The Creative Brain

Creativity—along with critical thinking, collaborating, and communicating—is now seen as an essential skill to teach in schools. Creative thinking is defined as the "interaction among aptitude, process, and environment by which an individual or group produces a perceptible product that is both novel and useful as defined within a social context" (Plucker, Beghetto, & Dow, 2004, p. 90). Since we are seeing new, complex problems in society that we haven't encountered before, we need new problem-solving strategies to tackle them. Creative thinking allows children to generate more potential solutions, develop enhanced critical thinking to evaluate those ideas, and communicate those ideas effectively (Dow, 2017). But while more and more teachers recognize the importance of fostering creative thinking in their students, there are still prevailing misconceptions that surround creativity and how to correctly embed creative thinking within lesson plans in a pragmatic manner. Recent research findings on the role of neurotransmitters, collaboration, and critical thinking on increasing creativity can give educators more clarity and insight.

The Creative Brain Regions

Perhaps the main neurological misunderstanding about learning and creativity is that creativity resides in a specific hemisphere of the brain. This yielded the popular idea of "right-brain" vs. "left-brain" thinking, where the right side of the brain is for artistic and creative abilities and the left side is for science and math abilities. This fallacy of localization is continually endorsed by popular brain hemisphere quizzes on social media, memes, and invalid educational paradigms.