In the last decade, Gardner (1993), a famous student of intelligence, has defined creativity as the ability of a person to solve problems regularly, to deliver novel ideas or products that end up being accepted in their respective culture.
For his part, Romero (1994) recognizes creativity as an original activity that produces more than one solution to a problem.
Creativity supposes, then, an original or new, unconventional behavior, and also with a practical utility. It could be said that one of the distinctive characteristics of humanity is precisely its ability to develop new things, a trait that has made it evolve as a species and progress as a civilization.
Here a definition of creativity arising from the best-known studies on the subject will be assumed, one that understands it as the process thanks to which a person solves a problem in an original way, with a solution - or several of them - unknown until that moment, and generating a new utility or product.
Delving further into the subject, creativity is understood as a process and as a product. This is, as a peculiar, internal, subjective and therefore unnoticed way for the viewer, that a person has to analyze and elaborate situations and, on the other hand, as a set of objective and tangible results of the action of a person considered creative (Marín, 1980; Novaes, 1973).
Being creative means, to recapitulate, seeing reality in a different, peculiar way, differently from others. A creative person is one who can decompose a situation or problem in the opposite way to the majority and, at the same time, as a result of that singular analysis, finds novel responses or modifications.
Such a solution will only be considered truly creative if it is useful and productive, if it brings more benefits than the previously used procedures.
Some skeptics point out that this is an unapproachable or unknowable entity, impossible to restrict to certain parameters. It is the result, they say, of chance, of special and unpredictable circumstances. It responds more to the surprising and sudden spark than to the will or intention of people gifted with it.
Despite what has been said, there is already a literature that analyzes the personality of creative subjects.
This path has arisen due to how insecure the so-called creativity tests are still. According to Gardner (1993), one of the most famous scholars on the subject today, the so-called creativity tests are not completely valid. Nothing guarantees that whoever succeeds in one of these tests will be successful in practical or real life.
Towards the end of the nineteenth century an interest arose to study in detail the lives of brilliant people, notable for their intellect and their works. The first works on these people are due to Francis Galton, Havelock Ellis and Cesare Lombroso.
It is already in the fifties of the twentieth century that the subject reappears with another look, that is, devoid of racist prejudices, which characterized nineteenth-century authors. The Berkeley Institute of Personality Assessment begins to study the biography of prominent artists and scientists. The goal is to find common denominators or features (Barron, 1976). In psychological jargon, a nomothetic approach is assumed, one that seeks to establish general laws.
In recent years, the prolific study of creative subjects has been spearheaded by Howard Gruber, Dean Simonton, and Howard Gardner (1993, 2001). This is how a profile of the creative individual seems to have been reached.
Several are the profiles of the creative person that have been exposed. Gowan, Demos, and Torrance (cited by Romero, 1994) present their own list of traits: curiosity, inquisitive spirit; originality of thought and action; independence of work and thought; fertile imagination; nonconformity; capture of relationships unnoticed by others; fluency of words and actions; constancy in their actions and appreciation for complexity.
It only remains to allude to the link between creativity and intelligence. According to experts, the most creative people are not always the ones with the highest intelligence. While it is essential to have a certain level of higher intelligence to be creative, the facts show that a good number of people of average normal intelligence display ingenious and creative ideas. Although it seems curious, there are also intelligent and very uncreative people.
According to experts (Ricarte, 1998), the intelligent subject exercises convergent thinking, that is, in only one sense: he strives to find the correct solution to a problem and only one. While the creative person practices divergent thinking, that is, she goes beyond the usual and strives to produce more than one solution to a certain issue or dilemma.
References
Barron, F. (1976), Creative personality and creative process. Madrid: Marova.
Davis, G. and J. SCOTT (Compilers) (1975), Strategies for creativity. Buenos Aires.
Gardner, H. (1993), Creative minds. Barcelona: Paidós Ibérica SA
Gardner, H. (2001), Art, mind and brain. A cognitive approach to creativity. Barcelona: Paidós Ibérica SA
Marin, R. (1980), Creativity. Barcelona: CEAC.
Novaes, M. (1973), Psychology of creative aptitude. Buenos Aires. Kapeluz.
Romero, C. (1994), The study of creativity in the field of education. In: More Light, Journal of Psychology and Pedagogy. N ° 1, Vol. 2. Pp. 51 - 65.
Ricarte, J. (1998), Creativity and persuasive communication. Barcelona: Autonomous University of Barcelona.
Torrance, P. (1977), Education and creative ability. Madrid: Marova.
