Dr. Martin E.P. Seligman—renowned worldwide as the “father of Positive Psychology”—has led visionary leaps in the scientific research, empirical data and personal understandings of human flourishing. This course explores the past, present and future of positive psychology as a journey through the key scientific leaps led by Dr. Seligman and his colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania's Positive Psychology Center and Master of Applied Positive Psychology program. There are no prerequisites.
Creativity and Imagination
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From the course by University of Pennsylvania
Positive Psychology: Martin E. P. Seligman’s Visionary Science
1971 ratings
University of Pennsylvania
1971 ratings
Course 1 of 5 in the Specialization Foundations of Positive Psychology
From the lesson
Being Whole: Mind/Body Flourishing Throughout Life
In this module, Dr. Martin Seligman shares key research questions from the field of Positive Psychology, and the answers turn some conventional assumptions on their head. Are we shaped by the future vs. the past? And what does science tell us about mind/body flourishing? What gets better as we age?
Meet the Instructors
Martin E.P. Seligman, Ph.D.Zellerbach Family Professor of Psychology & Director, Positive Psychology Center
Positive Psychology Center
[MUSIC]
What is creativity?
Creativity researchers tend to define creativity as both originality and
meaningfulness or utility in your daily life.
So if something is just original but it's not meaningful,
people may consider it a bit bizarre.
If it's just meaningful or make sense to people but it isn't novel,
people don't tend to call that creativity.
So creativity tends to involve that combination of both originality and
meaningfulness.
And then sometimes, some creativity researchers also say surprising,
has to be a part of creativity now as surprising to you, but
surprising to a field that you work in.
But what are the greatest predictors of creativity?
Well, to try answer that question, the creativity researcher, E Paul Torrance,
looked at three local elementary schools in the in the 50s.
And he took the time to really get to know the children.
So he gave them interview questions, he gave them IQ tests,
he looked at their standardized achievement test scores, their GPA.
And then he wanted to follow them up, 30 years later,
to find out as adults what were the best predictors of creativity.
And he found that a set of characteristics that he called the Beyonder
characteristics did the best job differentiating those who ended up
becoming the greatest creative achievers.
Versus those who, he called them the sociometric stars,
those who just did really well in academics in school.
So here's the list of the Beyonder characteristics.
So he found that those who were the Beyonders as adults, those that went
beyond others in their field had a love of work when they were young children.
They had persistence, they had purpose in life,
they felt like they had some sort of purpose.
Now, to the extent to which an elementary school student could have
a purpose in life.
But you could see the little seeds of their interest or
their future passions were even at play in elementary school.
Deep thinking, it's really important here to note that deep thinking is not quite
the same thing as fast thinking.
The kind of thinking that we measure on IQ test for instance.
So deep reflective thinking.
Tolerance of mistakes, openness to change, risk-taking and
feeling comfortable as a minority of one.
So ask these kids, if you were the only one in the classroom with an idea that you
really believed in and all the other students didn't believe in this idea or
they made fun of you.
Would you be okay with that?
He found the extent to which these elementary school kids said yeah,
I'd be okay with that.
And that predicted the lifelong creativity even better than IQ test scores.
So it's really interesting that really taking the time to get to
know a child can really give us better prediction.
Maybe some of these simpler questions than huge, long academic batteries that we give
people that we expect are the best markers of potential.
Torrance found that the most important factor in predicting life
on creativity was the extent to which children fell in love with a future image
of themselves in adulthood.
And that seem to carry them throughout the whole creative field.
This is a quote from Torrance towards the end of his life.
He wrote an article called The Importance of Falling in Love With Something,
and this is a quote from that article.
Life's most energizing and
exciting moments occur in those split seconds when our struggling and
searching are suddenly transformed into the dazzling aura of the profoundly new.
An image of the future.
One of the most powerful wellsprings of creative energy, outstanding
accomplishment, and self-fulfillment seems to be falling in love with something.
Your dream, your image of the future.
Now, modern day creativity researchers are extending this research in showing just
how important it is to imagine the future, imagine your personal future.
But also imagine the future of everyone else for creativity.
And recent years, there's been discovery in the field of cognitive neuroscience
of what's called the default mode network or wait, I like to call it or
refer to as the imagination network.
Because I believe a lot of the cognitive processes and behaviors that
are associated with this network are related to imagination in some way.
So I'm going to go down a list of some of the cognitive processes that have been
associated with this brain network in recent years.
