CLARIFYING CREATIVITY

CREATIVITY & TALENT

I have been researching and explaining scientific experiments that have been made about the creativity for couple weeks. However I noticed that it is important to first separate creativity from talent as a concept since these two notions are usually perceived together. There is a moment throughout the creativity enhancement research where I came up with the idea of “you can’t teach someone to have creative talent”. I think this is exactly where I should define the differences of creativity and talent.

Stephan King has a powerful quotation about it, “Talent is cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work.” Talent is something that people are born with. It is at some point has a genetic aspect. Otherwise it is impossible to explain a five years old boy playing a piano as a 50 years old experienced pianist. There is no such educational method that establishes this ability. On the other side, creativity is not an innate, God – given asset. But also it is not something that happens to you in one day. Creativity comes with a continuous hard work maybe lasts for days or even months. Therefore creativity can be improved with several methods. Innate talent can’t be thought but creativity can.

CREATIVITY & INTELLIGENCE

There is another concept that needs to be separated from creativity, which is: intelligence. For many years contradictory ideas were developed about the relationships between the creativity and intelligence. On a study that is done by Getzels and Jackson(1992), creativity and intelligence were founded to be largely independent traits. A few years after that Hasan and Butcher (1996) conducted another experiment concludes that these two concepts are so highly correlated that they were indistinguishable. This believe lasted for many years.

However today, the most common view is that intelligence level does not provide us any idea about the creativity of a certain person. The idea that the more intelligent individual has to be more creative is completely wrong. Examining the worlds one of the highly creative individuals like Edison, Einstein and Churchill can provide us answers considering they were experienced difficulties in school.

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Before I go further on my paper I wanted to clarify these concepts in order do develop a better understanding for creativity. After that I am planning to examine emotions and their affects deeply.