We are told to 'Read The Question' in essays and examinations. Marks are awarded for nice writing and regurgitation, not for creative and lateral thinking. Universities are often worse than high-schools which are worse than junior schools. At University, we learn to reference every assertion and never, never to question the wisdom and ultimate knowledge of our professors. By the time we leave full-time education, we are functional members of society, but our creative potential has been very largely stifled.
The good and great have commented on this in the quotations on education. There is even a whole school of philosophy Conventionalism that describes how new knowledge is constrained.
A caveat: Academic knowledge is not bad. In fact much of it is very interesting and can be used in many ways. It is just that when all you learn is to know and to repeat knowledge, then there is little creativity going on. As adults, we do become less creative, but not in the traditional way. Our continued creative decline is more due to falling into a number of cognitive traps than the fading of old age.
Where creativity does fade away is when we do not use it. One of the biggest culprits here is the simple pattern of human habit. Once we start doing something one way, we get comfortable with it and then do not change or vary it.
We find the best route home and then we always drive that way, even if it is choked with traffic. Few of us read much 'Too busy! Those of us who do study and become experts can easily fall into the expert trap, where experts can spend more time defending their hill than building it further. Here are some quotes by experts who should have known better, but were too busy being expert. And here are more quotes about what experts should really do. We repeat this in our roles in organizations.
When you are a manager, you find you have the rapt attention of everyone below you, and it is very easy to assume that they are in thrall of your intelligence and wisdom. A final creativity aid is pacing. The saying "think on your feet" really isn't that far off. The Stanford Graduate School of Education produced a trial showing that participants' creativity roughly doubled when they were walking. Although it may not be the answer to every problem, walking will help stimulate your mind.
With age, comes wisdom, and in most cases, the knowledge acquired over time can be a great benefit. However, sometimes people's predisposition to previous conclusions or default thinking, may inhibit them from reaching a unique, viable, and creative solutions.
This is where exploitation and exploration come into play. When adults face a new and sudden problem, they automatically exploit the knowledge required in their past to solve the situation in the present. On the opposite side of the spectrum is exploration or trying something different. Exploration yields a result that may not be as obvious by employing a new way of thinking. Additionally, exploration opens the mind to considering countless ideas that may never work, similar to the way children and teenagers daydream.
Some creative types—such as lyrical poets and mathematicians—tend to have early peaks and relatively rapid declines, whereas others—among them, historians and philosophers—are prone to later peaks and gradual, even negligible declines.
Second, creative people vary greatly in total lifetime productivity. At one extreme are the one-hit wonders, who make single contributions; their creativity is almost over before it begins. At the other end of the spectrum are highly prolific creators who make dozens, if not hundreds, of contributions and who are often still going strong well into their 60s and 70s, if not beyond.
Third, career age has more bearing on someone's creative trajectory than chronological age. Hence, early bloomers who start young will have their peak shifted forward, whereas late bloomers who start older will have their pinnacle delayed.
Some late bloomers do not truly hit their stride until their 60s or 70s. They often drudged away in uninspiring jobs for decades before discovering their true passion. One striking implication of these results is that it seems unlikely that creative declines are caused simply by aging brains.
If that were the case, it would be hard to explain why the creative path differs by domain, lifetime output, or the time someone embarks on his or her career. In one experiment, researchers presented preschoolers, pre-adolescents, teenagers, and adults with two scenarios and two possible hypotheses that could explain each scenario.
One hypothesis was an obvious explanation while the other was an unusual, non-obvious one. Adults chose the obvious hypothesis, while children more often chose the non-obvious. Most of the time, creativity is in the non-obvious choice. When searching for ways to explain observations or brainstorming new ideas, encourage yourself and your teams to set the obvious explanation aside while you give at least brief thought to the less obvious. Though it may slow down the search for an answer, it may speed up the process of unlocking creativity.
In another part of the experiment, researchers shared a social situation with the same age groups. Again, there were two possible explanations, but this time, one focused on people's traits i.
Adults chose the dispositional hypothesis while children more often chose the situational one.
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