Creativity: novelty, appropriateness, impact

 

Can creativity researchers be creative about how creativity should be measured?Davide Piffer suggests that three factors need to be understood and measured separately.

Can creativity be measured? An attempt to clarify the notion of creativity and general directions for future research

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.tsc.2012.04.009

He says: The goal of this investigation is to demonstrate that much of the confusion regarding the measurement of creativity is caused by the insufficient clarity of its definition and to provide suggestions for an improved assessment and new possible tools of investigation (e.g. interviews).
It is shown that three dimensions of creativity (novelty, appropriateness and impact)
constitute a framework within which creativity can be defined and measured.
Further clarity to the definition of creativity is added by distinguishing between person’s and product’s creativity and providing definitions for each.
Based on this new definition, it is argued that Divergent Thinking, Remote Associates or some personality scales can be considered neither the only components of the creative process/cognition/potential nor “creativity tests”. The use of the terms “creativity test” and “measure of creative process” in the literature are criticized and it is indicated when they should be used.
It is also shown that claims to have found a general factor of creativity are based on methodological and conceptual errors.
Finally it is concluded that a person’s creativity can only be assessed indirectly (for example with self report questionnaires or official external recognition) but it cannot be measured directly.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B3c4TxciNeJZOGVHc3BQSG9iWXM/view?usp=sharing

Educated parents more important than rich parents

Although academics should be above such things, sometimes a particular paper becomes cherished because it seems to prove a particular point, and becomes a totem for a general world view. For many years it has been taken as axiomatic that family environments have a very strong impact on child development. How could they not? Parents are there every day to inculcate values, teach skills and attitudes, nurture or neglect, and shape their young charges into the paths of righteousness, or sling them down the slippery slope of dissolution. Furthermore, rich parents are able to buy their children educational toys, books, tutors, quiet rooms for study, good schools, proper accents and habits, and the shiny baubles of wealth indicators.

Social class is often seen as the engine room of social success, and most psychological and sociological research measures socio-economic status as a matter of course, sometimes neglecting other measures as a consequence. However, social class is far from being a pure sociological measure, most notably because most parents are bringing up their own children, so genetics and social forces are confounded. Absent a genomic analysis of parents and children (which may become standard one day) it would be at least one step forward to measure the intelligence of parents and their children. Useful, but somewhat time consuming and expensive compared with a quick assessment of social class.

As a consequence, most data sets use cheap and cheerful measures: socio-economic status of family, and educational level of parents, either as highest level achieved, or total years of schooling. Both of these last measures are pretty crude, and will under-estimate the finer detail of scholastic attainments.

The general picture which emerges from worldwide PISA results is that parental education is more influential than parental status or wealth. In the German PISA sample for Germany there were very weak correlations between wealth indicators and academic achievement: PISA sum and availability of one's own study place:
r=.09(N=32947); own desk: r=.11 (N=32983);mobile: r=−.25 (N = 32113); TV: r = −.06 (N = 32968); game computer: r = −.20 (N = 31990); and video: r = −.22 (N = 31861). By contrast, another indicator of students' learning environment, which requires relatively less expenditure than electronics, is much more and stably and
positively related to their achievement: the number of books: r = .43 (N=32568).

Having a mobile phone, a video recorder and a game computer are associated with lower scholastic ability, and the only substantial positive correlation is with the number of books, and of course the cause may not be the books themselves, but the intellect and character of the families who choose to buy books.

The frequently supposed positive effects of wealth-driven private school attendance are hardly supported by research results. According to studies done in 22 Western countries (Dronkers & Robert, 2008a,b), the “effect of private schools” on PISA scores through parental attributes is much larger than the small positive or even negative effects of private school attendance itself: “The main explanation of their gross differences in scholastic achievement is the better social composition of private
schools.” (Dronkers & Robert, 2008a, p. 541). Thus, these schools do not make students smarter, but smarter kids improve these schools, at least their measured achievement test results. Similar results were found by Bond and Saunders (1999) for Great Britain: Effects of private school attendance varied between a small positive impact on abilities (β = .07) and negative ones on later occupational status (sum
β = −.12).

