Week 5 : Mind Mapping & Thinking

Advantage and Disadvantage of Creative Thinker... by Nurulhuda

To be a creative thinker, you have to act like one. Like people said ‘’to be creative, think creatively’’.

You train your skill in drawing to be a better artist. Same goes here where you have to practice yourself to that ways. It already work on other people, why not you?

As you know that habit can be aquired through alot of repitition  that happen in your life. Why not making think creatively as a habit. Here’s the advantage and disadvantage of being creative thinker .

ADVANTAGE	DISADVANTAGE
Bright future -a lot of job opportunities	-Always think the same ideas
Able to generate new ideas or invention -think out of the box	-Disable to fokus and wasting time when there are a lot of ideas including good and bad
Able to communicate instantly and think spontaneous -being known as creative person	-Being selfish and look down at other people’s work by judging your work is the best
Become independant person -do all the work alone without other people’s help	-Having isolation

TECHNIQUES by Navin Daniel

Techniques is pertaining to art, it has characteristic of particular art. It also has familiar ways in a practical way with a particular art. With techniques you have a special skill or knowledge.

It has been said that the left-hand side of our bodies are activate the right hemisphere of our brains and vice versa. The right hemisphere is thought that contains the area of intuition and insight which allows the individual to be creative. In left-handed people, the functions might be reversed configured. Studies have not yet clarified this however.

A person name Nicola Baumann and her colleagues decided to explore a method people could use to deliberately activate the right-hand side of their brains. They divided participants into two groups. One group had to squeeze a ball with their left hands while the other group had to squeeze a ball with their right hands. Participants then had to undergo a series of tasks to determine whether the ball squeezing activated different regions of the brain.

With the researchers found that squeezing a ball with one hand activated the opposite side of the brain. People who squeezed the ball with their left hands activated the right hemispheres in their brains, and vice versa for the right hand.

Nicola and her fellow researchers noted that when the participants activated their right hemispheres, this activation spread to several areas. Specifically, they found that squeezing a ball in the left hand activated a brain circuit associated with thinking holistically and intuitively, and thus more creatively.

Strategies :

1.            Become more aware and sensitive to be able notice to feelings, sight, sound and texture around you.

2.           Generate as many ideas, respond, solution or suggestion on a given task or situation to increase your flow of thought.

3.           Brainstorming technique can be used to increase fluency and flexibility of ideas to open-ended situations.

4.           Originality can be developed by practicing fluency, flexibility, flexible- habit of associate.

5.           Engage yourself more frequently in activities which require use imagination and original thinking.

6.           Never accept the first idea or solution.

7.           Get a feedback on the solutions you decide on from others who are less personally involved in the task.

8.           Try to think of what solutions someone else way offer for your problems.

9.        Give your ideas the chance to incubate

10.        Resist the temptation for immediate reward and success and cope with frustration and failure

11.         Develop independent thinking in making judgement

12.        Visualize causes and consequences and think ahead, predicting things that never happened.

13.        Be aware of your own defenses concerning the problems.

14.     Self-confident and positive.

Positive Attitude for Creativity by ammar

1.Curiosity

Creative people want to know all kinds of things. Knowledge does not require a reason. The question, "Why do you want to know that?" seems strange to the creative person, who is likely to respond, "Because I don't know the answer." Knowledge is enjoyable and often useful in strange and unexpected ways. The curious person's questioning attitude toward life is a positive one, not a destructive one reflecting skepticism or negativism. So go ask questions to everyone.

2. Challenge.

Creative people are eager to test their own limits and the limits of problems, willing to work hard, to persevere and not give up easily. They love to identify and challenge the assumptions behind ideas, proposals, problems, beliefs, and statements. Many assumptions, of course, turn out to be quite necessary and solid, but many others have been assumed unnecessarily, and in breaking out of those assumptions often comes a new idea, a new path, a new solution.

3. Constructive discontent.

Constructive discontent is necessary for a creative problem solver, for if you are happy with everything the way it is, you won't want to change anything. Only when you become discontent with something, when you see a problem, will you want to solve the problem and improve the situation. The more problems you find, the more solutions and therefore improvements you can make.

4. A belief that most problems can be solved.

By faith at first and by experience later on, the creative thinker believes that something can always be done to eliminate or help alleviate almost every problem. Problems are solved by a commitment of time and energy, and where this commitment is present, few things are impossible. Those who take on the problem with confidence will be the ones most likely to think through or around the impossibility of the problem.

