  Immersion in a creative task can be an intimate experience. It can feel like
a mystery: intangible, inexplicable, and beyond the reach of science. However,
science is making exciting headway into understanding creativity. While the
mind of a highly uncreative individual consists of a collection of items
accumulated through direct experience and enculturation, the mind of a creative
individual is self-organizing and self-mending; thus, experiences and items of
cultural knowledge are thought through from different perspectives such that
they cohere together into a loosely integrated whole. The reweaving of items in
memory is elicited by perturbations: experiences that increase psychological
entropy because they are inconsistent with one's web of understandings. The
process of responding to one perturbation often leads to other perturbations,
i.e., other inconsistencies in one's web of understandings. Creative thinking
often requires the capacity to shift between divergent and convergent modes of
thought in response to the ever-changing demands of the creative task. Since
uncreative individuals can reap the benefits of creativity by imitating
creators, using their inventions, or purchasing their artworks, it is not
necessary that everyone be creative. Agent based computer models of cultural
evolution suggest that society functions best with a mixture of creative and
uncreative individuals. The ideal ratio of creativity to imitation increases in
times of change, such as we are experiencing now. Therefore it is important to
educate the next generation in ways that foster creativity. The chapter
concludes with suggestions for how educational systems can cultivate
creativity.
