kb/data/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creativity-1.md

title	chunk	source	category	tags	date_saved	instance
Creativity	2/14	https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creativity	reference	science, encyclopedia	2026-05-05T07:11:10.173371+00:00	kb-cron

=== Renaissance === It was during the Renaissance that creativity was first conceived not as a conduit from the divine, but as arising from the abilities of "great men." This could be attributed to the leading intellectual movement of the time, aptly named humanism, which developed an intensely anthropocentric outlook on the world, valuing the intellect and achievement of the individual. From this philosophy arose the Renaissance man (or polymath), an individual who embodies the principles of humanism in their ceaseless courtship with knowledge and creation. One of the most well-known and immensely accomplished examples is Leonardo da Vinci.

=== From the 17th to the 19th centuries === However, the shift from divine inspiration to the abilities of the individual was gradual and would not become immediately apparent until the Age of Enlightenment. By the 18th century, creativity (notably in aesthetics) linked with the concept of imagination became more frequent. In the writing of Thomas Hobbes, imagination became a key element of human cognition. William Duff was one of the first to identify imagination as a quality of genius, typifying the separation being made between talent (productive, but not breaking new ground) and genius. As an independent topic of study, creativity received little attention until the 19th century. Psychologist Mark Runco and Robert Albert argue that creativity as the subject of proper study began seriously to emerge in the late 19th century with the increased interest in individual differences inspired by the arrival of Darwinism. In particular, they refer to the work of Francis Galton, who, through his eugenicist outlook, took a keen interest in the heritability of intelligence, with creativity taken as an aspect of genius.

=== Modern === In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, leading mathematicians and scientists such as Hermann von Helmholtz (1896) and Henri Poincaré (1908) began to reflect on and publicly discuss their creative processes. The insights of Poincaré and von Helmholtz inspired the accounts of the creative process by pioneering theorists such as Graham Wallas and Max Wertheimer. In his work Art of Thought, published in 1926, Wallas presented one of the first models of the creative process. In the Wallas model, creative insights and illuminations may be explained by a process consisting of five stages:

preparation (preparatory work on a problem that focuses the individual's mind on the problem and explores the problem's dimensions), incubation (in which the problem is internalized into the unconscious mind although nothing appears externally to be happening), intimation (the creative person gets a "feeling" that a solution is on its way), illumination or insight (in which the creative idea bursts forth from its preconscious processing into conscious awareness); verification (in which the idea is consciously verified, elaborated, and then applied). Wallas's model is also often treated as four stages, with "intimation" seen as a sub-stage. Wallas considered creativity to be a legacy of the evolutionary process, which allowed humans to quickly adapt to rapidly changing environments. Simonton provides an updated perspective on this view in his book, Origins of Genius: Darwinian Perspectives on Creativity. In 1927, mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead gave the Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh, later published as Process and Reality. He is credited with having coined the term "creativity" to serve as the ultimate category of his metaphysical scheme. Although psychometric studies of creativity had been conducted by The London School of Psychology as early as 1927 with the work of H.L. Hargreaves into the Faculty of Imagination. The formal psychometric measurement of creativity, from the standpoint of orthodox psychological literature, is usually considered to have begun with psychologist J.P. Guilford's address to the American Psychological Association in 1950. That address helped to popularize the study of creativity and to focus attention on scientific approaches to conceptualizing creativity. Statistical analyzes led to the recognition of creativity as an aspect of human cognition separate from IQ-type intelligence, under the study of which it had previously been subsumed. Guilford's work suggested that above a threshold level of IQ, the relationship between creativity and classically measured intelligence broke down.

=== Across cultures === Creativity is viewed differently in different countries. For example, cross-cultural research centered in Hong Kong found that Westerners view creativity more in terms of the individual attributes of a person, such as their aesthetic taste, while Chinese people view creativity more in terms of the social influence of creative people (i.e. what they can contribute to society). Mpofu, et al., surveyed 28 African languages and found that 27 had no word which directly translated to "creativity", with Arabic being the exception. The linguistic relativity hypothesis (i.e. that language can affect thought) suggests that the lack of an equivalent word for "creativity" may affect the views of creativity among speakers of such languages. However, more research would be needed to establish this, and there is certainly no suggestion that this linguistic difference makes people any less—or more—creative. Nevertheless, it is true that there has been very little research on creativity in Africa and Latin America. Creativity has been more thoroughly researched in the northern hemisphere, but there are cultural differences between northern countries. In Scandinavia, creativity is seen as an individual attitude that helps people cope with life's challenges, while in Germany, creativity is seen more as a process that can be applied to help solve problems.

== Classification ==

=== "Four C" model === Psychologists James Kaufman and Ronald Beghetto introduced a "four C" model of creativity. The four "C's" are: