title: Parsnip

text: The parsnip is a biennial plant with a rosette of roughly hairy leaves that have a pungent odor when crushed. Parsnips are grown for their fleshy, edible, cream-colored taproots. The roots are generally smooth, although lateral roots sometimes form. Most are narrowly conical, but some cultivars have a more bulbous shape, which generally tends to be favored by food processors as it is more resistant to breakage. The plant's apical meristem produces a rosette of pinnate leaves, each with several pairs of leaflets with toothed margins. The lower leaves have short stems, the upper ones are stemless, and the terminal leaves have three lobes. The leaves are once- or twice-pinnate with broad, ovate, sometimes lobed leaflets with toothed margins; they grow up to long.


title: Parsnip

text: The petioles are grooved and have sheathed bases. The floral stem develops in the second year and can grow to more than tall. It is hairy, grooved, hollow (except at the nodes), and sparsely branched. It has a few stalkless, single-lobed leaves measuring long that are arranged in opposite pairs.


title: Parsnip

text: The yellow flowers are in a loose, compound umbel measuring in diameter. Six to 25 straight pedicels are present, each measuring that support the umbellets (secondary umbels). The umbels and umbellets usually have no upper or lower bracts. The flowers have tiny sepals or lack them entirely, and measure about . They consist of five yellow petals that are curled inward, five stamens, and one pistil. The fruits, or schizocarps, are oval and flat, with narrow wings and short, spreading styles. They are colored straw to light brown, and measure long.


title: Parsnip

text: Despite the slight morphological differences between the two, wild parsnip is the same taxon as the cultivated version, and the two readily cross-pollinate. Parsnip has a chromosome number of 2"n"=22.


title: Parsnip

text: Like carrots, parsnips are native to Eurasia and have been eaten there since ancient times. Zohary and Hopf note that the archaeological evidence for the cultivation of the parsnip is "still rather limited", and that Greek and Roman literary sources are a major source about its early use. They warn that "there are some difficulties in distinguishing between parsnip and carrot (which, in Roman times, were white or purple) in classical writings since both vegetables seem to have been called "pastinaca" in Latin, yet each vegetable appears to be well under cultivation in Roman times". The parsnip was much esteemed, and the Emperor Tiberius accepted part of the tribute payable to Rome by Germania in the form of parsnips. In Europe, the vegetable was used as a source of sugar before cane and beet sugars were available. As "pastinache comuni", the "common" "pastinaca" figures in the long list of comestibles enjoyed by the Milanese given by Bonvesin da la Riva in his "Marvels of Milan" (1288).


title: Parsnip

text: This plant was introduced to North America simultaneously by the French colonists in Canada and the British in the Thirteen Colonies for use as a root vegetable, but in the mid-19th century, it was replaced as the main source of starch by the potato and consequently was less widely cultivated.


title: Parsnip

text: In 1859, a new cultivar called 'Student' was developed by James Buckman at the Royal Agricultural College in England. He back-crossed cultivated plants to wild stock, aiming to demonstrate how native plants could be improved by selective breeding. This experiment was so successful, 'Student' became the major variety in cultivation in the late 19th century.


title: Parsnip

text: "Pastinaca sativa" was first officially described by Carolus Linnaeus in his 1753 work "Species Plantarum". It has acquired several synonyms in its taxonomic history:


title: Parsnip

text: Several species from other genera ("Anethum", "Elaphoboscum", "Peucedanum", "Selinum") are likewise synonymous with the name "Pastinaca sativa".


title: Parsnip

text: Like most plants of agricultural importance, several subspecies and varieties of "P. sativa" have been described, but these are mostly no longer recognized as independent taxa, but rather, morphological variations of the same taxon.


title: Parsnip

text: In Eurasia, some authorities distinguish between cultivated and wild versions of parsnips by using subspecies "P. s." "sylvestris" for the latter, or even elevating it to species status as "Pastinaca sylvestris". In Europe, various subspecies have been named based on characteristics such as the hairiness of the leaves, the extent to which the stems are angled or rounded, and the size and shape of the terminal umbel.


title: Parsnip

text: Parsnips resemble carrots and can be used in similar ways, but they have a sweeter taste, especially when cooked. They can be baked, boiled, pureed, roasted, fried, grilled, or steamed. When used in stews, soups, and casseroles, they give a rich flavour. In some cases, parsnips are boiled and the solid portions are removed from the soup or stew, leaving behind a more subtle flavour than the whole root, and starch to thicken the dish. Roast parsnip is considered an essential part of Christmas dinner in some parts of the English-speaking world and frequently features in the traditional Sunday roast. Parsnips can also be fried or thinly sliced and made into crisps. They can be made into a wine with a taste similar to Madeira.


title: Parsnip

text: In Roman times, parsnips were believed to be an aphrodisiac. However, parsnips do not typically feature in modern Italian cooking. Instead, they are fed to pigs, particularly those bred to make Parma ham.


title: Parsnip

text: A typical 100 g serving of parsnip provides of food energy. Most parsnip cultivars consist of about 80% water, 5% sugar, 1% protein, 0.3% fat, and 5% dietary fiber. The parsnip is rich in vitamins and minerals, and is particularly rich in potassium with 375 mg per 100 g. Several of the B-group vitamins are present, but levels of vitamin C are reduced in cooking. Since most of the vitamins and minerals are found close to the skin, many will be lost unless the root is finely peeled or cooked whole. During frosty weather, part of the starch is converted to sugar and the root tastes sweeter.


title: Parsnip

text: The consumption of parsnips has potential health benefits. They contain antioxidants such as falcarinol, falcarindiol, panaxydiol, and methyl-falcarindiol, which may potentially have anticancer, anti-inflammatory and antifungal properties. The dietary fiber in parsnips is partly of the soluble and partly the insoluble type and comprises cellulose, hemicellulose, and lignin. The high fiber content of parsnips may help prevent constipation and reduce blood cholesterol levels.


title: Parsnip

text: The etymology of the generic name "Pastinaca" is not known with certainty, but is probably derived from either the Latin word , meaning 'to prepare the ground for planting of the vine' or , meaning 'food'. The specific epithet "sativa" means 'sown'.


title: Parsnip

text: While folk etymology sometimes assumes the name is a mix of parsley and turnip, it actually comes from Middle English , alteration (influenced by , 'turnip') of Old French (now ) from Latin "pastinum," a kind of fork. The word's ending was changed to "-nip" by analogy with turnip because it was mistakenly assumed to be a kind of turnip.


title: Parsnip

text: The wild parsnip from which the modern cultivated varieties were derived is a plant of dry rough grassland and waste places, particularly on chalk and limestone soils. Parsnips are biennials, but are normally grown as annuals. Sandy and loamy soils are preferable to silt, clay, and stony ground; the latter produces short, forked roots. Parsnip seed significantly deteriorates in viability if stored for long. Seeds are usually planted in early spring, as soon as the ground can be worked to a fine tilth, in the position where the plants are to grow. The growing plants are thinned and kept weed-free. Harvesting begins in late fall after the first frost, and continues through winter. The rows can be covered with straw to enable the crop to be lifted during frosty weather. Low soil temperatures cause some of the starches stored in the roots to be converted into sugars, giving them a sweeter taste.


title: Parsnip

text: Parsnip leaves are sometimes tunnelled by the larvae of the celery fly ("Euleia heraclei"). Irregular, pale brown passages can be seen between the upper and lower surfaces of the leaves. The effects are most serious on young plants, as whole leaves may shrivel and die. Treatment is by removing affected leaflets or whole leaves, or by chemical means.


title: Parsnip

text: The crop can be attacked by larvae of the carrot fly ("Chamaepsila rosae"). This pest feeds on the outer layers of the root, burrowing its way inside later in the season. Seedlings may be killed while larger roots are spoiled. The damage done provides a point of entry for fungal rots and canker. The fly is attracted by the smell of bruised tissue.


title: Parsnip

text: Parsnip is used as a food plant by the larvae of some lepidopteran species, including the parsnip swallowtail ("Papilio polyxenes"), the common swift moth ("Korscheltellus lupulina"), the garden dart moth ("Euxoa nigricans"), and the ghost moth ("Hepialus humuli"). The larvae of the parsnip moth ("Depressaria radiella"), native to Europe and accidentally introduced to North America in the mid-1800s, construct their webs on the umbels, feeding on flowers and partially developed seeds.


title: Parsnip

text: Parsnip canker is a serious disease of this crop. Black or orange-brown patches occur around the crown and shoulders of the root accompanied by cracking and hardening of the flesh. It is more likely to occur when the seed is sown into cold, wet soil, the pH of the soil is too low, or the roots have already been damaged by carrot fly larvae. Several fungi are associated with canker, including "Phoma complanata", "Ilyonectria radicicola", "Itersonilia pastinaceae", and "I. perplexans". In Europe, "Mycocentrospora acerina" has been found to cause a black rot that kills the plant early. Watery soft rot, caused by "Sclerotinia minor" and "S. sclerotiorum", causes the taproot to become soft and watery. A white or buff-coloured mould grows on the surface. The pathogen is most common in temperate and subtropical regions that have a cool wet season.