Educational level is an indicator of parental cognitive ability, which can influence their educational behavior and their shaping of a benign developmental environment. This can include wealth (e.g. via books) having an environmental impact on children's cognitive development. Further, parental educational level
can be an indicator of genes underlying parents' and children's behavior.

Now Rindermann and Baumeister have taken a close look at Hart and Risely (1995) and find that as regards cognitive development, parental education is more important than socio-economic status.

Rindermann, H. & Baumeister, A. E. E. (2015). Parents’ SES vs. parental
educational behavior and children’s development: A reanalysis of the
Hart and Risley study. Learning and Individual Differences, 37, 133-138.

In their seminal study “Meaningful differences in the everyday  experience of young American children”, Hart and Risley (1995) showed a  close relationship between differences in family environment and  children’s development. The conventional conclusion was that children’s  cognitive development (measured by psychometric intelligence and verbal  ability tests) depends on parental socioeconomic status (SES), especially on wealth. We reanalyzed their data and show that the quality of education given by parents is crucial (beta-PEB=.58) and not the diffuse aggregate measure of SES (beta-SES=.11). Additionally, we  compare their sample with a similar but larger sample (Hoff, 2003) showing the same pattern of results. Possible causal factors (associated environmental and genetic factors) are discussed.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B3c4TxciNeJZSEJPOXgxLTlrNTA/view?usp=sharing

As you will see, the original study had a sample size of 42, of whom 17 were African American. So, a very small sample on which to make any statements about large issues, and furthermore, a sample which conflates social and ethnic effects. Is there any hope for psychology?

Charlie Hebdo

The purpose of terrorism is to terrify. In that aim the perpetrators of the attack on the staff of Charlie Hebdo in Paris have been successful. They have shown that journalists in Paris cannot be protected against men carrying heavy weapons willing to kill anyone in their way. Leading journalists and cartoonists, familiar to all French readers, have been gunned down despite Police in the street, bodyguards in the building and locks on the doors. Pens were not mightier than machine guns that day, though they may be in the long run. In the grisly trade of political assassination this has been a successful mission.

The status quo of domestic policing in Europe is that most people are peaceful, and that the few who are violent are doing so for their own limited criminal purposes and want to avoid detection and capture. They run away with their stolen goods, and are usually eventually tracked down.  These particular perpetrators of the attack on Charlie Hebdo have already been identified as being two brothers with criminal backgrounds. They have moved on to Posture criminality, in which the aim is to stroll and swagger rather than run, to cause the greatest hurt possible, to be triumphant in murder so as to glorify themselves and their adopted cause. Conventional policing will always have a difficulty when confronted with armed death cults, who kill for the sake of making a larger political and religious point. “Don’t ever make fun of Islam” is their boast, and they are in charge of deciding what constitutes fun.

However, it would, be mistaken to describe these miscreants as “professional”. Professional soldiers follow rules of engagement, and do not kill unarmed civilians or even armed men who are wounded, incapable of defending themselves, and have surrendered. “Dispassionate” or “cold blooded” would be closer to the mark, and even that may be part of a posture, the martyr’s bravado, the swagger of a fool who considers himself fully justified because of a set of arguments which admit no contradiction.

Liberal democracies are a soft touch on these matters, and that is their attraction to the locals and to immigrant arrivals, and also part of their strength. Avoiding over-reaction is a measure of the long-sightedness of a tolerant society. However, there is also a danger in under-reacting. “Business as usual” is a good policy most of the time, but it can also slide into appeasement, withdrawal, and the cowed acquiescence of a fearful public, restricting their opinions and freedoms. What democracies must now work out is how they deal with people who treat open societies as if they were war zones, and who regard their half-examined convictions as being justification enough for slaughter. France and Europe as a whole will have been frightened by this attack. It is not too much to speak of them going through a collective symbolic trauma. However, they should not shirk from recognising that Islam has a prominent militant wing, a death meme which finds resonance in many a self-important young idiot, and with a supportive fringe of unknown size who will condemn the act and then list the supposed causes in the distant sense of “understanding why they did it, wrong as it was”.