And I just want to make clear when I say network,
it's not something to be intimidated by, or you don't have to be a cognitive
neuroscientist to understand what a network is.
It's just you have different areas of the brain that operate as team players, and
they communicate with each other to solve a particular task or
to solve a particular problem.
So all of these processes that I'm about to show you are recruited by
this brain network to help solve this process.
So you find the imagination network has been associated with daydreaming,
how many of us out there are huge daydreamers, myself included?
Imagining and planning the future, mostly your personal future.
Retrieving deeply personal memories, like your first kiss or
the first time you were in a school play, these deeply personal memories.
This brain network is associated with retrieving them.
Making meaning out of your life.
So we know that when this brain network is disrupted or
we don't allow people the opportunity to activate this brain network,
they don't really get full meaning making out of their environment.
They don't get a good chance to make sense of what they're experiencing
in their environment.
Monitoring one's emotional state is also important.
So whenever you look at within and you meditate or
you try again touch with all of your emotions and sensations.
We know that this brain network is important.
Reading fiction,
this is another really important aspect of the imagination network.
Which, by the way,
is different than when we are reading a reading comprehension section on the SAT.
That activates a different brain network,
that activates a network called the executive attention network.
Which is important for holding things in working memory and
comprehending abstract material.
But we read science fiction or we read anything where we have to transport our
mind into the mind of what we're reading, you see this brain network as important.
Reflective compassion is also important for this brain network.
Reflective compassion is whenever we view the suffering of someone else or
we hear about it, and we start to reflect on how that relates to maybe our own life.
All of that reminds me of the time that my mom made that sacrifice for me for
instance.
And it seems like compassion is really draws on this imagination brain network.
So compassion draws on imagination.
And then perspective taking is also related to compassion.
But those who activate this brain network are better able to, like I said,
transport their mind, the mind of someone else and take a different perspective.
So we know that this whole long list in a list is growing in the field of cognitive
neuroscience of all the processes associated with this brain network.
We know this brain network is associated with the kind of self-generated cognitions
is the technical term for it.
But our daydreams, whenever our mind wanders, whenever we're at rest.
And people aren't forcing us to pay attention to their goals, and
we're allowed to think about our own goals.
And we see quite clearly that these kinds of processes are essential for
not only the meaning-making process for our own construction of ourselves, but
also for creativity.
So a area of personality that I've been studying in my career, which we have
found recently, is directly tied to imagination brain network activity.
It's openness to experience.
[LAUGH] So openness to experience can be measured in lots of different ways but
they're tends to be a group of items that tend to correlate with each other.
So you find that to the extent to which someone scores really high on one of
the items, they tend to score very highly on those other items as well.
And I'm going to go down a list of some very common items that are measured in
openness experience, you can get the sense of just how open to experiences you are.
So here's one, I enjoy concentrating on a fantasy or daydream and
exploring all its possibilities, letting it grow and develop.
I'm curious about many different things.
I like to reflect and play with ideas.
I have an active imagination.
I have a deep appreciation for beauty.
I get deeply immersed in music.
I believe in the importance of personal growth.
I need a creative outlet.
So the extent to which all of these things, that you score high on all of
these things, is the extent to which you will have greater probability of showing
creativity in life at various different levels of creativity.
You have creativity from the everyday personal level of creativity like coming
up with a really funny JibJab card for your parents.
I don't know if any of you have ever done a JibJab card,
they're cute to arts and crafts, to just questioning assumptions.
So just throughout your daily life, everyday creativity is important but
all the way up to life to publicly recognize creative achievement.
And so we've done the study where we looked at various levels of
creative achievement across the arts and sciences.
So we've looked at visual arts, music, dance, architecture, creative writing,
humor, inventions, scientific discovery, theatre/film and culinary arts.
And we administer what's called the creative achievement questionnaire.
We had people rate their level of creativity each level of these different
areas.
So for the visual arts, I have no interest or recognized talent in this
area whatsoever, can't even draw a stick figure all the way up too.
My work has been critiqued in national publications or
I've sold a piece of my work.
And we put into the pot,
lots of different variables that have been studied in psychology.
From IQ tests to on the spot tests of divergent thinking, or being able
to think what if or how many uses are there for breakthrough personality.
And we see quite clear, this factor openness to experience is the single best
predictor of lifelong creative achievement.
So curiosity, active imagination, personal growth,
constantly pushing yourself out of your comfort zone.
All these things tend to cohere as a factor of personality and
tend to be correlated with, tends to be correlated with the creative achievement.
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