title: Parsnip

text: Violet root rot caused by the fungus "Helicobasidium purpureum" sometimes affects the roots, covering them with a purplish mat to which soil particles adhere. The leaves become distorted and discoloured and the mycelium can spread through the soil between plants. Some weeds can harbour this fungus and it is more prevalent in wet, acid conditions. "Erysiphe heraclei" causes a powdery mildew that can cause significant crop loss. Infestation by this causes results in yellowing of the leaf and loss of foliage. Moderate temperatures and high humidity favor the development of the disease.


title: Parsnip

text: Several viruses are known to infect the plant, including seed-borne strawberry latent ringspot virus, parsnip yellow fleck virus, parsnip leafcurl virus, parsnip mosaic potyvirus, and potyvirus celery mosaic virus. The latter causes clearing or yellowing of the areas of the leaf immediately beside the veins, the appearance of ochre mosaic spots, and crinkling of the leaves in infected plants.


title: Parsnip

text: The shoots and leaves of parsnip must be handled with care, as its sap contains furanocoumarins, phototoxic chemicals that cause blisters on the skin when it is exposed to sunlight, a condition known as phytophotodermatitis. It shares this property with many of its relatives in the carrot family. Symptoms include redness, burning, and blisters; afflicted areas can remain sensitive and discolored for up to two years. Reports of gardeners experiencing toxic symptoms after coming into contact with foliage have been made but these have been small in number compared to the number of people who grow the crop. The problem is most likely to occur on a sunny day when gathering foliage or pulling up old plants that have gone to seed. The symptoms have mostly been mild to moderate. Risk can be reduced by wearing long pants and sleeves to avoid exposure, and avoiding sunlight after any suspected exposure.


title: Parsnip

text: The toxic properties of parsnip extracts are resistant to heating, and to periods of storage lasting several months. Toxic symptoms can also affect livestock and poultry in parts of their bodies where their skin is exposed. Polyynes can be found in Apiaceae vegetables such as parsnip, and they show cytotoxic activities.


title: Parsnip

text: The parsnip is native to Eurasia. However, its popularity as a cultivated plant has led to the plant being spread beyond its native range, and wild populations have become established in other parts of the world. Scattered population can be found throughout North America.


title: Parsnip

text: The plant can form dense stands which outcompete native species, and is especially common in abandoned yards, farmland, and along roadsides and other disturbed environments. The increasing abundance of this plant is a concern particularly due to the plant's toxicity and increasing abundance in populated areas such as parks. Control is often carried out via chemical means, with glyphosate-containing herbicides considered to be effective.


title: CAP theorem

text: In theoretical computer science, the CAP theorem, also named Brewer's theorem after computer scientist Eric Brewer, states that any distributed data store can provide only two of the following three guarantees:


title: CAP theorem

text: Thus, if there is a network partition, one has to choose between consistency or availability. Note that consistency as defined in the CAP theorem is quite different from the consistency guaranteed in ACID database transactions.


title: CAP theorem

text: Eric Brewer argues that the often-used "two out of three" concept can be somewhat misleading because system designers need only to sacrifice consistency or availability in the presence of partitions, but that in many systems partitions are rare.


title: CAP theorem

text: No distributed system is safe from network failures, thus network partitioning generally has to be tolerated. In the presence of a partition, one is then left with two options: consistency or availability. When choosing consistency over availability, the system will return an error or a time out if particular information cannot be guaranteed to be up to date due to network partitioning. When choosing availability over consistency, the system will always process the query and try to return the most recent available version of the information, even if it cannot guarantee it is up to date due to network partitioning.


title: CAP theorem

text: Database systems designed with traditional ACID guarantees in mind such as RDBMS choose consistency over availability, whereas systems designed around the BASE philosophy, common in the NoSQL movement for example, choose availability over consistency.


title: CAP theorem

text: According to University of California, Berkeley computer scientist Eric Brewer, the theorem first appeared in autumn 1998. It was published as the CAP principle in 1999 and presented as a conjecture by Brewer at the 2000 Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC). In 2002, Seth Gilbert and Nancy Lynch of MIT published a formal proof of Brewer's conjecture, rendering it a theorem.


title: CAP theorem

text: In 2012, Brewer clarified some of his positions, including why the often-used "two out of three" concept can be somewhat misleading because system designers only need to sacrifice consistency or availability in the presence of partitions; partition management and recovery techniques exist. Brewer also noted the different definition of consistency used in the CAP theorem relative to the definition used in ACID.


title: CAP theorem

text: A similar theorem stating the trade-off between consistency and availability in distributed systems was published by Birman and Friedman in 1996. Birman and Friedman's result restricted this lower bound to non-commuting operations.


title: CAP theorem

text: The PACELC theorem, introduced in 2010, builds on CAP by stating that even in the absence of partitioning, there is another trade-off between latency and consistency. PACELC means, if partition (P) happens, the trade-off is between availability (A) and consistency (C); Else (E), the trade-off is between latency (L) and consistency (C).


title: CAP theorem

text: Blockchain technology often sacrifices immediate consistency for availability and partition tolerance. By requiring a specific number of "confirmations", Blockchain consensus algorithms are basically reduced to eventual consistency.


title: Creativity

text: Creativity is a phenomenon whereby something new and valuable is formed. The created item may be intangible (such as an idea, a scientific theory, a musical composition, or a joke) or a physical object (such as an invention, a printed literary work, or a painting).


title: Creativity

text: Scholarly interest in creativity is found in a number of disciplines, primarily psychology, business studies, and cognitive science. However, it can also be found in education, the humanities (philosophy, the arts) and theology, social sciences (sociology, linguistics, economics), engineering, technology and mathematics. These disciplines cover the relations between creativity and general intelligence, personality type, mental and neural processes, mental health, artificial intelligence; the potential for fostering creativity through education, training, leadership and organizational practices; the factors that determine how creativity is evaluated and perceived; the fostering of creativity for national economic benefit; and the application of creative resources to improve the effectiveness of teaching and learning.


title: Creativity

text: The English word "creativity" comes from the Latin term "creare," "to create, make": its derivational suffixes also come from Latin. The word "create" appeared in English as early as the 14th century, notably in Chaucer (in The Parson's Tale), to indicate divine creation.


title: Creativity

text: However, its modern meaning as an act of human creation did not emerge until after the Enlightenment.


title: Creativity

text: In a summary of scientific research into creativity, Michael Mumford suggested: "Over the course of the last decade, however, we seem to have reached a general agreement that creativity involves the production of novel, useful products" (Mumford, 2003, p. 110), or, in Robert Sternberg's words, the production of "something original and worthwhile". Authors have diverged dramatically in their precise definitions beyond these general commonalities: Peter Meusburger estimates that over a hundred different definitions can be found in the literature, typically elaborating on the context (field, organisation, environment etc.) which determines the originality and/or appropriateness of the created object, and the processes through which it came about. As an illustration, one definition given by Dr. E. Paul Torrance in the context of assessing an individual's creative ability, described it as "a process of becoming sensitive to problems, deficiencies, gaps in knowledge, missing elements, disharmonies, and so on; identifying the difficulty; searching for solutions, making guesses, or formulating hypotheses about the deficiencies: testing and retesting these hypotheses and possibly modifying and retesting them; and finally communicating the results."


title: Creativity

text: Creativity in general is usually distinguished from innovation in particular, where the stress is on implementation. For example, Teresa Amabile and Pratt (2016) define creativity as production of novel and useful ideas and innovation as implementation of creative ideas, while the OECD and Eurostat state that "Innovation is more than a new idea or an invention. An innovation requires implementation, either by being put into active use or by being made available for use by other parties, firms, individuals or organisations."


title: Creativity

text: There is also an emotional creativity which is described as a pattern of cognitive abilities and personality traits related to originality and appropriateness in emotional experience.


title: Creativity

text: Theories of creativity (particularly investigation of why some people are more creative than others) have focused on a variety of aspects. The dominant factors are usually identified as "the four Ps" – process, product, person, and place/press (according to Mel Rhodes). A focus on "process" is shown in cognitive approaches that try to describe thought mechanisms and techniques for creative thinking. Theories invoking divergent rather than convergent thinking (such as Guilford), or those describing the staging of the creative process (such as Wallas) are primarily theories of creative process. A focus on creative "product" usually appears in attempts to measure creativity (psychometrics, see below) and in creative ideas framed as successful memes. The psychometric approach to creativity reveals that it also involves the ability to produce more.


title: Creativity

text: A focus on the nature of the creative "person" considers more general intellectual habits, such as openness, levels of ideation, autonomy, expertise, exploratory behavior, and so on. A focus on "place" (sometimes called "press") considers the circumstances in which creativity flourishes, such as degrees of autonomy, access to resources, and the nature of gatekeepers. Creative lifestyles are characterized by nonconforming attitudes and behaviors as well as flexibility.


title: Creativity

text: Most ancient cultures, including thinkers of Ancient Greece, Ancient China, and Ancient India, lacked the concept of creativity, seeing art as a form of discovery and not creation. The ancient Greeks had no terms corresponding to "to create" or "creator" except for the expression "" ("to make"), which only applied to (poetry) and to the (poet, or "maker") who made it. Plato did not believe in art as a form of creation. Asked in "The Republic", "Will we say, of a painter, that he makes something?", he answers, "Certainly not, he merely imitates."


