Guest Lecture - Rex Jung
Davynne Tealesa Atanasoff
I really enjoyed having Rex E. Jung lecture in class. He started out talking about his
very impressive background and what other fields he has done research and been published in.
These included intelligence, traumatic brain injury, lupis/autoimmune disease, and
creativity just to name a few. His focus for this lecture, however, was creativity.
Although we did get him side tracked for a while talking about Einstein. His creativity
lecture began with talking about the lies we have been told about creativity. These included
that creativity is only on the right side of the brain and that it can't be taught. Then
he talked about some of the trends of creativity. The one I found most interesting was that
creative people put out a lot of stuff, not necessarily good stuff, but a lot of stuff.
He also talked about the process of creativity (Preparation, Incubation, Illumination, and
Verification). He ended the lecture with talking about the ways we could teach ourselves to
become more creative. He called this process the 5 P's. Prepare- collect ideas to put together
in novel ways. Practice- that 10,000 hours to become an expert is likely right. Play-
unstructured cognitive activity. Produce- put a lot of ideas out into the world. Persevere-
keep trying and failing and trying!
Three questions I did not ask
- If height predicts intelligence wasn't Albert Einstein short?
- Could the creativity part of the gifted test be flawed? (As a child I took this test
and there was a series of 9 blank boxes and I was told to draw a picture in each one. I
drew a picture that incorporated all the boxes into one, and was told I couldn't do that.)
- Do kids with imaginary friends show more creativity?
Three future directions I would take this:
- I would see if kids with imaginary friends show more creativity than kids who do not have one.
- I would set a classroom that emphasized creativity and see if their brain differed compared to a control classroom.
- I would like to see if children who were made to play a musical instrument as a child show more creativity as an adult as compared to children who were not made to play an instrument as a child.
