Stories by Scott Barry Kaufman

One of humanity’s most precious resources is imagination. Our ability to overcome the constraints of the present environment and travel to distant places and hopeful futures all in the mind is a skill that is hugely neglected in today’s society.

Fifty years ago, Sarnoff Mednick defined the process of creative thinking as "the forming of associative elements into new combinations which either meet specific requirements or are in some way useful.

Quick Quiz: Which of the following are signs of introversion? Highly sensitive Deep Thinker Reflective Introspective Intelligent Negative emotions Socially Anxious Defensive Vulnerable Always prefers solitude over social interaction Answer: Not a single one.

There is little that shapes the human experience as profoundly and pervasively as creativity. Creativity drives progress in every human endeavor, from the arts to the sciences, business, and technology.

Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty" — Bertrand Russell The latest neuroscience of aesthetics suggests that the experience of visual, musical, and moral beauty all recruit the same part of the “emotional brain”: field A1 of the medial orbitofrontal cortex (mOFC).

Personality and IQ have traditionally been viewed as distinct domains of human functioning. However, research over the past three decades suggests that IQ is a personality trait.

For academic achievement, ability is not enough. What’s also needed are mindsets and strategies for overcoming obstacles, staying on task, and learning and growing over the long-term. According to Gregory Walton and colleagues, academic tenacity is not about being smart, but learning smart.

Forty seconds before round two, and I'm lying on my back trying to breathe. Pain all through me. Deep breath. Let it go. I won't be able to lift my shoulder tomorrow, it won't heal for over a year, but now it pulses, alive, and I feel the air vibrating around me, the stadium shaking [...]

I believe that if we implemented a more imaginative college admissions system, we'd be pleasantly surprised by just how much intellectual and creative potential there already exists all around us.

Think back to a time when you were completely engaged in an activity. Maybe it was reading a comic book, or catching up with an old friend.

For some people, hardship can trigger creative growth

There's a scene in the 1988 movie Rain Man in which Raymond Babbitt (played by Dustin Hoffman) recites a waitress's phone number. Naturally the waitress is shocked.

Prodigies dazzle us with their virtuoso violin concertos, seemingly prescient chess moves, and vivid paintings. While their work would be enough to impress us if they were 40, prodigies typically reach adult levels of performance in non-verbal, rule-based domains such as chess, art, and music before the age of 10.

W.Joel Schneider is a psychologist atIllinois State University,dividing his time equally between the Clinical-Counseling program and the Quantitative Psychology program.

Dan Hurley is one of my favorite science journalists. Not only does he write about issues that interest me, but he doesn’t sacrifice the nuance, or the humor.

Working memory and fluid reasoning: same or different? It depends.

We live in a culture saturated with evaluation. In school, we learn to take tests. We take the tests, and depending on the outcome, either feel really smart or really stupid.

It’s well known that good standardized test takers also tend to have high cognitive ability. That’s not a shocker. But until recently, very little research has looked at the effect of improving standardized achievement test performance.

“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” — that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. – John Keats The golden mean, or divine proportion, has fascinated philosophers, mathematicians, artists, and scientists for centuries.

Jerome L. Singer is the father of daydreaming. His seminal research over the past 50+ years with his colleagues (including John Antrobus and Eric Klinger) has laid the foundations for virtually all current investigations of the costs and benefits of daydreaming and mind wandering (see “The Origins of Positive-Constructive Daydreaming” and “Ode to Positive Constructive [...]

What’s going on in the brain when we reason, create, and imagine? A group of thoughtful cognitive neuroscientists have been unraveling some of creativity’s mysterious origins (see “The Real Neuroscience of Creativity” or the recent edited volume “Neuroscience of Creativity”).

Openness to experience– the drive for cognitive exploration of inner and outer experience– is the personality trait most consistently associated with creativity.

[This post was co-authored with Jerome L. Singer and Dorothy G. Singer] Many people often think of play in the form of images of young children at recess engaging in games of tag, ball, using slides, swings, and physically exploring their environments.

Lately I’ve become increasingly nostalgic: Nostalgic of my college years, old friends, and my more carefree days without as many commitments and responsibility.