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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Creativity | 5/14 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creativity | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T07:11:10.173371+00:00 | kb-cron |
=== Dialectical theory === The term "dialectical theory of creativity" dates back to psychoanalyst Daniel Dervin and was later developed into an interdisciplinary theory. This theory starts with the ancient concept that creativity takes place in an interplay between order and chaos. Similar ideas can be found in neuroscience and psychology. Neurobiologically, it can be shown that the creative process takes place in a dynamic interplay between coherence and incoherence that leads to new and usable neuronal networks. Psychology shows how the dialectics of convergent and focused thinking with divergent and associative thinking leads to new ideas and products. Personality traits such as the "Big Five" seem to bedialectically intertwined in the creative process: emotional instability versus stability, extraversion versus introversion, openness versus reserve, agreeableness versus antagonism, and disinhibition versus constraint. The dialectical theory of creativity also applies to counseling and psychotherapy.
=== Neuroeconomic framework === Lin and Vartanian developed a neurobiological description of creative cognition. This interdisciplinary framework integrates theoretical principles and empirical results from neuroeconomics, reinforcement learning, cognitive neuroscience, and neurotransmission research on the locus coeruleus system. It describes how decision-making processes studied by neuroeconomists as well as activity in the locus coeruleus system underlie creative cognition and the large-scale brain network dynamics associated with creativity. It suggests that creativity is an optimization and utility maximization problem that requires individuals to determine the optimal way to exploit and explore ideas (e.g., the multi-armed bandit problem). This utility-maximization process is thought to be mediated by the locus coeruleus system, and this creativity framework describes how tonic and phasic locus coeruleus activities work in conjunction to facilitate the exploiting and exploring of creative ideas. This framework not only explains previous empirical results but also makes novel and falsifiable predictions at different levels of analysis (ranging from neurobiological to cognitive and personality differences).
=== Behaviorism theory === B.F. Skinner attributed creativity to accidental behaviors that are reinforced by the environment. In behaviorism, creativity can be understood as novel or unusual behaviors that are reinforced if they produce a desired outcome. Spontaneous behaviors by living creatures are thought to reflect past learned behaviors. In this way, a behaviorist may say that prior learning caused novel behaviors to be reinforced many times over, and the individual has been shaped to produce increasingly novel behaviors. A creative person, according to this definition, is someone who has been reinforced more often for novel behaviors than others. Behaviorists suggest that anyone can be creative, they just need to be reinforced to learn to produce novel behaviors.
=== Investment theory === The "investment theory of creativity" suggests that many individual and environmental factors must exist in precise ways for extremely high, as opposed to average, levels of creativity to result. In the "investment" sense, a person with their particular characteristics in their particular environment may see an opportunity to devote their time and energy to something that has been overlooked by others. The creative person develops an undervalued or under-recognized idea to the point where it is established as a new and creative idea. Just as in the financial world, some investments are worth the buy-in, while others are less productive and do not generate returns to the extent that the investor expected. This "investment theory of creativity" asserts that creativity might rely to some extent on the right investment of effort being added to a field at the right time in the right way.
=== Computational creativity ===