CREATIVITY

ETYMOLOGY
Creativity comes from the Latin term cre "to create, make".

DEFINATION
Creativity is the ability to generate innovative ideas and manifest them from thought into reality. The process involves original thinking and then producing. "Creativity is the process of bringing something new into being...creativity requires passion and commitment. Out of the creative act is born symbols and myths. It brings to our awareness what was previously hidden and points to new life. The experience is one of heightened consciousness-ecstasy." - Rollo May, The Courage to Create Unlike many phenomena in science, there is no single, authoritative perspective or definition of creativity. And unlike many phenomena in psychology, there is no standardized measurement technique. Some say it is a trait we are born with; others say it can be taught with the application of simple techniques. It is the act of turning new and imaginative ideas into reality. Creativity involves two processes: thinking, then producing. Innovation is the production or implementation of an idea. If you have ideas, but don't act on them, you are imaginative but not creative. Creativity has been associated with right or forehead brain activity or even specifically with lateral thinking.

DISTINGUISHING BETWEEN INNOVATION AND CREATIVITY

It is often useful to explicitly distinguish between creativity and innovation. Creativity is typically used to refer to the act of producing new ideas, approaches or actions, while innovation is the process of both generating and applying such creative ideas in some specific context.

"...creativity by individuals and teams is a starting point for innovation; the first is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the second."

Although popularly associated with art and literature, it is also an essential part of innovation and invention and is important in professions such as business, economics, architecture, industrial design, graphic design, advertising, game design, mathematics, music, science and engineering, and teaching.

CREATIVE THOUGHT
Creative thought is a mental process involving creative problem solving and the discovery of new ideas or concepts, or new associations of the existing ideas or concepts, fueled by the process of either conscious or unconscious insight. From a scientific point of view, the products of creative thought (sometimes referred to as divergent thought) are usually considered to have both originality and appropriateness. Although intuitively a simple phenomenon, it is in fact quite complex. It has been studied from the perspectives of behavioral psychology, social psychology, psychometrics, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, philosophy, aesthetics, history, economics, design research, business, and management, among others.

Because of, the ambiguity and multi-dimensional nature of creativity, entire industries have been spawned from the pursuit of creative ideas and the development of creativity techniques. Some students of creativity have emphasized an element of chance in the creative process. Linus Pauling, asked at a public lecture how one creates scientific theories, replied that one must endeavor to come up with many ideas, then discard the useless ones. Another adequate definition of creativity, according to Otto Rank, is that it is an "assumptions-breaking process." Creative ideas are often generated when one discards preconceived assumptions and attempts a new approach or method that might seem to others unthinkable.

CREATIVITY IS THE MOST CRUCIAL FACTOR FOR FUTURE SUCESS

According to the IBM 2010 Global CEO Study, which surveyed 1,500 Chief Executive Officers from 60 countries and 33 industries worldwide, CEOs believe that, "more than rigor, management discipline, integrity or even vision - successfully navigating an increasing complex world will require creativity." CEOs say creativity helps them capitalise on complexity "The effects of rising complexity calls for CEOs and their teams to lead with bold creativity, connect with customers in imaginative ways and design their operations for speed and flexibility to position their organisations for twenty-first century success." Amen to that! If we are going to find solutions in a world that is becoming increasingly interconnected and complex, we cannot rely on traditional ways of leading and managing. Creativity requires whole-brain thinking; right-brain imagination, artistry and intuition, plus left-brain logic and planning.

CREATIVITY AT WORK
Creativity is a core competency for leaders and managers and one of the best ways to set your company apart from the competition. Corporate Creativity is characterised by the ability to perceive the world in new ways, to find hidden patterns, to make connections between seemingly unrelated phenomena, and to generate solutions. Generating fresh solutions to problems, and the ability to create new products, processes or services for a changing market, are part of the intellectual capital that give a company its competitive edge. Creativity is a crucial part of the innovation equation.

INTELLIGENCE
ETYMOLOGY Intelligence derives from the Latin verb intellegere; per that rationale, understanding (intelligence) is different from being smart (capable of adapting to the environment).

