The Creativity Test | 1968
“What we have concluded is that non-creative behavior is learned.”
The Creativity Test
The year is 1968, and NASA decide that if they want to hire the most innovative minds then they must understand what it is that makes someone a creative genius. They commission Dr. George Land and Dr. Beth Jarman to develop a special creativity test that would identify who was the most imaginative and creative. Essentially, the test subject would be given problems to solve. If they could come up with multiple solutions, it was a sign that they were a divergent thinker, meaning that they were using their imagination. If they struggled to come up with many solutions, it was a sign of convergent thinking which indicated they were bootstrapped by their own logic and judgement.
Since the test was fairly simple to do, they chose to give it to a selection of five-year-olds first, before moving onto ten-year-olds, fifteen-year-olds, and lastly adults over the age of twenty five.
The results are as follows:
As you can see, the outcome is rather surprising, and perhaps incredibly alarming. You see, one question that hadn’t been answered prior to conducting the test was whether we are born with creativity or whether it is something we learn throughout our lives. It is fairly clear from the results that creativity is something that we are born with and that un-creativity is learned. So, what happens to us? Why are almost all of the five-year-olds ‘creative geniuses’ and why are the large majority of adults not?
Well, if non-creative behaviour is learned then we must look at where it is taught… which is within our flawed schooling system.
Fear & The Pressure of Conformity
Having already written an in-depth article about the origins of our school system (which you can read here), I won’t dive into it again. Instead, I want to focus more on the notion of fear and conformity. Essentially, school has become a place where children do their best to ‘fit in’. With peer pressure, school rules, and what is deemed as ‘cool’ or ‘not cool’, there is less and less room for true authenticity and originality. The majority of children gradually slide into a very tight box where there is little wiggle room to develop their confidence, opinions, or sense of self away from their peers. However, it isn’t only peer pressure that may cause these creative inhibitions but also the way school teaches us to think.
According to George Land, school teach us to use both divergent and convergent thinking at the same time, which isn’t how it is supposed to work. When divergent thinking is seen as the accelerator and convergent thinking is seen as the brake, it is easy to see how this is a very limiting way to process our thoughts, with little hope for making great progress in a short space of time. In other words, we are being taught to think of an idea and immediately judge and criticise it.
“Oh, that won’t work because xyz…”
“Oh, that isn’t a good idea because xyz…”
“Oh, that’s is too difficult because xyz…'“
We barely give ourselves a chance to think of anything before squashing it with all the reasons why it can’t work or won’t happen. As a result, our solutions to any given problem become more and more limited, before we reach a point where our sole answer to any issue is “that’s just the way it is and there is nothing we can do about it.”
The truth is, there is always something we can do to solve a problem or make the world a better place, we just need to use our imagination.
Take our five-year-olds for example. Perhaps we could assume that many of the ideas that they came up with weren’t necessarily workable solutions to the problem at hand. Perhaps, they really only came up with a handful of useable solutions with the rest being useless. But the test wasn’t examining accuracy, it was examining the breadth of the ideas dreamed up. Often ideas, either wrong or right, breed more ideas that lead onto more ideas, until suddenly a workable solution to a problem is found, constructed from the best parts of the failed ideas that came before them. However, this can only be achieved if we allow our imaginations to flow without condemning everything we think of. It is about being able to think in abstraction, being able to think outside the box. We have to be willing to be wrong, to be delusional, and to be silly, in order to reach an answer that is brilliant, functional, and ingenious.
“Nature does this as well. We’ve found that evolution works this way [by] producing many alternatives then through natural selection selecting the best ones. It’s always creating a lot of possibilities before it starts selecting.”
This isn’t to say that convergent thinking isn’t useful, it just shouldn’t be done at the same time as divergent thinking. We should initially allow our creativity to flow so we can think up a large amount of new and interesting ideas, and then we should employ convergent thinking to help decide what works and what doesn’t, allowing us to finally come to a workable conclusion. By seeing them as two different mindsets with two different uses, we can learn to use both to achieve great results.
Nevertheless, as convergent thinking is the mode most people are likely more used to, it is the divergent, or creative thinking that needs to be worked upon. Creative thinking is good for the brain, in fact it uses almost all (if not all) of the brain. When we are thinking convergently or under the influence of fear, we use less and less of our brain. If you want to regain your divergent thinking and relearn how to be as creative as a five-year-old, you have to let go of the fear of being ‘wrong’ and become comfortable with being uncomfortable. This isn’t something that is only open to a small selection of people, instead it is something we can all participate in, especially if we want to build a future to look forward to on this planet.
