Why do creative ideas and solutions to unresolved problems benefit from taking a break? The idea of unconscious work as an explanation is so appealing that even after reading this paper, which states clearly that unconscious work is a fantasy based on no clear theory and no clear empirical evidence, some readers will claim that we are saying the…

Despite an established body of research characterizing how creative individuals explore their "external" world, relatively little is known about how such individuals navigate their "inner mental life", especially in unstructured contexts such as periods of awake rest. Across two studies, the present manuscript tested the…

Much modern laboratory research on creative thinking, or "in vitro" research, is based on the "remote-associates" perspective, which assumes that creative advances arise through bringing together ideas which were previously "remotely associated," that is, not directly linked. That view has provided the foundation for…

The starting reasoning and promoting switch from intuitive system 1 to deliberate system 2 for provoking creative thinking is lacking feasible model, especially during the global pandemic. We established a visible, trainable and learnable (VTL) model with digital technique to promote this dual switch for creative thinking. This study was…

Chance favors the prepared mind, said Louis Pasteur. Sometimes, significant breakthroughs occur when we creatively integrate new information, leading to a creative insight or an Aha! moment, while at other times when we fail to use a clue, we remain stuck in our habitual thinking patterns. In this study, we hypothesized that the brain's transient…

Even after many decades of productive research, problem solving instruction is still considered ineffective. In this study we address some limitations of extant problem solving models related to the phenomenon of insight during problem solving. Currently, there are two main views on the source of insight during problem solving. Proponents of the…

Metaphor generation is both a creative act and a means of learning. When learning a new concept, people often create a metaphor to connect the new concept to existing knowledge. Does the manner in which people generate a metaphor, via sudden insight (Aha! moment) or deliberate analysis, influence the quality of generation and subsequent learning…

The intuitions of teachers have been found to take a variety of forms in general education (John, 2003). However, in the field of additional language (L+) teaching, the lion's share of past work has focused on the improvisational form of intuition (e.g., Borg, 2015; Richards, 1998; Smith, 1996). Moreover, the ways in which intuition plays a role…

This article contains 15 "takeaways" about how to teach organic creativity, from actual teachers with several hundred total years of experience. Teachers of English, physics, Advanced Placement Calculus, science, theater, the visual arts, dance, school administration, school counseling, educational psychology professing, world languages,…

Divergent thinking involves the ability to find many different and new responses or solutions to open-ended problems. The ability to think divergently has been associated with different cognitive processes, including intuitive and rational thinking styles. However, research has not specifically addressed the extent to which divergent thinking is…

The literature on insight problems--problems that supposedly can only be solved by rejection of an initial faulty problem representation and sudden comprehension of another, nonobvious representation (restructuring)--suggests that the size of initial representations affects the very process of problem solving. Large initial representations impose…

Scholars studying intuition are frequently focusing on decision takers and to this day, they conceptualize intuition as a form of judgment. More recently, the notion of intuition in creativity has been challenged by the argument that although the creative process may contain intuitive judgments, any creative idea or solution is essentially the…

In 2012 the New Zealand Government identified as a priority the need to address the undersupply of students studying STEM subjects for delivering its Business Growth Agenda. Low engagement and retention rates in STEM subjects contribute to the shortage of STEM graduates, producing a negative impact on the New Zealand economy. This Teaching and…

This book examines research on creative thinking, both current and historical. It explores two dimensions of human thought (time and space) and two modes of thinking (conscious and unconscious) as well as both left and right brain functions and artistic and scientific creative activities. The book proposes a "Double Circulation" model of…

This article reports the development of a brief self-report measure of dispositional insight problem solving, the Dispositional Insight Scale (DIS). From a representative Australian database, 1,069 adults (536 women and 533 men) completed an online questionnaire. An exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis revealed a 5-item scale, with all…