After being subjected to criminal and political violence many of my traumatised patients felt that they would never see humanity in the same way ever again. That is understandable, though an over-reaction. Equally, seeing this event as an individual aberration is an error. A corrosive idea is doing the rounds of the impressionable: you are justified in killing those who criticise your religion. Pens also wrote the murderous stories contained in some sermons and religious texts. Pens, and perhaps more, will be required to counter it.

Author replies

 

Emanuel Jauk has come back to me about comments I made on his paper, making some clarifications, and pointing out that although I had uploaded one of his papers he had sent me another relevant paper which I hadn’t uploaded, so here is a link to it, with apologies to Emanuel:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B3c4TxciNeJZek00aXpudTBWUU0/view?usp=sharing

I had said of his presentation:

"The paper is slightly unusual, in that it seeks to model creative processes using IQ120 as a cut-off, and so runs contrary to the general findings of the Lubinski and Benbow work that there is no cut-off point, and that the brighter you are the more creative you are in real life."

Emanuel replies: “The paper you refer to was published in Intelligence 2013 (i sent it to you; it is a different one than the document you uploaded). We observed an IQ-120-cutoff for the relationship between intelligence and divergent thinking ability (referred to as "creative potential" in this manuscript).

I had said:
"The paper [...] runs contrary to the general findings of the Lubinski and Benbow work [... .] I think the difference lies in the fact that [...] their volunteers were assessed on creativity tests, rather than real life achievements."

Emanuel replies:
“We did actually assess real-life achievements, too, and found no cutoff-point. Instead, we observed a linear increase of creative achievement as intelligence increases. Thus, the findings do in no way contradict those from the Lubinski group; they rather support them. In the second paper (EJP 2014; the one you uploaded) deals with creative achievement in more detail and shows that intelligence has additive and interactive effects on it.

Emanuel concludes:

“I understand that all the different creativity measures and tests might lead to some confusion, but it is important for me to highlight that if we consider the full complexity of the phenomenon, the big picture seems to be fairly consistent, actually.”

 

In summary, there appear to be break points if you look at creativity test performance, but not when you look at actual achievements in the real world.

 

Order restored.

Creative memories

Perhaps I am slightly jaundiced about the benefits of memory, because my traumatised patients were trying so hard to forget, but the dream of boosting one’s intelligence never dies, and expanding one’s memory is seen as the royal path to that special power.

So, what can be achieved by training people in the N-back technique? You may have already guessed that my calm and balanced view is that the whole enterprise is a colossal waste of time which would be better spent learning how to play the cello.

Oshin Vartanian lives in Toronto, a city with a high tower with a glass floor where, if one is so inclined, one can dance with women one has never met purely for the vertiginous pleasure of waltzing over the streets which are clearly and terrifyingly visible very far below. My compliments to the unknown lady with whom I danced, and her wise word: “Just dance, and don’t look down”.

Here, as promised, is Oshin’s Powerpoint presentation:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B3c4TxciNeJZb2U2MnlSWDlpRlE/view?usp=sharing

Here is one of the papers on which his talk was based, published in the journal Neuroscience in 2013. Briefly, he found that a short regimen of WM training was associated with greater neural efficiency during engagement in a divergent thinking task, but not improved performance as measured by efficiency.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B3c4TxciNeJZcy1GcUpackM5VEk/view?usp=sharing

He has an on-going study due to finish this week in which the team are testing the relative effectiveness of a 10-day training regimen on the adaptive dual n-back task (vs. non-adaptive dual n-back task) on divergent thinking—but this time measuring originality, flexibility and appropriateness in addition to fluency. They will also score all responses using the consensual assessment technique for the quality of responses which Paul Silvia described in his presentation (see earlier post).

