Exploring Intelligence — Creative Minds

Which Part of Our Mind is Not Creative?

I was excited to find that Jeff Hawkins touched on the topic of creativity in his book On Intelligence. I think creativity is often highly misunderstood in our current culture. We think doing anything differently than it has been done before is creative. Yet our brain is primed to find patterns. Creativity can look very different within different personality structures. But I have yet to find a child who is intrinsically uncreative.

Creativity exists in all of us. It is only with much oppression that it may begin to shrink. But then again, sometimes oppression only turns the creativity up as a survival mechanism.

Hawkins argues that humans are creative in so much of our lives, creative in solving mundane everyday problems, that we often do not recognize it as creativity. He uses the example of finding a restroom in a restaurant you have never been to before. This is easy for us to do and we don’t think of it as a creative act. Yet we are not finding the restaurant directly from our memory. But we are using information from…