Creativity – nature or nurture?
Raluca Soare Trifu, Doina Cosman, Bogdan C.S. PirvuABSTRACT. Creativity and the creative genius are fascinating as well as controversial topics. In spite of longitudinal research, prospective and retrospective, meant to reveal, through correlational biographical analysis and advanced statistical methods, key elements in the production and definition of creativity, the topic is far from being exhausted. The new ways and means of neurological examination provide the possibility of observing the creative process in progress. This new approach in studying creativity, by means of functional imagistics, allows for an integrative, or structuralist perspective upon creativity, showing a loss of interest in the dichotomy nature-nurture. These new considerations upon creativity simultaneously attempt to provide an explanatory basis for the relationship between creativity and psychopathology. This connection will be the issue of this article, along with an attempt at the conceptual description and definition of creativity.
Keywords: creativity; neuroscience; psychopathology; eminence