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Max Grogorenko

We all live our own lives, sometimes interesting, sometimes boring. We communicate with other people, work, fuss around and rest. We are busy with our everyday routine, do something special like nothing on earth. We watch, read, listen and learn something. Is there a lot of creativity in our lives? Doweneeditornot? Ifwedothanwhy?How is creativity connected with fullness and depth of our life? Can our understanding of creativity or creative work change our life for the best? Let’strytofindout.


Creativity is a basic human need which makes us humans. Human rationality is based on his ability to creatively understand and transform the outside world. It is capacity to creativity which determined survival of human species far back in the past.

Creativity is an ability to join familiar elements of surrounding reality into new, non-standard combinations and to gain results different from known and natural.

Creativity is a creation of subjective new and valuable materially and spiritually for the creator himself and others.

Creativity is a way ofactive cognition of the world and yourself.

Creativity is a tool to transform the world.

Creativity is a way to share information.

Creativity is a way of acquisition of the outside world.

Creativity is a way to make oneself known.

Creativity is always a process of active cooperation between a man and the world which results in change in the world and a man himself.

I’m speaking of creativity in every field of human life: comprehension and transformation of the world (science, production, etc.), art, everyday activity, interrelations between humans and surrounding reality.

What can be called creativity and what can’t? This question doesn’t have a definite answer. Everyone can give his own correct answer at given moment depending on circumstances.

Think whether production of repeated non-original values can be called as creativity? Can we call a result which is easy to repeat a creative process?

Perhaps, any hand made object will bear some features of individuality. Can we call a process that didn’t involve a stroke of genius that was just the result of rational work a creative process?

How is creative process carried out?

Everything that a man does one way or another is based on creative process. By every action a man transforms surrounding reality, to a greater or lesser degree, with a greater or lesser understanding of this process, its reasons and results. A creative process always anticipates a choice from several known opportunities or a search of new solutions, unknown to to a man.

This process is labour-consuming and requires high engagement and great piece of work. That’s why in order to save resources all repeated actions are “recorded” by consciousness in the form of short programs and executes them when necessary avoiding a phase of conscious decision making. Generally, a man performs a series of such programmed actions during the day and making only few conscious decisions connected with complex and non-standard tasks. Human consciousness, in this case, is a very economic and efficient tool, which spends most of its general resources on the processes which are really important for a man and frees him from most routing tasks.

What does creative process represent? What phases does it consist of? The answer to this question was accurately formulated by Graham Wallace, who marked out four phases of creative thinking (this description goes back to the report of Jules Henri Poincaré made in 1908):

1. Preparation – formulation of a task, an attempt to solve it;

2. Incubation – temporary distraction from the task;

3. Inspiration – emersionofintuitivesolution

4. Verification – testing and/or implementation of the solution.

(See: Wallas. G. The Art of Thought. N. Y., 1926; see also: R. Solso Cognitive psychology 1996;Henri Poincaré. MathematicalCreation / Jacques Salomon Hadamard.Адамар Ж. Исследование психологии процесса изобретения в области математики. М., 1970. Приложение III.).

As seen, here the question is not about simple combination of known facts but about search for solution that actively engages unconsciousness. The phase of “transferring” of the task into unconsciousness is necessary here, i.e. accurately defined task with further distraction from it at the level of objective consciousness and expectation for inspiration.

How does it work? Human consciousness operates with limited amount of information which, foremost, is known to a man and, secondly, is admitted by consciousness as related to a specific task. The same relates to the method of combination of known facts. Certainly, a man who is a specialist in some question uses a lot more facts and a lot more variants of their combination rather than a man who is new to this question. However, for both of them moments of inspiration are important because during these moments the most beautiful and effective solutions of the task come. These are moments when correct solution seems to come by itself, sometimes as a non-standard method of combination of known facts or sometimes as a complete new occurrence.

Such moments of inspiration are result of work of subconsciousness which “knows”, understands, process much more information than consciousness. This result should overcome a critical barrier dividing consciousness and subconsciousness, having been admitted by this barrier as interesting and useful.

