"Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand." - Albert Einstein
Imagine that all people from now on were born with six fingers on each hand. Think of all the possible consequences that would arise (give yourself a minute or so). Was that difficult? This is a common creativity exercise. The importance of creativity is often underestimated and not given much thought.
This is becoming a problem in the discipline of science, especially in post-secondary education, since for year after year all we are told is what is known. By the end we become fact-spewing machines and not much else, as we are rarely encouraged to exercise our creativity. It is creativity and imagination that bring about new ideas and technologies which evidently shape our world; for we need creativity and imagination to utilize the knowledge we gain during our lives.
After an extensive literature search, I could not find a single reference to anything resembling an "Einstein gene", leaving me with the conclusion that everyone is capable of great creative thinking. In fact, most scientific studies come to the conclusion that creative thinking does not require any sort of "genius" and it comes about from ordinary thought processes (if not an outburst of madness), and external events; just as the saying goes, necessity is the mother of invention (Weisberg, R. International Journal of Cultural Policy. 2010. 16, 235-253).
It is found that simply reflecting on a subject inspires creative thinking (Ghosh, S. Journal of Intelligent and Robot Systems. 2003. 38, 255-275), this is perhaps why sleeping on a question often yields the answer. I firmly believe that we all need to exercise our creative thinking to better our creativity and imagination, and that there should be much more encouragement of creative thinking in our schools, especially post-secondary.
Benjamin Rehl
Prince George
