Learned non creativity

In the sixties NASA had plenty of smart employees but they needed to know which employees were the best at thinking creatively. They valued these creative thinkers highly and wanted to select them for important projects. They didn’t know how to do this by themselves so they approached George Land. Land solved NASA’s problem with an extremely simple test.

The test was so simple that Land wanted to find out if children could take it.

It turns out they could and the results were a great success so Land turned the experiment into a longitudinal study. Meaning he would return to the children every few years and see how time has affected their results on the test.

What Land was testing for was a genius level of imagination and creative thinking. The results he found were as follows:

Age 5 – 98%
Age 10 – 30%
Age 15 – 12%
Adult (average age 31) – 2%

Land expounds on this data to say there are two kinds of thinking at play. There is divergent thinking where you expand your options by brainstorming all the possible solutions and then there is convergent thinking where you start to narrow down the options most likely based on viability such as budget constraints or effort needed.

Land goes on to say that where most people go wrong is that they start convergent thinking too early (like immediately after the idea pops into your head).

I think Land’s trend alludes to the societal pressure to become a realistic adult. Of learning the hard way that others will shoot down your suggestions. Then learning it so well that you start to practice it internally too.

If every idea gets stamped out by your internal critic before it has the chance to become a fully formed well thought out solution then of course creative thinking is going to be hard.

Fortunately Land has a solution to this problem.

A way to exercise your creative thinking is to take an ordinary object like a pen and come up with as many uses for it as possible and the more you practice this exercise the more you develop your creative thinking.