From my point of view the sample sizes are too small, and I wouldn’t bother to put any of these heads in a scanner, simply because reliable results require sample sizes approaching 500 subjects. However, these slight but significant results for N back keep alive the dream that you, by learning to remember pointless things which happened a few moments ago, might conceivably become more fluid in your intelligence and might even become more creative in your cello improvisations.

However, don’t use the N-back technique to learn to play the cello. Get a good music teacher, preferably one not interested in neuro-psychology.

Ebola 2015

 

2015 is intended to be the year in which the Ebola outbreak is overcome. Although getting precise figures in West Africa is hard, there are grounds for some optimism. Some West African countries have done very well, and others, such as Sierra Leone and Liberia, far less well. The estimates for the number of projected infections for 2015 vary so greatly as to not be helpful. Too much uncertainty, too many assumptions, mostly about human behaviour. West Africans have worked out that funeral practices have to change, and by now they may all have come to understand that Ebola actually exists, but in countries with poor documentation and weak infrastructures all these assumptions are questionable. To confuse matters, the WHO website seems to have fallen into the hands of journalists. It is full of uplifting personal stories, and the epidemiology is now harder to find, but here are their latest estimates: A total of 20 206 confirmed, probable, and suspected cases of Ebola have been reported in four affected countries (Guinea, Liberia, Mali and Sierra Leone) and four previously affected countries (Nigeria, Senegal, Spain and the United States of America) in the seven days to 28 December (week 52). There have been 7905 reported deaths.

http://www.who.int/csr/disease/ebola/situation-reports/en/

Ebola is said to be hard to catch and easily prevented by simple precautions. Nonetheless, many African health workers have caught Ebola. This might be due to poor or non-existent equipment, poor training, fatigue, or simply an inability or unwillingness to follow strict protocols.

The call for Western nurses to go to Africa pre-supposes that they are better than African nurses. Colonialism is accepted in this instance. Otherwise it would be better to simply send African nurses rubber gloves and disinfectants and let them get on with it.  I do not know if Westerners are better nurses, particularly when carrying out fairly simple procedures. They may be, but quite a few of them have caught Ebola, and several have been flown back to their home countries, bringing the virus with them.

So we have a mystery. What is the game plan? Are Western countries motivated by some perverse sense of fair play, namely that the virus should be given equal opportunity to infect people in distant lands? Are the national authorities trying to show how good their own facilities and tracking systems are?  In point of fact they have often been shown to be haphazard, which is not surprising given the (current) rarity of the condition outside Africa.

Perhaps the authorities have done a cool calculation. They doubt Sierra Leone and Liberia will ever manage to control the outbreak. By providing equipment and health staff they hope to reduce the total number of carriers. (This assumes that carriers will always have free access to international travel, and will get through all controls, even a blanket quarantine). Treating a number of infected returning Western nurses at very high cost is a price worth paying, so this point of view asserts, because nurses will probably confess to being ill a bit sooner than African citizens fleeing the epidemic, and the cost of treating Western nurses is counterbalanced by their much better nursing skills, which reduces the case load at a global level. If all this is true, then it seems that nursing Ebola patients is in fact very complicated, and African nurses cannot or will not do it properly. This is strange, because there are many African nurses in the UK health service. I suppose it is possible that all the good ones have come to work in the NHS leaving West Africa denuded, or more likely that several West African countries did not bother too much about establishing good quality health services, but it seems an odd sort of globalisation.

Asking Western health volunteers to spend an extra week or two in a good hotel in Sierra Leone after completing nursing would probably catch most of the infections, and seems worth considering. The costs of the current policy of letting returning nurses come straight back home and then treat them if they become ill are hard to calculate since much of the system is up and running, but it is reported to be very high, and not negligible in a service under strain.

Quarantine would be far more effective, but that is too simple. Worse, it is unfashionable, and is often opposed on the basis that people would try to get round it. Some probably would, but some people get round all requirements, such as having to admit they been in contact with an Ebola patient and then felt ill.

