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#11. Lit Review: Explaining Creativity
In Explaining Creativity, author and professor R. Keith Sawyer gives a comprehensive overview of the psychological research done on creativity so far. Though he touches topics such as the history of creativity research to research on creativity in various domains such as art and science, one of the most valuable
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#10. Lit Review: Smart Thinking
In Smart Thinking, psychologist Art Markman presents a three-part formula for helping people solve problems more creatively. The strategies are grounded in recent literature from psychology and cognitive science on motivation, learning, perception, and memory. Early on, he draws a distinction between intelligence and what he calls “smart thinking”. Intelligence
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#8. Lit Review: You Creative Brain
I recently finished Shelley Carson’s book on the neural bases of creativity, and it was a pretty interesting read. Carson is a psychology professor at the Harvard Extension School and has been conducting research on creativity for many years. In Your Creative Brain, Carson’s main thesis of book is that everyone
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#7. Lit Review: Conceptual Blockbusting
In Conceptual Blockbusting, author James L. Adams discusses various kinds of blocks that impede our ability to “conceptualize” of problems and solve them in a creative way. He believes it’s important to understand these kinds of blocks that act as impediments to our thinking because we can then begin to be more deliberate about overcoming them–that
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#6. Lit Review Map (So Far)
One of the things that I’m also juggling in the midst of conducting interviews and now analyzing my data is making sure I’m familiarizing myself with the literature. Like in my previous post, I mentioned that I was using Mindjet’s MindManager 9 to map out what I’m learning from my reading
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#5. Elizabeth Gilbert on Nurturing Creativity
Today I listened to a radio show that I’d stumbled upon while searching for perspectives on “the creative process” in Google. The radio show is called TED Radio Hour, and it’s jointly produced by NPR. The topic of the show was The Creative Process, and what was particularly interesting was
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#4. Analysis: The Tangled Thicket
Currently, I’ve done about two dozen interviews with people from various fields. It’s all been super interesting. Although I’d love to interview more types of people from various backgrounds (most everyone I’ve talked to has such interesting stories about what they’re working on), I’m reaching a point where my head feels
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#3. What’s in a tool?
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the tools I’m trying out for organizing and managing my thesis. It’s been a while since I tackled a project as extended as this one (the last one that comes to mind is the honors thesis I wrote in my undergrad–which, being a
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#2. Survey Launch
Creativity is a huge topic, so one of the ways I’m tackling the process of narrowing everything down is by running a survey. Here’s the link, if you’re interested in taking it (and you know you are… right?): www.tinyurl.com/ideas-survey. I worked on these questions over the summer, when the IRB
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#1. So it begins.
Hello and welcome. This blog will chronicle the development of my graduate thesis project. All the perils! The drama! The triumphs! Well, we’ll see about those. For now, check out some of the links above about the project to learn more about why I’m choosing to study creativity.