2 Answers

  1. I'm not an expert, but I think that since” all the processes of higher nervous activity are reflexes, ” as Pavlov said, it's the same here.

    We are talking about complex conditioned reflexes. With the involvement of the cerebral cortex and the limbic system responsible for the emotional sphere of life.

    Information passes into and out of the brain via analyzers, which are complexes of receptors, nerve fibers, and nuclei. The analyzer… he is, in general, analyzing. It perceives(through receptors), processes (information analysis), and outputs results (information synthesis).

    Information about all the details, qualitative and quantitative characteristics of objects in the surrounding space, their colors, smells, and sounds produced by them is perceived by the receptors. The receptors convert the energy of the stimulus(for example, photons-a stimulus for rods and cones of the retina) into the energy of a nerve impulse, that is, they recode it. In this form, information rises to the cortical regions of the brain through the ascending sections of the corresponding analyzers.

    Let's say a visual analyzer, I would describe it more colorfully, with heat and smells, but for an example with a joke, the visual one is enough. I turn my head and see something. Information from the eye went to the visual cortex and now I see two objects, I can only name their color, brightness, and saturation.

    The reflex circuit includes new neurons from neighboring brain regions, from associative fields, which allows you to use the higher functions of analysis and synthesis, such as recognizing objects and distinguishing images. Now I understand that that cream-colored mass over there is nothing more than an ordinary pouf. But the other man, pale and thin, with a rounded body and long dark hair, is a female. Higher cognitive functions are activated. The neurons of the limbic system are connected and feelings and emotions wake up, now I know what laughter is, what can cause it and what will happen when I joke, the hippocampus also clings at the same time and I remember 2 years of life with this person, who she is, why she is here, I remember all my life experience, and of course I remember how to joke with this person right now in this situation. New cortical structures are included, and here everything is assembled, I go through the options for the development of events after my joke, I think what will happen if… however, the impulse has already reached the effector organ-my musculoskeletal system. And all this way in a fraction of a second. I push my chair out of the way so she can't see. And when he tries to sit up, with a cry of surprise, he falls into my arms and bursts out laughing, and I break into a smile, we get on the unicorn and ride into the sunset. Duvushka is alive and well and happy. Everyone is happy. Mir-rainbow-pies-strong tea.

    And this is a reflex aftereffect. Nerve impulses continue to involve new cortical areas in the reflex circuits, forcing me to come up with new scenarios and depriving me of sleep.

  2. answer to a question from the agm:

    1. The concept of creativity. Divergent and convergent thinking.

    Creativity (from English creativity) – the level of creative giftedness, the ability to create, which is a relatively stable characteristic of the individual. Creativity and intelligence were compared for the first time in scientific research by the American psychologist J. Gilford. When creating his model of the structure of intelligence, he identified two types of thinking: convergent and divergent.

    Convergent thinking (convergent thinking) is aimed at analyzing all available ways to solve a problem in order to choose the only correct one. Convergent thinking is the basis of intelligence, which is why it is also called “intelligent”, it is associated with solving problems that have the only correct answer.

    The second type of thinking – divergent − is called “creative”. Divergent thinking is thinking “going in many directions at the same time”, it is aimed at generating many different options for solving a problem. It serves as a means of generating original creative ideas and allows for the existence of several correct answers to the same question. Divergent thinking is at the core of creativity.

    J. Guilford connects creativity with productivity of divergent thinking The well-known definition of J. Guilford: “Creativity is a process of divergent thinking”. Initially, it included in the structure of creativity, in addition to divergent thinking, the ability to transform, the accuracy of solutions, and other intellectual parameters themselves. This postulated a positive relationship between intelligence and creativity. However, in the experiments of J. R. R. Tolkien, Gilford found that highly intelligent test subjects may not show creative behavior when solving tests, but there are no low-intelligent creatives. Thus, divergent thinking does not reflect all the features of the creative process and does not coincide with it completely.

    The study of creativity abroad is conducted mainly in two directions. One is related to the question of whether creativity depends on intelligence, and focuses on measuring cognitive processes in relation to creativity.

    The other direction is concerned with finding out whether the personality with its psychological characteristics is an essential aspect of creativity, and is characterized by attention to personal and motivational traits.

    Attempts to define creativity through cognitive variables aim to assess unusual intellectual factors and cognitive styles. Since 1954, Gilford and his collaborators have identified 16 hypothetical intellectual abilities that characterize creativity. Among them are the following:

    • fluency of thought (the number of ideas that occur per unit of time);

    • flexibility of thought (ability to switch from one idea to another);

    • originality (the ability to produce ideas that differ from generally accepted views);

    • curiosity (sensitivity to problems in the world around you);

    • ability to develop hypotheses, irrelevance (logical independence of the response from the stimulus);

    • fantastic (complete isolation of the response from reality in the presence of a logical connection between the stimulus and the reaction).

    E. P. Torrance, following J. Guilford, describes creativity in terms of thinking, understanding creative thinking “as the process of sensing difficulties, problems, gaps in information, missing elements, and skewness in something; making guesses and formulating hypotheses about these shortcomings, evaluating and testing these guesses and hypotheses; the possibility of reviewing and verifying them, and finally summarizing the results.”

    A number of researchers note the role of convergent thinking in the creative process. J. Moneta notes that competence and convergent thinking play a fundamental role in the model of scientific creativity.