title: Creativity

text: It is commonly argued that the notion of "creativity" originated in Western cultures through Christianity, as a matter of divine inspiration. According to the historian Daniel J. Boorstin, "the early Western conception of creativity was the Biblical story of creation given in the "Genesis"." However, this is not creativity in the modern sense, which did not arise until the Renaissance. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, creativity was the sole province of God; humans were not considered to have the ability to create something new except as an expression of God's work. A concept similar to that of Christianity existed in Greek culture. For instance, Muses were seen as mediating inspiration from the Gods. Romans and Greeks invoked the concept of an external creative "daemon" (Greek) or "genius" (Latin), linked to the sacred or the divine. However, none of these views are similar to the modern concept of creativity, and the individual was not seen as the cause of creation until the Renaissance.


title: Creativity

text: It was during the Renaissance that creativity was first seen, not as a conduit for the divine, but from the abilities of "great men". The rejection of creativity in favor of discovery and the belief that individual creation was a conduit of the divine would dominate the West probably until the Renaissance and even later. The development of the modern concept of creativity began in the Renaissance, when creation began to be perceived as having originated from the abilities of the individual and not God. This could be attributed to the leading intellectual movement of the time, aptly named humanism, which developed an intensely human-centric outlook on the world, valuing the intellect and achievement of the individual. From this philosophy arose the Renaissance man (or polymath), an individual who embodies the principals of humanism in their ceaseless courtship with knowledge and creation. One of the most well-known and immensely accomplished examples is Leonardo da Vinci.


title: Creativity

text: However, the shift from divine inspiration to the abilities of the individual was gradual and would not become immediately apparent until the Enlightenment. By the 18th century and the Age of Enlightenment, mention of creativity (notably in aesthetics), linked with the concept of imagination, became more frequent. In the writing of Thomas Hobbes, imagination became a key element of human cognition; William Duff was one of the first to identify imagination as a quality of genius, typifying the separation being made between talent (productive, but breaking no new ground) and genius.


title: Creativity

text: As a direct and independent topic of study, creativity effectively received no attention until the 19th century. Runco and Albert argue that creativity as the subject of proper study began seriously to emerge in the late 19th century with the increased interest in individual differences inspired by the arrival of Darwinism. In particular, they refer to the work of Francis Galton, who through his eugenicist outlook took a keen interest in the heritability of intelligence, with creativity taken as an aspect of genius.


title: Creativity

text: In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, leading mathematicians and scientists such as Hermann von Helmholtz (1896) and Henri Poincaré (1908) began to reflect on and publicly discuss their creative processes.


title: Creativity

text: The insights of Poincaré and von Helmholtz were built on in early accounts of the creative process by pioneering theorists such as Graham Wallas and Max Wertheimer. In his work "Art of Thought", published in 1926, Wallas presented one of the first models of the creative process. In the Wallas stage model, creative insights and illuminations may be explained by a process consisting of five stages:


title: Creativity

text: Wallas considered creativity to be a legacy of the evolutionary process, which allowed humans to quickly adapt to rapidly changing environments. Simonton provides an updated perspective on this view in his book, "Origins of genius: Darwinian perspectives on creativity".


title: Creativity

text: In 1927, Alfred North Whitehead gave the Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh, later published as "Process and Reality." He is credited with having coined the term "creativity" to serve as the ultimate category of his metaphysical scheme: "Whitehead actually coined the term – our term, still the preferred currency of exchange among literature, science, and the arts... a term that quickly became so popular, so omnipresent, that its invention within living memory, and by Alfred North Whitehead of all people, quickly became occluded".


title: Creativity

text: Although psychometric studies of creativity had been conducted by The London School of Psychology as early as 1927 with the work of H. L. Hargreaves into the Faculty of Imagination, the formal psychometric measurement of creativity, from the standpoint of orthodox psychological literature, is usually considered to have begun with J. P. Guilford's address to the American Psychological Association in 1950. The address helped to popularize the study of creativity and to focus attention on scientific approaches to conceptualizing creativity. Statistical analyses led to the recognition of creativity (as measured) as a separate aspect of human cognition to IQ-type intelligence, into which it had previously been subsumed. Guilford's work suggested that above a threshold level of IQ, the relationship between creativity and classically measured intelligence broke down.


title: Creativity

text: James C. Kaufman and Beghetto introduced a "four C" model of creativity; "mini-c" ("transformative learning" involving "personally meaningful interpretations of experiences, actions, and insights"), "little-c" (everyday problem solving and creative expression), "Pro-C" (exhibited by people who are professionally or vocationally creative though not necessarily eminent) and "Big-C" (creativity considered great in the given field). This model was intended to help accommodate models and theories of creativity that stressed competence as an essential component and the historical transformation of a creative domain as the highest mark of creativity. It also, the authors argued, made a useful framework for analyzing creative processes in individuals.


title: Creativity

text: The contrast of terms "Big C" and "Little c" has been widely used. Kozbelt, Beghetto and Runco use a little-c/Big-C model to review major theories of creativity. Margaret Boden distinguishes between h-creativity (historical) and p-creativity (personal).


title: Creativity

text: Robinson and Anna Craft have focused on creativity in a general population, particularly with respect to education. Craft makes a similar distinction between "high" and "little c" creativity and cites Ken Robinson as referring to "high" and "democratic" creativity. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has defined creativity in terms of those individuals judged to have made significant creative, perhaps domain-changing contributions. Simonton has analysed the career trajectories of eminent creative people in order to map patterns and predictors of creative productivity.


title: Creativity

text: There has been much empirical study in psychology and cognitive science of the processes through which creativity occurs. Interpretation of the results of these studies has led to several possible explanations of the sources and methods of creativity.


title: Creativity

text: Incubation is a temporary break from creative problem solving that can result in insight. There has been some empirical research looking at whether, as the concept of "incubation" in Wallas' model implies, a period of interruption or rest from a problem may aid creative problem-solving. Early work proposed that creative solutions to problems arise mysteriously from the unconscious mind while the conscious mind is occupied on other tasks.


title: Creativity

text: This hypothesis is discussed in Csikszentmihalyi's five-phase model of the creative process which describes incubation as a time that your unconscious takes over. This was supposed to allow for unique connections to be made without our consciousness trying to make logical order out of the problem.


title: Creativity

text: Ward lists various hypotheses that have been advanced to explain why incubation may aid creative problem-solving, and notes how some empirical evidence is consistent with a different hypothesis: Incubation aids creative problem in that it enables "forgetting" of misleading clues. Absence of incubation may lead the problem solver to become fixated on inappropriate strategies of solving the problem.


title: Creativity

text: J. P. Guilford drew a distinction between convergent and divergent production (commonly renamed convergent and divergent thinking). Convergent thinking involves aiming for a single, correct solution to a problem, whereas divergent thinking involves creative generation of multiple answers to a set problem. Divergent thinking is sometimes used as a synonym for creativity in psychology literature or is considered the necessary precursor to creativity. Other researchers have occasionally used the terms "flexible" thinking or fluid intelligence, which are roughly similar to (but not synonymous with) creativity.


title: Creativity

text: In 1992, Finke et al. proposed the "Geneplore" model, in which creativity takes place in two phases: a generative phase, where an individual constructs mental representations called "preinventive" structures, and an exploratory phase where those structures are used to come up with creative ideas. Some evidence shows that when people use their imagination to develop new ideas, those ideas are heavily structured in predictable ways by the properties of existing categories and concepts. Weisberg argued, by contrast, that creativity only involves ordinary cognitive processes yielding extraordinary results.


title: Creativity

text: Helie and Sun more recently proposed a unified framework for understanding creativity in problem solving, namely the Explicit–Implicit Interaction (EII) theory of creativity. This new theory constitutes an attempt at providing a more unified explanation of relevant phenomena (in part by reinterpreting/integrating various fragmentary existing theories of incubation and insight).


title: Creativity

text: A computational implementation of the theory was developed based on the CLARION cognitive architecture and used to simulate relevant human data. This work represents an initial step in the development of process-based theories of creativity encompassing incubation, insight, and various other related phenomena.


title: Creativity

text: In "The Act of Creation", Arthur Koestler introduced the concept of "bisociation" – that creativity arises as a result of the intersection of two quite different frames of reference. This idea was later developed into conceptual blending. In the 1990s, various approaches in cognitive science that dealt with metaphor, analogy, and structure mapping have been converging, and a new integrative approach to the study of creativity in science, art and humor has emerged under the label conceptual blending.


title: Creativity

text: Honing theory, developed principally by psychologist Liane Gabora, posits that creativity arises due to the self-organizing, self-mending nature of a worldview. The creative process is a way in which the individual hones (and re-hones) an integrated worldview. Honing theory places emphasis not only on the externally visible creative outcome but also the internal cognitive restructuring and repair of the worldview brought about by the creative process. When faced with a creatively demanding task, there is an interaction between the conception of the task and the worldview. The conception of the task changes through interaction with the worldview, and the worldview changes through interaction with the task. This interaction is reiterated until the task is complete, at which point not only is the task conceived of differently, but the worldview is subtly or drastically transformed as it follows the natural tendency of a worldview to attempt to resolve dissonance and seek internal consistency amongst its components, whether they be ideas, attitudes, or bits of knowledge.


