The issue of creative thinking, creativity is one of the most difficult problems in the psychology of thinking.
Among all people in the world, the percentage of creatively thinking people is only 10%. And there are even fewer talented people capable of making any discovery. Therefore, the nature of creativity and creative abilities of people has long been of interest to scientists.
The first attempts of scientists to describe the mechanism of creative thinking date back to the early 18th century. They were unsuccessful and only led the researchers to their own creative solution to the problem - the concept of the unconscious was introduced.
In this regard, I note that this concept was introduced by none other than the German philosopher Godfried Leibniz, who studied the problems of creative thinking. The great psychoanalyst S. Freud at that time still had to wait two hundred years for his birth. And psychology, as a separate area of scientific knowledge, did not yet exist.
Godfried Leibniz tried to understand the peculiarities of thinking of famous creative people of his time. And the essence of his research was to ask them about the "algorithm" of the actions of their brain in the process of thinking. However, people only remembered the starting point of their thinking and the end result. This allowed G. Leibniz to suggest that the creative processes of thinking are in the unconscious.
Research continued, and the next stage was that psychologists tried to observe and analyze the thinking process of creative people. But we faced the same problem of inaccessibility for observation of the most essential points associated with creative thinking.
It's time to remember D. I. Mendeleev and other scientists who made their great discoveries through a sudden insight after heavy logically correct rational reasoning. In this, creative thinking is akin to intuition, if we define it as an unprepared comprehension of truth. The difference is that the solution of creative problems still has prerequisites - the process of rational thinking.
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The third stage of study begins in the 20th century, in its first decades. At its origins was the German scientist, the founder of Gestalt psychology Max Wertheimer.
He was the first to study creative thinking in the following way. He offered the subjects simple creative tasks and limited the time to solve them. If during this time the subject could not cope with the solution of the problem, he was offered a hint, but it was given in such a form that it was still necessary to guess how to use it. At the same time, the scientist observed the behavior of creatively thinking people, trying to find out something about their thinking by their behavior. At the same time, the picture is not so much clearer as it is confused.
Wertheimer proposed a definition of creative thinking that included the characteristics and personality traits of creative people.
The definition consists of several points.
- Creative thinking never repeats what has been passed, and always follows an original and new path. That is, a creatively thinking person each time brings something new to the solution of the problem.
- Creative thinking seeks and finds several different solutions to the same problem, not content with one single solution.
- A creatively thinking person is not afraid to be a black sheep. That is, to be different from the people around you and to attract general and not always friendly attention.
- A creatively thinking person is almost always a critical person who criticizes not only his own ideas, but also the thinking of other people, thereby causing hostility to himself and generating conflicts.
Thus, the definition was mixed and the features of thinking and personality traits of a person. And the question of creativity is still open. This is one of the most difficult problems in the psychology of thinking.
Based on the definition, I would classify K. G. Jung with his ideas about the collective unconscious and the peculiar structure of the personality, A. Crowley, V. Pauli, have already mentioned Dmitry Ivanovich. The list goes on, of course.
Who would you classify yourself as a creative person? Maybe yourself?
For a sweet tooth, a couple of puzzles from M. Wertheimer. Those that he offered his subjects at the beginning of the century:
- From six line segments of the same length, you need to create four equilateral triangles.
- Draw nine dots so that you have a "grid" of three rows of three dots. Cross out ALL nine dots with four straight lines.
Success!)
Author: Panina Irina Nikolaevna