Using creative activities
Chia Swee Hong, Heidi Rumford, Alex Cole in Sensory Motor Activities for Early Development, 2020
Arts-based activities, imaginative play and games lend them themselves to creativity. Creativity involves mental and physical processes which create new ideas or new links between current concepts. Benari (1999) cited the work of Rayner (1971) to highlight the importance of creative play. Most children need no encouragement in creative play: they copy activities done by adults, make up stories, use real objects, but soon replace them with invisible pretend play. Although Nielse (1999) refers to art, the main characteristic of creativity is the opportunity to use the materials freely. In order to develop creativity, the process must always take precedence over the finished product. This view is supported by Foley (2010), who said that, in her creative conversation, she was more interested in focusing more on the process than the finished product. According to Belton (2014), music making is probably the richest human experience, providing and nurturing emotional, sensory motor and cognitive experience. Depending on the type of music making, it involves listening, watching, feeling, moving and coordinating movement. The experience is likely to be felt by all children.
Life Enrichment through Creativity
Lisa D. Hinz in Beyond Self-Care for Helping Professionals, 2018
Creativity is not a fixed condition of the mind – people can learn to cultivate creativity (Lehrer, 2012; Richards, 2014). In his 2012 New York Times bestselling book on creativity, Imagine: How Creativity Works, journalist Jonah Lehrer interviewed creative people from disparate fields and wrote fascinating accounts of their accomplishments. From his interviews, he culled suggestions about how to support greater creativity. Some of his suggestions include letting go, being an outsider, thinking like a child, collaboration, interacting with strangers and city living. “Letting go” refers to making time to relax and allow remote association to flow through the mind. It helps to have no pressing outside demands to attend to so that the mind can wander freely without interference from the “inner critic.” If there is no specific task at hand, the inner critic can be quieted because there is nothing to criticize. In addition, letting your mind wander allows for the headspace needed to make the varied connections associated with creative, divergent thinking. As was mentioned in a previous chapter, contemplating a concept or object for a long period of time permits the secondary characteristics to surface, thus increasing the possibility of divergent thinking and creative potential (Arnheim, 1966).
The Relationship-Centered Care Research Network
Thomas S. Inui, Richard M. Frankel in Enhancing the Professional Culture of Academic Health Science Centers, 2022
Should all research groups have an external facilitator? We would argue that an external facilitator is a wonderful addition to any group but is probably not an absolute necessity and, from our interview data, is not every investigator’s preference. More important are issues of mindfulness about group formation, attention to the physical and emotional environment, and invitations and activities designed to optimize creativity. In the case of the RCCRN, use of a facilitator was deliberate, and part of our effort to “detoxify” the competitive culture in which participants were embedded and guide them into a formation process that could result in their “embodying” Relationship-Centered Care phenomena. To our knowledge, these principles have not been applied or studied in any formal way in creating research communities, although doing so would not add a great deal of effort or expense.
A Dose of Creativity: An Integrative Review of the Effects of Serotonergic Psychedelics on Creativity
Published in Journal of Psychoactive Drugs, 2023
Miguel Ângelo Costa
Creativity is a distinctive human cognitive ability which, while traditionally difficult to define, can be understood as the ability to come up with ideas or artifacts that are new, surprising, and valuable, requiring both originality and effectiveness (Boden 2007; Gabora 2013; Runco and Jaeger 2012). The creative process is considered to be a product of two mutualistic abilities in divergent thinking (DT) and convergent thinking (CT) (Cropley 2006). DT is defined as the production of multiple answers to an open problem, while CT is understood as finding a single correct solution to a well-established problem (Razoumnikova 2013). DT itself is associated with four core dimensions: fluency, flexibility, elaboration, and originality (Guilford 1967). Both types of thinking play a role in different stages of the creative process, with DT prevalent in the early stages of idea finding, while CT is needed to convert ideas into useful products (Kim and Pierce 2013).
The Fantasy Questionnaire: A Measure to Assess Creative and Imaginative Fantasy
Published in Journal of Personality Assessment, 2018
David Weibel, Corinna S. Martarelli, Diego Häberli, Fred W. Mast
Taken together, recent definitions suggest that the fantasy construct includes an imaginative (e.g., Bacon et al., 2013) and a creative (e.g., Barrett, 2010) component. Creativity is the process of finding new combinations of elements that are associated with each other (cf. Martindale, 2007; Mednick, 1962). Imagination is the ability to form pictorial experiences or sensations in our mind without the use of information from our senses (O'Connor & Aardema, 2005). Imagination influences cognitive functions such as memory, attention, and perception (cf. Mast, 2009). Imagination and fantasy are related, but not identical. Imagination concerns the ability to re-create vivid quasi-perceptual memories in one's mind, whereas fantasy is referring to a product of imagination; for example, a vivid daydream consisting of a sequence of mental images (e.g., Choi et al., 2013). In contrast, creativity is a practical activity with an objective result (e.g., an invention) that is in some way new, different, and effective (Cropley, 2011). Unlike creativity, fantasy is not bound to a specific and objective output. However, these two concepts are not independent of each other: Various studies propose that fantasy is an imaginative way of discovering creative solutions and can help one to anticipate the realization of a creative construction (Bowers, 1979; Klinger, 1990; Lynn & Rhue, 1986; Vygotsky, 1930/2004). Thus, fantasy can be viewed as a precondition of creativity or, in other words, creativity could be a manifestation of fantasy.
Problem-solving training modifies cognitive functioning and related functional connectivity in healthy adults
Published in Neuropsychological Rehabilitation, 2023
Béatrice Alescio-Lautier, Caroline Chambon, Claire Deshayes, Jean-Luc Anton, Guy Escoffier, Marie-Hélène Ferrer, Véronique Paban
New cognitive interventions to help people with the demands of daily life remain unexplored. To help people cope with the difficulties of everyday life, it is necessary to find alternative interventions. In this sense, creativity could be a key ability by providing individuals with additional resources to solve complex and novel situations. Therefore, in addition to training proposed to improve cognitive functioning, those that stimulate creativity have grown in number and are of great interest (Meinel et al., 2018; Puccio et al., 2020; Vally et al., 2019). Since creativity has many facets, creativity training can be based on a variety of approaches (Scott et al., 2004). Among them, idea generation training is undoubtedly the most commonly used approach (Baruah & Paulus, 2008; Clapham, 1997). However, other approaches, such as training creative processes, conceptual combination and critical thinking, have also been used and are equally effective (Murdock et al., 1993; Puccio et al., 2020).
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