“I’m just not creative” is a refrain that I hear over and over as I teach art workshops to adults. I always protest, believing that EVERYONE is meant to be creative, but our training as we reached adulthood too often managed to squelch it out of us. I was very blessed to have parents who encouraged and valued creativity, and who, as scientists, were very creative and innovative in their field. There is the mistaken idea that creativity is only for professional artists, or that minuscule percent of the population that was born creative, with the implication being that the majority of humanity is simply not.
It is reported that during the space race NASA wanted to identify the next generation of creative geniuses so that they could be trained and recruited to be the next generation of rocket scientists. They contracted Dr. George Land and Beth Jarman to create a ‘creativity test’ (see Breakpoint and Beyond: Mastering the Future Today) and gave it to 1600 school children ages 4 and 5. They were very surprised to find that a whopping 98 percent of these children scored at the creative genius level. By the time these same kids were 10, only 30 percent still scored at the genius level, and by age 15 it dropped to only 12 percent. Sadly, the same test given to 200,000 adults yielded only two percent creative geniuses.
In subsequent NASA reports, there were lengthy discussions about these findings, and how our society discourages creativity. At least some of this material is available online for public consumption. Some observations of note:
- When an idea fails to produce the results expected, the creator is punished
- creativity threatens the insecure
- it is difficult to communicate creative ideas
In his book, Applied Imagination, Osborne aprroaches the issue of creativity on the basis that everyone has imagination and that PRACTICE, yes PRACTICE! with the appropriate techniques will increase the proliferation of ideas – – otherwise know as CREATIVITY.
Over and over in NASA memorandums from the 1990s (THAT IS 30 YEARS AGO!) I read the conclusions that creativity is not a strictly inherited trait only granted to a small, gifted portion of the population. Actually, the studies show that we are born as CREATIVE BEINGS, and then most of us somewhere along the way become convinced we are not.
The good news is that we can reignite that sense of creativity by simply using it! An art class, gardening, cake decorating… so many options! What will you do this year to include a creative practice in your life?
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