Anders Elfving

The Swedish public service network recently broadcasted the BBC show "Battle of the Brains".

To summarize the show, it's about ten people who have become very successful in largely varying areas.
These people take different tests which are later compared and analyzed.

It's quite an intriguing topic, since even the most fundamental parts in the concept of intelligence still requires far more study.

I found a few question marks in the methodology of the testing, and even more so in the analysis. I will put them here; perhaps a more gifted reader will take me under his/her wings and help me sort this out.

Creativity

Creativity was measured by letting the subjects draw a painting that would display their creativity.
The results where established by asking random people to order the paintings individually in accordance to creativity.

The area in which this was measured was sadly predictable.
I have a slight problem with the general idea of creativity being equal with areas of creation in which we cannot find obvious logics connected to successful results.
A vast majority of the computing power of our brain is used for computing which we are unaware of. These processes and the subconscious knowledge that they provide us with, will not be available for us to apply conscious logics on. There's a huge difference between true creativity and decisions that we base on information that we don't know we have.
Drawing a beautiful painting can obviously not be accepted as purely a creative and illogical process.

I was also a bit concerned about the "success measurement" for this test.
Society has had it's good time to implant us with associations to the word creativity. Therefore creating a "creative painting" would be creating something that isn't already accepted as "creative" - since it would otherwise require reusing old patterns.
Even if every observer is blown away with the ways the paint was used on the canvas, they will in the end step back into society's view on creativity to rank the greatness of the creative achievement.
When trying to evaluate the methodology, I find myself realizing that creativity is very closely connected to a goal, and achieving that goal. An entirely new way of doing something with a poor result, is not considered creative, but dumb. I find it that you could even say that creativity is bond to an improvement, greater than what could be achieved following the norm.
I found the goal of creatively creating a creative painting, a bit paradoxical, although I found the clip of the physicist painting with his overall very amusing.

Likely, my comments on creativity are worth little as long as a better definition of the term is not established.

Creativity, as I see it, is solving problems by applying entirely new patterns of thought.
It can be defined as the opposite of disciplined and methodical trial-and-error testing of already known solutions.
Creativity can be applied in a macro or micro perspective, e.g. using an entirely unpredictable material in an engine, or using and ordinary engine to achieve a brilliant and entirely different task than before. Doing something creatively should also, as mentioned above, result in a greater achievement than when following the norm.

Another measurement for creativity used in the show was the amount of ways that the subjects could apply the use of a regular sock (like a schoolbook example of divergent thought). The more rubbish ways to use the sock, the higher the test result. This is a typical example of a situation where a methodical mental trial-and-error of the possible uses for a sock, would be better than a creative non-logical way.
I might be wrong about this, but the methodical physicist won this challenge, as one might have expected.

This blog post will be updated with further discussion about the connection between creativity and intelligence.