PSY1926

Creativity and innovation are essential to our ability to flexibly and positively make changes in our lives – both individually and collectively. How do our minds, brains, and environments together enable the generation and shaping of useful and influential novel ideas? This seminar course investigates this question, drawing on research and observations from the cognitive and brain sciences and other disciplines such as design, art, and computer science. Core parts of the course involve reading and discussing original research articles along with active hands-on/minds-on within-class collaborative activities. One integrative theme throughout the course is the ways in which creative thinking/making is boosted when we contextually vary the extent to which we deliberately exert cognitive control in the pursuit of creative goals. A second integrative theme is understanding how we need both concreteness and abstraction to best realize our making/creating endeavors.

001475