In this provocative book, acclaimed psychologists Thomas Ward, Ronald Finke, and Steven Smith eloquently portray the fascinating processes of the creative mind at work, and hand us the invaluable tools with which we can mine our most valued and important resource. Creativity - and the methods by which we can heighten it - has recently become the focus of a burgeoning and exciting new field in psychology. By skillfully blending this cutting-edge scientific research with the real-world experiences of humanity's most successful creative thinkers, this provocative book isolates the mechanisms by which our mind conceives innovative and creative ideas. Since all creative thoughts emerge from skillfully drawing upon the well of knowledge we already possess, this book tackles the very nature of this knowledge. As these astute authors convincingly argue, the same mental processes that help a chemist like Kary Mullis discover a revolutionary new scientific principle or inspire an artist like Beethoven to create a marvelous symphony underlie the host of creative endeavors we all undertake. This inspiring book applies these basic tenets to a rich variety of creative pursuits, including engineering, design, writing, business, science, art, and even the challenges of our everyday lives. We learn how best to combine and play with the images, words, and concepts that spark fertile new ideas and lead to ever more impressive creative leaps.

Creative Cognition combines original experiments with existing work in cognitive psychology to provide the first explicit account of the cognitive processes and structures that contribute to creative thinking and discovery. Creative Cognition combines original experiments with existing work in cognitive psychology to provide the first explicit account of the cognitive processes and structures that contribute to creative thinking and discovery. In separate chapters, the authors take up visualization, concept formation, categorization, memory retrieval, and problem solving. They describe novel experimental methods for studying creative cognitive processes under controlled laboratory conditions, along with techniques that can be used to generate many different types of inventions and concepts. Unlike traditional approaches, Creative Cognition considers creativity as a product of numerous cognitive processes, each of which helps to set the stage for insight and discovery. It identifies many of these processes as well as general principles of creative cognition that can be applied across a variety of different domains, with examples in artificial intelligence, engineering design, product development, architecture, education, and the visual arts. Following a summary of previous approaches to creativity, the authors present a theoretical model of the creative process. They review research involving an innovative imagery recombination technique, developed by Finke, that clearly demonstrates that creative inventions can be induced in the laboratory. They then describe experiments in category learning that support the provocative claim that the factors constraining category formation similarly constrain imagination and illustrate the role of various memory processes and other strategies in creative problem solving.