title: Creativity

text: A central feature of honing theory is the notion of a potentiality state. Honing theory posits that creative thought proceeds not by searching through and randomly 'mutating' predefined possibilities, but by drawing upon associations that exist due to overlap in the distributed neural cell assemblies that participate in the encoding of experiences in memory. Midway through the creative process one may have made associations between the current task and previous experiences, but not yet disambiguated which aspects of those previous experiences are relevant to the current task. Thus the creative idea may feel 'half-baked'. It is at that point that it can be said to be in a potentiality state, because how it will actualize depends on the different internally or externally generated contexts it interacts with.


title: Creativity

text: Honing theory is held to explain certain phenomena not dealt with by other theories of creativity – for example, how different works by the same creator are observed in studies to exhibit a recognizable style or 'voice', even in different creative outlets. This is not predicted by theories of creativity that emphasize chance processes or the accumulation of expertise, but it is predicted by honing theory, according to which personal style reflects the creator's uniquely structured worldview. Another example is in the environmental stimulus for creativity. Creativity is commonly considered to be fostered by a supportive, nurturing, trustworthy environment conducive to self-actualization. However, research shows that creativity is also associated with childhood adversity, which would stimulate honing.


title: Creativity

text: In everyday thought, people often spontaneously imagine alternatives to reality when they think "if only...". Their counterfactual thinking is viewed as an example of everyday creative processes. It has been proposed that the creation of counterfactual alternatives to reality depends on similar cognitive processes to rational thought.


title: Creativity

text: The term "dialectical theory of creativity" dates back to psychoanalyst Daniel Dervin and was later developed into an interdisciplinary theory. The dialectical theory of creativity starts with the antique concept that creativity takes place in an interplay between order and chaos. Similar ideas can be found in neurosciences and psychology. Neurobiologically, it can be shown that the creative process takes place in a dynamic interplay between coherence and incoherence that leads to new and usable neuronal networks. Psychology shows how the dialectics of convergent and focused thinking with divergent and associative thinking leads to new ideas and products. Also, creative personality traits like the 'Big Five' seem to be dialectically intertwined in the creative process: emotional instability vs. stability, extraversion vs. introversion, openness vs. reserve, agreeableness vs. antagonism, and disinhibition vs. constraint. The dialectical theory of creativity applies also to counseling and psychotherapy.


title: Creativity

text: Lin and Vartanian developed a framework that provides an integrative neurobiological description of creative cognition. This interdisciplinary framework integrates theoretical principles and empirical results from neuroeconomics, reinforcement learning, cognitive neuroscience, and neurotransmission research on the locus coeruleus system. It describes how decision-making processes studied by neuroeconomists as well as activity in the locus coeruleus system underlie creative cognition and the large-scale brain network dynamics associated with creativity. It suggests that creativity is an optimization and utility-maximization problem that requires individuals to determine the optimal way to exploit and explore ideas (multi-armed bandit problem). This utility maximization process is thought to be mediated by the locus coeruleus system and this creativity framework describes how tonic and phasic locus coerulues activity work in conjunction to facilitate the exploiting and exploring of creative ideas. This framework not only explains previous empirical results but also makes novel and falsifiable predictions at different levels of analysis (ranging from neurobiological to cognitive and personality differences).


title: Creativity

text: Skinner attributed creativity to accidental behaviors that are reinforced by the environment. Spontaneous behaviors done by living creatures reflect past learned behavior. In Karen Pryor's book "Don't Shoot the Dog" she refers to how she reinforced a dolphin to display novel behaviors. This is what one can attribute to both those who are creative and those who appreciate creativity. A behaviorist may say that prior learning caused novel behaviors to be reinforced many times over and the individual has been shaped to produce increasingly novel behaviors. A creative person, according to this definition, would be someone who has been reinforced more often for novel behaviors than others. Behaviorists would also suggest that anyone can be creative, they just need to be reinforced to learn to produce novel behaviors.


title: Creativity

text: J. P. Guilford's group, which pioneered the modern psychometric study of creativity, constructed several performance-based tests to measure creativity in 1967:


title: Creativity

text: Originally, Guilford was trying to create a model for intellect as a whole, but in doing so also created a model for creativity. Guilford made an important assumption for creative research: creativity is not one abstract concept.  The idea that creativity is a category rather than one single concept opened up the ability for other researchers to look at creativity with a whole new perspective.


title: Creativity

text: Additionally, Guilford hypothesized one of the first models for the components of creativity.  He explained that creativity was a result of having:


title: Creativity

text: This represents the base model by which several researchers would take and alter to produce their new theories of creativity years later. Building on Guilford's work, tests were developed, sometimes called "Divergent Thinking (DT)" tests have been both supported and criticized.<ref name="doi10.1080/10400419.2011.545713"></ref> For example, Torrance developed the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking in 1966. They involved task of divergent thinking and other problem-solving skills, which were scored on:


title: Creativity

text: Considerable progress has been made in automated scoring of divergent thinking tests using semantic approach. When compared to human raters, NLP techniques were shown to be reliable and valid in scoring the originality. The reported computer programs were able to achieve a correlation of 0.60 and 0.72 respectively to human graders.


title: Creativity

text: Semantic networks were also used to devise originality scores that yielded significant correlations with socio-personal measures. Most recently, an NSF-funded team of researchers led by James C. Kaufman and Mark A. Runco combined expertise in creativity research, natural language processing, computational linguistics, and statistical data analysis to devise a scalable system for computerized automated testing (SparcIt Creativity Index Testing system). This system enabled automated scoring of DT tests that is reliable, objective, and scalable, thus addressing most of the issues of DT tests that had been found and reported. The resultant computer system was able to achieve a correlation of 0.73 to human graders.


title: Creativity

text: Some researchers have taken a social-personality approach to the measurement of creativity. In these studies, personality traits such as independence of judgement, self-confidence, attraction to complexity, aesthetic orientation, and risk-taking are used as measures of the creativity of individuals. A meta-analysis by Gregory Feist showed that creative people tend to be "more open to new experiences, less conventional and less conscientious, more self-confident, self-accepting, driven, ambitious, dominant, hostile, and impulsive." Openness, conscientiousness, self-acceptance, hostility, and impulsivity had the strongest effects of the traits listed. Within the framework of the Big Five model of personality, some consistent traits have emerged. Openness to experience has been shown to be consistently related to a whole host of different assessments of creativity. Among the other Big Five traits, research has demonstrated subtle differences between different domains of creativity. Compared to non-artists, artists tend to have higher levels of openness to experience and lower levels of conscientiousness, while scientists are more open to experience, conscientious, and higher in the confidence-dominance facets of extraversion compared to non-scientists.


title: Creativity

text: An alternative is using biographical methods. These methods use quantitative characteristics such as the number of publications, patents, or performances of a work. While this method was originally developed for highly creative personalities, today it is also available as self-report questionnaires supplemented with frequent, less outstanding creative behaviors such as writing a short story or creating your own recipes. For example, the Creative Achievement Questionnaire, a self-report test that measures creative achievement across 10 domains, was described in 2005 and shown to be reliable and valid when compared to other measures of creativity and to independent evaluation of creative output. Besides the English original, it was also used in a Chinese, French, and German-speaking version. It is the self-report questionnaire most frequently used in research.


title: Creativity

text: The potential relationship between creativity and intelligence has been of interest since the late 1900s, when a multitude of influential studies – from Getzels & Jackson, Barron, Wallach & Kogan, and Guilford – focused not only on creativity, but also on intelligence. This joint focus highlights both the theoretical and practical importance of the relationship: researchers are interested not only if the constructs are related, but also how and why.


title: Creativity

text: There are multiple theories accounting for their relationship, with the three main theories as follows:


title: Creativity

text: Sternberg and O'Hara proposed a framework of five possible relationships between creativity and intelligence:


title: Creativity

text: A number of researchers include creativity, either explicitly or implicitly, as a key component of intelligence.


title: Creativity

text: This possible relationship concerns creativity and intelligence as distinct, but intersecting constructs.


title: Creativity

text: In support of the TT, Barron reported finding a non-significant correlation between creativity and intelligence in a gifted sample and a significant correlation in a non-gifted sample. Yamamoto in a sample of secondary school children, reported a significant correlation between creativity and intelligence of "r" = 0.3, and reported no significant correlation when the sample consisted of gifted children. Fuchs-Beauchamp et al. in a sample of preschoolers found that creativity and intelligence correlated from "r" = 0.19 to "r" = 0.49 in the group of children who had an IQ below the threshold; and in the group above the threshold, the correlations were "r" = <0.12. Cho et al. reported a correlation of 0.40 between creativity and intelligence in the average IQ group of a sample of adolescents and adults; and a correlation of close to "r" = 0.0 for the high IQ group. Jauk et al. found support for the TT, but only for measures of creative potential, not creative performance.


title: Creativity

text: Much modern day research reports findings against TT. Wai et al. in a study using data from the longitudinal Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth – a cohort of elite students from early adolescence into adulthood – found that differences in SAT scores at age 13 were predictive of creative real-life outcomes 20 years later. Kim's meta-analysis of 21 studies did not find any supporting evidence for TT, and instead negligible correlations were reported between intelligence, creativity, and divergent thinking both below and above IQ's of 120. Preckel et al., investigating fluid intelligence and creativity, reported small correlations of "r" = 0.3 to "r" = 0.4 across all levels of cognitive ability.


title: Creativity

text: Under this view, researchers posit that there are no differences in the mechanisms underlying creativity in those used in normal problem solving; and in normal problem solving, there is no need for creativity. Thus, creativity and Intelligence (problem solving) are the same thing. Perkins referred to this as the 'nothing-special' view.


