from free association primarily in that thinking is a directed association. But then the question arises: how is it directed? As clinical observations show, the factor that directs association and turns it into thinking is the goal. Then it is natural to ask: what is the goal?

We discussed the mechanism for forming a stable goal of action above. In a relatively simple case, such as an arithmetic problem, the goal is questioned. Let's say, if we know how much water flows into the pool through one pipe and how much through another, and the volume of the pool is also known, then the goal that determines the direction and course of the thought process will be the question: in how many minutes will the pool be filled? And then direct associations like “pool - bathing - swimming”, etc. will be inhibited. (There are conditions in which precisely such “random” associations are excited, and the question ceases to play a guiding role in the organization of the associative process. According to Luria, this occurs when the frontal lobes of the brain are damaged.)

For example, a comic exercise to establish a situational connection between objects can help develop the ability to bring concepts together: Make up as many questions as possible, connecting two objects. For example: newspaper - camel.

How many camels can be wrapped in one newspaper? What does the newspaper say about the camel? Why do you stoop like a camel when reading a newspaper? Etc. Try to make the questions unusual or funny.

Another option is tasks to define concepts or explain “catch phrases”, for example, explain the following expressions:

To be born in a shirt - ......; Goof up - ......; Open secret - ......; Procrustean bed - ......; Eating henbane - ......; Sink into oblivion - ......; Damaged little head - ......

Flexibility of thinking. The ability to quickly and easily move from one class of phenomena to another, distant in content, is called flexibility of thinking. We can say that flexibility is a well-developed skill of transference and transposition. The absence of such ability is called inertia, rigidity and even stuckness or stagnation of thinking. But what is close or distant in content? Is it possible to measure semantic distance? This is probably a variable that is influenced by the so-called functional fixedness of a person. It was described by the American psychologist K. Duncker and shown in the following experiment.

The subject is asked to attach three candles to the door. Among the objects that can be manipulated are a hammer, boxes of nails, and pliers. The solution is to nail boxes to the door and place candles in them. The task was presented in two versions: in the first case, the boxes were empty, in the second, they were filled with nails. When solving the first option, everyone used boxes as a stand. In the second option, only half of the subjects guessed to pour out the nails and turn the boxes into coasters. Dunker explained this by the fact that in the second version the boxes were perceived as containers for nails, it was this function that the subject recorded, so the transition to other possible functions was difficult.

The ability to overcome functional fixity is one of the manifestations of thinking flexibility. One might expect that people with higher mental flexibility scores are more likely to come across the right idea when solving a practical problem.

There is also flexibility in the ability to abandon a compromised hypothesis in time. The word “on time” needs to be emphasized here. If you persist for too long on a tempting but false idea, time will be lost. And abandoning a hypothesis too early may result in a missed opportunity for a solution. It is especially difficult to abandon a hypothesis if it is your own, invented independently. Numerous experiments by K. Duncker show this. Apparently, the mind tends to draw imaginary limitations around itself, and then stumble over them. The ability to step over such invisible barriers is the flexibility of the intellect.

To develop flexibility of thinking, you can complete the following task:

Write down all the uses for a small nail that you can think of in five minutes. Analyze your answers.

To analyze the answers, the following categories can be distinguished: sensory; external resemblance; relation of part to whole; abstraction; logics; class allocation; analogy.

Can you now think of even more ways to use carnations?

Ability to evaluate. The ability to evaluate, to select one of many alternatives before testing it, is extremely important. Evaluation actions are carried out not only upon completion of the work, but also many times during the course of it; they serve as milestones along the path of creative quest, separating various stages and phases of the creative process. Chess players were the first to draw attention to the independence of evaluative abilities from other types of abilities.

A. N. Luk will describe the results of the experiment: group leaders at one research institute were given reports on the work done at another institute and asked to rate them on a 10-point scale. The intention of the experimenters was to evaluate the “evaluators” themselves. It turned out that some people use the entire scale (sometimes they supplement it with “+” and “-”). Others did not use the entire scale, but only a few marks (for example, - 10, 5, 1). These people probably differ from each other in the severity of their evaluative abilities. It is curious that people with low evaluative abilities turned out to be bad leaders: they did not know their subordinates well; assigned tasks without taking into account individual characteristics. Their own groups were unproductive.

Among the evaluation criteria, in addition to logical consistency and compliance with previously accumulated experience, one should mention the aesthetic criteria of grace and simplicity.

But when evaluating the work of others and your own, it is important not to “go too far.” Physicists are well aware of the name of P. Ehrenfest, a major scientist, friend and like-minded person of A. Einstein. He was a truly great critic, whose analysis was so profound that to have his approval was considered the highest honor. He was a great physicist, those around him thought, but precisely as a great mind, as a critic. His own creative searches lagged behind his critical gift (so, in any case, he himself believed). And now, tormented by feelings of inferiority? Considering himself mediocrity in science, P. Ehrenfest committed suicide...

At his grave, A. Einstein, paying tribute to the magnificent physicist and wonderful person, expressed a very deep thought about the reason for the discrepancy between Ehrenfest’s creative abilities and his critical talent. Any creator, Einstein said, should love his idea so much that for some time, until it gets stronger, he should not allow internal criticism. Only when a reliable system is built that approves a new idea, only then does the critical fuse “turn on.” Ehrenfest, Einstein said, with his eternal “self-criticism”, with his dissatisfaction with himself, began to criticize himself before the idea could survive. This point of view, psychologically, at least, is non-standard, and does not even fit into the framework of popular ideas about creativity. Consider banal talk about the eternal dissatisfaction of the creator, which, according to many, should be a companion to any creativity! Yes, dissatisfaction, apparently, should be there, but then, and first - pride and joy. Like Pushkin: “Oh yes Pushkin, oh yes son of a bitch!”

In this regard, I would like to mention one more quality, namely courage.

Courage in creativity. Courage in creativity is the ability to make a decision in a situation of uncertainty, not be afraid of your own conclusions and bring them to the end, risking personal success and your own reputation. The famous physicist P. L. Kapitsa noted that “in science, erudition is not the main feature that allows a scientist to solve problems; the main thing is imagination, concrete thinking and, most importantly, courage.” For example, Schrödinger for a long time did not have the courage to publish his mathematically flawless equation, the result of which certainly contradicted experiment.

In addition, people often give in to the seeming enormity of the task. For example, Altshuller described the following situation: at one of the seminars on the theory of invention, students were asked the following problem: “Suppose 300 electrons were to move in several groups from one energy level to another. But the quantum transition took place with two fewer groups, so each group included 5 more electrons. What is the number of electron groups? This complex problem has not yet been solved.”

The listeners - highly qualified engineers - said that they do not undertake to solve this problem: - This is quantum physics, and we are production workers. Since others failed, we certainly won’t succeed... Then I took a collection of algebra problems and read the text of the problem: “Several buses were ordered to send 300 pioneers to the camp, but since two buses did not arrive by the appointed time, each the bus was loaded with 5 more pioneers than expected. How many buses have been ordered? The problem was solved instantly... An inventive task almost always has a terrifying connotation. In any mathematical problem there is a more or less clear subtext: “I can be solved. Such problems have already been solved many times.” If a mathematical problem “cannot be solved,” no one thinks that it cannot be solved at all. In an inventive problem, the subtext is completely different: “They already tried to solve me, but it didn’t work out! It’s not for nothing that smart people think that nothing can be done about it...”

Ability to “adhesion” and “anti-adhesion”. A person has the inherent ability to combine perceived stimuli, as well as to quickly assimilate new information with previous baggage, without which the perceived information does not turn into knowledge, does not become part of the intellect.

The principles of combining data, linking and grouping them can be very diverse. The ability to combine newly perceived information with what was previously known, to include it in existing knowledge systems, to group data in one way or another already in the process of perception is a condition and prerequisite for the ability to generate ideas.

Apparently, there are no “pure” perceptions in an adult: in every perception there is an element of judgment. For example, imagine a person engaged in conversation who suddenly notices a silently flying point on the horizon. The observer's attention is absorbed in the conversation, and therefore he does not try to determine whether it is a bird or an airplane. He simply perceives an object floating in the sky. But after a few minutes the object came closer and turned out to be an elegant glider. This is surprising, it turns out to be a complete surprise. This means that in the perception of the object there was also a judgment: the point was not only perceived, but also evaluated as an airplane or a bird. Different people, to varying degrees, have the ability to resist the “coloring” of perception by previously accumulated information, get rid of the pressure of “prior knowledge” and isolate what is observed from what is introduced by interpretation. When observation is too “overloaded” with theoretical interpretations, it sometimes leads to fictitious discoveries.

In 1866, the famous German biologist E. Haeckel, the author of the biogenetic law, examining sludge treated with ethyl alcohol through a microscope, discovered a primitive living organism from protoplasm (without a nucleus) Moneron. Other scientists immediately confirmed the find; moreover, the widespread distribution of Mopegas on the bottom of the world's oceans was proven. The sensation lasted 10 years until they became convinced that it was based on an artifact: calcium sulfate contained in sea water, when treated with alcohol, forms a colloidal suspension; It was the scientists who took it for a living organism.

Excessive readiness to link the observed with previously developed theoretical concepts played a cruel joke on the researchers and led to a false interpretation of the observation. The ability to cohere is important and necessary, but must be balanced by the ability to overcome cohesion, to tear the observed fact away from habitual associations.

To develop this ability, you can perform the following tasks:

1. Try transforming one item into another. This is done in stages; at each stage, only one attribute of the item can be changed. For example, how to turn a pillar into a hole. First, the pole can be made hollow inside, then sawed into shorter parts, then one of the parts can be dug into the ground. How many ways can you think of?

2. Try to improve the named objects (sofa; table; lamp; scissors; pan, etc.) by adding new functions to them and connecting them with other objects. Explain how your improvements work. For example: the glasses can be connected to a radio to listen to news and music; with a compass and a miniature map of the area so as not to get lost, etc.

