Research that our Psychology of Creativity instructor, Evangelia G. Chrysikou, had done indicated that techniques for boosting creative potential may involve lowering cognitive control ─ breaking down established ways of viewing the world or invoking unconscious thought processes.
This helps overcome functional fixedness and puts people in a more open state of mind for problem-solving.
At my daughter‘s birthday party about fifty years ago, I tried lowering cognitive control by overcoming functional fixedness – the idea there is ‘one right way’ of doing something – with an elephant drawing competition.
Without mentioning that they were supposed to be drawing an elephant, I gave the following instructions:
- Draw a circle in the upper left part of the paper.
- Draw eight vertical parallel lines in the lower right part.
- Add two short curved lines and one long curved line to the circle.
- Draw a little circle inside the first circle and a big floppy circle beside it.
- Draw an oval that touches the first circle and runs along the top of the parallel lines.
My favourite drawing looked like the computer painting above, as I recall (remember that was before we had digital cameras so we didn’t take pictures of everything we saw). It won for ‘best use of colour‘ and did well in the ‘best legs‘ category, but placed well down in the ‘looks like an elephant‘ part of the competition. I remember thinking this drawing would have done well in a 'looks like a moose‘ contest...
The generic parts technique that I used in the elephant-drawing contest above is one way of doing this ─ by describing something in terms of its generic features rather than its actual name or function.
I will write more blog posts about creativity-enhancing research as well as my take on how the theories involved can be applied by artists.