title: Creativity

text: Weisberg & Alba examined problem solving by having participants complete the nine dots puzzle – where the participants are asked to connect all nine dots in the three rows of three dots using four straight lines or less, without lifting their pen or tracing the same line twice. The problem can only be solved if the lines go outside the boundaries of the square of dots. Results demonstrated that even when participants were given this insight, they still found it difficult to solve the problem, thus showing that to successfully complete the task it is not just insight (or creativity) that is required.


title: Creativity

text: Getzels and Jackson administered five creativity measures to a group of 449 children from grades 6–12, and compared these test findings to results from previously administered (by the school) IQ tests. They found that the correlation between the creativity measures and IQ was "r" = 0.26. The high creativity group scored in the top 20% of the overall creativity measures, but were not included in the top 20% of IQ scorers. The high intelligence group scored the opposite: they scored in the top 20% for IQ, but were outside the top 20% scorers for creativity, thus showing that creativity and intelligence are distinct and unrelated.


title: Creativity

text: However, this work has been heavily criticised. Wallach and Kogan highlighted that the creativity measures were not only weakly related to one another (to the extent that they were no more related to one another than they were with IQ), but they seemed to also draw upon non-creative skills. McNemar noted that there were major measurement issues, in that the IQ scores were a mixture from three different IQ tests.


title: Creativity

text: Wallach and Kogan administered five measures of creativity, each of which resulted in a score for originality and fluency; and 10 measures of general intelligence to 151 5th grade children. These tests were untimed, and given in a game-like manner (aiming to facilitate creativity). Inter-correlations between creativity tests were on average "r" = 0.41. Inter-correlations between intelligence measures were on average "r" = 0.51 with each other. Creativity tests and intelligence measures correlated "r" = 0.09.


title: Creativity

text: The neuroscience of creativity looks at the operation of the brain during creative behaviour. It has been addressed in the article "Creative Innovation: Possible Brain Mechanisms". The authors write that "creative innovation might require coactivation and communication between regions of the brain that ordinarily are not strongly connected." Highly creative people who excel at creative innovation tend to differ from others in three ways:


title: Creativity

text: This article also explored the links between creativity and sleep, mood and addiction disorders, and depression.


title: Creativity

text: In 2005, Alice Flaherty presented a three-factor model of the creative drive. Drawing from evidence in brain imaging, drug studies and lesion analysis, she described the creative drive as resulting from an interaction of the frontal lobes, the temporal lobes, and dopamine from the limbic system. The frontal lobes can be seen as responsible for idea generation, and the temporal lobes for idea editing and evaluation. Abnormalities in the frontal lobe (such as depression or anxiety) generally decrease creativity, while abnormalities in the temporal lobe often increase creativity. High activity in the temporal lobe typically inhibits activity in the frontal lobe, and vice versa. High dopamine levels increase general arousal and goal directed behaviors and reduce latent inhibition, and all three effects increase the drive to generate ideas. A 2015 study on creativity found that it involves the interaction of multiple neural networks, including those that support associative thinking, along with other default mode network functions.


title: Creativity

text: Similarly, in 2018, Lin and Vartanian proposed a neuroeconomic framework that precisely describes norepinephrine's role in creativity and modulating large-scale brain networks associated with creativity. This framework describes how neural activity in different brain regions and networks like the default mode network are tracking utility or subjective value of ideas.


title: Creativity

text: In 2018, experiments showed that when the brain suppresses obvious or 'known' solutions, the outcome is solutions that are more creative. This suppression is mediated by alpha oscillations in the right temporal lobe.


title: Creativity

text: Vandervert described how the brain's frontal lobes and the cognitive functions of the cerebellum collaborate to produce creativity and innovation. Vandervert's explanation rests on considerable evidence that all processes of working memory (responsible for processing all thought) are adaptively modeled for increased efficiency by the cerebellum. The cerebellum (consisting of 100 billion neurons, which is more than the entirety of the rest of the brain) is also widely known to adaptively model all bodily movement for efficiency. The cerebellum's adaptive models of working memory processing are then fed back to especially frontal lobe working memory control processes where creative and innovative thoughts arise. (Apparently, creative insight or the "aha" experience is then triggered in the temporal lobe.)


title: Creativity

text: According to Vandervert, the details of creative adaptation begin in "forward" cerebellar models which are anticipatory/exploratory controls for movement and thought. These cerebellar processing and control architectures have been termed Hierarchical Modular Selection and Identification for Control (HMOSAIC). New, hierarchically arranged levels of the cerebellar control architecture (HMOSAIC) develop as mental mulling in working memory is extended over time. These new levels of the control architecture are fed forward to the frontal lobes. Since the cerebellum adaptively models all movement and all levels of thought and emotion, Vandervert's approach helps explain creativity and innovation in sports, art, music, the design of video games, technology, mathematics, the child prodigy, and thought in general.


title: Creativity

text: Essentially, Vandervert has argued that when a person is confronted with a challenging new situation, visual-spatial working memory and speech-related working memory are decomposed and re-composed (fractionated) by the cerebellum and then blended in the cerebral cortex in an attempt to deal with the new situation. With repeated attempts to deal with challenging situations, the cerebro-cerebellar blending process continues to optimize the efficiency of how working memory deals with the situation or problem. Most recently, he has argued that this is the same process (only involving visual-spatial working memory and pre-language vocalization) that led to the evolution of language in humans. Vandervert and Vandervert-Weathers have pointed out that this blending process, because it continuously optimizes efficiencies, constantly improves prototyping attempts toward the invention or innovation of new ideas, music, art, or technology. Prototyping, they argue, not only produces new products, it trains the cerebro-cerebellar pathways involved to become more efficient at prototyping itself. Further, Vandervert and Vandervert-Weathers believe that this repetitive "mental prototyping" or mental rehearsal involving the cerebellum and the cerebral cortex explains the success of the self-driven, individualized patterning of repetitions initiated by the teaching methods of the Khan Academy. The model proposed by Vandervert has, however, received incisive critique from several authors.


title: Creativity

text: Creativity involves the forming of associative elements into new combinations that are useful or meet some requirement. Sleep aids this process. REM rather than NREM sleep appears to be responsible. This has been suggested to be due to changes in cholinergic and noradrenergic neuromodulation that occurs during REM sleep. During this period of sleep, high levels of acetylcholine in the hippocampus suppress feedback from the hippocampus to the neocortex, and lower levels of acetylcholine and norepinephrine in the neocortex encourage the spread of associational activity within neocortical areas without control from the hippocampus. This is in contrast to waking consciousness, where higher levels of norepinephrine and acetylcholine inhibit recurrent connections in the neocortex. It is proposed that REM sleep aids creativity by allowing "neocortical structures to reorganize associative hierarchies, in which information from the hippocampus would be reinterpreted in relation to previous semantic representations or nodes."


title: Creativity

text: Some theories suggest that creativity may be particularly susceptible to affective influence. As noted in voting behavior, the term "affect" in this context can refer to liking or disliking key aspects of the subject in question. This work largely follows from findings in psychology regarding the ways in which affective states are involved in human judgment and decision-making.


title: Creativity

text: Barbara Fredrickson in her broaden-and-build model suggests that positive emotions such as joy and love broaden a person's available repertoire of cognitions and actions, thus enhancing creativity.


title: Creativity

text: According to these researchers, positive emotions increase the number of cognitive elements available for association (attention scope) and the number of elements that are relevant to the problem (cognitive scope). Day-by-day psychological experiences including emotions, perceptions, and motivation will significantly impact creative performance. Creativity is higher when emotions and perceptions are more positive and when intrinsic motivation is stronger.


title: Creativity

text: Various meta-analyses, such as Baas et al. (2008) of 66 studies about creativity and affect support the link between creativity and positive affect.


title: Creativity

text: Jürgen Schmidhuber's formal theory of creativity postulates that creativity, curiosity, and interestingness are by-products of a simple computational principle for measuring and optimizing learning progress. Consider an agent able to manipulate its environment and thus its own sensory inputs. The agent can use a black box optimization method such as reinforcement learning to learn (through informed trial and error) sequences of actions that maximize the expected sum of its future reward signals. There are extrinsic reward signals for achieving externally given goals, such as finding food when hungry. But Schmidhuber's objective function to be maximized also includes an additional, intrinsic term to model "wow-effects". This non-standard term motivates purely creative behavior of the agent even when there are no external goals. A wow-effect is formally defined as follows. As the agent is creating and predicting and encoding the continually growing history of actions and sensory inputs, it keeps improving the predictor or encoder, which can be implemented as an artificial neural network or some other machine learning device that can exploit regularities in the data to improve its performance over time. The improvements can be measured precisely, by computing the difference in computational costs (storage size, number of required synapses, errors, time) needed to encode new observations before and after learning. This difference depends on the encoder's present subjective knowledge, which changes over time, but the theory formally takes this into account. The cost difference measures the strength of the present "wow-effect" due to sudden improvements in data compression or computational speed. It becomes an intrinsic reward signal for the action selector. The objective function thus motivates the action optimizer to create action sequences causing more wow-effects. Irregular, random data (or noise) do not permit any wow-effects or learning progress, and thus are "boring" by nature (providing no reward). Already known and predictable regularities also are boring. Temporarily interesting are only the initially unknown, novel, regular patterns in both actions and observations. This motivates the agent to perform continual, open-ended, active, creative exploration. Schmidhuber's work is highly influential in intrinsic motivation which has emerged as a research topic in its own right as part of the study of artificial intelligence and robotics.


