Genius and Creativity

Creative geniuses know how to think not what to think.

Scholars, researchers:
tried to measure genius using statistics

1904 study
most geniuses are fathered by men older than 30 and
had mothers younger than 25 and
were usually sickly as children.

Other studies
• geniuses were celibate (Galileo and Newton)
• Others were fatherless (Dickens)
• Others motherless (Darwin, Marie Curie)

In the end....data meant nothing.

Academics
measured the link between intellligence and genius ...... and discovered intelligence is not enough.

IQ
Intelligence Quotient
• 170 about average

Marilyn vos Savant
She is a question and answer columnist in Parade magazine.
Listed in Guinness Book of World Records as having the highest ever recorded IQ of 228.

Richard Feynman
He was a Nobel-prize winning physicist.(IQ 122)....many feel he's the last great American genius.

J.P Guilford
leading psychologist of the 60's
called for a scientific focus on creativity.

Psychologists reached the conclusion that creativity is not the same as intelligence.
An individual can be far more creative than they are intelligent ....... or far more intelligent than they are creative.

Typically , we think reproductively
.....we look at similar problems and how we solved them in the past.

Creative individuals think productively. They ask many different questions and look at the situation in many different ways.

Productive thinking produces many alternative approaches.

Richard Feynman proposed teaching productive thinking in schools.
It is better to invent your own way or a new way than it is to look up an old soution and apply what you've looked up.

We need to vary our ideas to succeed.

1899 Charles Duell
• director of US Patent Office
suggested that the government close the office because everything that coulld be invented was already invented.

1938 Chester Carlson
• invented xerography
In 1930, he started work with Bell Telephone Laboratories. Later, while working as a patent attorney in a New York electronics firm he was impressed by the inconvenience of obtaining extra copies of documents and drawings.

In 1935, he set out to invent a machine into which one could feed an original, push a button, and get a copy.
He worked for three years studying and brainstorming and hired a physicist to assist him.
On October 22, 1938, in a laboratory room which he had rented, the world’s first electrostatic copying-process was developed. This process was later named xerography and it revolutionized document reproduction in offices and factories.

Kodak, IBM scoffed at his idea.
Carbon paper was cheap and plentiful... who would buy an expensive machine?

Different Kinds of Thinking
Hard and Soft thinking

Hard Thinking: Reproductive thinking - Getting something done
- logical
- precise
- exact
- specific
- consistent

Practical Phase - evaluate and execute ideas

Logical thinking is a series of steps each one building on the next and is merely an extension of what we know rather than being truly new.

Soft Thinking: Productive thinking - Thinking something different
- playful
- humorous
- irrational
- approximate
- metaphorical
- deals with contradiction
- finds similarities and connections among things

Imaginative Phase
- ask questions-what if?
- why not?

Intuitive thinking has no rules or step-by-step reasoning.
Intuitive thinking has a freedom and flexibility that enables the thinker to make connections between ideas to produce something truly new.

Graphic ideation (sketching, doodling) is complementary to verbal ideation and can help you develop new ideas.

Verbal Language
Most psychologists feel that verbal languages are the basis of thinking.

Schools reinforce this.
Reading, writing and math are stressed.

Visual Thinking
Helps to solve problems where shapes, forms, or patterns are concerned and visual imagery is very common in dreams. When we recall a dream we usually will "see" it, perhaps in color, before we verbalize it.

Visual thinking is used by everybody on a regular basis.
• moving chess pieces on a chess board
• moving men steering a piano along a winding staircase