Creativity has always been the driver of progress in our society. When we look closer at the many processes of creativity, and we see all the ways it can be used and applied to a huge number of different fields. The thing is our innovations are what move us forward into exciting new ways of life. But there are painful changes that are often made. For instance, our livelihood can be adversely affected and we could lose our jobs because of technological changes. Creativity is the very best answer in keeping your job and showing your value to your employer.

Different Processes of Creativity

There are lots of misinterpretations about the ways people look at creativity. This is understandable because it can be to define at times. We often look at it as the ways that left brain thinkers think, as opposed to right brain thinkers. Both can add tremendous value, but in different ways from different angles.

But creativity is actually more than that. A recent report from Scientific American stated that creativity doesn’t actually come from a specific region in the brain. Rather, creativity is looked up as a big intersection where unconscious and conscious processes come together, and also emotions.

Scientists have long understood that different areas in the brain take care of different tasks. The Wernicke area, for example, resides in the lower left region of the brain, and takes care of every aspect of language, all the way from speaking to speech comprehension. Another region known as the Dorsal Attention/Visuospatial Network is what handles our spatial awareness.

Different Brain Networks

However, these different brain regions are not the only thing that matters in regards to creativity. What is also important is how groups of these brain regions work together. In basic terms, our brains contain three (3) neural networks. There is that executive attention network that allows us to recall recent memories, to solve various problems, and to focus on completing specific tasks. Then we have the imagination network which takes care of our social relationships, and as its name implies, it imagines various phenomena all the way from assessing solutions to what others are thinking about. And finally, we have the salience network which evaluates all of our mental activity, and it switches from network to network, and chooses the best response for the current task.

So when we get to the origin of creative expression, it comes from certain key factors such as position feelings and emotions, along with free flowing improvisation that is unstructured. There was a recent study that was very well designed where jazz musicians were shown images of people who were depicting sad, happy, or neutral expressions. After seeing one of the images, they were asked to improvise music as they resided in an fMRI scanner that was mapping their brain activity as this was done. The data indicated that positive emotions and expressions are certainly connected to deeper levels of creativity.

Non-Artistic Creativity

Some people have difficulty equating creativity and innovation to fields outside of art and design. While this outlook is understandable, nothing could be further from the truth. All the wonders of technology that we see every day is an example of non-artistic creativity.

As our society develops and becomes more enlightened, the ability to innovate will actually be one of the most valuable and sought after skills by employers in virtually every field imaginable. A creative person on your staff will often by your best problem solver. They might also be the best leaders who encourage colleagues and other employees to embrace the changes that will come in the future.

Read more here – https://qz.com/1181208/how-design-thinking-powers-progress-in-healthcare-engineering-science-and-more/