Originality and ease of generating ideas. Another component of creative talent is ease of generating ideas. It is not necessary that every idea be correct: the more ideas a person comes up with, the more likely it is that some of them will be good ideas. Moreover, the best thoughts do not come to mind immediately. It's great when ideas original, that is, they differ from generally accepted ones, when solutions are unexpected, even paradoxical.

A thought, or idea, is not just an associative connection of two or more concepts. The combination of concepts must be meaningfully justified and must reflect the objective relationship of the phenomena behind these concepts. This compliance is one of the main criteria for evaluating an idea.

Another criterion is the breadth of the idea, covering a large number of heterogeneous facts. The most fruitful ideas include (predict) new, not yet discovered phenomena.

Ideas are also assessed for depth and fundamentality. A deep idea is considered to be one that establishes relationships between objects or their individual properties that do not lie on the surface, but require insight and deepening into the essence of phenomena to be discovered. Such ideas, as a rule, turn out to be fundamental, that is, they serve as the basis for generating other ideas, the foundation for theories.

We have become acquainted with the basics of the concept of thinking, which follows from the theory of neural models. According to this theory, thought, or idea, is the sequential activation and comparison of patterns. The neural model is material, but thought, like movement, cannot be called material. The brain puts thought into one or another specific code form, and different people do not have the same ability to use visual-spatial code, verbal, acoustic-figurative, alphabetic, digital, etc. The ability to manipulate this type of symbols can be improved, but not infinitely. Congenital characteristics of the brain and developmental conditions in the first years of life predetermine a predominant tendency to use certain information codes. In addition, the method of encoding information must harmoniously correspond to the content and structure of the displayed phenomena. That is, different codes serve to convey different information. Even F. M. Dostoevsky noted in his letters that “... for different forms of art there are corresponding series of poetic thoughts, so that one thought can never be expressed in another form that does not correspond to it.”

The task of developing creative abilities is not only to increase the number of codes familiar to a given person. We need to help everyone “find themselves,” i.e. understand which symbols, which information code is accessible and acceptable to him. Then thinking will be as productive as possible and will give him the highest satisfaction. A. N. Luk believes that “the happy coincidence of individual characteristics of thinking with the structure of the problems facing science in a given period of time is apparently one of the necessary conditions for the manifestation of scientific genius.”

To do this, it is important to create in different areas and as early as possible. As an example, we will give a task from the Torrance test battery (similar tasks can be used for both diagnostics and development).

1. Draw as many objects as possible using the following set of shapes: circle, rectangle, triangle, semicircle. Each shape can be used several times and its size can be changed, but other shapes and lines cannot be added.

Label the title of each drawing.

Fantasy. The ability to create something new and unusual is laid down in childhood, through the development of higher mental functions, such as thinking and imagination or fantasy. What is imagination? Imagination is the ability, inherent only in humans, to create new images (ideas) by processing previous experience. There are three types of imagination:

Logical imagination deduces the future from the present using logical transformations.

The critical imagination looks for what exactly in the world around us is imperfect and needs to be changed.

Creative imagination gives birth to fundamentally new ideas and ideas that do not yet have prototypes in the real world, although they are based on elements of reality.

The desire to look into the future and mentally imagine it has been inherent in man since ancient times and was expressed not only in myth-making, but also became a highly revered, albeit unsafe, profession of a soothsayer. A person models a chain of events in the brain, united by a causal relationship. In doing so, he uses past experience, because patterns can only be discovered in repeating phenomena. In this way, the final link of the simulated chain of events is predicted.

Fantasy, like other mental functions, undergoes age-related changes. The younger preschooler, whose imagination is just beginning to develop, is characterized by a passive form. He listens to fairy tales with great interest and then imagines their images as real phenomena. That is, the imagination uncritically compensates for the lack of life experience and practical thinking by introducing the described fairy-tale images into the child’s real life. That is why he easily believes that the dressed up actor is the real Santa Claus.

Senior preschool and primary school age is characterized by activation of the imagination function. First, recreating, and then creative, thanks to which a fundamentally new image is created. This period is sensitive for the formation of fantasy. Younger schoolchildren carry out most of their active activities with the help of imagination. They are enthusiastically engaged in creative activities (the psychological basis of which is also imagination).

Adolescence is characterized by a transition from a child’s perception of the surrounding reality to an adult’s. The student begins to perceive the world around him more critically. And his imagination takes on more critical forms. He no longer believes in fairy-tale miracles. Fantasies take the form of dreams. Creative imagination during this period often appears in the adult form of inspiration. Teenagers experience the joy of creative creation. They compose poetry, music, and try to solve complex, sometimes unsolvable problems, like creating a perpetual motion machine. Since the sensitive period for the development of fantasy at this age remains, the imagination function requires a constant influx of information for its development. That is why all teenagers love to read and watch science fiction, action films, including heroes who are sharply different from normal people, and unrealistic circumstances.

To develop imagination, you can use the “unfinished stories” technique. For example, come up with the ending of the proposed story:

Rivals. Up and Op decided to conquer the unconquered peak. Everyone wanted to be first. Up went up the mountain from the north, Op - from the south. And everyone was seen off by a whole crowd of fans. With great difficulty, Up overcame the mountain, wrote his name on the summit cliff, looked: on the other side of the cliff, Op was writing his name, they snorted at each other and began to descend in different directions.

Fluency. Creative thinking is flexible: it is not difficult for him to move from one aspect of a problem to another, without limiting himself to one single point of view.

Fluency of thought is determined by the number of ideas arising per unit of time. How can you analyze ideas? Obviously, we can evaluate thoughts already formulated. Ease of formulation is necessary to put thoughts into words or other codes (formula, graphic, etc.). Whatever symbols the idea crystallizes in, it is advisable to translate it into a verbal code. Presentation of results is necessary not only for “communication” or publication. This is also a kind of critical operation that reveals logical inconsistencies and theoretical miscalculations. An idea that seemed brilliant at the time of its inception can become very dull after being expressed in words.

Sometimes glibness of speech is mistaken for ease of generating ideas. The fact is that logical operations in the second signal system proceed primarily as actions with words. Therefore, logical thinking is influenced by the fixed syntactic structure of language (in contrast to figurative thinking). The connection between syntax and mental processes makes the following phenomenon possible. Syntactically correct texts are sometimes devoid of any meaning and yet create the appearance of content. Such texts penetrate not only the humanities, but also natural science journals. You can't even say about them whether they are true or false - they are simply meaningless. However, the impeccable grammatical form of presentation masks the emptiness. It is curious that translating such a text into another language immediately reveals a semantic vacuum.

glibness in the absence of thoughts also manifests itself in music, dance, painting - there is a technique of expression, but there is nothing to express. It is not for nothing that in the ancient manual on rhetoric the first rule of eloquence read: “If you have nothing to say, be silent.”

Many of the exercises we cited above are also aimed at developing fluency. To consolidate, you can play the game “Circles on the Water,” which J. Rodari used in his teaching practice. In addition to fluency, this game is aimed at developing creative imagination and, at the same time, philological abilities. The game is suitable for any age.

When you throw a stone into the water, it creates circles in the water, the further you go, the bigger they are. Also, a word that has stuck in your head can give rise to a lot of associations, evoke different comparisons, ideas, and images. This task can turn into an exciting game.

Let's take any word, for example, "lemon". What associations does it evoke? What combinations does it come into? For example, it is associated with words starting with the letter “l”: fox, moon, spoon, ribbon.

1. Let’s select as many words as possible starting with the initial letter in 1 minute. Calculate the result.

2. Now let’s select in 1 minute as many words as possible starting with the syllable “li”. Calculate the result, (etc.)

3. Now in 1 minute you can find as many rhymes as possible for the word “lemon”. Let's do the math too.

4. Arrange the letters of the word in a column. Now let's write the first words that come to mind using the corresponding letters. Or, to complicate the task, you can write words next to the letters that form a complete sentence.

The more words or sentences you come up with, the funnier they are, the better. Calculate the result. Now add up all the resulting amounts. Whoever has the greater value wins.

And the last one, which is often not taken seriously, namely “Ability to Rework.” “Trifles create perfection, and perfection is not a trifle,” wrote Michelangelo. It hardly needs explaining how important this ability is in bringing work to a level where it acquires universal significance and social value. What is meant here is not just persistence and composure, but specifically the ability to refine details, to painfully painstaking fine-tuning, to improve the original plan. The idea alone, whatever it may be, usually does not receive recognition. “In any practical matter, the idea makes up from 2 to 5%, and the rest is execution,” said mathematician and shipbuilder Academician A. N. Krylov.

How, exactly, do intellectual abilities differ from creative abilities? After all, the components of creative talent listed above are essentially no different from ordinary thinking abilities. The concepts of “thinking” and “creativity” are often opposed. But such a position leads to a grave mistake, forcing us to admit that there must be special psychological laws for creative individuals. In fact, the elementary abilities of the human mind are the same for everyone. They are only expressed differently (stronger and weaker) and combine with each other in different ways. For example, the combination of vigilance in searching for problems, flexibility of intellect, ease of generating ideas and the ability to distantly associate manifest themselves as non-standard thinking, which has long been considered an indispensable component of talent.

Now that you have learned a lot and systematized your knowledge about creative thinking, we are confident that you will always find YOUR solution! Creative success to you!

Tasks and questions for self-test

1. After completing all the test tasks, draw up your psychological portrait.

2. Highlight the strongest and weakest characteristics of basic and programming properties.

3. Try to determine what you need for further personal growth and self-realization.

4. Can you help another person to know himself and determine the path of self-realization?

5. What does practical psychology study?

6. Define the mental world and its basic properties.

7. The concept of individuality in psychology.

8. Basic and programming properties.

9. Brain and psyche.

10. Type of human structure.

11. The influence of the endocrine glands on human emotions.

12. Psychological characteristics of temperament. Think about how people of different temperaments will behave in the same situation.