title: Creativity

text: According to Schmidhuber, his objective function explains the activities of scientists, artists, and comedians.


title: Creativity

text: For example, physicists are motivated to create experiments leading to observations obeying previously unpublished physical laws permitting better data compression. Likewise, composers receive intrinsic reward for creating non-arbitrary melodies with unexpected but regular harmonies that permit wow-effects through data compression improvements.


title: Creativity

text: Similarly, a comedian gets intrinsic reward for "inventing a novel joke with an unexpected punch line, related to the beginning of the story in an initially unexpected but quickly learnable way that also allows for better compression of the perceived data."


title: Creativity

text: Schmidhuber argues that ongoing computer hardware advances will greatly scale up rudimentary artificial scientists and artists based on simple implementations of the basic principle since 1990.


title: Creativity

text: A study by psychologist J. Philippe Rushton found creativity to correlate with intelligence and psychoticism. Another study found creativity to be greater in schizotypal than in either schizophrenic individuals or those without mental health conditions. While divergent thinking was associated with bilateral activation of the prefrontal cortex, schizotypal individuals were found to have much greater activation of their "right" prefrontal cortex. This study hypothesizes that such individuals are better at accessing both hemispheres, allowing them to make novel associations at a faster rate. In agreement with this hypothesis, ambidexterity is also associated with schizotypal and schizophrenic individuals. Three recent studies by Mark Batey and Adrian Furnham have demonstrated the relationships between schizotypal and hypomanic personality and several different measures of creativity.


title: Creativity

text: Particularly strong links have been identified between creativity and mood disorders, particularly manic-depressive disorder (a.k.a. bipolar disorder) and depressive disorder (a.k.a. unipolar disorder). In "Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament", Kay Redfield Jamison summarizes studies of mood-disorder rates in writers, poets, and artists. She also explores research that identifies mood disorders in such famous writers and artists as Ernest Hemingway (who shot himself after electroconvulsive treatment), Virginia Woolf (who drowned herself when she felt a depressive episode coming on), composer Robert Schumann (who died in a mental institution), and even the famed visual artist Michelangelo.


title: Creativity

text: A study looking at 300,000 persons with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or unipolar depression, and their relatives, found overrepresentation in creative professions for those with bipolar disorder as well as for undiagnosed siblings of those with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. There was no overall overrepresentation, but overrepresentation for artistic occupations, among those diagnosed with schizophrenia. There was no association for those with unipolar depression or their relatives.


title: Creativity

text: Another study involving more than one million people, conducted by Swedish researchers at the Karolinska Institute, reported a number of correlations between creative occupations and mental illnesses. Writers had a higher risk of anxiety and bipolar disorders, schizophrenia, unipolar depression, and substance abuse, and were almost twice as likely as the general population to kill themselves. Dancers and photographers were also more likely to have bipolar disorder.


title: Creativity

text: As a group, those in the creative professions were no more likely to have psychiatric disorders than other people, although they were more likely to have a close relative with a disorder, including anorexia and, to some extent, autism, the "Journal of Psychiatric Research" reports.


title: Creativity

text: People who have worked in the arts industry throughout history have faced many environmental factors that are associated with and can sometimes influence mental illness. Including things such as poverty, persecution, social alienation, psychological trauma, substance abuse, and high stress. In fact, according to psychologist Robert Epstein, PhD, creativity can be obstructed through stress. So, while research has found that people are the most creative in positive moods, it might be pursuing a career that causes some problems.


title: Creativity

text: Conversely, research has shown that creative activities such as art therapy, poetry writing, journaling, and reminiscence can promote mental well-being.


title: Creativity

text: Nancy Andreasen was one of the first known researchers to carry out a large scale study revolving around creativity and whether mental illnesses have an impact on someone's ability to be creative. Originally she had expected to find a link between creativity and schizophrenia but her research sample had no real history of schizophrenia from the book authors she pooled. Her findings instead showed that 80% of the creative group had previously had some form of mental illness episode in their lifetime. When she performed follow up studies over a 15-year period, she found that 43% of the authors had bipolar disorder compared to the 1% of the general public that has the disease. In 1989 there was another study done by Kay Redfield Jamison that reaffirmed those statistics by having 38% of her sample of authors having a history of mood disorders. Anthony Storr who is a prominent psychiatrist remarked that, "The creative process can be a way of protecting the individual against being overwhelmed by depression, a means of regaining a sense of mastery in those who have lost it, and, to a varying extent, a way of repairing the self-damaged by bereavement or by the loss of confidence in human relationships which accompanies depression from whatever cause."


title: Creativity

text: According to a study done by Shapiro and Weisberg, there appears to be a positive correlation between the manic upswings of the cycles of bipolar disorder and the ability for an individual to be more creative. The data that they had collected and analyzed through multiple tests showed that it was in fact not the depressive swing that many believe to bring forth dark creative spurts, but the act of climbing out of the depressive episode that sparked creativity. The reason behind this spur of creative genius could come from the type of self-image that the person has during a time of hypomania. A hypomanic person may be feeling a bolstered sense of self-confidence, creative confidence, and sense of individualism.


title: Creativity

text: In reports from people who were diagnosed with bipolar disorder they noted themselves as having a larger range of emotional understanding, heightened states of perception, and an ability to connect better with those in the world around them. Other reported traits include higher rates of productivity, higher senses of self-awareness, and a greater understanding of empathy. Those who have bipolar disorder also understand their own sense of heightened creativity and ability to get immense amounts of tasks done all at once. McCraw, Parker, Fletcher, & Friend (2013) report that out of 219 participants (aged 19 to 63) that have been diagnosed bipolar disorder 82% of them reported having elevated feelings of creativity during the hypomanic swings.


title: Creativity

text: Giannouli believes that the creativity a person diagnosed with bipolar disorder feels comes as a form of "stress management". In the realm of music, one might be expressing their stress or pains through the pieces they write in order to better understand those same feelings. Famous authors and musicians along with some actors would often attribute their wild enthusiasm to something like a hypomanic state. The artistic side of society has also been notorious for behaviors that are seen as maladapted to societal norms. Side effects that come with bipolar disorder match up with many of the behaviors that we see in high-profile creative personalities; these include, but are not limited to, alcohol addiction, drug abuse including stimulants, depressants, hallucinogens and dissociatives, opioids, inhalants, and cannabis, difficulties in holding regular occupations, interpersonal problems, legal issues, and a high risk of suicide.


title: Creativity

text: Weisberg believes that the state of mania sets "free the powers of a thinker". What he implies here is that not only has the person become more creative they have fundamentally changed the kind of thoughts they produce. In a study done of poets, who seem to have especially high percentages of bipolar authors, it was found that over a period of three years those poets would have cycles of really creative and powerful works of poetry. The timelines over the three-year study looked at the poet's personal journals and their clinical records and found that the timelines between their most powerful poems matched that of their upswings in bipolar disorder.


title: Creativity

text: Creativity can be expressed in a number of different forms, depending on unique people and environments. A number of different theorists have suggested models of the creative person. One model suggests that there are four "Creativity Profiles" that can help produce growth, innovation, speed, etc.


title: Creativity

text: Research by Dr Mark Batey of the Psychometrics at Work Research Group at Manchester Business School has suggested that the creative profile can be explained by four primary creativity traits with narrow facets within each


title: Creativity

text: This model was developed in a sample of 1000 working adults using the statistical techniques of Exploratory Factor Analysis followed by Confirmatory Factor Analysis by Structural Equation Modelling.


title: Creativity

text: An important aspect of the creativity profiling approach is to account for the tension between predicting the creative profile of an individual, as characterised by the psychometric approach, and the evidence that team creativity is founded on diversity and difference.


title: Creativity

text: One characteristic of creative people, as measured by some psychologists, is what is called "divergent production". "Divergent production" is the ability of a person to generate a diverse assortment, yet an appropriate amount of responses to a given situation. One way of measuring "divergent production" is by administering the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking. The Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking assesses the diversity, quantity, and appropriateness of participants responses to a variety of open-ended questions.


title: Creativity

text: Other researchers of creativity see the difference in creative people as a cognitive process of dedication to problem solving and developing expertise in the field of their creative expression. Hard working people study the work of people before them and within their current area, become experts in their fields, and then have the ability to add to and build upon previous information in innovative and creative ways. In a study of projects by design students, students who had more knowledge on their subject on average had greater creativity within their projects. Other researchers emphasize how creative people are better at balancing between divergent and convergent production, which depends on an individual's innate preference or ability to explore and exploit ideas.


title: Creativity

text: The aspect of motivation within a person's personality may predict creativity levels in the person. Motivation stems from two different sources, intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. Intrinsic motivation is an internal drive within a person to participate or invest as a result of personal interest, desires, hopes, goals, etc. Extrinsic motivation is a drive from outside of a person and might take the form of payment, rewards, fame, approval from others, etc. Although extrinsic motivation and intrinsic motivation can both increase creativity in certain cases, strictly extrinsic motivation often impedes creativity in people.


