The Importance Of Creativity

Creativity has always been something that is exceptionally desirable in American society, but it has really never been understood. For years, scientists have been trying to understand where creativity lies and how the brain allows you to be creative. In an effort to better understand it, Professor E. Paul Torrance designed a series of creativity tasks in the 1950s where 400 Minneapolis children participated in, and completed the tasks. Those children came to be known as the “Torrance Kids” and the Torrance tasks became to be considered as the gold standard in creativity assessment. As many studies have been conducted, it has been stated that creativity does not live in one spot.

Unfortunately, as time passes, it has been noted that American

Even though imagination is the cornerstone of creativity, imagination depends on memory to create something new. Memory is needed to recognize when something is original. It is an essential and particularly rewarding part of creativity, while emotions are intimately involved in the creativity process too.

The studies of Professor James C. Kaufman have suggested that creativity can be taught or at least exercised. According to Shelley Carson, researcher and lecturer in psychology at Harvard University and author of Your Creative Brain, “the brain is a creativity machine. You just need to know how to manipulate your software to make it work for you.” Teachers and students both can play a part in enhancing creativity. One way teachers can enhance creativity is by helping students see that rules and imagination are not in conflict each other. Shelley Carson states that children sometimes give up on imagination as they become more interested in rules. An example of this was provided by composer and musician, Bruce Adolphe, when he explains how he asked a group of children to start a story with an ordinary moment from their everyday lives and then add a twist that never happened before. In doing that, the children would tell a story of something they have been taught to do a certain way every day, like brushing their teeth, and then change up the process by including something totally different from the way it would normally be done like a dragon squeezing out the