5. The ability to suspend judgment and criticism.

Many new ideas, because they are new and unfamiliar, seem strange, odd, bizarre, even repulsive. Only later do they become "obviously" great. Other ideas, in their original incarnations, are indeed weird, but they lead to practical, beautiful, elegant things. Thus, it is important for the creative thinker to be able to suspend judgment when new ideas are arriving, to have an optimistic attitude toward ideas in general, and to avoid condemning them with the typical kinds of negative responses like, "That will never work; that's no good; what an idiotic idea; that's impossible," and so forth. By too quickly bringing your judgment into play, these fragile early ideas and their source can be destroyed.

6. Seeing the good in the bad.

Creative thinkers, when faced with poor solutions, don't cast them away. Instead, they ask, "What's good about it?" because there may be something useful even in the worst ideas. And however little that good may be, it might be turned to good effect or made greater.

7. Problems lead to improvements.

The attitude of constructive discontent searches for problems and possible areas of improvement, but many times problems arrive on their own. But such unexpected and perhaps unwanted problems are not necessarily bad, because they often permit solutions that leave the world better than before the problem arose. Or think about exams or papers. When you don't do as well as you want, you think, "Oh no!" But actually, you have a good insight into what you don't know and still need to learn. You are aware of the geography of your knowledge in a much more detailed form than before the errors showed up.

8. A problem can also be a solution.

A fact that one person describes as a problem can sometimes be a solution for someone else. Above we noted that creative thinkers can find good ideas in bad solutions.

9. Problems are interesting and emotionally acceptable.

Many people confront every problem with a shudder and a turn of the head. They don't even want to admit that a problem exists. As a result, often the problem persists and drives them crazy or rises to a crisis and drives them crazy. Creative people see problems as interesting challenges worth tackling. Problems are not fearful beasts to be feared or loathed; they are worthy opponents to be jousted with and unhorsed. Problem solving is fun, educational, rewarding, ego building, helpful to society.

Negative Attitudes That Block Creativity

1.      Oh no, a problem

The reaction to a problem is often a bigger problem than the problem itself. . Many people try to avoid or deny problems that why they never learned the appropriate emotional, psychological, and practical responses. They do not know that seeking problems aggressively will build confidence, increase happiness, and give you a better sense of control over your life.

2.      It can't be done

This attitude is surrendering before the battle by assuming that something cannot be done or a problem cannot be solved and giving up before starting is called self fulfilling. People said "The difficult we do immediately; the impossible takes a little longer."

    

3.      I can't do it. Or There's nothing I can do.

Some people think, well maybe the problem can be solved by some expert, but not by me because I'm not smart enough, im not an engineer . lets take a look on history. Who knows the Wright brothers were bicycle mechanics before they could invent an airplane and they not an expert aviation engineer. A good mind with a positive attitude and some good problem solving skills will go far in solving any problem. Interest in and commitment to the problem are the keys. Motivation--a willingness to expend the effort--is more important than laboratory apparatus. And remember that you can always do something. Even if you cannot totally eradicate the problem from the face of the earth, you can always do something to make the situation better.

4.      But I'm not creative.

 Everyone is creative to some extent. Most people are capable of very high levels of creativity; just look at young children when they play and imagine. The problem is that this creativity has been suppressed by education. All you need to do is let it come back to the surface. You will soon discover that you are surprisingly creative.

5.      That's childish.

In our effort to appear always mature and sophisticated, we often ridicule the creative, playful attitudes that marked our younger years. But if by acting childish can save your marriage or gets you promoted or keeps your friend from suicide, do you care whether other people describe your route to the solution as "childish. Remember that sometimes people laugh when something is actually funny, but often they laugh when they lack the imagination to understand the situation.

6.      What will people think?

There is strong social pressure to conform and to be ordinary and not creative. We usually consider what will people think.

Here are some overheard examples:

Creative Person: "I like to put water in my orange juice so it's less sweet."
Ordinary Person: "You're weird, you know?"


Ordinary Person: "What are you doing?"
Creative Person: "We're painting our mailbox."
Ordinary Person: "You're crazy."


Creative Person: "Why don't we add a little garlic?"
Ordinary Person: "Because the recipe doesn't call for garlic."


Ordinary Person: "Why are you going this way? It's longer."
Creative Person: "Because I like the drive."
Ordinary Person: "Did anyone ever tell you you're strange?"


Solutions are often new ideas, being strange, are usually greeted with laughter, contempt, or both. That's just a fact of life, so make up your mind not to let it bother you. Ridicule should be viewed as a badge of real innovative thinking.

Quotation: "Progress is made only by those who are strong enough to endure being laughed at."

7. I might fail.

Fear of failure is one of the major obstacles to creativity and problem solving. The cure is to change your attitude about failure. Failures along the way should be expected and accepted; they are simply learning tools that help focus the way toward success. We maybe facinf fail for hundred times but we learnt thousand from them.


