Research Paper about Creativity

📌Category: Development, Life
📌Words: 888
📌Pages: 4
📌Published: 27 January 2022

“Without the creating of music or poetry or books or buildings or something of meaning, his very breath is cut off from him. He must create, must pour out creation. By some strange, unknown, inward urgency he is not really alive unless he is creating.”(Buck, 2001). Pearl Buck is quoted in The 101 Habits of Highly Successful Screenwriters; and from her quote on creativity we gain insight into the true deeper meaning of creativity. Creativity is something that we need, something we use every day that makes us able to function. The ambiguity of creativity allows for an open-ended definition for most people. However, creativity is a term often disliked because of the typical association with just artistic ability rather than its equivocal meaning, in which creativity can be virtually anything. I too had this ideology, until I dug deeper into the true meaning and complexities of creativity and found it was composed of so much more than what's on the surface. The concept of creativity is like a roadmap that runs hand in hand with originality, innovation and imagination; taking little pieces from each category. I originally struggled to recognize the connection between these three seemingly unrelated topics, this is until I further explored the subject of creativity.

Originality is a subjective term that allows everyone to have their own unique meanings and concepts. Some people believe that our brains are made for exploring, adapting, and making decisions; biologically wired to crave novelty while others believe people tend to prefer familiarity. As I read Runco’s textbook on creativity, my views on originality became more nuanced in the aspect of originality, novelty, and familiarity. Throughout class, we frequently discussed the novelty that comes with originality and the familiarity that comes with repetitive creations. This topic was also discussed throughout Runco. In Runco, it was found that remakes of movies and movies that have less originality like those involving cliches are actually rated higher. This suggests the idea that people tend to cling to familiarity rather than something completely novel. This also explores the next point on originality, which is a highly controversial topic amongst researchers; can anything be fully original? Runco discusses the topic of novelty in originality and uses many other researchers' studies to help form his ideas. One of the many studies introduced in Runco is Mandler’s who suggested: “no repetition is very truly entirely that; there is always something novel in whatever we do or say” (Runco, 2007). These ideas on originality and novelty helped shape my own views in a different light allowing me to think about originality on a deeper scale.

Along with originality, innovation has a more fluid definition than what people typically believe. With innovation obviously comes invention but contrary to typical beliefs these inventions don’t always have to be concrete. I had not thought about innovation like this until we discussed in class the idea of the assembly line; the assembly line was an idea and not a concrete invention, yet it was still innovative. This can also be seen from skeuomorphs which is an element of the graphical user interface that imitates the design of a familiar physical object. A skeuomorph isn’t a physical object but it’s still innovative and makes our everyday lives a little easier to navigate. A few examples of skeuomorphism would be an amazon shopping cart or the sound the computer trash makes when you throw something away. Skeuomorphs are an important part in daily routines, leading to my next point on innovation, applicability. In order to be innovative, there must be some form of applicability. Abstract inventions and applicability can be seen in the Root-Bernstein studies. Root-Bernstein is a study focused on imagination and not so heavily on innovation;  I could not previously see the connection between the two until after our discussions. The study focused on what's called a paracosm which is a persistent, consistent, elaborative, and detailed imaginary world. A paracosm is seemingly unrelated to innovation, but this quote from Root-Bernstein's study can connect the two ideas, “In a certain sense, of course, all make-believe involves the invention of places, beings, and imperatives not tangibly present, yet conceptually so (Harris, 2000).” This goes back to the whole roadmap of creativity, specifically the correlation between innovation and imagination. 

Imagination could considerably be the backbone of creativity, interlinked heavily with all the other pieces. In fact, imagination is typically associated with creativity, not so much with originality and innovation, but I did not originally make a connection between these groups either. Imagination is almost required to be original and innovative just because it’s such a broad topic. Imagination is actually much more complex than what's on the surface; and this can be seen in Stravinsky’s research where he distinguished the creative imagination and virtual imagination. There's also opposing research to Stravinsky from Betts and Colello who distinguished creativity into reproductive imagination and creative imagination; the more widespread ideas. I previously did not know how broad of a subject imagination really was and how many different researchers, psychologists, and neurologists actually took a deeper look into imagination.

Throughout the discussion in our class, I gained a more nuanced and robust knowledge of creativity as a whole and the interlinks between each topic. Creativity takes pieces and parts of each topic. Originality cannot be produced without a little bit of creativity. Creativity produces innovation and imagination is a creative mind at work. All these parts and pieces I never would have connected can now come together in one big roadmap on creativity to shine a new light on the true meaning. Creativity and everything it’s made up of is the backbone of existence, and now I truly believe every person possesses creativity; afterall, “What keeps life fascinating is the constant creativity of the soul.” (Chopra, 2006)

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