|
Creativity, a component of genius, and problem solving (likewise) are of themselves both in part skills and not necessarily some innate talent. I've been poking around the Skills and Creativity pages on Wikipedia for the past few days, as well as their references, looking at the state of art and understanding of these topics. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's five-phase model of creativity seems pretty accurate: preparation, incubation, insight, evaluation, elaboration. (Creativity: Flow and the psychology of discovery and invention). I'm also quite captivated by Liane Gabora's "honing theory", which ... gets into a whole mess of areas: world models, systems theory, epistemology, evolution, communications theory, and more. I've only just run across it but it's quite exciting, as is much the rest of her work (bio page with links below). Another element I'm finding useful is to have a useful concepts and interests capture system, for which I've gone retro: 4x6 index cards and a series of file boxes. The immediacy, free-form nature, adaptability, and physicality of the system make it hugely useful (my HN user submissions history includes a link to a POIC, "pile of index cards", data management system). And the list of people who've relied on index cards, starting with Carl Linneaus who invented the damned idea, is pretty impressive. (I particularly recommend John McPhee's essay, "Structure".) I've known researchers myself who've used the method and am coming to understand its merits. And yes, search and grep are challenges, but the review such attempts trigger seems to be a more-than-ofsetting advantage. https://www.worldcat.org/title/creativity-the-psychology-of-... https://people.ok.ubc.ca/lgabora/ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creativity https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skill |