CONCEPT
i) from Mainstream Science on Intelligence (1994), a report by fifty-two researchers: A very general mental capability that, among other things, involves the ability to reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, comprehend complex ideas, learn quickly and learn from experience. It is not merely book learning, a narrow academic skill, or test-taking smarts. Rather, it reflects a broader and deeper capability for comprehending our surroundings catching on, making sense of things, or figuring out what to do. (ii) from Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns (1995), a report published by the Board of Scientific Affairs of the American Psychological Association: Individuals differ from one another in their ability to understand complex ideas, to adapt effectively to the environment, to learn from experience, to engage in various forms of reasoning, [and] to overcome obstacles by taking thought. Although these individual differences can be substantial, they are never entirely consistent: a given persons intellectual performance will vary on different occasions, in different domains, as judged by different criteria. Concepts of intelligence are attempts to clarify and organize this complex set of phenomena.

Intelligence is an umbrella term describing a property of the mind including related abilities, such as the capacities for abstract thought, understanding, communication, reasoning, learning, learning from the experience, planning, and problem solving.

THEORIES OF INTELLIGENCE
i) The single intelligence based upon the unilinear construct of general intelligence
(ii) The construct of multiple intelligences. Influenced by his cousin Charles Darwin, Francis Galton was the first scientist to propose a theory of general intelligence; that intelligence is a true, biologically-based mental faculty that can be studied by measuring a persons reaction times to cognitive tasks. Galtons research in measuring the head sizes of British scientists and laymen led to the conclusion that head-size is unrelated to a persons intelligence. Alfred Binet, and the French school of intelligence, believed intelligence was a median average of dissimilar abilities, not a unitary entity with specific, identifiable properties. EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE

Emotional intelligence (EI) refers to the ability to perceive, control, and evaluate emotions. Some researchers suggest that emotional intelligence can be learned and strengthened, while other claim it is an inborn characteristic. Since 1990, Peter Salovey and John D. Mayer have been the leading researchers on emotional intelligence. In their influential article Emotional Intelligence, they defined emotional intelligence as, the subset of social intelligence that involves the ability to monitor one's own and others' feelings and emotions, to discriminate among them and to use this information to guide one's thinking and actions (1990). Salovey and Mayer proposed a model that identified four different factors of emotional intelligence: the perception of emotion, the ability reason using emotions, the ability to understand emotion, and the ability to manage emotions.

FACTORS EFFECTING INTELLENGENCE

Intelligence is an ill-defined, difficult to quantify concept. Accordingly, the IQ tests used to measure intelligence provide only approximations of the posited 'real' intelligence. In addition, a number of theoretically unrelated properties are known to correlate with IQ such as race, gender and height but since correlation does not imply causation the true relationship between these factors is uncertain. Factors affecting IQ may be divided into biological and environmental.

Biological
Other biological factors correlating with IQ include ratio of brain weight to body weight and the volume and location of gray matter tissue in the brain.

Environmental
Evidence suggests that family environmental factors may have an effect upon childhood IQ, accounting for up to a quarter of the variance.

Ethical issues
Since intelligence is susceptible to modification through the manipulation of environment, the ability to influence intelligence raises ethical issues. Neuroethics considers the ethical, legal and social implications of neuroscience, and deals with issues such as difference between treating a human neurological disease and enhancing the human brain, and how wealth impacts access to neurotechnology. Neuroethical issues interact with the ethics of human genetic engineering.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Artificial intelligence (or AI) is both the intelligence of machines and the branch of computer science which aims to create it, through "the study and design of intelligent agents"or "rational agents", where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions which maximize its chances of success. Achievements in artificial intelligence include constrained and well-defined problems such as games, crossword-solving and optical character recognition. General intelligence or strong AI has not yet been achieved and is a long-term goal of AI research. Among the traits that researchers hope machines will exhibit are reasoning, knowledge, planning, learning, communication, perception, and the ability to move and manipulate objects.

MEMOREY
Memory is the retention of, and ability to recall, information, personal experiences, and procedures (skills and habits). ubjectivity in remembering involves at least three important factors: 1. Memories are constructions made in accordance with present needs, desires, influences, etc. 2. Memories are often accompanied by feelings and emotions. 3. Memory usually involves awareness of the memory (Schacter 1996).

PROCESSES From an information processing perspective there are three main stages in the formation and retrieval of memory: o Encoding or registration (receiving, processing and combining of received information) o Storage (creation of a permanent record of the encoded information) o Retrieval, recall or recollection (calling back the stored information in response to some cue for use in a process or activity).

