Creativity
Creativity is the ability to produce novel or unique ideas or objects which are also meaningful. For creativity to be meaningful, someone must be able to see the value, originality, or usefulness of the accomplishment. Visual imagery, ideational fluency, flexibility of thought, and originality combine to make up creative thinking. Visual imagery occurs when we see things in our "mind's eye." Highly creative people may come up with many ideas for a problem. We call this ideational fluency. If we have the ability to generate many different categories of ideas besides the obvious, we are said to possess flexibility of thought.
Creative people are often perceived as more intelligent. However, creative people are problem finders as well as problem solvers. Social psychologist Graham Wallas identified four stages of creative problem solving:
Preparation is discovering and defining a problem, then attempting to solve it.
Incubation describes putting the problem aside for a while and working on something else.
Insight describes the Eureka or insight solution moment when a solution comes immediately to mind.
Elaboration-verification is the solution even though it may still need to be confirmed.
The relationship between intelligence and creativity is not as simple as it seems. Some recent research has found that IQ and creativity are not strongly related. The one important trait commonly found in highly creative persons is openness to experience. Creative people tend to enjoy and seek out new experiences, new places, and new ideas.
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