• Greek philosophers like Plato rejected the concept of creativity, preferring to see art as a form of discovery. Asked in The Republic, "Will we say, of a painter, that he makes something?", Plato answers, "Certainly not, he merely imitates."
• Most ancient cultures, including Ancient Greece, Ancient China, and Ancient India, lacked the concept of creativity, seeing art as a form of discovery and not creation. The ancient Greeks had no terms corresponding to "to create" or "creator" except for the expression "poiein" ("to make"), which only applied to poiesis (poetry) and to the poietes (poet, or "maker" who made it. Plato did not believe in art as a form of creation. Asked in The Republic, "Will we say of a painter that he makes something?" he answers, "Certainly not, he merely imitates."
• It is commonly argued that the notion of "creativity" originated in Western cultures through Christianity, as a matter of divine inspiration. According to scholars, "the earliest Western conception of creativity was the Biblical story of the creation given in Genesis." However, this is not creativity in the modern sense, which did not arise until the Renaissance. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, creativity was the sole province of God; humans were not considered to have the ability to create something new except as an expression of God's work. A concept similar to that in Christianity existed in Greek culture. For instance, Muses were seen as mediating inspiration from the gods. Romans and Greeks invoked the concept of an external creative "daemon" (Greek) or "genius" (Latin), linked to the sacred or the divine. However, none of these views are similar to the modern concept of creativity, and the rejection of creativity in Favor of discovery and the belief that individual creation was a conduit of the divine would dominate the West probably until the Renaissance and even later.
• It was during the Renaissance that creativity was first seen, not as a conduit for the divine, but from the abilities of "men”. The development of the modern concept of creativity began in the Renaissance, when creation began to be perceived as having originated from the abilities of the individual and not God. This could be attributed to the leading intellectual movement of the time, aptly named humanism, which developed an intensely human-centric outlook on the world, valuing the intellect and achievement of the individual. From this philosophy arose the Renaissance man (or polymath), an individual who embodies the principles of humanism in their ceaseless courtship with knowledge and creation. One of the most well-known and immensely accomplished examples is Leonardo da Vinci.
• However, the shift from divine inspiration to the abilities of the individual was gradual and would not become immediately apparent until the Enlightenment. By the 18th century and the Age of Enlightenment, mention of creativity (notably in aesthetics), linked with the concept of imagination, became more frequent. In the writing of Thomas Hobbes, imagination became a key element of human cognition; William Duff was one of the first to identify imagination as a quality of genius, typifying the separation being made between talent (productive, but not new ground) and genius.
• As an independent topic of study, creativity effectively received no attention until the 19th century. Runco and Albert argue that creativity as the subject of proper study began seriously to emerge in the late 19th century with the increased interest in individual differences inspired by the arrival of Darwinism. In particular, they refer to the work of Francis Galton, who, through his eugenicist outlook took a keen interest in the heritability of intelligence, with creativity taken as an aspect of genius.
• In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, leading mathematicians and scientists such as Hermann von Helmholtz (1896) and Henri Poincare (1908) began to reflect on and publicly discuss their creative processes.
• The insights of Poincare and von Helmholtz were built on in early accounts of the creative process by pioneering theorists such as Graham Wallas and Max Wertheimer. In his work Art of Thought, published in 1926, Wallas presented one of the first models of the creative process. In the Wallas stage model, creative insights and illuminations may be explained by a process consisting of five stages:
• 1. preparation (preparatory work on a problem that focuses the individual's mind on the problem and explores the problem's dimensions),
• 2. incubation (in which the problem is internalized into the unconscious mind and nothing appears externally to be happening),
• 3. intimation (the creative person gets a "feeling" that a solution is on its way),
• 4. illumination or insight (in which the creative idea bursts forth from its preconscious processing into conscious awareness);
• 5. verification (in which the idea is consciously verified, elaborated, and then applied).
• Wallas' model is also often treated as four stages, with "intimation" seen as a sub-stage.
• Wallas considered creativity to be a legacy of the evolutionary process, which allowed humans to quickly adapt to rapidly changing environments. Simonton provides an updated perspective on this view in his book, Origins of Genius: Darwinian Perspectives on creativity.
• In 1927, Alfred North Whitehead gave the Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh, later published as Reality. He is credited with having coined the term "creativity" to serve as the ultimate category of his metaphysical scheme: "Whitehead actually coined the term—our term, still the preferred currency of exchange among literature, science, and the arts—a term that quickly became so popular, so omnipresent, that its invention within living memory, and by Alfred North Whitehead of all people, quickly became occluded".
