Living creatively

1. Humanities 101: Micro-lessons
LESSONS
Creativity crisis
Speaking visually
Living creatively
The Creativity Crisis in America
Would you like to know more?
Bronson, Po, and Ashley Merryman. "The creativity crisis." (2010): 44-49.
Kim, Kyung Hee. "The creativity crisis: The decrease in creative thinking scores on the Torrance Tests of Creative
Thinking." Creativity research journal 23.4 (2011): 285-295.
For the past 30 years, research has shown a steady
drop in students’ creative capacities. “Children seem
to struggle more with developing creative solutions to
their problems” (Kim, 2011). Students are losing the
ability to imagine, they are encouraged to conform,
and are rewarded for fostering hierarchal structures.
But creativity is important to life. “The correlation to
lifetime creative accomplishment was more than
three times stronger for childhood creativity than
childhood IQ” (Bronson & Merryman, 2010).

2. Humanities 101: Micro-lessons
LESSONS
Creativity crisis
Speaking visually
Living creatively
Can we learn to be creative?
Would you like to know more?
Edwards, Betty. "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain." CHI'97 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in
Computing Systems. 1997. 188-189.
Pink, Daniel H., and Daniel H. Pink. A whole new mind: Moving from the information age to the conceptual age.
Vol. 50. New York: Riverhead Books, 2005.
Teacher and author, Dr. Betty Edwards argues that the
price of relegating the arts to the sidelines, is that we
have lost the ability to think and communicate visually. As
a culture we have emphasized the importance of reading
comprehension (language arts) and quantitative literacy
(math and science), but we are missing an entire process
of the mind. We learn better if we think and speak using
all three forms: language, numeracy, and visually. Test
scores would improve and our students abilities to
understand and communicate would be improved.
Art has this long history, predating even
language, of expressing nonverbal information.“

3. Humanities 101: Micro-lessons
LESSONS
Creativity crisis
Speaking visually
Living creatively
How do we live creatively?
Would you like to know more?
Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly, and Isabella Selega Csikszentmihalyi, eds. Optimal experience: Psychological studies of
flow in consciousness. Cambridge university press, 1992.
Seligman, Martin EP. Learned optimism: How to change your mind and your life. Vintage, 2006.
Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi developed a theory
concerning optimal experiences. These experiences are
known as “being in the zone” or a “zen moment”. They
lose sense of time and are not distracted by others. And
when people are in this moment they exist somewhere
between boredom and anxiety. He calls these moments
“flow”. The most successful people experience “flow”
more regularly and are able to master skills. They do so
because they live creatively. And research shows that
people who experience flow, live longer!