13. Do you have a strong or weak character?

14. Describe general and special abilities.

15. Describe the structure of intelligence and its possible profile.

16. System of psychological cognitive processes. Describe each process.

17. Basic functions of speech.

18. The role of emotions in human life.

19. Mental states. Determine for yourself the level of personal and situational anxiety.

20. What characterizes the orientation of a person?

21. Basic types of human values.

22. Define self-awareness and characterize each of its components.

23. The main stages of the creative process.

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1.Introduction

The problem of creativity has become so relevant these days that it is rightfully considered the “problem of the century.” Creativity is not a new subject of research. The issue of creativity has a long and controversial history, and has given rise to much debate. It attracted the attention of thinkers from all eras of the development of world culture. The history of its study goes back more than two thousand years. Creativity has always interested thinkers of all eras and aroused the desire to create a “theory of creativity.”
Freud considered creative activity to be the result of sublimation (displacement) of sexual desire to another sphere of activity: sexual fantasy is objectified in a socially acceptable form in a creative product.
A. Adler considered creativity a way to compensate for the deficiency complex (incorrect translation - inferiority). The greatest attention was paid to the phenomenon of creativity by C. Jung, who saw in it a manifestation of the archetypes of the collective unconscious.
Psychologists of the humanistic school (G. Allport and A. Maslow) believed that the initial source of creativity is the motivation for personal growth, which is not subject to the homeostatic principle of pleasure; According to Maslow, this is the need for self-actualization, the full and free realization of one’s abilities and life opportunities.
At the turn of the 19th - 20th centuries, the “science of creativity” began to take shape as a special area of ​​research; “theory of creativity” or “psychology of creativity”.
The situation of the scientific and technological revolution in the second half of the twentieth century created conditions that opened a new stage in the development of creativity research.
The relevance of studying the psychology of creativity and scientific creativity, in particular, arose in connection with the need to optimize and intensify the principles of organizing scientific activity and managing it.
Purpose of the work: To analyze human creative abilities: their limits and conditions from a philosophical point of view.
The formulated goal involves solving the following tasks:
1) Consider whether creative abilities are inherited or can they be formed
2) Define what ability and talent are
3) How does creative thinking differ from “ordinary” thinking?
4) Determine the characteristics of creative individuals
5) Consider the components of creativity
6) Definition of technique and its connection with creative activity

2. The concept of creativity

Creativity is defined as human activity that creates new material and spiritual values ​​that have novelty and social significance, that is, as a result of creativity, something new is created that did not exist before.
The concept of “creativity” can also be given a broader definition.
Philosophers define creativity as a necessary condition for the development of matter, the formation of its new forms, along with the emergence of which the forms of creativity themselves change.
Creativity is the process of creating a subjectively new thing, based on the ability to generate original ideas and use non-standard methods of activity.
Products of creativity are not only material products - buildings, cars, etc., but also new thoughts, ideas, solutions that may not immediately find material embodiment. In other words, creativity is the creation of new things on different plans and scales.
When characterizing the essence of creativity, it is important to take into account various factors and characteristics inherent in the creation process.
Creativity has technical, economic (reducing costs, increasing profitability), social (ensuring working conditions), psychological and pedagogical characteristics - the development in the creative process of mental, moral qualities, aesthetic feelings, intellectual abilities of a person, the acquisition of knowledge, etc.
From the point of view of psychology and pedagogy, the process of creative work itself, the study of the process of preparation for creativity, the identification of forms, methods and means of developing creativity, are especially valuable.
Creativity is purposeful, persistent, hard work. It requires mental activity, intellectual abilities, strong-willed, emotional traits and high performance.
Creativity is characterized as the highest form of personal activity, requiring long-term preparation, erudition and intellectual abilities. Creativity is the basis of human life, the source of all material and spiritual benefits.

3. Philosophical approach to creativity and ability

Abilities are individual characteristics of a person, which are subjective conditions for the successful implementation of a certain type of activity. Abilities are not limited to the knowledge, skills and abilities an individual has. They are revealed in the speed, depth and strength of mastering the methods and techniques of certain activities and are internal mental regulators that determine the possibility of their acquisition. In the study of ability, there are 3 main problems: the origin and nature of ability, types and diagnosis of individual types of ability, patterns of development and formation of ability.
In philosophy, abilities for a long period were interpreted as properties of the soul, special powers, inherited and initially inherent in the individual. Echoes of such ideas are entrenched in everyday speech; there are relapses of their revival in the scientific literature based on the achievements of genetics. The inconsistency of understanding abilities as innate has been criticized by the English. philosopher J. Locke and French materialists, who put forward the thesis about the complete dependence of an individual’s ability on the external conditions of his life. The mechanistic nature of such a concept was overcome in the philosophy of Marxism, where the problem of ability is posed on the basis of an understanding of man as a set of social relations, a dialectical approach to the interpretation of the relationship between internal and external.
Innate are anatomical and physiological characteristics that act as prerequisites for the possible development of abilities, while the abilities themselves are formed in the processes of carrying out various activities, in a complex system of interactions of the individual with other people.
The ability manifested in the implementation of some specific activity has a complex structure consisting of various components. Connected with this is the widespread phenomenon of compensation: with the relative weakness or even absence of some components, the ability to carry out certain activities is achieved by the development of other components. This also explains the observed differences in combinations of personal and physiological characteristics of individuals who have demonstrated a high level of development of the ability to perform any one specific activity.
Of great practical importance, in particular for vocational guidance, is the diagnosis of existing abilities (the possibilities for their development) during professional selection and in sports. It is carried out using tests that also allow one to give quantitative assessments of ability.
The qualitative level of development of ability is expressed by the concept of talent and genius. Their distinction is usually made by the nature of the resulting products of activity. Talent is a set of abilities that allows us to obtain a product of activity that is distinguished by novelty, high perfection and social significance. Genius is the highest level of talent development, allowing for fundamental shifts in one or another area of ​​creativity.
The problem of developing the ability to perform specific types of activity occupies a large place in psychological and pedagogical research. They show the possibility of developing ability through the creation of a personal attitude towards mastering the subject of activity.
Creativity is an activity that generates something qualitatively new, something that has never existed before. Activity can act as creativity in any field: scientific, industrial and technical, artistic, political, etc. - where something new is created, discovered, or invented. Creativity can be considered in two aspects: psychological and philosophical. The psychology of creativity studies the process, the psychological “mechanism” of the act of Creativity as a subjective act of an individual. Philosophy considers the question of the essence of creativity, which was posed differently in different historical eras.
Thus, in ancient philosophy, creativity is associated with the sphere of finite, transitory and changeable existence (“being”), and not with infinite and eternal existence; contemplation of this eternal existence is placed above all activity, including creative activity. In the understanding of artistic creativity, which initially did not stand out from the general complex of creative activities (crafts, etc.), later, especially starting with Plato, the doctrine of Eros develops as a unique aspiration (“obsession”) of a person to achieve the highest (“ smart") contemplation of the world, the moment of which is creativity.
Views on creativity in medieval philosophy are associated with the understanding of God as a person who freely creates the world. Creativity appears, therefore, as an act of will that brings existence out of non-existence. Augustine also emphasizes the importance of will in the human personality. For him, human creativity appears, first of all, as the creativity of history: it is history that is the sphere in which finite human beings take part in the implementation of the divine plan for the world. Since it is not so much the mind as the will and the volitional act of faith that connect a person with God, a personal act, an individual decision acquires significance as a form of participation in the creation of the world by God; this creates the prerequisites for understanding creativity as unique and inimitable. At the same time, the sphere of creativity turns out to be primarily the area of ​​historical, moral and religious action; artistic and scientific creativity, on the contrary, appears as something secondary.
The Renaissance era is imbued with the pathos of man's limitless creative possibilities. Creativity is now recognized, first of all, as artistic creativity, the essence of which is seen in creative contemplation. A cult of genius emerges as the bearer of creativity, interest in the act of creativity itself and in the personality of the artist, and reflection on the creative process, characteristic of modern times. There is an increasingly clear tendency to consider history as a product of purely human creativity. The Italian philosopher G. Vico, for example, is interested in man as the creator of language, morals, customs, art and philosophy, that is, essentially, as the creator of history.
The philosophy of English empiricism tends to interpret creativity as a successful - but largely random - combination of already existing elements (the theory of knowledge of F. Bacon and especially T. Hobbes, J. Locke and D. Hume); Creativity acts as something akin to invention. The completed concept of creativity in the 18th century. created by I. Kant, who specifically analyzes creative activity in the doctrine of the productive ability of the imagination. The latter turns out to be a connecting link between the diversity of sensory impressions and the unity of the concepts of the mind due to the fact that it simultaneously possesses the clarity of the impression and the synthesizing power of the concept. The “transcendental” imagination thus appears as the general basis of contemplation and activity, so that creativity lies at the very basis of knowledge.
In idealistic philosophy of the late 19th and 20th centuries. Creativity is considered primarily in its opposition to mechanical and technical activity. Moreover, if the philosophy of life opposes the creative natural principle to technical rationalism, then existentialism emphasizes the spiritual and personal nature of creativity.
The English scientist G. Wallace (1924) divided the creative process into 4 phases: preparation, maturation (of ideas), insight and verification. Since the main links of the process (maturation and insight) are not amenable to conscious-volitional control, this served as an argument in favor of concepts that assigned a decisive role to subconscious and irrational factors in creativity. However, experimental psychology has shown that the unconscious and conscious, intuitive and rational creativity complement each other in the process. Being absorbed in its object, the individual is least capable of introspection, retaining only a vague sense of the general direction of thought: moments of conjecture, discovery, sudden decision are experienced in the form of especially vivid states of consciousness, which were initially mainly described in psychology (“aha-experience” , awareness of the required solution - in K. Bühler, “insight”, the act of instantly comprehending a new structure - in W. Köhler, etc.). However, the study of productive thinking has revealed that a guess, “insight,” an unexpected new solution arises in experimental conditions with the appropriate organization of the creative process (M. Wertheimer, B. M. Teplov, A. N. Leontiev). Using the example of D. I. Mendeleev’s discovery of the periodic law, B. M. Kedrov showed that the analysis of products and “by-products” (unpublished materials) of creativity makes it possible to identify milestones on the path of scientific discovery, regardless of how they were perceived by the scientist himself. At the same time, personal mechanisms of creativity can only be revealed in the context of their conditioning by a specific socio-historical situation.

