Creativity: The Owner's Manual
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About this ebook
Cutting-edge, user-friendly, and comprehensive: the revolutionary guide to the brain, now fully revised and updated
At birth each of us is given the most powerful and complex tool of all time: the human brain. And yet, as we well know, it doesn't come with an owner's manual—until now. In this unsurpassed resource, Dr. Pierce J. Howard and his team distill the very latest research and clearly explain the practical, real-world applications to our daily lives. Drawing from the frontiers of psychology, neurobiology, and cognitive science, yet organized and written for maximum usability, The Owner's Manual for the Brain, Fourth Edition, is your comprehensive guide to optimum mental performance and well-being. It should be on every thinking person's bookshelf.
- What are the ingredients of happiness?
- Which are the best remedies for headaches and migraines?
- How can we master creativity, focus, decision making, and willpower?
- What are the best brain foods?
- How is it possible to boost memory and intelligence?
- What is the secret to getting a good night's sleep?
- How can you positively manage depression, anxiety, addiction, and other disorders?
- What is the impact of nutrition, stress, and exercise on the brain?
- Is personality hard-wired or fluid?
- What are the best strategies when recovering from trauma and loss?
- How do moods and emotions interact?
- What is the ideal learning environment for children?
- How do love, humor, music, friendship, and nature contribute to well-being?
- Are there ways of reducing negative traits such as aggression, short-temperedness, or irritability?
- What is the recommended treatment for concussions?
- Can you delay or prevent Alzheimer's and dementia?
- What are the most important ingredients to a successful marriage and family?
- What do the world's most effective managers know about leadership, motivation, and persuasion?
- Plus 1,000s more topics!
Pierce Howard
Pierce J. Howard, Ph.D., is director of research and development for the Center for Applied Cognitive Studies in Charlotte, North Carolina. Since the first edition of The Owner's Manual for the Brain was published in 1994, Dr. Howard has appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show and conducted countless seminars around the world. He is a member of the American Psychological Association, the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology, and the International Test Commission.
Read more from Pierce Howard
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Reviews for Creativity
11 ratings2 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5This was a very good and concise guide to creativity. I loved it!
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A must-read for anyone who wants to be inspired and be creative.
Book preview
Creativity - Pierce Howard
Getting to New You
The call for creativity strikes fear in some while arousing enthusiasm in others. Why? This chapter addresses that question, based on the current state of research on creativity.
Teresa Amabile, a leading researcher in creativity, has defined creativity conceptually as follows (1983, p. 33): A product or response will be judged as creative to the extent that (a) it is both a novel and appropriate, useful, correct or valuable response to the task at hand, and (b) the task is heuristic rather than algorithmic
(see topic 26.4). She then identifies three criteria for distinguishing more creative contributions from less creative ones: (1) novelty (we haven’t seen or heard this before), (2) relevance (it relates to satisfying the need that originally prompted the contribution), and (3) spontaneity (the contributor didn’t use a formula to mechanically
come up with the contribution).
Margaret Boden (1990), thinking in parallel with Amabile, distinguishes between psychological creativity and historical creativity. The first is merely something new for the individual doing the creating; the second is something new for humanity. To quote Boden: A merely novel idea is one which can be described and/or produced by the same set of generative rules as are other, familiar ideas. A genuinely original, or creative, idea is one which cannot
(p. 40). Robert Sternberg (in Review of General Psychology, Vol. 3, No. 2, 1999, pp. 83–100) expands on the nature of relevance by specifying seven different ways that a creative act can relate to the tradition of an ongoing domain:
1. Conceptual replication, in which one attempts to repeat an earlier study to determine whether its results were a fluke or are here to stay.
2. Redefinition, in which one finds a new meaning or application for an established entity.
3. Forward incrementation, in which one takes an established paradigm to a higher level.
4. Advance forward incrementation, in which one takes an established paradigm to a level higher than its advocates are willing to take it.
5. Redirection, in which one builds on previous work, but in a different direction.
6. Reconstruction and redirection, in which one takes a defunct entity, resurrects it, modernizes it, and claims that it still has value.
7. Re-initiation, in which one approaches something in a radically different way and direction from current practice.
Sternberg points out that the first three tend to be nonthreatening and are relatively easy to accept, whereas the last four tend to be resisted because they threaten those currently at work in the field.
How do we know whether or not a contribution possesses novelty, relevance, and spontaneity? Amabile (1983, p. 31) proposes a consensual definition: A product or response is creative to the extent that appropriate observers independently agree it is creative. Appropriate observers are those familiar with the domain in which the product was created or the response articulated.
Her definition reflects Aristotle’s comment in the Rhetoric that he can’t tell how to make good art; he can only describe the art that observers