The role of a critical barrier is very high: if it hadn’t separated subconsciousness from consciousness human consciousness would have drowned in stream of information: facts from outside world, memory, models of progression of evens, etc. A man couldn’t be able to function. The degree of barrier permeability differs from human to human and depends much on the level stereotyped thinking implanted in him. Most people rejects ideas using principal “it can’t be so it can never happen” as early as the moment of evaluation of the idea by their inner censor, i.e. these ideas don’t even reach human’s consciousness.

Luckily, tolerance of the critical barrier may change. It can be “taught” to pass promising ideas and solutions through. Such teaching process is very useful. Thus we come to a topic of creativity cultivation – ability which is necessary for creative process. К

Psychologicalvocabularydeterminescreativityasfollows: “Creativity (lat. Creatio - making) – is a creative abilities of an individual, characterized by his readiness to produce conceptually new ideas, which are a part of giftedness structure as an independent factor. According to EllisPaulTorrancecreativityincludes hypersensitivity to problems and to deficit or inconsistency of experience; it includes actions to determine these problems and search for solutions on the basis of hypothesizing, actions to verify and change hypotheses and actions to define the results of the solution.”(Psychologicaldictionaryhttp://psi.webzone.ru/st/050200.htm)

Creativity, creative giftedness is an originally inherent ability. Somebodyhasalotofit, somebodynot. However, most people possess sufficient amount of creative abilities and they can and should be developed. There are a lot of methods to do it. What they have in common is that they all use multilevel creative tasks that anticipate plenty of solutions. Any type of artistry that allows to utilize intuition and subconsciousness in creative process can be one of the effective and interesting methods.

Why does one need to create?

So, having gained insight of what creativity is and what creative process represents let’s ask a question why a man should create?

The most important thing is cultivation of creativity, ability to assign tasks, separation of available information from the one to be discovered, determination of methods of task solution, broadening of abilities to combine variants and search for non-standard solutions and also development of abilities to transfer tasks to the unconsciousness and receive processed answer.

It is important to remember that everything in human develops using one and the same principle: utilizable part (ability, skill) develops and idle part atrophies. Everything inside human is connected: having learnt to combineelements in one of the areas, say in photography, a man can easily learn to solve similar tasks in another area, not connected with photography, for example, in psychology.

Thus, a man actively develops his tool of learning the world – his mind – in all of its aspects: conscious and unconscious and mechanism of effective relations between these two aspects.

Thanks to creativity a man receives a powerful tool of cognition of himself and outside world because by combining different elements of reality using different methods and by creating something new he discovers the structure of the universe. By setting a task a ,an discovers his abilities. Nothing can be created in the world that could contradict existing laws and wasn’t anticipated in potency, so everything new that a man creates opens new laws according to which this new can exist and interact with other elements of the world. This equallyrelates to the laws operating the universe and to the laws operating inside human. Since everything in the world is interconnected when creating something in outside world a man can discover something inside himself and developing his abilities he can learn something new about outside world.

By discovering something a man sort of assumes it, gains power over this part of the world. By creating something he assumes a part of the world through this new something that he has created. In particular it is peculiar to art. Thus, through creativity a man spreads his power over cognized aspects of himself and the world becoming a master of his own life.

Having cognized and having gained power a man receives opportunity to change himself and the world around for the better.

Thanks to creativity a man can share his subjective experience, his experience in overcoming his beasts, his experience of cognition, experience of creation and experience in making mistakes through art, scientific works and other products of creative activity.

And of course, creativity is a method of interrelation with the world thanks to which an alchemic process of changing the world and a man takes place.

As well as, creativity, creation of something new brings pleasure to any individual. You must admit that this is a strong motivation!

If the result of creative process is needed and useful to other peopled it is great! It makes our lives better. Even if it has little value for others it is of great value for the creator himself as it makes him evolve and become more harmonic and multisided individual.