In sum, the Ebola epidemic concedes that some African countries cannot provide their citizens with an effective health care system; that Western health workers are better at standard nursing; and that quarantine should not be used.  Now that a Scottish nurse with Ebola is in a critical condition in a London hospital the possibility of quarantine for returning health workers has been considered but turned down, on the grounds that it would lead to fewer such Western professionals being willing to travel to Africa to treat Ebola. However, the government's chief medical officer for England, Dame Sally Davies, has said the case raises questions about airport screening procedures. Whether these questions will lead to some answers seems unlikely. Returning doctors reported a chaotic environment at Heathrow airport, with everyone confined into a small room for testing, thus maximising the risk of cross infection among staff.

The UK authorities are now saying that the bodies of nurses who die of Ebola should be cremated immediately or, for those opposed to cremation, placed in sealed coffins. The charity which sent the nurse out to Freetown is carrying out an investigation and “will leave no stone unturned”.

2015 should be the year that Ebola comes under control, and there has been considerable progress in many areas,  but at the moment it is too soon to say that the situation has been contained.

Uruguayan marihuana

Some of you were kind enough to ask me to bring them some Uruguayan marihuana, being connoisseurs who compare blends from across the world and who have deep feelings of admiration for a small country which decided to take a leap of faith and make the substance entirely legal, and available in pharmacies. I am grateful for the implied compliment that the nation of my birth has faced the contentious issue of the legalisation of drugs in an entirely rational, calm and practical manner.

At the end of 2013 I explained the legislation, and noted the tiny impediment that individuals needed to obtain permits before getting their rations:

http://drjamesthompson.blogspot.com/2013/12/ending-2013-on-marihuana-high-uruguayan.html

All permits are controlled by the state bureaucracy, and since they have no real work to do they make the issuing of permits a form of performance art. Permits take time. Sometimes a year. 

However, it turns out I had mis-underestimated local lethargy. Although Uruguay garnered international attention and approbation for their policy, the international community does not understand how policy works in Uruguay. Policy is something you announce. Once you have done so, the job is done. Implementation is another matter.

A year on it is still not possible to get legal marihuana, and this is not because individuals desiring to partake of this substance cannot obtain permits. Pharmacies in this country have the status of a national health service. They are the first port of call for all ailments, and the learned pharmacist will willingly prescribe an ointment or antibiotic for each complaint, commonly both. Doctor’s surgeries are usually located close to pharmacies, so that ailing patients do not have too far to walk. When closed, every pharmacy has a notice in their window showing which nearby pharmacy is currently open “taking its turn” to serve the public throughout the weekend and public holidays. Some even remain open 24 hours a day, all days of the year, and become a social destination and a point of reference when giving people directions. Clients are respectful, polite, eager to get advice and to carry it out. The clientele includes mothers with sick babies, sunbathers with blisters, and people who have had the misfortune to tear their knees on sunken wrecks. All of these are tended to with professional aplomb and mild detachment, as befits public servants who have seen it all, in the case of wrecks many times.

After due consideration, pharmacists are not entirely convinced that they want to cater to a group of people who are not actually ill, and who tend to resolve misunderstandings with firearms. In particular, even if they went against their moral scruples and began to establish a regular clientele of state-sponsored dope heads they anticipate that the current free enterprise purveyors of hard drugs will not welcome the competition, and might arrive in the cool of the evening on their traditional motor bikes “to settle accounts” in an unpleasant final manner. Pharmacists prefer to be pillars of the community than footnotes in the funeral columns. As a consequence, the whole issue of legalised marihuana is judged to have served its purpose: it has gained favourable international publicity. Of course, the policy has not been abandoned. It has merely been moved into the implementation phase, which may take some time.

As a benchmark for those of you who have made the requests for marihuana, and repeated them with a certain feverish insistence, let us consider the sunken wreck on which two family members have already gashed their knees. There is no doubt it is there, because it can be seen, and walked round, at low tide. Ten men with spades, or one man with a digger, and another man to drive a large pickup truck could probably clear the whole thing away, even if it took several days of low tide. However, such an action is not something the authorities wish to rush into, and in the interim some feeble notices half-warn bathers of the hazard. I do not wish to disappoint those of you who were anticipating I would return with little packets of state-sponsored comfort for your delectation, but you ought to know that the wreck has been there since 1930.