title: Creativity

text: From a personality-traits perspective, there are a number of traits that are associated with creativity in people. Creative people tend to be more open to new experiences, are more self-confident, are more ambitious, self-accepting, impulsive, driven, dominant, and hostile, compared to people with less creativity.


title: Creativity

text: From an evolutionary perspective, creativity may be a result of the outcome of years of generating ideas. As ideas are continuously generated, the need to evolve produces a need for new ideas and developments. As a result, people have been creating and developing new, innovative, and creative ideas to build our progress as a society.


title: Creativity

text: In studying exceptionally creative people in history, some common traits in lifestyle and environment are often found. Creative people in history usually had supportive parents, but rigid and non-nurturing. Most had an interest in their field at an early age, and most had a highly supportive and skilled mentor in their field of interest. Often the field they chose was relatively uncharted, allowing for their creativity to be expressed more in a field with less previous information. Most exceptionally creative people devoted almost all of their time and energy into their craft, and after about a decade had a creative breakthrough of fame. Their lives were marked with extreme dedication and a cycle of hard-work and breakthroughs as a result of their determination.


title: Creativity

text: Another theory of creative people is the "investment theory of creativity". This approach suggest that there are many individual and environmental factors that must exist in precise ways for extremely high levels of creativity opposed to average levels of creativity. In the "investment" sense, a person with their particular characteristics in their particular environment may see an opportunity to devote their time and energy into something that has been overlooked by others. The creative person develops an undervalued or under-recognised idea to the point that it is established as a new and creative idea. Just like in the financial world, some investments are worth the buy in, while others are less productive and do not build to the extent that the investor expected. This "investment theory of creativity" views creativity in a unique perspective compared to others, by asserting that creativity might rely to some extent on the right investment of effort being added to a field at the right time in the right way.


title: Creativity

text: So called "malevolent creativity" is associated with the "dark side" of creativity. This type of creativity is not typically accepted within society and is defined by the intention to cause harm to others through original and innovative means. Malevolent creativity should be distinguished from negative creativity in that negative creativity may unintentionally cause harm to others, whereas malevolent creativity is explicitly malevolently motivated. While it is often associated with criminal behaviour, it can also be observed in ordinary day-to-day life as lying, cheating and betrayal.


title: Creativity

text: Malevolent creativity is often a key contributor to crime and in its most destructive form can even manifest as terrorism. As creativity requires deviating from the conventional, there is a permanent tension between being creative and producing products that go too far and in some cases to the point of breaking the law. Aggression is a key predictor of malevolent creativity, and studies have also shown that increased levels of aggression also correlates to a higher likelihood of committing crime.


title: Creativity

text: Although everyone shows some levels of malevolent creativity under certain conditions, those that have a higher propensity towards it have increased tendencies to deceive and manipulate others to their own gain. While malevolent creativity appears to dramatically increase when an individual is placed under unfair conditions, personality, particularly aggressiveness, is also a key predictor in anticipating levels of malevolent thinking. Researchers Harris and Reiter-Palmon investigated the role of aggression in levels of malevolent creativity, in particular levels of implicit aggression and the tendency to employ aggressive actions in response to problem solving. The personality traits of physical aggression, conscientiousness, emotional intelligence and implicit aggression all seem to be related with malevolent creativity. Harris and Reiter-Palmon's research showed that when subjects were presented with a problem that triggered malevolent creativity, participants high in implicit aggression and low in premeditation expressed the largest number of malevolently-themed solutions. When presented with the more benign problem that triggered prosocial motives of helping others and cooperating, those high in implicit aggression, even if they were high in impulsiveness, were far less destructive in their imagined solutions. They concluded premeditation, more than implicit aggression controlled an individual's expression of malevolent creativity.


title: Creativity

text: The current measure for malevolent creativity is the 13-item test Malevolent Creativity Behaviour Scale (MCBS).


title: Creativity

text: Creativity is viewed differently in different countries. For example, cross-cultural research centered on Hong Kong found that Westerners view creativity more in terms of the individual attributes of a creative person, such as their aesthetic taste, while Chinese people view creativity more in terms of the social influence of creative people (i.e., what they can contribute to society). Mpofu et al. surveyed 28 African languages and found that 27 had no word which directly translated to 'creativity' (the exception being Arabic). The principle of linguistic relativity (i.e., that language can affect thought) suggests that the lack of an equivalent word for 'creativity' may affect the views of creativity among speakers of such languages. However, more research would be needed to establish this, and there is certainly no suggestion that this linguistic difference makes people any less (or more) creative; Africa has a rich heritage of creative pursuits such as music, art, and storytelling. Nevertheless, it is true that there has been very little research on creativity in Africa, and there has also been very little research on creativity in Latin America. Creativity has been more thoroughly researched in the northern hemisphere, but here again there are cultural differences, even between countries or groups of countries in close proximity. For example, in Scandinavian countries, creativity is seen as an individual attitude which helps in coping with life's challenges, while in Germany, creativity is seen more as a process that can be applied to help solve problems.


title: Creativity

text: It has been the topic of various research studies to establish that organizational effectiveness depends on the creativity of the workforce to a large extent. For any given organization, measures of effectiveness vary, depending upon its mission, environmental context, nature of work, the product or service it produces, and customer demands. Thus, the first step in evaluating organizational effectiveness is to understand the organization itself – how it functions, how it is structured, and what it emphasizes.


title: Creativity

text: Amabile and Sullivan and Harper argued that to enhance creativity in business, three components were needed:


title: Creativity

text: Nonaka, who examined several successful Japanese companies, similarly saw creativity and knowledge creation as being important to the success of organizations. In particular, he emphasized the role that tacit knowledge has to play in the creative process.


title: Creativity

text: In business, originality is not enough. The idea must also be appropriate – useful and actionable. Creative competitive intelligence is a new solution to solve this problem. According to Reijo Siltala it links creativity to innovation process and competitive intelligence to creative workers.


title: Creativity

text: Creativity can be encouraged in people and professionals and in the workplace. It is essential for innovation, and is a factor affecting economic growth and businesses. In 2013, the sociologist Silvia Leal Martín, using the Innova 3DX method, suggested measuring the various parameters that encourage creativity and innovation: corporate culture, work environment, leadership and management, creativity, self-esteem and optimism, locus of control and learning orientation, motivation, and fear.


title: Creativity

text: Similarly, social psychologists, organizational scientists, and management scientists (who conduct extensive research on the factors that influence creativity and innovation in teams and organizations) have developed integrative theoretical models that emphasize the roles of team composition, team processes, and organizational culture. These theoretical models also emphasize the mutually reinforcing relationships between them in promoting innovation.


title: Creativity

text: The investigation by Sai Loo, an academic and author of research monographs, on creative working in the knowledge economy brings together studies of creativity as described in this web page. It offers connections with the sections on the '"Four C" model', 'Theories of creative processes', 'Creativity as a subset of intelligence', 'Creativity and personality', and 'In organisations'. It is the last section that the investigation addresses.


title: Creativity

text: Research studies of the knowledge economy may be classified into three levels: macro, meso and micro. Macro studies refer to investigations at a societal or transnational dimension. Meso studies focus on organisations. Micro investigations centre on the minutiae workings of workers. There is also an interdisciplinary dimension such as research from businesses, economics, education, human resource management, knowledge and organizational management, sociology, psychology, and knowledge economy-related sectors – especially information technology (IT) software and advertising.


title: Creativity

text: Loo studies how individual workers in the knowledge economy use their creativity and know-how in the advertising and IT software sectors. It examines this phenomenon across three developed countries of England, Japan, and Singapore to observe global perspectives. Specifically, the study uses qualitative data from semi-structured interviews of the related professionals in the roles of creative directing and copywriting (in advertising), and systems software developing and software programme managing.


title: Creativity

text: The study offers a conceptual framework of a two-dimensional matrix of individual and collaborative working styles, and single and multi-contexts. The investigation draws on literature sources from the four disciplines of economics, management, sociology, and psychology. The themes arising from the analysis of knowledge work and creativity literature serve to create a distinct theoretical framework of creative knowledge work. These workers apply their cognitive abilities, creative personalities and skill sets in the areas of science, technology, or culture industries to invent or discover new possibilities – e.g. a medium, product or service. These work activities may be done individually or collectively. Education, training and 'encultured environments' are necessary for the performance of these creative activities. Acts of creativity are viewed as asking new questions over and above those questions asked by an intelligent person, seeking novelty when reviewing a situation, and creating something that is different and novel, i.e. a 'variation' on the idea of existing ideas in a domain. This framework is evidenced by the empirical chapters on the micro-workings of creative workers in the two knowledge economy sectors from global perspectives.


title: Creativity

text: This investigation identifies a definition of creative work, three types of work and the necessary conditions for it to occur. These workers use a combination of creative applications including anticipatory imagination, problem-solving, problem seeking, and generating ideas and aesthetic sensibilities. Taking aesthetic sensibilities as an example, for a creative director in the advertising industry, it is a visual imagery whether still or moving via a camera lens, and for a software programmer, it is the innovative technical expertise in which the software is written. There are specific creative applications for each of the sectors such as emotional connection in the advertising sector, and the power of expression and sensitivity in the IT software sector. In addition to the creative applications, creative workers require abilities and aptitudes to carry out their roles. Passion for one's job is generic. For copywriters, this passion is identified with fun, enjoyment and happiness alongside attributes such as honesty (regarding the product), confidence, and patience in finding the appropriate copy. Knowledge is also required in the disciplines of the humanities (e.g. literature), the creative arts (e.g. painting and music) and technical-related know-how (e.g. mathematics, computer sciences and physical sciences). In the IT software, technical knowledge of computer languages (e.g. C++) is especially significant for programmers whereas the degree of technical expertise may be less for a programme manager, as only knowledge of the relevant language is necessary to understand the issues for communicating with the team of developers and testers.


