Creativity Research / Part 1

To further understand the nature of the importance of creativity, I got a few books out on the subject and read through, noting down many of the key concepts which stuck out to me. I shall highlight the key points which really stress it's importance, or point out other very interesting info on the subject...

• Our culture is obsessed with creativity. Hundreds of institutions and corporations instruct their scientists and executives to attend workshops on "creative problem-solving." Practically all boards of education stress the importance of giving students time for "creative self-expression" during the school day.
• Creativity is associated with a wide range of human endeavors, from science, business, and education to everyday life and the arts.
• Can we really compare a salesman or a cook to Einstein or Picasso? (...) Research on the cognitive processes are remarkably similar in all these diverse cases.
• Creativity is a process that results in some sort of outcome (an action or a product) that posesses at least two qualities: it must be unique and it must have value.
• The extraordinarily creative person has no extra, super-normal mental abilities. What this individual does posess, however, is a different motivational makeup. He or she seems to be more driven to work hard, to not give up when the going gets tough.
• All creative outcomes involve a marriage or fusion of previously unrelated ideas, planes of thought, or, to use a term favored by many creativity experts, contexts.
• The most common misconception about being creative is that we must feel inspired first. But research has shown that feeling inspired is no guarantee that we will do well. (...) Creativity, Bernard Shaw reputedly said, is "ninety per cent perspiration, ten per cent inspiration".
• Many individuals have reported how their involvement in the arts, either as participants or audience members, helped overcome behavioral problems.
• Twentieth-century writer Graham Greene makes a more sweeping statement:
  "Sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, the melancholia, the panic fear which is inherent in the human situation."
• Practically all studies involving the two most researched art therapies, poetry and painting, show both the patients and their writing or art work becoming more positive in outlook during the course of therapy.
• Creative capacity was frequently the last realistic organized activity to be compromised by an illness, and on recovery was like the first to begin to return.
• There is an unexpected relationship between universal creativity and post-secondary education.

References:
Swede, G. (1993). Creativity A New Psychology. Toronto, Ontario: Wall & Emerson.
Corrigan, A. (2010). Creativity fostering, measuring and contexts. New York: Nova Science.