MODELS
Two models of thinking which are popular with Materialists are the behaviorist model (thinking is a set of behaviors) and that of cognitive psychology (the brain is like a computer). Neither can account for the subjective and presentneed basis of memory (Schacter 1996). The Freudian model posits an area of the unconscious where memories of traumatic experiences are stored. These unconscious memories are claimed to be significant causal factors in shaping conscious thought and behavior. This model is not consistent with what is known about the memory of traumatic experiences.

TYPES OF MEMORY
SENSORY MEMORY
Sensory memory corresponds approximately to the initial 200500 milliseconds after an item is perceived. The ability to look at an item, and remember what it looked like with just a second of observation, or memorisation, is an example of sensory memory. The sensory memories act as buffers for stimuli received through the senses. A sensory memory exists for each sensory channel: iconic memory for visual stimuli, echoic memory for aural stimuli and haptic memory for touch. Information is passed from sensory memory into short-

term memory by attention, thereby filtering the stimuli to only those which are of interest at a given time.

SHORT TERM MEMORY

Short-term memory acts as a scratch-pad for temporary recall of the information under process. For instance, in order to understand this sentence you need to hold in your mind the beginning of the sentence you read the rest. Short-term memory (or "primary" or "active memory") is the capacity for holding a small amount of information in mind in an active, readily available state for a short period of time. The duration of short-term memory (when rehearsal or active maintenance is prevented) is believed to be in the order of seconds.

LONG TERM MEMORY

The storage in sensory memory and short-term memory generally have a strictly limited capacity and duration, which means that information is available only for a certain period of time, but is not retained indefinitely. By contrast, long-term memory can store much larger quantities of information for potentially unlimited duration (sometimes a whole life span). Its capacity is immeasurably large. For example, given a random seven-digit number, we may remember it for only a few seconds before forgetting, suggesting it was stored in our short-term memory. On the other hand, we can remember telephone numbers for many years through repetition; this information is said to be stored in long-term memory.

WORKING MEMORY
The term working memory refers to a brain system that provides temporary storage and manipulation of the information necessary for such complex cognitive tasks as language comprehension, learning, and reasoning. This definition has evolved from the concept of a unitary short-term memory system. Working memory has been found to require the simultaneous storage and processing of information. It can be divided into the following three subcomponents: (i) the central executive, which is assumed to be an attentional-controlling system, is important in skills such as chess playing and is particularly susceptible to the effects of Alzheimer's disease; and two slave systems, namely (ii) the visuospatial sketch pad, which manipulates visual images (iii) the phonological loop, which stores and rehearses speech-based information and is necessary for the acquisition of both native and second-language vocabulary.

FORGETTING
Forgetting is due to either: Weak encoding (why we forget most things, including our nightly dreams); Lack of a retrieval cue (we seem to need something to stimulate memory); Time and the replacement in the neural network by later experiences Repetitive experiences (you'll remember the one special meal you had at a special restaurant, but you won't remember what you had for lunch a year ago Tuesday), or A drive to keep us sane. (Imagine the brain overload that would occur if we were to never forget anything, the stated goal of L. Ron Hubbard's dianetics. His followers should read Jorge Luis Borges's "Funes, the Memorious," a story about such a being.) An additional reason for forgetting may have something to do with dreaming: *In the quiet of night your brain may turn the day's events into dreams. Through dreams your brain may examine those events and make sense of them. It may erase some and add others to your memory bank.* The chances of remembering something improve by "consolidation," which creates strong encoding. Thinking and talking about an experience enhance the chances of remembering it. One of the better known techniques of remembering involves the process of association.

MENEMONIC
A mnemonic device is a mind memory and/or learning aid. Commonly, mnemonics are verbal such as a very short poem or a special word used to help a person remember somethingbut may be visual, kinesthetic or auditory. Mnemonics rely on associations between easy-toremember constructs which can be related back to the data that is to be remembered. This is based on the principle that the human mind much more easily remembers spatial, personal, surprising, sexual, humorous or otherwise meaningful information than arbitrary sequences.

REFERENCES:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1736359 www.wikipedia.com
http://www.med.univ-rennes1.fr/iidris/cache/an/40/4003 http://www.questia.com/googleScholar.qst?docId=76974189 About.com