4. Origins of creative talent

Genotype or environment? Among the many English clubs, there is one very unusual one: it unites people who believe that the Earth is flat. True, the orbital flight of Yuri Gagarin shook many adherents of this, to put it mildly, outdated hypothesis. Still, there are several hundred eccentrics left who do not want to come to terms with the spherical shape of the planet. It is unlikely that a discussion with them would be fruitful.
In our country there seem to be no supporters of the flat Earth concept; in any case, their voices are not heard. But there are those who want to defend the position that genius, talent, and abilities are all just the result of upbringing, and the innate inclinations of all people are absolutely the same. Arguing with them is probably as futile as arguing with members of the Flat Earth Club.
Once upon a time there were fierce debates about the origin of talent - whether it was a gift of nature, genetically determined, or a gift of circumstances. Then they found a compromise formula: both genotype and environment play a role. But in this formulation the problem is solved only qualitatively. It is necessary to find out what exactly is inherited and what is instilled by upbringing. Discussions on the topic of innate and acquired talent turn into idle talk if the parties do not try to specify their statements, that is, to separate innate qualities from what is brought in during individual development.

5.Talent and pedigree

In the 19th century, research became popular that was supposed to confirm the heritability of talent and show how talent and genius are inherited.
Leo Tolstoy's great-grandmother Olga Golovina (married Trubetskaya) and A.S. Pushkin's great-grandmother Evdokia Golovina (Pushkina) were sisters.
Thanks to the fact that church birth registration books were carefully kept in Western Europe in the middle of the century, it was possible to establish that the five largest representatives of German culture - the poets Schiller and Hilderlin, the philosophers Schelling and Hegel, as well as the physicist Max Planck - are related: Johann Vanth, who lived in the 15th century was their common ancestor. As German and Austrian researchers have recently established, Viennese resident Simon Michel, who died in 1719, was the great-grandfather of Karl Marx and Heinrich Heine.
Many bourgeois scientists concluded from this that some families have inherited talent and therefore achieve outstanding success, while others do not and, even under equal conditions of development, cannot do anything outstanding.
But counter examples can also be given. The son of the brilliant mathematician David Hilbert was extremely similar in appearance to his father, and he sadly noted: he got everything from me, but his mathematical abilities from his wife. However, given that inheritance can also be of a recessive type, counterexamples in themselves do not negate the possibility of inheriting talent. The weakness of this kind of archival research lies elsewhere.
A person has two parents, four grandparents, and generally 2 ancestors, where n is the number of generations. If we accept that the change of generations occurs after 25 years, then in 10 centuries 40 generations have changed. Consequently, each of our contemporaries had at that time 2, or approximately a thousand billion ancestors. But a thousand years ago there were only a few hundred million people on Earth. It turns out that all people are related to each other, because the mixing of genes has been and is happening all the time. This explains the presence of outstanding relatives among outstanding people, noted by English biologists. They were simply not interested in other people, and their ancestry was more difficult to trace. But if you follow, it turns out that every person has great and talented relatives. Interesting data was provided by Pskov journalist M.V. Rusakov in the book “Descendants of A.S. Pushkin." He collected information about all the direct descendants of the poet up to the present day. His great-great-grandchildren live on all continents. Thanks to mixed marriages, the direct descendants of the great Russian poet now belong to different nations and peoples: among them there are Americans, English, Armenians, Belgians, Georgians, Jews, Moroccans, Germans, French (Mountbatten, West, Liu, von Rintelen, Svanidze, Morillo and etc.) All of them are the offspring of the boyar family of the Pushkins and at the same time the descendants of the Arab Ibrahim.
If you just as conscientiously and scrupulously study the family tree of other people - talented and untalented, you will get the same picture; but this does not take into account the very numerous illegitimate offspring. This is why the concept of “pure race” is absurd. And Galton’s calculations, although outwardly convincing, do not have any evidentiary power, because they are methodologically flawed. He did not carry out control calculations, i.e. I didn’t count how many outstanding relatives ordinary untalented people belonging to the same classes and estates have, i.e. having equal opportunities to develop and realize their talents.
Mixing of genes occurs only with the “geographical accessibility” of human habitats. If separate groups of people are geographically isolated, then genetic exchange does not occur between them. This applies, in particular, to people who lived on different continents before the era of great geographical discoveries. As Darwin showed, if representatives of the same species become spatially separated (as on the Galapagos Islands), then a gradual divergence of characters occurs until the appearance of varieties, and then new species.
Marriages between people of different races produce full-fledged offspring, and therefore there is no doubt that all people form a single biological species. The theory of an ancient continent, which subsequently split, or a single ancestral homeland of people is quite plausible. (Previously, Southeast Asia was considered such an ancestral home, but now Africa).
But since territorial division occurred a very long time ago, races with different skin colors and other stably inherited characteristics were formed. The assumption that the inclinations of mental abilities may not be the same, although essentially absurd, seems tempting to some people. After all, on Earth there are both developed states and tribes at the Neolithic level; It is tempting to explain this by differences in mental talent.
However, in fact, peoples formed on different continents, in different conditions and at different levels of culture, have the same abilities.

6. Components of creativity

Creativity is a fusion of many qualities. And the question about the components of human creative potential remains open, although at the moment there are several hypotheses regarding this problem. Many psychologists associate the ability for creative activity, first of all, with the characteristics of thinking. In particular, the famous American psychologist Guilford, who studied the problems of human intelligence, found that creative individuals are characterized by so-called divergent thinking. People with this type of thinking, when solving a problem, do not concentrate all their efforts on finding the only correct solution, but begin to look for solutions in all possible directions in order to consider as many options as possible. Such people tend to form new combinations of elements that most people know and use only in a certain way, or to form connections between two elements that at first glance have nothing in common. The divergent way of thinking underlies creative thinking, which is characterized by the following main features:
1. Speed ​​- the ability to express the maximum number of ideas (in this case, it is not their quality that is important, but their quantity).
2. Flexibility - the ability to express a wide variety of ideas.
3. Originality - the ability to generate new non-standard ideas (this can manifest itself in answers, decisions that do not coincide with generally accepted ones).
4. Completeness - the ability to improve your “product” or give it a finished look.
Well-known domestic researcher of the problem of creativity A.N. Onion, based on the biographies of outstanding scientists, inventors, artists and musicians, identifies the following creative abilities:
1. The ability to see a problem where others do not see it.
2. The ability to collapse mental operations, replacing several concepts with one and using increasingly information-capacious symbols.
3. The ability to apply the skills acquired in solving one problem to solving another.
4. The ability to perceive reality as a whole, without splitting it into parts.
5. The ability to easily associate distant concepts.
6. The ability of memory to provide the necessary information at the right moment.
7. Flexibility of thinking.
8. The ability to choose one of the alternatives to solve a problem before testing it.
9. The ability to incorporate newly perceived information into existing knowledge systems.
10. The ability to see things as they are, to isolate what is observed from what is introduced by interpretation.
11. Ease of generating ideas.
12. Creative imagination.
13. The ability to refine details to improve the original plan.
Candidates of psychological sciences V.T. Kudryavtsev and V. Sinelnikov, based on a wide historical and cultural material (history of philosophy, social sciences, art, individual areas of practice), identified the following universal creative abilities that have developed in the process of human history.
1. Realism of the imagination is the figurative grasp of some essential, general tendency or pattern of development of an integral object, before a person has a clear concept about it and can fit it into a system of strict logical categories.
2. The ability to see the whole before the parts.
3. The trans-situational - transformative nature of creative solutions - the ability, when solving a problem, not just to choose from alternatives imposed from the outside, but to independently create an alternative.
4. Experimentation - the ability to consciously and purposefully create conditions in which objects most clearly reveal their hidden essence in ordinary situations, as well as the ability to trace and analyze the features of the “behavior” of objects in these conditions.
Scientists and teachers involved in the development of programs and methods of creative education based on TRIZ (theory of solving inventive problems) and ARIZ (algorithm for solving inventive problems) believe that one of the components of human creative potential is the following abilities:
1. Ability to take risks.
2. Divergent thinking.
3. Flexibility in thinking and action.
4. Speed ​​of thinking.
5. The ability to express original ideas and invent new ones.
6. Rich imagination.
7. Perception of the ambiguity of things and phenomena.
8. High aesthetic values.
9. Developed intuition.
Analyzing the points of view presented above on the issue of the components of creative abilities, we can conclude that despite the difference in approaches to their definition, researchers unanimously identify creative imagination and the quality of creative thinking as mandatory components of creative abilities.
Based on this, we can determine the main directions in the development of children’s creative abilities:

1. Development of imagination.
2. Development of thinking qualities that form creativity.

7. Thinking and creativity

The potential capabilities of the human brain are an area almost unexplored. Only by individual ups and outbursts of creative genius can we guess what a person is capable of. Until now, most people use their brains barbarously, with low efficiency. And science faces a problem: what should the external environmental conditions be so that everyone can develop their creative (abilities) inclinations and turn them into creative achievements? Perhaps the so-called great creators are simply people who make good use of their brain reserves.
Creative activity is considered as the interaction of two thought processes: divergent (developing a larger number of possible solutions) and convergent (selecting the optimal solution from a number of possible ones). Preference is given to the first.
There are four indicators of mental activity:
1. Fluency.
2.Flexibility.
3.Originality.
4.Degree of detail.
Thinking can be divided into three types:
- thinking based on the results of concepts, acting as a logical process (judgments, conclusions) which ends with the development of cereal models - this is logical thinking;
-intuitive thinking, woven into practical activities, based on unconscious side perceptions and ideas of skills;
-discursive thinking, acting as a unity of intuitive and logical thinking.
Psychologically, a scientific discovery, creativity has two essential features: one of which is an intuitive moment, the other is the formalization of the intuitive effect obtained, that is, otherwise creativity is an intuitive moment, but its effect is realized and formed by means of discursive thinking.
In the case when ready-made logical programs are available in a person’s experience to solve a specific problem, the solution proceeds primarily at the logical level and is not accompanied by shifts in emotional indicators. At the initial stages of solving creative problems, a person also strives to apply already known logical schemes to them, but the unsolvability of such problems in a known way turns them into creative solutions, now possible only with the help of intuition. In the course of activities aimed at solving a problem, an intuitive model of the situation is formed, leading in successful cases, which are closely related to the occurrence of by-products of actions and their emotional assessments, to an intuitive solution.
The following patterns of intuitive decision models can be identified:
1. An intuitive solution is possible only if the key to it is already contained in unconscious experience.
2. Such experience is ineffective if it was formed in actions preceding attempts to solve a creative problem.
3. It becomes effective and is formed against the background of the target search position.
4. Its effectiveness increases when directed methods for solving a problem are exhausted, but the search dominant does not go out.
5. The influence of the unconscious part of the action is the more effective, the less meaningful the power of its conscious part is.
6. Complication of the situation in which unconscious experience is acquired prevents its subsequent use.
7. A similar complication of the task itself also has a negative effect.
8. The success of a solution is related to the degree of automation of the methods of action, during which the necessary unconscious experience is formed - the less automated this method is, the greater the chances of success.
9. The more general category the final solution to a creative problem can be classified into, the more likely it is to find such a solution.

