Creativity – What's the Role of Memory?
Creativity – What's the Role of Memory?
Jonathan Firth's Memory & Metacognition Updates #28
Before I get into today’s topic, just a quick reminder that I am running a Zoom session on study skills on Monday 6 Feb 2023, 16:00–17:30 UK time. It can be found on my university’s website here.
Hello all! As promised, I’d like to spend a bit of time focusing on creativity, and thinking about how it connects to memory, metacognition, and study skills.
It’s a big area of interest for me. I currently teach a 4th year undergraduate module called ‘Creativity in Education’, and a few years back I wrote a book titled Creative Thinking, as well as a supporting workbook.
I also feel that creativity is widely misunderstood. The blog post below explains how it does not apply just to traditional arts subjects:
Blog post: What is creativity really about? (Medium, free to access)
The connection to memory
At first glance, memory and creativity are very different processes. After all, memory is about recalling old information, and creativity is about making something new.
It might seem that the two things are unrelated – or even opposites.
However, there is broad agreement in the cognitive science community that skills such as evaluation, creativity and critical thinking are not disconnected from knowledge. And despite the discourse around transferable skills, they don’t easily transfer across situations, either.
Specifically, a store of knowledge in long-term memory helps you to be more creative. It would be hard to create something new if you didn’t know anything, right?
People with more knowledge are more creative, particularly if the knowledge is relevant to the creative problem at hand.
One way to look at this is that creativity is often more about recombining existing information than creating new information. For example:
Most authors don’t invent entirely new styles of novel, but instead use existing genres and tropes, and familiar settings.
Composers, similarly, recombine old elements and use them in new contexts.
Scientists (remember that science is also creative!) have to build on existing theoretical knowledge, understand where gaps lie, and use existing tools and methods to make progress.
The list could go on. The point is that a store of factual knowledge is one of the foundations of successful creativity.
Strategies
Of course, people also need to learn creative strategies and skills, so that they can do creative things with their existing knowledge. These strategies are a major aspect of my book on creative thinking; it covers 21 strategies in all.
But here, once again, is a role for memory. How do people come to learn about creative strategies? Do they remember the strategies after first learning about them? Do they think to use them at the right time, and apply them in the right way?
This strategic knowledge is underpinned by long-term memory.
If you are thinking that this sounds a bit like what I sometimes say regarding study skills, you’re right! And this implies that there is also a role for metacognition in creativity.
Metacognition means thinking about your thinking, and from that perspective, we can think about our creative thinking, too. Just as with a learning task in a classroom, people can think about their creativity before, during and after a task. And they can learn and apply relevant skills and strategies.
Indeed, I think it’s very likely that the most successful creatives, whether in science or in the arts, are not always the ones with the best knowledge (though this is a prerequisite, as I explained above), but the ones who are able to make the best use of this knowledge via their creative strategies and habits.
I will focus more on this metacognition of creativity next time.
In the meantime, I thought I would share the following research article. It could be food for thought for any of you who still feel that arts-based creativity and creativity in science are fundamentally different:
That’s it for today. I hope you are avoiding the January blues and not snowed under with marking at this time of year!
All the best,
Jonathan
Last week: Study Skills: Podcast
Website: www.jonathanfirth.co.uk
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