More on Creativity

Further from the The New Scientist, some of the other conditions for creativity that were mentioned in the piece "Looking for Inspiration":

"The 'creative personality' tends to place a high value on aesthetic qualities and to have broad interests, providing lots of resources to draw on and knowledge to recombine into novel solutions".

"'Creatives' have an attraction to complexity and an ability to handle conflict. They are also usually highly self-motivated, perhaps even a little obsessive".

"Creativity comes to those who wait, but only to those who are happy to do so in a bit of a fog".

"...brains of creative people seem more open to incoming stimuli than less creative types. Our senses are continuously feeding a mass of information into our brains, which have to block or ignore most of it to save us from being snowed under. Peterson calls this process latent inhibition, and argues that people who have less of it, and who have a reasonably high IQ with a good working memory can juggle more of the data, and so may be open to more possibilities and ideas".

"Creativity has two states, inspiration and elaboration, each characterised by very different states of mind. While people were dreaming up their stories, brains were surprisingly quieted. The dominant activity was alpha waves, indicating a very low level of cortical arousal: a relaxed state, as though the conscious mind was quiet while the brain was making connections behind the scenes....However, when these quiet-minded people were asked to work on their stories, the alpha wave activity dropped off and the brain became busier, revealing increased cortical arousal, more corralling of activity and more organised thinking. Strikingly, it was the people who showed the biggest difference in brain activity between the inspiration and development stages who produced the most creative stroylines".

"Part of creativity is a conscious process of evaluating and analyzing ideas".

"The test also shows that the more we try and are stretched, the more creative our minds can be."

"The most creative people also use the different rhythms of the day, the weekends and the holidays to help shift focus and brain state. They may spend two hours at their desk then go for a walk, because they know that pattern works for them, and they don't feel guilty".