Brief description

Purpose of the work: To analyze human creative abilities: their limits and conditions from a philosophical point of view.
The formulated goal involves solving the following tasks:
1) Consider whether creative abilities are inherited or can they be formed
2) Define what ability and talent are
3) How does creative thinking differ from “ordinary” thinking?
4) Determine the characteristics of creative individuals
5) Consider the components of creativity
6) Definition of technique and its connection with creative activity

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INTRODUCTION

Creativity refers to the activity of creating new and original products of social significance.

The essence of creativity is predicting the result, correctly setting up an experiment, in creating, through the effort of thought, a working hypothesis close to reality, in what Sklodovskaya called a sense of nature.

The relevance of the topic is determined by the fact that many researchers reduce the problem of human abilities to the problem of a creative personality: there are no special creative abilities, but there is a person with certain motivation and traits. Indeed, if intellectual talent does not directly affect a person’s creative success, if during the development of creativity the formation of certain motivation and personality traits precedes creative manifestations, then we can conclude that there is a special type of personality - a “Creative Person.”

Creativity is going beyond the given limits (Pasternak’s “above barriers”). This is only a negative definition of creativity, but the first thing that catches your eye is the similarity between the behavior of a creative person and a person with mental disorders. The behavior of both deviates from the stereotypical, generally accepted one.

People do a lot of things every day: small and large, simple and complex. And every task is a task, sometimes more or less difficult.

When solving problems, an act of creativity occurs, a new path is found, or something new is created. This is where special qualities of the mind are required, such as observation, the ability to compare and analyze, to find connections and dependencies - all that together constitutes creative abilities.

The acceleration of scientific and technological progress will depend on the quantity and quality of creatively developed minds, on their ability to ensure the rapid development of science, technology and production, on what is now called the increase in the intellectual potential of the people.

The purpose of this course work is to consider aspects of the development of creative abilities.

Based on the goal, the following tasks can be set:

Describe creativity as a mental process;

Consider the essence of a creative personality and her life path;

Study the development of creative abilities;

Review the basic concepts of creativity.

1. ESSENCE AND IMPORTANCE OF CREATIVITY DEVELOPMENT

1.1 Creativity as a mental process

Most philosophers and psychologists distinguish between two main types of behavior: adaptive (related to the resources available to a person) and creative, defined as “creative destruction.” In the creative process, a person creates a new reality that can be comprehended and used by other people.

Attitudes towards creativity have changed dramatically in different eras. In Ancient Rome, only the material and the work of the bookbinder were valued in a book, and the author had no rights - neither plagiarism nor forgeries were prosecuted. In the Middle Ages and much later, the creator was equated with a craftsman, and if he dared to show creative independence, then it was not encouraged in any way. The creator had to earn a living in a different way: Moliere was a court upholsterer, and the great Lomonosov was valued for his utilitarian products - court odes and the creation of festive fireworks.

And only in the 19th century. artists, writers, scientists and other representatives of creative professions were given the opportunity to live from the sale of their creative product. As A. S. Pushkin wrote, “inspiration is not for sale, but you can sell a manuscript.” At the same time, the manuscript was valued only as a matrix for replication, for the production of a mass product.

In the 20th century the real value of any creative product was also determined not by its contribution to the treasury of world culture, but by the extent to which it can serve as material for replication (in reproductions, television films, radio broadcasts, etc.). Therefore, there are differences in income that are unpleasant for intellectuals, on the one hand, between representatives of the performing arts (ballet, musical performance, etc.), as well as dealers in mass culture and, on the other hand, creators.

Society, however, has at all times divided two spheres of human activity: otium and oficium (negotium), respectively, leisure activity and socially regulated activity. Moreover, the social significance of these areas has changed over time. In Ancient Athens, bios theoretikos - theoretical life - was considered more “prestigious” and acceptable for a free citizen than bios praktikos - practical life.

Interest in creativity, the personality of the creator in the 20th century. connected, perhaps, with the global crisis, the manifestation of man’s total alienation from the world, the feeling that through purposeful activity people are not solving the problem of man’s place in the world, but are pushing its solution even further away.

The most common are “divine” and “demonic” versions of attribution of the cause of creativity. Moreover, artists and writers accepted these versions depending on their worldview. If Byron believed that a “demon” possessed a person, then Michelangelo believed that God was guiding his hand: “A good picture approaches God and merges with him.”

The consequence of this is the tendency, observed among many authors, to renounce authorship. Since it was not I who wrote, but God, the devil, the spirit, the “inner voice,” the creator recognizes himself as an instrument of an outside force.

It is noteworthy that the version of the non-personal source of the creative act passes through spaces, eras and cultures. And in our time it is being revived in the thoughts of the great Joseph Brodsky: “The poet, I repeat, is the means of existence of language. The person writing the poem, however, does not write it because he expects posthumous fame, although he often hopes that the poem will outlive him, even if only for a short time. A person writing a poem writes it because his tongue tells him or simply dictates the next line.

When starting a poem, the poet, as a rule, does not know how it will end, and sometimes he is very surprised by what happens, because it often turns out better than he expected, often the thought goes further than he expected. This is the moment when the future of language interferes with the present... The writer of a poem writes it, first of all, because versification is a colossal accelerator of consciousness, thinking, and worldview. Having experienced this acceleration once, a person is no longer able to refuse to repeat this experience; he becomes dependent on this process, just as he becomes dependent on drugs and alcohol. A person who is in such a dependence on language, I believe, is called a poet.”

In this state, there is no sense of personal initiative and no sense of personal merit in creating a creative product; it is as if an alien spirit is invading the person, or thoughts, images, and feelings are being instilled into him from the outside. This experience leads to an unexpected effect: the creator begins to treat his creations with indifference or, moreover, with disgust. A so-called post-creative saturation occurs. The author is alienated from his work. When performing purposeful activities, including work, there is an opposite effect, namely, the “effect of nested activity.” The more effort a person spends on achieving a goal, producing a product, the greater the emotional significance this product acquires for him.

Since the activity of the unconscious in the creative process is associated with a special state of consciousness, the creative act is sometimes performed in a dream, in a state of intoxication and under anesthesia. In order to reproduce this state by external means, many resorted to artificial stimulation. When R. Rolland wrote Cola Breugnon, he drank wine; Schiller kept his feet in cold water; Byron took laudanum; Rousseau stood in the sun with his head uncovered; Milton and Pushkin loved to write while lying on a sofa or couch. Balzac, Bach, Schiller were coffee lovers; drug addicts - Edgar Poe, John Lennon and Jim Morrison.

Spontaneity, suddenness, independence of the creative act from external causes is its second main feature. The need for creativity arises even when it is undesirable. At the same time, the author’s activity eliminates any possibility of logical thought and the ability to perceive the environment. Many authors mistake their images for reality. The creative act is accompanied by excitement and nervous tension. All that remains for the mind is processing, giving a complete socially acceptable form to the products of creativity, discarding the superfluous and detailing Bogoyavlenskaya D.B. Intellectual activity as a problem of creativity. - Rosto.v-on-Don, 2003..

So, the spontaneity of the creative act, the passivity of the will and the altered state of consciousness at the moment of inspiration, the activity of the unconscious, speak of a special relationship between consciousness and the unconscious. Consciousness (the conscious subject) is passive and only perceives the creative product. The unconscious (unconscious creative subject) actively generates a creative product and presents it to consciousness.

In Russian psychology, the most holistic concept of creativity as a mental process was proposed by Ya.A. Ponomarev (1988). He developed a structural-level model of the central link of the psychological mechanism of creativity. Studying the mental development of children and problem solving by adults, Ponomarev came to the conclusion that the results of the experiments give the right to schematically depict the central link of psychological intelligence in the form of two spheres penetrating one another. The external boundaries of these spheres can be represented as abstract limits (asymptotes) of thinking. From below, this limit will be intuitive thinking (beyond it extends the sphere of strictly intuitive thinking of animals). At the top is the logical (behind it extends the sphere of strictly logical thinking of computers).

The basis for success in solving creative problems is the ability to act “in the mind,” determined by a high level of development of the internal plan of action. This ability is perhaps the structural equivalent of the concept of “general ability” or “general intelligence.”

Two personal qualities are associated with creativity, namely, the intensity of search motivation and sensitivity to side formations that arise during the thought process.

Ponomarev considers the creative act as included in the context of intellectual activity according to the following scheme: at the initial stage of problem formulation, consciousness is active, then, at the solution stage, the unconscious is active, and consciousness is again involved in selecting and checking the correctness of the solution (at the third stage). Naturally, if thinking is initially logical, that is, expedient, then a creative product can appear only as a by-product. But this process option is only one of the possible ones.