Creativity and those bricks again

Paul Silvia has kindly handed over his Powerpoint presentation, with which the symposium on intelligence and creativity commenced, together with three key papers on which it was based.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B3c4TxciNeJZdW14QUY1Z1lJRDg/view?usp=sharing

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B3c4TxciNeJZdUpkaTlUYUh3Tjg/view?usp=sharing

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B3c4TxciNeJZNFQtWXZUbEFxaG8/view?

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B3c4TxciNeJZRTVrUDNOeHFnQzg/view?usp=sharingusp=sharing

 

This work has an interesting link with neuropsychological tests of fluency, in which patients are given one minute in which to say as many words as they can with the initial letters f, a, s (the initial word frequencies differ, though this is not usually analysed in clinical settings) and later within the categories of boy’s names and animals, and then alternating between fruits and furniture. You may say that none of these fluency tasks are very creative, but they share a common sub-component with the many creativity tests which use the “as many as possible” instruction. For example, in giving boy’s names should one try an alphabetic strategy or a friends and family strategy?

Silvia shows that cognitive abilities are heavily involved in creative thought, and I think it could be argued that any fluency task has some basic features in common with creativity tasks.

Another half brick of creativity

Here are the last two papers for the creativity symposium, and links to key papers referenced in all the presentations. First of all, here are other papers by the creative Rex Jung:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B3c4TxciNeJZellMRWNYTkRMNUE/view?

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B3c4TxciNeJZTmNvcTQ1T25Wb0E/view?usp=sharingusp=sharing

 

Presenting on “Intelligence and Creativity: Bridges, Gaps and Overlaps” Emanuel Jauk (emanuel.jauk@uni-graz.at) said:  In a sample of 297 participants, we studied three different aspects of the intelligence-creativity relationship.
In a first study, we investigated the threshold hypothesis - one of the most prominent notions concerning the interplay between intelligence and creativity. The threshold hypothesis posits that above-average intelligence (usually in terms of an IQ of at least 120) represents a necessary but not sufficient condition for high creative potential. We used segmented regression analyses in order to empirically detect possible thresholds in the intelligence-creativity relationship. Our results confirm the threshold hypothesis in the way that intelligence increases creative potential (in terms of divergent thinking ability) only up to an above-average IQ and loses its impact thereafter.
Moving further from creative potential to indicators of real-life creative behavior, we established a structural equation model for the prediction of creative accomplishments by means of creative potential, intelligence, and openness to
experience. We found that personal accomplishments in terms of everyday creative activities depend on openness and creative potential, but not on intelligence. Socially acknowledged creative achievement, in contrast, was found to depend upon intelligence.
Finally, we investigated brain structural correlates of creative potential, intelligence, and openness in a subsample of 135 individuals using voxel-based morphometry. The study integrated and extended previous findings indicating that the ability to produce original ideas (ideational originality) is tied to default-mode as well as dopaminergic brain structures. This result was apparent throughout groups of lower and higher intelligent individuals. In contrast, the ability to produce a large number of ideas (ideational fluency) is correlated with brain structure only in lower
intelligent individuals, which might indicate a threshold effect on the neurostructural level.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B3c4TxciNeJZa0pWeWpjQ2RxNWM/view?usp=sharing

The paper is slightly unusual, in that it seeks to model creative processes using IQ120 as a cut-off, and so runs contrary to the general findings of the Lubinski and Benbow work that there is no cut-off point, and that the brighter you are the more creative you are in real life. I think the difference lies in the fact that Jauk et al. are looking at the normal population rather than a select group of high achievers and even more importantly their volunteers were assessed on creativity tests, rather than real life achievements.