Proverb: Mistakes aren't fun, but they sure are educational.

Characteristics of the Creative Person by hafiz & khairil

• Idea generation – coming up with new ideas, new alternatives to solving problems, and new variations on a theme (flexibility, fluency, originality, divergent thinking).
• Curiosity – wanting to know more about something; a desire to dig deeper into a subject; an unwillingness to settle for conventional explanations.
• Imagination – the faculty or action of producing ideas, especially mental images of what is not present or had not been experienced; the ability to consider alternative points of views; ways of life; and beliefs both across time and across social and physical space. Imagination is also the ability to pose counterfactuals (“what ifs”), to suppose, and to reason through the implications of such alternative scenarios.
• Reasoning by metaphor and analogy – finding homologies; recognizing common traits across otherwise dissimilar phenomena; interpreting or communicating something that is unfamiliar or ambiguous by means of comparing it to something more familiar and recognizable.
• Elaboration – related to curiosity is the desire and ability to extend an insight, story or discovery -- to consider repercussions, to push an argument to its extremes, to “unpack” statements and observations.
• Complexity – ability to identify and recognize non-obvious problems; question assumptions; see multiple paths of causation; consider multiple variables; formulate numerous hypotheses; recognize missing elements; tolerate ambiguity.
• Synthesis and combination– ability to bring together disparate bits of information and facts in order to tell a coherent story or provide a logical argument; “connecting the dots;” applying knowledge and techniques from one discipline to solve or consider problems in another discipline (x-disciplinary thinking); utilizing knowledge in a different or new context.
• Abstraction and simplification – the ability to formulate general concepts by abstracting common properties of specific instances; the ability to pose overarching “theories,” and the capacity to see the “big picture” – identify fundamentals, first principles, general structures.
• Tolerance for ambiguity – the ability to perceive value in the highly complex or asymmetrical.
• Divergent Thinking – the ability to go against the grain of the usual or expected.
• Fluency – the ability to extend an idea.
• Flexibility – the ability to cross conceptual boundaries.
• Concentration– the ability to disregard peripheral material and concepts in order to focus on the task or problem at hand.
• Persistence – the ability to pursue a solution to a problem, etc. even when faced with difficulties, roadblocks, negative feedback, and other forms of resistance.
• Entrepreneurship – the ability to go outside the approved or recognized conceptual boundaries of a situation or context in order to solve a problem, or pursue an idea.
• Intrinsic motivation – the desire to do something based on the enjoyment of the behavior iteself rather then relying on or requiring external reinforcement.
• Risk taking – the willingness to undertake a venture that may result in a loss or damage to oneself.
• Projection/empathy – the indentification with and understanding of anothers feelings, situation, or motivations.
• Originality – creating something new and useful to a discipline, domain, community.
• Story telling – using spoken or written language in narrative form to make sense of something, to theorize about something, and/or communicate something to others.
• Flow -- the automatic, effortless, yet highly focused state of consciousness when engaged in activities, often painful, risky or difficult, which stretch a person’s capacity while involving an element of novelty or discovery. Such activity can be based on the following nine elements: clear goals, immediate feedback, balance between challenges and skills, merging of action and awareness, elimination of distractions, lack of fear of failure, lack of self-consciousness, distortion of sense of time, autotelic activity (enjoyment for its own sake) (Csikszentmihalyi 1996).

What is Creativity? by zatty & farah

It Is An Ability.

WHY? Because it uses our potency of imagining, exploring and inventing something new for the next generation. It uses our capability of designing and combining new ideas so that those ideas could generate one succesfull invention. However, to produce something creative, we have to give a full commitment throughout the process of designing.

It Is Also A Process

Creativity is an intelligent process of ideas. It is a continous process of improvement and solutions. The longer the idea takes to be produced and refurbished, the better the outcome will be. However, if one idea is invented, there will always be room for improvement. A creative person will always want to make a product much better than previously. Therefore, creativity can also be seen as a never ending process.

An Attitude.

Creativity is also an attitude: the ability to accept change and newness, a willingness to play with ideas and possibilities, a flexibility of outlook, the habit of enjoying the good, while looking for ways to improve it. We are socialized into accepting only a small number of permitted or normal things, like chocolate-covered strawberries, for example. The creative person realizes that there are other possibilities, like peanut butter and banana sandwiches, or chocolate-covered prunes.

Creative Thinking

1. what is creativity
2. characteristic of creative person http://www3.wooster.edu/teagle/creativity_characteristics.php
3. attitude of creative thinker http://www.virtualsalt.com/crebook1.htm
4. technique http://indianblogger.com/improve-creative-thinking/
5. advantage and disadvantage