In general, in psychology there are at least three main approaches to the problem of creative abilities. They can be formulated as follows:

1. There are no creative abilities as such. Intellectual talent acts as a necessary, but not sufficient condition for the creative activity of an individual. The main role in determining creative behavior is played by motivation, values, and personality traits (A. Tannenbaum, A. Olokh, D.B. Bogoyavlenskaya, A. Maslow, etc.). These researchers include cognitive talent, sensitivity to problems, and independence in uncertain and difficult situations as the main traits of a creative personality.

The concept of D.B. stands apart. Bogoyavlenskaya (1971, 1983), who introduces the concept of “creative activity of the individual,” believing that this activity is a certain mental structure inherent in the creative type of personality. Creativity, from Bogoyavlenskaya’s point of view, is a situationally unstimulated activity, manifested in the desire to go beyond the boundaries of a given problem. A creative personality type is inherent in all innovators, regardless of their type of activity: test pilots, artists, musicians, inventors.

2. Creative ability (creativity) is an independent factor, independent of intelligence (J. Guilford, K. Taylor, G. Gruber, Ya. A. Ponomarev). In a “softer” version, this theory states that there is a slight correlation between the level of intelligence and the level of creativity. The most developed concept is the “intellectual threshold theory” of E.P. Torrens: if IQ is below 115-120, intelligence and creativity form a single factor; with IQ above 120, creativity becomes an independent value, that is, there are no creative individuals with low intelligence, but there are intellectuals with low creativity.

3. A high level of intelligence development implies a high level of creative abilities and vice versa. There is no creative process as a specific form of mental activity. This point of view was and is shared by almost all specialists in the field of intelligence.

1.2 Creative personality and her life path

Many of the researchers reduce the problem of human abilities to the problem of a creative personality: there are no special creative abilities, but there is a person with certain motivation and traits. Indeed, if intellectual talent does not directly affect a person’s creative success, if during the development of creativity the formation of certain motivation and personality traits precedes creative manifestations, then we can conclude that there is a special type of personality - a “Creative Person.”

Creativity is going beyond tradition and stereotypes. This is only a negative definition of creativity, but the first thing that catches your eye is the similarity between the behavior of a creative person and a person with mental disorders. The behavior of both deviates from the stereotypical, generally accepted one Bogoyavlenskaya D.B. Intellectual activity as a problem of creativity.

There are two opposing points of view: talent is the maximum degree of health, talent is a disease.

Traditionally, the latter point of view is associated with the name of Cesare Lombroso. True, Lombroso himself never claimed that there is a direct relationship between genius and madness, although he selected empirical examples in favor of this hypothesis: “Grey hair and baldness, thinness of the body, as well as poor muscular and sexual activity, characteristic of all madmen, are very common among great thinkers.... In addition, thinkers, along with madmen, are characterized by: constant overflow of the brain with blood (hyperemia), intense heat in the head and cooling of the extremities, a tendency to acute diseases of the brain and poor sensitivity to hunger and cold.”

Lombroso characterizes geniuses as lonely, cold people, indifferent to family and social responsibilities. Among them there are many drug addicts and drunkards: Musset, Kleist, Socrates, Seneca, Handel, Poe. The 20th century added many names to this list, from Faulkner and Yesenin to Hendricks and Morrison.

Brilliant people are always painfully sensitive. They experience sharp declines and rises in activity. They are hypersensitive to social reward and punishment, etc. Lombroso provides interesting data: in the population of Ash-Kenazi Jews living in Italy, there are more mentally ill people than Italians, but there are also more talented people (Lombroso himself was an Italian Jew). The conclusion he comes to is as follows: genius and madness can be combined in one person.

The list of geniuses suffering from mental disorders is endless. Petrarch, Moliere, Flaubert, Dostoevsky suffered from epilepsy, not to mention Alexander the Great, Napoleon and Julius Caesar. Rousseau and Chateaubriand had melancholy. Psychopaths (according to Kretschmer) were George Sand, Michelangelo, Byron, Goethe and others. Byron, Goncharov and many others had hallucinations. The number of drunkards, drug addicts and suicides among the creative elite cannot be counted.

The “genius and madness” hypothesis is being revived today. D. Carlson believes that genius is a carrier of the recessive schizophrenia gene. In the homozygous state, the gene manifests itself in the disease. For example, the son of the brilliant Einstein suffered from schizophrenia. This list includes Descartes, Pascal, Newton, Faraday, Darwin, Plato, Emerson, Nietzsche, Spencer, James, etc.

If we proceed from the above interpretation of creativity as a process, then a genius is a person who creates on the basis of unconscious activity, who is capable of experiencing the widest range of states due to the fact that the unconscious creative subject goes beyond the control of the rational principle and self-regulation.

Representatives of depth psychology and psychoanalysis (here their positions converge) see the main difference between a creative personality in specific motivation. Let us dwell only briefly on the positions of a number of authors, since these views are presented in numerous sources.

3. Freud considered creative activity to be the result of sublimation (displacement) of sexual desire to another sphere of activity: sexual fantasy is objectified in a socially acceptable form in a creative product.

A. Adler considered creativity a way to compensate for the “inferiority complex.” The greatest attention was paid to the phenomenon of creativity by C. Jung, who saw in it a manifestation of the archetypes of the collective unconscious.

A number of researchers believe that achievement motivation is necessary for creativity, while others believe that it blocks the creative process. However, most authors are still convinced that the presence of any motivation and personal passion is the main sign of a creative personality. To this are often added characteristics such as independence and conviction. Independence, focus on personal values, and not on external assessments, can perhaps be considered the main personal quality of a creative person.

Creative people have the following personality traits:

1) independence - personal standards are more important than group standards; non-conformity of assessments and judgments;

2) openness of mind - willingness to believe one’s own and others’ fantasies, receptivity to the new and unusual;

3) high tolerance to uncertain and insoluble situations, constructive activity in these situations;

4) developed aesthetic sense, desire for beauty Gruzenberg SO. Psychology of creativity. - Minsk, 2005..

Often mentioned in this series are the features of the “I-concept”, which is characterized by confidence in one’s abilities and strength of character, and mixed traits of femininity and masculinity in behavior (they are noted not only by psychoanalysts, but also by geneticists).

The most contradictory data are about mental and emotional balance. Although humanistic psychologists loudly claim that creative people are characterized by emotional and social maturity, high adaptability, balance, optimism, etc., most experimental results contradict this.

Research has shown that gifted children whose actual achievements are below their capabilities experience serious problems in the personal, emotional, and interpersonal spheres. The same applies to children with an IQ above 180 points.

Similar conclusions about high anxiety and poor adaptation of creative people to the social environment are presented in a number of other studies. A specialist like F. Barron argues that in order to be creative, you have to be a little neurotic; therefore, emotional disturbances that distort the “normal” vision of the world create the preconditions for a new approach to reality. However, it is possible that cause and effect are confused here, and neurotic symptoms are a by-product of creative activity.

The productivity of scientific creativity has become the subject of research not so long ago. According to many authors, the beginning of the scientometric approach to the problem of age-related dynamics of creativity is associated with the works of G. Lehmann.

In the monograph “Age and Achievements” (1953), he published the results of an analysis of hundreds of biographies of not only politicians, writers, poets and artists, but also mathematicians, chemists, philosophers and other scientists.

The dynamics of achievements of representatives of exact and natural sciences is as follows: 1) rise from 20 to 30 years; 2) peak productivity at 30-35 years; 3) decline by age 45 (50% of initial productivity); 4) by the age of 60, loss of creative abilities. A qualitative decline in productivity precedes a quantitative decline. And the more valuable the contribution of a creative person, the higher the likelihood that the creative peak occurred at a young age. Lehman's conclusions about the significance of an individual's contribution to culture were based on counting the number of lines devoted to them in encyclopedias and dictionaries. Later, E. Kleg analyzed the dictionary-reference book “Americans in Science” and came to the conclusion that the decline in creative productivity among the most outstanding scientists begins to be observed no earlier than 60 years.

Many authors believe that there are two types of creative productivity throughout life: the first occurs between 25 and 40 years of age (depending on the field of activity), and the second occurs at the end of the fourth decade of life, followed by a decline after 65 years.

The most prominent figures in science and art do not experience the typical decline in creative activity before death, which has been established in many studies.

Creative productivity is demonstrated into old age by people who have retained free-thinking and independent views, i.e., qualities inherent in youth. In addition, creative individuals remain highly critical of their work. The structure of their abilities optimally combines the ability to create with reflective intelligence.

Thus, the features of the interaction between consciousness and the unconscious, and in our terms - the subject of conscious activity and the unconscious creative subject, determine the typology of creative individuals and the features of their life path.

1.3 Development of creativity

In developmental psychology, three approaches compete and complement each other: 1) genetic, which assigns the main role in the determination of the mental properties of heredity; 2) environmental, whose representatives consider external conditions to be the decisive factor in the development of mental abilities; 3) genotype-environment interaction, the proponents of which distinguish different types of adaptation of an individual to the environment depending on hereditary traits.

Numerous historical examples: the families of mathematicians Bernoulli, composers Bach, Russian writers and thinkers - at first glance, convincingly indicate the predominant influence of heredity on the formation of a creative personality.

Critics of the genetic approach object to a straightforward interpretation of these examples. Two more alternative explanations are possible: firstly, the creative environment created by older family members and their example influence the development of the creative abilities of children and grandchildren (environmental approach). Secondly, the presence of identical abilities in children and parents is reinforced by a spontaneously developing creative environment that is adequate to the genotype (the genotype-environment interaction hypothesis).

Nichols' review, which summarized the results of 211 twin studies, showed the results of diagnosing divergent thinking in 10 studies. The average correlation between MZ twins is 0.61, and between DZ twins is 0.50. Consequently, the contribution of heredity to the determination of individual differences in the level of development of divergent thinking is very small. Russian psychologists E.L. Grigorenko and B.I. Kochubey in 1989 conducted a study of MZ and DZ twins (students in the 9th and 10th grades of high school). The main conclusion reached by the authors is that individual differences in creativity and performance in the hypothesis testing process are determined by environmental factors. A high level of creativity was found in children with a wide range of contacts and a democratic style of relationship with their mother Gruzenberg S.O. Psychology of creativity. - Minsk, 2005..