title: Creativity

text: There are three types of work. One is intra-sectoral (e.g. 'general sponge' and 'in tune with the zeitgeist' [advertising], and 'power of expression' and 'sensitivity' [IT software]). The second is inter-sectoral (e.g. 'integration of advertising activities' [advertising], and 'autonomous decentralized systems' [ADS] [IT software]). The third relates to changes in culture/practices in the sectors (e.g. 'three-dimensional trust' and 'green credentials' [advertising], and 'collaboration with HEIs and industry' and 'ADS system in the Tokyo train operator' [IT software]).


title: Creativity

text: The necessary conditions for creative work to exist are a supportive environment such as supportive information, communications and electronic technologies (ICET) infrastructure, training, work environment and education.


title: Creativity

text: This investigation has implications for lifelong learning of these workers informally and formally. Teaching institutions need to offer multi-disciplinary knowledge of humanities, arts and sciences and it has impacts on the programme structure, delivery approaches and assessments. At a macro level, governments need to offer a rich diet of cultural activities, outdoor activities and sports fixtures that inform potential creative workers in the areas of video gaming and advertising. This study has implications for work organisations that support and encourage collaborative working alongside individual working, offer opportunities to engage in continuous professional development (formally and informally), and foster an environment, which promotes experiential functioning and supports experimentation.


title: Creativity

text: Diversity between team members' backgrounds and knowledge can increase team creativity by expanding the total collection of unique information that is available to the team and by introducing different perspectives that can integrate in novel ways. However, under some conditions, diversity can also decrease team creativity by making it more difficult for team members to communicate about ideas and causing interpersonal conflicts between those with different perspectives. Thus, the potential advantages of diversity must be supported by appropriate team processes and organizational cultures in order to enhance creativity. Recent study by An Zeng et al. found that studies of fresh research teams is associated with higher creativity or originality.


title: Creativity

text: Team communication norms, such as respecting others' expertise, paying attention to others' ideas, expecting information sharing, tolerating disagreements, negotiating, remaining open to others' ideas, learning from others, and building on each other's ideas, increase team creativity by facilitating the social processes involved with brainstorming and problem solving. Through these processes, team members are able to access their collective pool of knowledge, reach shared understandings, identify new ways of understanding problems or tasks, and make new connections between ideas. Engaging in these social processes also promotes positive team affect, which facilitates collective creativity.


title: Creativity

text: Supportive and motivational environments that create psychological safety by encouraging risk taking and tolerating mistakes increase team creativity as well. Organizations in which help-seeking, help giving, and collaboration are rewarded promote innovation by providing opportunities and contexts in which team processes that lead to collective creativity can occur. Additionally, leadership styles that downplay status hierarchies or power differences within an organization and empower people to speak up about their ideas or opinions also help to create cultures that are conducive to creativity.


title: Creativity

text: There is a long-standing debate on how material constraints (e.g., lack of money, materials, or equipment) affect creativity. In psychological and managerial research, two competing views in this regard prevail. In one view, many scholars propose a negative effect of material constraints on innovation and claim that material constraints starve creativity. The proponents of this view argue that adequate material resources are needed to engage in creative activities like experimenting with new solutions and idea exploration. In an opposing view, scholars assert that people tend to stick to established routines or solutions as long as they are not forced to deviate from them by constraints. In this sense, Neren posits that scarcity is an important driver of creativity. Consistently, Gibbert and Scranton demonstrated how material constraints facilitated the development of jet engines in World War II.


title: Creativity

text: To reconcile these competing views, contingency models were proposed. The rationale behind these models is that certain contingency factors (e.g., creativity climate or creativity relevant skills) influence the relationship between constraints and creativity. These contingency factors reflect the need for higher levels of motivation and skills when working on creative tasks under constraints. Depending on these contingency factors, there is either a positive or negative relationship between constraints and creativity.


title: Creativity

text: Creativity research for most of the twentieth century was dominated by psychology and business studies, with little work done in sociology as a discipline. While since the turn of the millennium, there has been more attention paid by sociological researchers, it has yet to establish itself as a specific research field, with reviews of sociological research into creativity a rarity in high impact literature.


title: Creativity

text: While psychology has tended to focus on the individual as the locus of creativity, sociological research is directed more at the structures and context within which creative activity takes place, primarily based in the more long-standing field of the sociology of culture, which finds its roots in the works of Marx, Durkheim, and Weber. This has meant a particular focus on the cultural and creative industries as sociological phenomena. Such research has covered a variety of areas, including the economics and production of culture, the role of creative industries in development, and the rise of the "creative class".


title: Creativity

text: Economic approaches to creativity have focussed on three aspects – the impact of creativity on economic growth, methods of modelling markets for creativity, and the maximisation of economic creativity (innovation).


title: Creativity

text: In the early 20th century, Joseph Schumpeter introduced the economic theory of "creative destruction", to describe the way in which old ways of doing things are endogenously destroyed and replaced by the new. Some economists (such as Paul Romer) view creativity as an important element in the recombination of elements to produce new technologies and products and, consequently, economic growth. Creativity leads to capital, and creative products are protected by intellectual property laws.


title: Creativity

text: Mark A. Runco and Daniel Rubenson have tried to describe a "psychoeconomic" model of creativity. In such a model, creativity is the product of endowments and active investments in creativity; the costs and benefits of bringing creative activity to market determine the supply of creativity. Such an approach has been criticised for its view of creativity consumption as always having positive utility, and for the way it analyses the value of future innovations.


title: Creativity

text: The "creative class" is seen by some to be an important driver of modern economies. In his 2002 book, "The Rise of the Creative Class", economist Richard Florida popularized the notion that regions with "3 T's of economic development: Technology, Talent and Tolerance" also have high concentrations of creative professionals and tend to have a higher level of economic development.


title: Creativity

text: Several different researchers have proposed methods of increasing the creativity of an individual. Such ideas range from the psychological-cognitive, such as Osborn-Parnes Creative Problem Solving Process, Synectics, science-based creative thinking, Purdue Creative Thinking Program, and Edward de Bono's lateral thinking; to the highly structured, such as TRIZ (the Theory of Inventive Problem-Solving) and its variant Algorithm of Inventive Problem Solving (developed by the Russian scientist Genrich Altshuller), and Computer-Aided morphological analysis.


title: Creativity

text: Daniel Pink, in his 2005 book "A Whole New Mind", repeating arguments posed throughout the 20th century, argues that we are entering a new age where creativity is becoming increasingly important. In this "conceptual age", we will need to foster and encourage "right-directed thinking" (representing creativity and emotion) over "left-directed thinking" (representing logical, analytical thought). However, this simplification of 'right' versus 'left' brain thinking is not supported by the research data.


title: Creativity

text: Nickerson provides a summary of the various creativity techniques that have been proposed. These include approaches that have been developed by both academia and industry:


title: Creativity

text: Experiments suggest the need for closure of task participants, whether as a reflection of personality or induced (through time pressure), negatively impacts creativity. Accordingly, it has been suggested that reading fiction, which can reduce the cognitive need for closure, may help to encourage creativity.


title: Creativity

text: Some see the conventional system of schooling as stifling of creativity and attempt (particularly in the preschool/kindergarten and early school years) to provide a creativity-friendly, rich, imagination-fostering environment for young children. Researchers have seen this as important because technology is advancing our society at an unprecedented rate and creative problem solving will be needed to cope with these challenges as they arise. In addition to helping with problem solving, creativity also helps students identify problems where others have failed to do so. See the Waldorf School as an example of an education program that promotes creative thought.


title: Creativity

text: Promoting intrinsic motivation and problem solving are two areas where educators can foster creativity in students. Students are more creative when they see a task as intrinsically motivating, valued for its own sake. To promote creative thinking, educators need to identify what motivates their students and structure teaching around it. Providing students with a choice of activities to complete allows them to become more intrinsically motivated and therefore creative in completing the tasks.


title: Creativity

text: Teaching students to solve problems that do not have well defined answers is another way to foster their creativity. This is accomplished by allowing students to explore problems and redefine them, possibly drawing on knowledge that at first may seem unrelated to the problem in order to solve it. In adults, mentoring individuals is another way to foster their creativity. However, the benefits of mentoring creativity apply only to creative contributions considered great in a given field, not to everyday creative expression.


title: Creativity

text: Musical creativity is a gateway to the flow state. A place conducive to spontaneity, improvisation, and creativity. Recent studies have shown that we should emphasize students' creative side and integrate more creativity into their curriculums. A reason for this is that "Students aiming to express themselves and connect with peers through music will be able to tap into higher-order brain regions during improvisation rather than limiting themselves to the areas seen for rudimentary pattern generator" (Landau, 2017:30). Schools should teach this Buddhist philosophy to help musicians, for example, better understand what's happening when you're in a creative process and ways to realize it better. In this sense, an improvisation is a form of self-expression that can generate connectivity amongst peers and surpasses the age-old rudimentary aspects of school.