Does An IQ Test Prove Creativity?
Everyone has creativity, some a lot more than others. The development of humans, and possibly the universe, depends on it. Yet creativity is an elusive creature. What do we mean by it? What is going on in our brains when ideas form? Does it feel the same for artists and scientists? We asked writers and neuroscientists, pop stars and AI gurus ( 人工智能专家）to try to deconstruct the creative process-and learn how we can all ignite the spark within.
A
In the early 1970s, creativity was still seen as a type of intelligence. But when more subtle tests of IQ and creative skills were developed in the 1970s, particularly by the father of creativity testing, Paul Torrance, it became clear that the link was not so simple. Creative people are intelligent, in terms of IQ tests at least, but only averagely or just above. While it depends on the discipline, in general beyond a certain level IQ does not help boost creativity; it is necessary but not sufficient to make someone creative.
B
Because of the difficulty of studying the actual process, most early attempts to study creativity concentrated on personality. According to creativity specialist Mark Runco of California State University, Fullerton, the “creative personality” tends to place a high value on aesthetic ( 审美的）qualities and to have broad interests, providing lots of resources to draw on and knowledge to recombine into novel solutions. “Creatives” have an attraction to complexity and an ability to handle conflict. They are also usually highly self-motivated, perhaps even a little obsessive. Less creative people, on the other hand, tend to become irritated ( 被激怒的）if they cannot immediately fit all the pieces together. They are less tolerant of confusion. Creativity comes to those who wait, but only to those who are happy to do so in a bit of a fog.
C
But there may be a price to pay for having a creative personality. For centuries, a link has been made between creativity and mental illness ( 精神病）.Psychiatrist ( 精神病学家）Jamison of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, found that established artists are significantly more likely to have mood disorders. But she also suggests that a change of mood state might be the key to triggering a creative event, rather than the negative mood itself. Intelligence can help channel this thought style into great creativity, but when combined with emotional problems, lateral ( 侧向的）, divergent ( 发散的）or open thinking can lead to mental illness instead.
D
Jordan Peterson, a psychologist at the University of Toronto, Canada, believes he has identified a mechanism ( 机理）that could help explain this. He says that the brains of creative people seem more open to incoming stimuli ( 刺激） than less creative types. Our senses are continuously feeding a mass of information into our brains, which have to block or ignore most of it to save us from being snowed under. Peterson calls this process latent inhibition, and argues that people who have less of it, and who have a reasonably high IQ with a good working memory can juggle more of the data, and so may be open to more possibilities and ideas. The downside of extremely low latent inhibition may be a confused thought style that predisposes people to mental illness. So for Peterson, mental illness is not a prerequisite for creativity, but it shares some cognitive traits.
E
But what of the creative act itself? One of the first studies of the creative brain at work was by Colin Martindale, a psychologist from the University of Maine in Orono. Back in 1978, he used a network of scalp electrodes to record an electroencephalogram ( 脑电图）,a record of the pattern of brain waves, as people made up stories. Creativity has two stages: inspiration and elaboration, each characterised by very different states of mind. While people were dreaming up their stories, he found their brains were surprisingly quiet. The dominant activity was alpha waves, indicating a very low level of cortical ( 大脑皮层的）arousal: a relaxed state, as though the conscious mind was quiet while the brain was making connections behind the scenes. It’s the same sort of brain activity as in some stages of sleep, dreaming or rest, which could explain why sleep and relaxation can help people be creative. However, when these quietminded people were asked to work on their stories, the alpha wave activity dropped off and the brain became busier, revealing increased cortical arousal, more corralling of activity and more organised thinking. Strikingly, it was the people who showed the biggest difference in brain activity between the inspiration and development stages who produced the most creative storylines. Nothing in their background brain activity marked them as creative or uncreative. “It’s as if the less creative person can’t shift gear,” says Guy Claxton, a psychologist at the University of Bristol, UK. “Creativity requires
different kinds of thinking. Very creative people move between these states intuitively.” Creativity, it seems, is about mental flexibility: perhaps not a twostep process, but a toggling between two states. In a later study, Martindale found that communication between the sides of the brain is also important.
F
Paul Howard-Jones, who works with Claxton at Bristol, believes he has found another aspect of creativity. He asked people to make up a story based on three words and scanned ( 扫描）their brains using functional magnetic resonance imaging. In one trial, people were asked not to try too hard and just report the most obvious story suggested by the words. In another, they were asked to be inventive. He also varied the words so it was easier or harder to link them. As people tried harder and came up with more creative tales, there was a lot more activity in a particular prefrontal brain ( 脑前额叶）region on the right-hand side. These regions are probably important in monitoring for conflict, helping us to filter out many of of combining the words and allowing us to pull out just the desirable connections, Howard-Jones suggests. It shows that there is another side to creativity, he says. The story-making task, particularly when we are stretched, produces many options which we have to assess. So part of creativity is a conscious ( 有意识的）process of evaluating and analysing ideas. The test also shows that the more we try and are stretched, the more creative our minds can be.
G
And creativity need not always be a solitary ( 孤独的, 独 立的）, tortured affair, according to Teresa Amabile of Harvard Business School. Though there is a slight association between solitary writing or painting and negative moods or emotional disturbances, scientific creativity and workplace creativity seem much more likely to occur when people are positive and buoyant ( 轻快的）.In a decade-long study of real businesses, to be published soon, Amabile found that positive moods relate positively to creativity in organisations, and that the relationship is a simple linear one. Creative thought also improves people’s moods, her team found, so the process is circular ( 循环传递的）.Time pressures, financial pressures and hard-earned bonus schemes on the other
hand, do not boost workplace creativity: internal motivation, not coercion, produces the best work.
H
Another often forgotten aspect of creativity is social. Vera John-Steiner of the University of New Mexico says that to be really creative you need strong social networks and trusting relationships, not just active neural networks. One vital characteristic of a highly creative person, she says, is that they have at least one other person in their life who doesn’t think they are completely nuts ( 疯子）.
参考答案：
28. FALSE:题干guarantee错;原文二not necessarily
29. NOT GIVEN:
30. TRUE:原文见B段第5行
30题C段4-6段a wider range of= lots of recombine to=integrate into
31. TRUE:原文见D段最后两行
D段的最后一句话: mental illness不是creativity的先决条件，所以not necessarily suffer
32. A 原文见C段
C段倒数第五行是mood state trigger creative , rather than negative mood itself creative thinking(activity，practice)=creative event
33. E原文见G段
34. F原文见H段social networks人脉关系
35. C原文见E段最后4行
35:demand=require
36. D原文见F段前半段
37. scalpel ectrodes
38. Inspiration and elaboration
39. alpha wave activity/alpha waves
定位词:quiet-minded F段15行。
原文dropped off与选项went down同义替换
E段正数第九行“the dominant activity was alpha waves'.定义很清晰，alpha waves =activity, alpha wave activity
40. difference (P11倒数第5-6行)
40 F段11页倒数6行biggest=more two stages=inspiration
and development stages
Passage3: humanities in Health professionals
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发表于 2017-4-17 08:58:06
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