Thus, psychological studies do not confirm the hypothesis about the heritability of individual differences in creativity (more precisely, the level of development of divergent thinking).

An attempt to implement a different approach to identifying the hereditary determinants of creativity was made in the works of researchers belonging to the domestic school of differential psychophysiology. Representatives of this direction argue that the basis of general abilities are the properties of the nervous system (inclinations), which also determine the characteristics of temperament.

A hypothetical property of the human nervous system that could determine creativity during individual development is considered to be “plasticity.” Plasticity is usually determined by the variability of EEG parameters and evoked potentials. The classic conditioned reflex method for diagnosing plasticity was to change a skill from positive to negative or vice versa.

The opposite pole to plasticity is rigidity, which manifests itself in low variability in indicators of electrophysiological activity of the central nervous system, difficulty in switching, inadequacy of transferring old methods of action to new conditions, stereotypical thinking, etc.

One of the attempts to identify the heritability of plasticity was made in the dissertation research of S. D. Biryukov. It was possible to identify the heritability of “field dependence-field independence” (success in completing the embedded figures test) and individual differences in the performance of the “Forward and backward writing” test. The environmental component of the total phenotypic variance across these measures was close to zero. In addition, using the method of factor analysis, it was possible to identify two independent factors characterizing plasticity: “adaptive” and “afferent”.

The first is associated with the general regulation of behavior (characteristics of attention and motor skills), and the second - with the parameters of perception.

According to Biryukov, the ontogeny of plasticity is completed by the end of puberty, while there are no gender differences in either the factor of “adaptive” plasticity or the factor of “afferent” plasticity.

The phenotypic variability of these indicators is very high, but the question of the connection between plasticity and creativity remains open. Since psychological research has not yet revealed the heritability of individual differences in creativity, let us turn our attention to environmental factors that can have a positive or negative impact on the development of creative abilities. Until now, researchers have assigned a decisive role to the microenvironment in which the child is formed, and, first of all, to the influence of family relationships. Most researchers identify the following parameters when analyzing family relationships: 1) harmony - inharmonious relationships between parents, as well as between parents and children; 2) creative - non-creative personality of the parent as a role model and subject of identification; 3) common intellectual interests of family members or lack thereof; 4) parents' expectations for the child: expectations of achievement or independence.

If regulation of behavior is cultivated in a family, the same requirements are imposed on all children, and there are harmonious relationships between family members, then this leads to a low level of creativity in children.

It seems that a larger range of acceptable behavioral manifestations (including emotional ones) and less unambiguous requirements do not contribute to the early formation of rigid social stereotypes and favor the development of creativity. Thus, a creative person appears as psychologically unstable. The requirement to achieve success through obedience does not contribute to the development of independence and, as a result, creativity.

K. Berry conducted a comparative study of the characteristics of family education of Nobel Prize laureates in science and literature. Almost all the laureates came from families of intellectuals or businessmen; there were practically no people from the lower strata of society. Most of them were born in large cities (capitals or metropolitan areas). Among the Nobel laureates born in the United States, only one came from the midwestern states, but 60 came from New York. Most often, Nobel Prizes were received by people from Jewish families, less often by Protestant families, and even less often by Catholic families.

The parents of Nobel laureate scientists were most often also involved in science or worked in the field of education. People from families of scientists and teachers rarely received Nobel Prizes for literature or the struggle for peace.

The situation in the families of laureate scientists was more stable than in the families of laureate writers. Most scientists emphasized in interviews that they had a happy childhood and began their scientific careers early, which proceeded without significant disruptions. True, it is impossible to say whether a calm family environment contributes to the development of talent or the formation of personal qualities favorable to a career. It is enough to recall the impoverished and joyless childhood of Kepler and Faraday. It is known that little Newton was abandoned by his mother and was raised by his grandmother.

Tragic events in the lives of the families of Nobel Prize winners in literature are a typical phenomenon. Thirty percent of literary laureates lost a parent or their families went bankrupt as children.

Experts in the field of post-traumatic stress, experienced by some people after exposure to a situation outside the scope of normal life (natural or technical disaster, clinical death, participation in combat, etc.), argue that the latter have an uncontrollable desire to speak out, talk about their unusual experiences, accompanied by a feeling of incomprehension. Perhaps the trauma associated with the loss of loved ones in childhood is that unhealed wound that forces the writer, through his personal drama, to reveal in words the drama of human existence.

D. Simonton, and then a number of other researchers, hypothesized that an environment favorable for the development of creativity should reinforce children’s creative behavior and provide examples of creative behavior to follow. From his point of view, a socially and politically unstable environment is most favorable for the development of creativity.

Among the numerous facts that confirm the crucial role of family-parental relationships, there are the following:

1. As a rule, the eldest or only son in the family has a greater chance of showing creative abilities.

2. Children who identify themselves with their parents (father) are less likely to show creativity. On the contrary, if a child identifies himself with the “ideal hero,” then he has a greater chance of becoming creative. This fact is explained by the fact that most children have parents who are “average”, uncreative people, and identification with them leads to the formation of uncreative behavior in children.

3. More often, creative children appear in families where the father is much older than the mother.

4. Early death of parents leads to the absence of a pattern of behavior with restricted behavior in childhood. This event is typical for the lives of both major politicians, outstanding scientists, and criminals and mentally ill people.

5. For the development of creativity, increased attention to the child’s abilities is beneficial, a situation where his talent becomes an organizing principle in the family Gruzenberg S.O. Psychology of creativity. - Minsk, 2005..

So, a family environment, where, on the one hand, there is attention to the child, and on the other hand, where various, inconsistent demands are placed on him, where there is little external control over behavior, where there are creative family members and non-stereotypical behavior is encouraged, leads to the development child's creativity.

The hypothesis that imitation is the main mechanism for the formation of creativity implies that in order to develop a child’s creative abilities, it is necessary that among the people close to the child there is a creative person with whom the child identifies himself. The identification process depends on relationships in the family: the role model for the child may not be the parents, but an “ideal hero” who has creative traits to a greater extent than the parents.

For the development of creativity, an unregulated environment with democratic relations and the child’s imitation of a creative personality are necessary.

The development of creativity may proceed according to the following mechanism: on the basis of general giftedness, under the influence of the microenvironment and imitation, a system of motives and personal properties (nonconformism, independence, self-actualization motivation) is formed, and general giftedness is transformed into actual creativity (synthesis of giftedness and a certain personality structure).

If we summarize the few studies devoted to the sensitive period of creativity development, then it is most likely that this period occurs at the age of 3-5 years. By the age of 3, a child develops a need to act like an adult, to “become equal to an adult.” Children develop a “need for compensation” and develop mechanisms for selflessly imitating the activities of an adult. Attempts to imitate the work actions of an adult begin to be observed from the end of the second to the fourth year of life. Most likely, it is at this time that the child is most sensitive to the development of creative abilities through imitation.

Intelligence, as the ability to solve current problems in the mind without behavioral tests, is not unique to humans, but not a single species has created anything resembling human culture. Elements of human culture - music, books, norms of behavior, technological means, buildings, etc. - are inventions, replicated and distributed in time and space.

Creativity as a method of social behavior was invented by humanity to realize ideas - the fruits of human active imagination. An alternative to creativity is adaptive behavior and mental degradation or destruction as the externalization of a person’s mental activity to destroy one’s own thoughts, plans, images, etc.

One of the arguments in favor of representing creativity as a social invention is data from psychogenetics and developmental psychology.

The development of children's creativity is accompanied by an increase in the frequency of neurosis-like reactions, maladaptive behavior, anxiety, mental imbalance and emotiveness, which directly indicates the close relationship of these mental states with the creative process.

It has been established that people with high and ultra-high intelligence are the least satisfied with life. This phenomenon is observed both in Western countries and in Russia.

Fewer and fewer individuals satisfy the demands of cultural adaptation put forward by modern production

Creativity is becoming more and more specialized, and creators, like birds sitting on distant branches of the same tree of human culture, are far from the earth and barely hear and understand each other. The majority is forced to take their discoveries on faith and use the fruits of their mind in everyday life, not realizing that someone once invented the capillary pen, the zipper, and the video player.

This form of creativity is accessible to almost everyone: children with lesions of the musculoskeletal system, the mentally ill, and people tired of monotonous or extremely complex professional activities. The massive scale of “amateur” creativity and its beneficial effect on a person’s mental health testify in favor of the hypothesis of “functional redundancy as a species-specific trait of a person.”

If the hypothesis is correct, then it explains such important characteristics of the behavior of creative people as the tendency to show “supra-situational activity” (D.B. Bogoyavlenskaya) or the tendency to excess activity (V.A. Petrovsky).

2. CONCEPTS OF CREATIVITY

creativity creativity intelligence

2.1 The concept of reducing creativity to intelligence

Eysenck (1995), based on significant correlations between IQ and Guilford tests of divergent thinking, expressed the opinion that creativity is a component of general mental talent.

A comparison was made of age-related indicators of the acquisition of knowledge and skills among famous people with similar data from a sample of ordinary children. It turned out that the IQ of celebrities is significantly above average (158.9). From this, Termen concluded that geniuses are those people who, according to testing data, in early childhood can be classified as highly gifted.

Of greatest interest are the results of the California Longitudinal Study, which Terman organized in 1921. Terman and Cox selected 1,528 boys and girls aged 8 to 12 years old from students in 95 high schools in California with an IQ of 135 points, which amounted to 1% of the entire sample. The level of intelligence was determined using the Stanford-Binet test. The control sample was formed from students from the same schools. It turned out that intellectually gifted children are ahead of their peers in the level of development by an average of two school grades.

The subjects selected by Theremin were distinguished by their early development (they began to walk, talk, read, write, etc. early). All intelligent children successfully completed school, 2/3 received a university education, and 200 people became doctors of science.

As for creative achievements, the results are not so clear. Not a single early intellectual from Theremin’s sample showed himself to be an exceptionally talented creator in the fields of science, literature, art, etc. None of them made a significant contribution to the development of world culture.

