Researching scientists: Rex Jung
The first mentor I am researching is Rex Jung.
Mr. Jung has a PhD from University of New Mexico, specializing in clinical neuropsychology.
The first article I read was a transcript of Mr. Jung's interview on "Speaking of Psychology" with Audrey Hamilton.
This interview gave me a basic overview of the research that Mr. Jung has done, focusing on intelligence and creativity and whether there is a correlation between the two.
Creativity is distinctly different from intelligence, although it took reading through several other articles to understand how.
Mr. Jung describes creativity and intelligence as two different kinds of reasoning: creativity means using abductive reasoning - the kind that finds the best hypothesis (outcome that may be true) based on incomplete observations - and intelligence is when you're using deductive reasoning - finding the specific conclusion that all the general rules lead to ("rule-based reasoning").
So, does being very creative mean that an individual is also more intelligent and vice versa?
Not necessarily.
You don't have to be intelligent to be creative, nor does intelligence guarantee creativity.
And why is that?
Because creativity and intelligence are different kinds of reasoning, used to solve different kinds of problems. An abundance of one doesn't guarantee an abundance or a deficit of the other, it just depends on how your brain tackles puzzles.
A question I have is how can creativity be measured?
It can't be based off of how 'good' a person is at 'creative activities', like painting or designing. That's what the stereotypical definition of creativity implies - "the use of the imagination or original ideas, especially in the production of an artistic work."
Maybe there's a way to correlate creativity to a specific firing of neurons in the brain?
