What is creativity?

We explain what creativity is and what is the importance of creative thinking. Characteristics and examples of creativity.

1. What is creativity?

Creativity is the ability or ability of the human being to invent or create things , which can be physical objects, ideas, representations or simply fantasies. It is about the possibility of generating the new: new concepts, new ideas or new associations between them, which usually leads to new solutions to problems.

The creative thinking is highly valued in our societies, in which innovation and change play an important role. It involves memory , intelligence, imagination and other complex mental processes that lead to original thinking .

Creativity is typical of human cognition, and it is what differentiates it from forms of artificial intelligence. It is present in different ways in many forms of personality (called creative personality) and is in a pure and free state during childhood , whose greatest example is the games of the imagination. Writers, artists, architects, scientists and inventors are cultivators of the creative aspect of their personality.

Finally, creativity is common to all human beings (and even some animal species) but it can be enhanced or not, according to the habits and preferences of each individual. The most creative will be those who can find a novel way of solving a problem, or a novel representation of it.

2.Characteristics of creativity

Creativity is characterized by some or several of the following elements:

• Spontaneity . The emergence of creativity is usually spontaneous, that is, unplanned, and leads to what many call “inspiration,” that is, a state of consciousness particularly inclined toward creation.
• Freedom . Creative thinking does not usually play by the rules, rather it contradicts them and is located in novel, different, free perspectives.
• Sensitivity . More than intelligence or knowledge , creativity has to do with the ability to assume new perspectives, which is often linked to sensitivity and the ability to play (playful thinking).
• Excitability . Creativity is stimulable through the consumption of complex and innovative cultural objects: art , literature , games, activities that allow the freer exploration of subjectivity and original thinking.

3. Why is creativity important?

Creativity has played a vital role in the evolution of the human species, as it has allowed it to face various problems throughout its history and develop innovative and original tools and solutions for each. In fact, this talent probably meant the superiority of homo sapiens over other contemporary hominids, which allowed him to reproduce more and dominate the entire world.

In everyday life, creativity is a highly valued talent. Scientific, inventive, artistic or architectural work depends largely on this talent, not to mention the development of new materials, new technologies or new philosophies of thought, whose impact on civilization is usually more or less revolutionary.

4. Creativity examples

Creativity is found in our daily lives in abundance. The following are just a few examples of this:

• The scientific and technological innovation . What better example of human creativity than the vertiginous advance of technology we witness? Most of the things we take for granted today were unthinkable two decades ago, and yet someone put all their creativity to find out how to do it.
• The works of art . Painting , sculpture , literature, music and all artistic expressions are born from pure creative capacity, since they have no practical task, no function, but to offer new and unique perspectives on life.
• The advertising . While there are general trends and common places, advertising is good evidence of creativity and inventiveness, since you must build original and diverse speeches and presentations to reach the target audience and sell a product differently.

5. How to develop creativity?

Creativity is a universal human talent, but not always universally cultivated. Some strategies to develop creativity can be the following:

• Cultural consumption . Culture consumption habits such as reading, going to the movies, going to museums and exhibitions, concerts, etc. It has an inspiring effect on the mind and encourages creative thinking, since it is the source of free and new associations.
• Brainstorming . The so-called “brainstorming” is a technique widely used to promote the emergence of novel ideas and relationships between them, to translate on a paper everything that comes out on a main topic, which is written in the middle. Associative freedom usually leads by unexpected paths.
• Sleep . Surrealists claimed that the dream, the quintessential source of creativity, should be cultivated to fill the conscious mind with creative content. That’s why they used to paint in the morning, as close to sleep as possible.
• Lateral thinking . This is the name of a creative thinking method that fosters innovative connections between ideas, abandoning traditional logic, and which is usually expressed through riddles, games and riddles, much like the tradition of Zen culture.