The concept of creativity by J. Guilford and E.P. Torrens. The concept of creativity as a universal cognitive creative ability gained popularity after the publication of the works of J. Guilford (Guilford J. P., 1967).

Guilford pointed out the fundamental difference between two types of mental operations: convergence and divergence. Convergent thinking (convergence) is actualized in the case when a person solving a problem needs to find the only correct solution based on many conditions. In principle, there may be several specific solutions (many roots of the equation), but this set is always limited.

Divergent thinking is defined as “a type of thinking that goes in different directions” (J. Guilford). This type of thinking allows for varying ways to solve a problem and leads to unexpected conclusions and results.

Further advances in the field of creativity research and testing are associated mainly with the work of psychologists at the University of Southern California, although their work does not cover the entire spectrum of creativity research.

Guilford identified four main dimensions of creativity:

1) originality - the ability to produce distant associations, unusual answers;

2) semantic flexibility - the ability to identify the main property of an object and propose a new way of using it;

3) figurative adaptive flexibility - the ability to change the shape of a stimulus in such a way as to see in it new signs and opportunities for use;

4) semantic spontaneous flexibility - the ability to produce a variety of ideas in an unregulated situation.

General intelligence is not included in the structure of creativity. Based on these theoretical premises, Guilford and his associates developed the Aptitude Research Program (ARP) tests, which test primarily divergent performance.

2.2 Concept of M. Wollach and N. Kogan

M. Wallach and N. Kogan believed that the transfer by Guilford, Torrance and their followers of test models for measuring intelligence to measuring creativity led to the fact that creativity tests simply diagnose IQ, like ordinary intelligence tests (adjusted for the “noise” created by specific experimental procedure). These authors speak out against strict time limits, an atmosphere of competition and the only criterion for the correctness of the answer, i.e. they reject such a criterion of creativity as accuracy. In this position, they are closer to Guilford's original thought about the difference between divergent and convergent thinking than its author himself. According to Wollach and Kogan, as well as authors such as P. Vernoy and D. Hargreaves, creativity requires a relaxed, free environment. It is desirable that research and testing of creative abilities be carried out in ordinary life situations, when the subject can have free access to additional information on the subject of the task.

Many studies have shown that achievement motivation, competitive motivation and social approval motivation block the self-actualization of an individual and make it difficult to demonstrate his creative potential.

Wallach and Kogan changed the system of creativity tests in their work. First, they gave subjects as much time as they needed to solve a problem or formulate an answer to a question. Testing was carried out during the game, while competition between participants was kept to a minimum, and the experimenter accepted any answer from the subject. If these conditions are met, then the correlation between creativity and test intelligence will be close to zero.

In studies conducted in the laboratory of the psychology of abilities at the Institute of Psychology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, A.N. Voronin on adult subjects obtained similar results: the intelligence factor and the creativity factor are independent.

The approach of Wollach and Kogan allowed us to take a different look at the problem of the relationship between creativity and intelligence. The mentioned researchers, testing the intelligence and creativity of 11-12 year old students, identified four groups of children with different levels of intelligence and creativity. Children belonging to different groups differed in their ways of adapting to external conditions and solving life problems.

Children with a high level of intelligence and high creativity were confident in their abilities and had an adequate level of self-esteem. They had inner freedom and at the same time high self-control. At the same time, they may seem like small children, and after a while, if the situation requires it, they behave like an adult. Showing great interest in everything new and unusual, they are very proactive, but at the same time successfully adapt to the requirements of their social environment, maintaining personal independence of judgment and action.

Children with high levels of intelligence and low levels of creativity strive for school success, which should be expressed in the form of an excellent grade. They perceive failure extremely hard; we can say that they are dominated not by the hope of success, but by the fear of failure. They avoid risks and do not like to express their thoughts publicly. They are reserved, secretive and distance themselves from their classmates. They have very few close friends. They do not like to be left to their own devices and suffer without external adequate assessment of their actions, study results or activities.

Children with a low level of intelligence but a high level of creativity often become “outcasts.” They have difficulty adapting to school requirements, often study in clubs, have unusual hobbies, etc., where they can show their creativity in a free environment. They are very anxious and suffer from a lack of self-confidence and an “inferiority complex.” Teachers often characterize them as dull and inattentive because they are reluctant to complete routine tasks and cannot concentrate.

Children with a low level of intelligence and creative abilities outwardly adapt well, stay in the “middle class” and are satisfied with their position. They have adequate self-esteem, the low level of their subject abilities is compensated by the development of social intelligence, sociability, and passivity in learning.

2.3 “Investment Theory” by R. Sternberg

One of the latest concepts of creativity to emerge is the so-called “investment theory” proposed by R. Sternberg and D. Lavert. These authors consider a creative person to be someone who is willing and able to “buy ideas low and sell high.” "Buying low" means pursuing unknown, unrecognized, or unpopular ideas. The challenge is to correctly assess their development potential and possible demand. A creative person, despite environmental resistance, misunderstanding and rejection, insists on certain ideas and “sells them at a high price.” After achieving market success, he moves on to another unpopular or new idea. The second problem is where these ideas come from.

Sternberg believes that a person may not realize his creative potential in two cases: 1) if he expresses ideas prematurely; 2) if he does not bring them up for discussion for too long and then they become obvious, “outdated”. It should be noted that in this case the author replaces the manifestation of creativity with its social acceptance and evaluation.

According to Sternberg, creative manifestations are determined by six main factors: 1) intelligence as an ability; 2) knowledge; 3) thinking style; 4) individual traits; 5) motivation; 6) external environment.

Intellectual ability is basic. The following components of intelligence are especially important for creativity: 1) synthetic ability - a new vision of a problem, overcoming the boundaries of ordinary consciousness; 2) analytical ability - identifying ideas worthy of further development; 3) practical abilities - the ability to convince others of the value of an idea (“selling”). If an individual has too much analytical ability to the detriment of the other two, then he is a brilliant critic, but not a creator. Synthetic ability, not supported by analytical practice, generates a lot of new ideas, but not substantiated by research and useless. Practical ability without the other two can lead to the sale of "poor quality" but clearly presented ideas to the public.

The influence of knowledge can be both positive and negative: a person must imagine what exactly he is going to do. It is impossible to go beyond the field of possibilities and show creativity if you do not know the boundaries of this field. At the same time, knowledge that is too established can limit the researcher’s horizons and deprive him of the opportunity to take a fresh look at the problem.

Creativity requires independence of thinking from stereotypes and external influence. A creative person independently poses problems and solves them autonomously.

Creativity presupposes, from Sternberg's point of view, the ability to take reasonable risks, the willingness to overcome obstacles, internal motivation, tolerance for uncertainty, and the willingness to resist the opinions of others. Creativity is impossible if there is no creative environment.

The individual components responsible for the creative process interact. And the cumulative effect of their interaction is not reducible to the influence of any one of them. Motivation can compensate for the lack of a creative environment, and intelligence, interacting with motivation, significantly increases the level of creativity.

Sternberg conducted additional research to identify the role of analytical intellectual abilities in the structure of creativity. Verbal, spatial, and mathematical intelligence were measured using the STAT test. The study involved 199 students who were divided into two groups - highly creative and low creative. They were taught the same psychological course in two different versions in college. One course was designed to stimulate creative thinking, the other was not. The results achieved by students were assessed depending on the initial level of creativity and type of training.

Students who initially had a higher level of creativity more often generated their own ideas, independently organized experiments, put forward various hypotheses when the experimental conditions and samples varied, i.e., they showed better results in creative learning conditions than those who also had high scores creativity, but studied in ordinary conditions Perna I. Ya. Rhythms of life and creativity. - L., 2001..

Therefore, for creativity to manifest itself, an appropriate (creative) environment is necessary. This also follows from the results of previous studies.

CONCLUSION

In conclusion, the following conclusions can be drawn:

Attitudes towards creativity have changed dramatically in different eras.

Psychologists owe their knowledge about the characteristics of a creative personality not so much to their own efforts as to the work of literary scholars, historians of science and culture, and art historians, who in one way or another touched upon the problem of a creative personality, since there is no creation without a creator.

The main thing in creativity is not external activity, but internal activity - the act of creating an “ideal”, an image of the world, where the problem of alienation of man and environment is resolved. External activity is only an explication of the products of an internal act. The peculiarities of the creative process as a mental (spiritual) act will be the subject of further presentation and analysis.

Inharmonious emotional relationships in the family contribute to the child’s emotional distance from, as a rule, uncreative parents, but in themselves they do not stimulate the development of creativity.

For the development of creativity, an unregulated environment with democratic relations and the child’s imitation of a creative personality are necessary. The development of creativity may proceed according to the following mechanism: on the basis of general giftedness, under the influence of the microenvironment and imitation, a system of motives and personal properties (nonconformism, independence, self-actualization motivation) is formed, and general giftedness is transformed into actual creativity (synthesis of giftedness and a certain personality structure).

Highlighting the signs of a creative act, almost all researchers emphasized its unconsciousness, spontaneity, the impossibility of its control by the will and mind, as well as a change in the state of consciousness.

LIST OF REFERENCES USED

1. Isaac G.Yu. Intelligence: a new look // Questions of psychology. - No. 1.- 2006.

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Characteristics of upbringing as an essential factor in personality development. The essence of the concepts of “creativity” and “creative personality” in pedagogy. Analysis of the system for the development of creative abilities in extracurricular activities. Methods for developing creative abilities.

course work, added 10/04/2011


Concepts of creativity and creative activity. Psychological characteristics of creative personalities. Formation and development of personality. Types of creativity and their features. The role of the unconscious in the creative process. Creative personality and her life path.

abstract, added 01/23/2012


Development of the creative potential of the individual in ontogenesis. Concept of mental retardation. Features of the development of creative abilities. Experimental study of creativity, creative thinking of children with mental retardation and healthy children, results.

course work, added 10/30/2013


Essence, characteristics of psychological barriers to creativity. The process of developing creative abilities when overcoming these barriers, assessing its effectiveness and prospects. Art therapy as the main means of development and creative abilities.