Now we turn to a great money spinner: training people how to be creative. You know the sort of thing: imagine you are travelling at the speed of light, and tell me what you would see? That was a made up example, to show the inherent absurdity of the project, because imagining you are travelling at the speed of light will produce little of interest unless you are Einstein. More usually the purveyors of these techniques suggest that by doing some simple and not so simple memory exercises you will “train your brain”. By the way, if you ever find an instance of a brain being trained without an attached person being involved, please let me know.

Oshin Vartanian has cast a critical eye on brain training.

The Prospects and Perils of Cognitive (Brain) Training for Improving Cognition: The Case for Creativity
Oshin Vartanian (oshin.vartanian@drdc-rddc.gc.ca)
Recently, there has been great theoretical and applied interest in the prospects of cognitive (brain) training for improving cognition. Primarily, researchers have employed working memory (WM) tasks for training purposes, and examined their effects on other tasks that draw on WM capacity. The available data suggest that whereas WM training can improve performance on the trained and other structurally similar tasks (i.e., near transfer), far transfer to structurally dissimilar untrained tasks or general cognitive function is not always observed. To increase the utility of cognitive training as an aid for improving cognition in real-world settings, we need a better understanding of the conditions under which transfers of different types—both far and near—occur. Toward that end, I will present a selective review of the studies in the area, with a particular focus on findings that have a bearing on training creativity.

I do not have links to his talk yet, but in essence Vartanian finds that training on working memory tasks brings some gains to similar memory tasks, but not usually to g loaded tasks. I do not know how long the effect lasts, but the training takes 10 sessions, so you might be better off investing your intelligence in learning some more useful skills. For example, learning more about statistics or genetics or even perfecting your spread sheet skills. Not Powerpoint. That will reduce even the sharpest of intellects.

In summary, it looks as if intelligence is a large part of real creativity, that is, suggestions which have merit in the real world, generating ideas with interesting and testable corollaries rather than the verbal diarrhoea of endless silly uses for a brick.

Have a creative 2015.

Heave half a brick at Creativity

It is wry comment from a bygone age, but in Britain the mentality of parochial dislike of newcomers was parodied as: “There’s a stranger: heave half a brick at him”.

Having decided to start the year on a bright and positive note, with a focus on that most positive of human characteristics, Creativity, why should I ask you to heave half a brick at anything? By way of explanation, the Sixties mixed profound social change with profound silliness. Creativity research centred on a particular test, in which people were invited to think of as many uses of a brick as possible. I can remember taking the test in my undergraduate years, and finding it fun for a few minutes. Dull people, it was argued, would suggest building a house; creative people would think of a brick as a one-time-use TV channel changer.

Dull as creativity researchers were, they eventually realised that asking people to list many uses for a brick encouraged fatuity, so they began to rate the entries for “creativity” (circular, but the beginning of wisdom) or they at least provided figures for the common and uncommon types of response. Notice what they did not do: they did not create a test which gave a set of problems for which creative solutions were required. For example, a yoghurt factory produces different flavours in large batches one flavour at a time (and cleans the machinery before each new batch) and keeps the different-flavoured yoghurts in a cold store from which they are send to supermarkets. They want to build a larger cold store so that they can respond more quickly to requests for different flavours. Is there a creative solution to this problem? A pot of yoghurt is offered as a prize.

Here is another creative problem, with thanks to the late Richard Feynman. He landed at the airport one Saturday, a day late for a Physics conference, and realised that he did not know whether it was being held at the University of North Carolina or the University South Carolina. This was not a trivial problem, because they are 60 miles apart. This was the age before mobile phones, and he did not have the home phone of his secretary and all the colleagues he might have phoned were already at the conference. Is there a creative way of solving this problem, and quickly? A string of sub-atomic particles is offered as a prize.

It was with an air of truculent scepticism that I attended the ISIR symposium on Intelligence and Creativity, with my very own brick ready as a projectile protest, but it remained firmly in my pocket, because the speakers were, in fact, creative. Paul Silvia (p_silvia@uncg.edu) pointed out that the “uses of a brick” test made the procedural error of asking for “as many ideas as possible” rather than stating the real aim: “be creative”. Poor instructions have led to misleading data. He outlined better scoring methods for tests of creativity and “divergent thinking” which show strong effect sizes for executive and strategic components in creative thought . He also provided the TV channel changer example, worth a prize in anyone’s value system.