    The researchers ' point of view on the role of competence and knowledge in creativity is that both too low and too high competence in the problem hinders the creative process. High competence does not allow you to break out of the existing stereotypes.

    P. Langley and R. Jones emphasize the importance of memory in the process of creativity. The availability of information allows you to create non-obvious associations and come up with original solutions to the problem.

    Since creativity is the opposite of intelligence as the ability to adapt universally according to this criterion, in practice there is an effect of the inability of creatives to solve simple intellectual problems.

    The most in-depth research on the relationship between creativity and intelligence was conducted by E. L. Grigorenko. She was able to reveal that the number of hypotheses generated by an individual when solving a complex mental problem correlates with creativity according to the method of E. P. Torrens, and the correctness of the solution positively correlates with the level of general intelligence according to D. Wexler. Therefore, creativity and general intelligence are abilities that determine the process of solving a mental problem, but play different roles at different stages of it.

    The results of V. K. Kozlenko's empirical study of creativity are of great interest, confirming that such components of creativity as fluency, flexibility and originality predominate in the thinking of creative individuals.

    There is a point of view that creative achievements are associated with neuroses and pathologies of the brain and nervous system. Thus, L. Cronbach tends to see the reason for creativity in the poor regulation of the thought process, in the inability to master the qualitative “sifting” of ideas.

    There is no single point of view regarding the motivational characteristics of creativity. According to one point of view, a creative individual tries to realize himself in the best possible way, to correspond to his capabilities as much as possible, to perform new, unusual types of activities, to apply new ways of activity. According to another point of view, the motivation of creative abilities is based on the desire to take risks, to test the limit of their capabilities.

    In some studies, the hypothesis of a high correlation between IQ and creativity indicators was confirmed, while in others, the opposite results were obtained. The reasons for this discrepancy were partly seen in the lack of development of creativity diagnostics, as a result of which in some cases there were no significant correlations between different indicators of this property.

    However, the main reason was the differences in the samples on which the research was conducted. Some studies included individuals with an IQ above the norm, others with an IQ corresponding to the norm, and third, the samples were mixed with a large spread of indicators of intelligence tests. After analyzing the results of the conducted studies, taking into account this circumstance, psychologists came to the following conclusion: the relationship between the indicators of intelligence tests and creativity exists, but it is not linear, but more complex. It can be described as follows. If IQ is average or above average, then it is related to creativity linearly — the higher the IQ, the higher the creativity score. But if the intelligence test score goes beyond the upper limit of the norm, it loses its relationship with creativity.

    This fact means that creativity requires a sufficiently high (above normal) level of mental development. If this level is reached, that is, the individual has a sufficiently large amount of knowledge and formed logical thinking, then its further increase becomes indifferent to the formation of creativity. However, a very high level of intelligence is often accompanied by a decrease in creativity, which is most likely due to a specific focus of the individual — on learning, learning new information, assimilation, systematization, analysis, and critical evaluation. This focus on criticism and logic in judgments, as many believe, can prevent the generation of new ideas.

    To assess the ability to create, the concepts of “ease”, “flexibility”, and “originality”are often used as criteria. These personality traits are shown when performing special tasks. Ease is detected by the speed of completing tasks (by the number of tasks completed in the allotted time). Flexibility is measured by the number of times you switch from one object class to another. Originality – by the frequency of a given answer in a homogeneous group of subjects (original answers usually include answers that make up no more than 2 % of the same answers given by other “non-original” subjects).

    The development of creativity is unthinkable without improving a number of psychological components inherent in any gifted person (according to A. Luk). This:

    • Vigilance in search of problems as a quality of thinking, i.e. the ability to detect unusual things among the usual phenomena.

    • The ability to curtail mental operations in a long chain of reasoning and replace them with a single generalizing operation.

    • Mastery of generalizing strategies through techniques of transferring the experience of solving one problem to solving another (“to create, you need to think about, sideways thinking”).

    • Complete perception. Often, organizational skills are drowned in the inability to see the situation in its integrity and the subsequent actions of the manager, similar to patching up the “trishkin kaftan”.

    • Skills of remote association of concepts that differ in content. This quality provides people with humor with the opportunity to compose jokes, where the funny is manifested precisely in the factor of “semantic distance” between concepts. In a person's memory, words are grouped into” clusters”, into associative blanks, and then effectively used in the processes of thinking. Such associative networks provide quick access to up-to-date information stored in a person's memory.

    • Flexibility of thinking as the ability to move from one class of phenomena to another, which significantly does not coincide in content with the first (the individual does not have any mental “customs borders” between phenomena).

    • Expressiveness of evaluative skills of decision options before their objective verification.

    • Ease of generating ideas (“many and different: good and not so good”). Here it is important to use different channels of information processing to create images of these ideas. To do this, a person must know their leading channel of perception and information processing and develop the effectiveness of other channels. You can not do without the development of such mental cognitive processes as representation and imagination. Fluency skills will also play a very positive role. After all, any idea must be translated into verbal code. This is necessary not only for its publication, but also for critical analysis, for the search for inaccuracies, errors or just errors.

    Summing up the above, we note that a special type of intellectual ability, called creativity, is currently widely studied by Anglo-American psychologists. The data obtained in their studies allow us to state the following:

    • there is a link between creativity and creative achievements of the individual, but the essence of this property has not yet been fully clarified;

    • it is not yet possible to separate creativity from intelligence in the traditional sense with complete certainty;

    • there are no reliable ways to measure creativity yet.

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