• Although psychometric studies of creativity had been conducted by The London School of Psychology as early as 1927 with the work of H.L. Hargreaves into the Faculty of Imagination, the formal psychometric measurement of creativity, from the standpoint of orthodox psychological literature, is usually considered to have begun with J.P. Guilford's address to the American Psychological Association in 1950. The address helped to popularize the study of creativity and to focus attention on scientific approaches to conceptualizing creativity. Statistical analyses led to the recognition of creativity (as measured) as a separate aspect of human cognition from IQ-type intelligence, into which it had previously been subsumed. Guilford's work suggested that above a threshold level of IQ, the relationship between creativity and classically measured intelligence broke down.
• There has been much empirical study in psychology and cognitive science of the processes through which creativity occurs. Interpretation of the results of these studies has led to several possible explanations of the sources and methods of creativity.
• Incubation is a temporary break from creative problem solving that can result in insight. Empirical research has investigated whether, as the concept of "incubation" in Wallas's model implies, a period of interruption or rest from a problem may aid creative problem-solving. Early work proposed that creative solutions to problems arise mysteriously from the unconscious mind while the conscious mind is occupied on other tasks. This hypothesis is discussed in Csikszentmihalyi's five-phase model of the creative process which describes incubation as a time when your unconscious takes over. This was supposed to allow for unique connections to be made without our consciousness trying to make logical order out of the problem.
• Ward lists various hypotheses that have been advanced to explain why incubation may aid creative problem-solving and notes how some empirical evidence is consistent with a different hypothesis: Incubation aids creative problems in that it enables "forgetting" of misleading clues. The absence of incubation may lead the problem solver to become fixated on inappropriate strategies of solving the problem.
• J. P. Guilford drew a distinction between convergent and divergent production (commonly renamed convergent and divergent thinking). Convergent thinking involves aiming for a single, correct, or best solution to a problem (e.g., "How can we get a crewed rocket to land on the moon safely and within budget?"). Divergent thinking, on the other hand, involves the creative generation of multiple answers to an open-ended prompt (e.g., "How can a chair be used?"). Divergent thinking is sometimes used as a synonym for creativity in psychology literature or is considered the necessary precursor to creativity. However, as Runco points out, there is a clear distinction between creative thinking and divergent thinking. Creative thinking focuses on the production, combination, and assessment of ideas to formulate something new and unique, while divergent thinking focuses on the act of conceiving of a variety of ideas that are not necessarily new or unique. Other researchers have occasionally used the terms flexible thinking or fluid intelligence, which are also roughly similar to (but not synonymous with) creativity. While convergent and divergent thinking differ greatly in terms of approach to problem solving, it is believed that both are employed to some degree when solving most real-world problems.
• In 1992, Finke et al. proposed the "Geneplore" model, in which creativity takes place in two phases: a generative phase, where an individual constructs mental representations called "preinventive" structures, and an exploratory phase where those structures are used to come up with creative ideas. Some evidence shows that when people use their imagination to develop new ideas, those ideas are structured in predictable ways by the properties of existing categories and concepts. Weisberg argued, by contrast, that creativity involves ordinary cognitive processes yielding extraordinary results.
• Helie and Sun proposed a framework for understanding creativity in problem solving, namely the Explicit-Implicit Interaction (EII) theory of creativity. This theory attempts to provide a more unified explanation of relevant phenomena (in part by reinterpreting/integrating various fragmentary existing theories of incubation and insight).
• The EII theory relies mainly on five basic principles:
• 1. the co-existence of and the difference between explicit and implicit knowledge
• 2. simultaneous involvement of implicit and explicit processes in most tasks
• 3. redundant representation of explicit and implicit knowledge
• 4. integration of the results of explicit and implicit processing
• 5. iterative (and possibly bidirectional) processing
• A computational implementation of the theory was developed based on the CLARION cognitive architecture and used to simulate relevant human data. This work is an initial step in the development of process-based theories of creativity encompassing incubation, insight, and various other related phenomena.
• In The Act of Creation, Arthur Koestler introduced the concept of bisociation – that creativity arises as a result of the intersection of two quite different frames of reference. In the 1990s, various approaches in cognitive science that dealt with metaphor, analogy, and structure mapping converged, and a new integrative approach to the study of creativity in science, art, and humour emerged under the label conceptual blending.