Creativity requires both originality and effectiveness; it must serve a practical purpose.

The creative mind is constantly combining old ideas into new forms, always testing possibilities.

Flexibility and originality are key attributes of creative thinkers.

Creativity is something our society values highly. But what is it exactly? Contemporary psychology offers the standard definition of creativity: Creativity requires both originality and effectiveness. It must serve a practical purpose and be appropriate to the task at hand. The idea, process, or product must be unique, novel, or unusual. An idea that is purely original but completely useless is not considered creative by modern scientific standards.

You may remember from your high school days the story of Isaac Newton and how watching an apple fall from a tree led to his discovery of the law of gravity. It is probably part history and part legend, but it captures one of the key features of creative thought.

Millions of people had seen apples fall before that. But it occurred to no one before Newton to ask, as he did, whether the same force that pulled the apple to the ground also existed in space, keeping celestial bodies in their orbits. In doing so, Newton connected two phenomena that everyone else treated as unrelated.

Newton’s discoveries, like those of extraordinary scientists from Archimedes to Stephen Hawking, align with the information-gap theory of curiosity first formulated by Professor George Loewenstein at Carnegie Mellon University. He hypothesized that when we notice a gap in our knowledge, it feels like an itch we want to scratch, driving us to look for an answer. Recent advances in brain imaging have begun to reveal how........

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