Guest Lecture - Rex Jung
Jeremiah Anderson
We talked about creativity and intelligence. Creativity is defined as novel and having
utility. Both are subjective. For testing purposes novel is considered novel to others.
Others being the board judges. And utility is within social context. The board of judges
assess the subjects answers to various tests and comes up a number value for creativity.
Also, no one is considered uncreative and it is relative. Intelligence is mostly assessed
by IQ tests. IQ tests can be highly predictive considered very accurate in industrial
societies for things like income level, job, social status, etc. IQ is said to be stable as
early as age 8 with a deviation of 10-20 points later in life. Teen years can cause weird
results on IQ tests. This is possibly due to lots of changes in the brain at that age. Also
we talked about genius. genius is talked about a lot, but rarely studied because of rarity
and problems identifying. IQ test genius are easier to find, but people like Einstein are
extremely rare. Also not all genius are agreed upon. For these reasons things like functional
MRI's have never been done on a genius. We do have Einstein's brain and it has been studied
with some interesting finds. We also talked about some different types of measurements we take.
Like how fractional anisotropy works by following the diffusion of water. Most of our
techniques are not as good as we would like. We also talked about some of the problems with
our techniques used. Finally, we talked about how possibly less myelination in some areas
could be help with creativity. Rex believes that creativity is possibly more "trainable"
and intelligence is more hard-wired.
3 questions:
- Should problem solving be under intelligence or creativity or both?
- Could a decrease in myelination in some areas of the brain be a effect of something else, not the cause of creativity?
- Is it possible that test anxiety, time limits, testing atmosphere, etc. skewing results? Creativity is a fickle thing, so consideration of these things could help future studies.
3 places to take research farther:
- Study whether problem solving is intelligence or creativity to further our understanding of how creativity and intelligence is assessed.
- Attempt to define creativity, even if it is narrow so everyone studying it is testing the same thing with an understanding that the definition may be too narrow.
- Try to assess and isolate how creativity works in a simpler organism to aid studies with humans.
- Assess if things like test anxiety, time limits, testing atmosphere, knowledge of being tested for creativity, etc could be skewing results significantly.
