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Creativity Comments by Winston J. Brill, Ph.D.

10/02 Creativity Comment

Intuition and Creativity

Many successful people claim that the secret to their success was that they acted on their intuition.  In other words, they relied on a gut feel rather than on solid (or even, not so solid) logic. 

For a long time I’ve been interested in the subject of intuition, which is even more mysterious (“flaky”?) than creativity.  I feel, however, that creativity and intuition are intimately connected.  In fact, I’ve examined how people who review various fields deal with these two topics.  I have a large collection of critiques, covering areas such as music, advertising, literature, technology, dance, chess, sports, and art.  What I was looking for were critiques where both the words “creativity” and “intuition” (or “creative” and “intuitive”) were used.  The result of this study showed many examples where the reviewer said the equivalent of, “This person is creative and intuitive.” 

I have yet to find an example where a critique notes that someone is creative, but not intuitive; or is intuitive, but not creative.  This is my best evidence of the close connection between creativity and intuition. 

Know of any examples that break this connection?