Creativity

In a recent interview Dr. Deepak Chopra made the following statement:

"Creativity is a spiritual experience, not a mental experience."

which made me investigate the topic a little further.

I came across the 2014 book Modeling Creativity (arxiv.org) by Tom De Smedt who summarizes key insights in chapter 4 as follows:

Creativity refers to the ability to think new ideas. 

Creative ideas are grounded in fast, unconscious processing such as intuition or imagination which is highly  error-prone but allows us to “think things without thinking about them”.

Some of these near-thoughts can emerge without warning as an interesting solution: a moment of insight. This usually happens while tackling everyday problems. This is called little-c creativity.

Big-C creativity, eminent ideas that fill history books, develop gradually. They require interaction with slow, conscious processing. This requires effort and motivation, because consciousness is lazy and tends to wander off.

Flexibility to switch between styles of thought – from unconscious to conscious, from goal-oriented to open-ended, from combinatory to explorative and transformative – is key to creativity: an agile mind.

Another Chopra quote summarizes the above:

"To harness true creativity, you must silence the conditioned mind."