Harrison Kell (harrison.kell@vanderbilt.edu) and colleagues presented work on the creative accomplishments of bright children identified at age 13.  They say:

The debate about the relationship between intelligence and creativity, especially when intelligence is assessed via standardized tests, is long-standing. To begin, data showing that creative accomplishment increases along with intelligence is reviewed. Next, the extraordinary achievements of 320 members of the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth (SMPY) in the top 1 in 10,000 in mathematical or verbal reasoning abilities are detailed. These individuals were identified prior to age 13 using a standardized test and tracked for over three decades. Finally, the creative accomplishments of 271 individuals from Duke University’s Talent Identification Program (TIP) scoring in the top 1 in 10,000 are presented. These participants were also identified before age 13 using standardized tests and tracked for over 30 years. The magnitude of the SMPY cohort’s creative accomplishments were closely replicated in the TIP cohort, including: over 5% tenured at research-intensive universities, over 8% holding patents, and over 2% being authors of fiction or non-fiction books. The ability patterns underlying the nature of the creative accomplishments among SMPY participants were also replicated in the TIP sample: Individuals whose verbal ability was relatively greater than their quantitative ability tended to produce creative works in the arts and humanities, while individuals whose quantitative ability was relatively greater than their verbal ability tended to produce creative works in STEM. This replication confirms the consistent role of ability pattern and relative ability strength in shaping differential development across the full range of cognitive ability, extending earlier conclusions about those in the top 1% of ability to those in the top .01%. Replication of findings across two profoundly gifted samples further demonstrates that 1) exceptional creative accomplishment covaries with exceptional intelligence, 2) this phenomenon is robust, and 3) individuals with great creative potential can be identified early in life using standardized tests.

This work is highly persuasive because the predictive measures are taken at age 13 and the accomplishments measured in adulthood, using measures which are as objective as possible, given the somewhat airy-fairy way in which creativity is conceptualised. Testing the findings on another rare sample is an added bonus. The moral of this research is: if you want creativity, find someone who scores well on verbal or mathematical tests.

Finally, to show that talks about creativity can be creative, Rex Jung did an entertaining tour de force of the reasons that creativity might exist at all. What evolutionary pressures may have selected for creative cognition, in contrast to other types of reasoning? He argues that intelligence itself is clearly important to human survival, but then goes on to ask whether creativity is important to human survival. He distinguishes, pace Tooby and Cosmides, between special purpose cognitive systems which facilitate rapid and accurate reasoning, though narrow in application; and situation specific improvisation, which facilitates novel and useful reasoning, which is broad in application, though it may take longer to come up with solutions.

Based on studies of brain connectivity, Jung proposes another interesting way of looking at thinking, which is to distinguish between the internal and social brain networks. The internal thinking network is based on general problem solving, and involves metaphor and “as if” thinking. The social thinking network is based on specific problem solving, is rule based, and focuses on the real external world.

Here is a snapshot of his distinction between creativity and intelligence.

 

This brief account cannot do justice to his presentation, which reported currently unpublished findings, but here is the link to Jung’s “Here be Dragons” paper, which gives almost all of the key points:

http://journal.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00784/full

Finally, to test the creative abilities of the presenters I confronted two of them and demanded they tell me what was the most creative idea humankind had ever come up with. One ventured “the theory of evolution” but I dismissed it as not being a theory but merely a set of observations. The other ventured “Human Rights” but I dismissed this as being no more than Thomas Paine showing off at dinner parties, and without any objective foundation other than wishful thinking. I then gave them my candidate: the theory of relativity. My first interlocutor retorted that the theory was without practical consequences, but I think I was able to talk him out of it. However, it was clear that while Darwin built up his theory by systematising observations drawn from an international network of colleagues, Einstein just sat there conducting personal thought experiments: a clear distinction between internal and social brain networks (or working preferences at the very least).

What is your candidate idea?