After watching the documentary “Why are we creative?”, where famous personalities answered this question for 30 years (I wrote about this earlier in the blog), this topic hooked me so much that I went to study the topic of creative thinking, asking questions: ❓What distinguishes those who goes beyond? Those who make great discoveries in science create legendary cinema, masterpieces of visual and musical art that remain relevant through the centuries. ❓Their characteristics are often associated with individualism, non-comformism, protest against foundations and rules, but is it just about initiative, lack of fear of being oneself and openly expressing oneself and one’s ideas, or is there something more systemic behind this that distinguishes their thinking from others? 💡Firstly, the concept of “creativity” was previously perceived as a synonym for “creative abilities,” but this is not entirely true. The concept of creativity is broader and more applied. A bank employee, a realtor, and any specialist in a seemingly non-creative profession can be creative. This broader understanding emerged from Guilford's research into the cognitive mechanisms of creativity. He considered divergent thinking an important factor in the development of creativity. What is this? 📌Divergent thinking (from the Latin divergere - to diverge) is a concept introduced by Guilford to denote thinking going in different directions to find multiple solutions to one problem. 📌There is also the opposite - convergent thinking, aimed at accurately using previously learned algorithms to solve a problem and searching for one solution. If convergent thinking leads a person along the shortest, most reliable, proven road, then divergent thinking opens up new, unexplored paths. And it is on them that you can find something interesting, unusual and unique. There are even tests for divergent thinking: subjects are asked to come up with as many options for using ordinary things as possible. 📝The Remote Association Test (RAT) aims to find a concept that unites two others, taken from the most distant areas. Researchers have found that people with high levels of creativity (as measured by divergent thinking tests) are able to simultaneously use the areas of the brain responsible for spontaneous decisions both imagination and areas responsible for controlled thought processes. Usually these areas are not active at the same time. What is interesting is that in addition to this function of thinking that helps to create new things, the presence of developed critical thinking is not the opposite of creativity, but a necessary condition for achieving results. It involves testing assumptions for soundness and logic, and provides the necessary combination of novelty and usefulness. A huge number of discoveries in science have been based on creativity, but under the influence of critical thinking. For example, the special theory of relativity was born out of one simple question that Einstein asked: what is the simultaneity of two events? It seemed to everyone that this was obvious, but for his critical thinking the answer to this question seemed not so obvious. As a result, the most important discovery in the world of physical theories. ⚡Creativity is about the balance of trust in the creative impulse, search, impulse to learn or create a new solution, to find it among the variety of different ideas and critical thinking. What influences the development of this skill?💡Environment, culture and education. 🧩Creativity is impossible in an environment where mistakes are severely punished and are not given the opportunity to try, explore, find original ways to solve problems; in this regard, the school education system often slows down the development of divergent thinking. 🧩The attitude of the culture as a whole towards this skill is also of great importance, whether individuality and non-standard views are encouraged or, on the contrary, suppressed in society. It is possible to identify general characteristics of an environment favorable for the development of this skill (K. Rogers, P. Torrens, Lotrey, T..