Narrative Creativity

This Element provides new creativity theory, explains why children are more imaginative than AI, and outlines methods to enhance creativity.

This Element introduces narrative creativity, distinguishing it from other approaches and explaining its biological and neuroscientific origins. It discusses its contributions to technological innovation, scientific progress, cultural growth, and psychological well-being. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.Narrative creativity is a new, neuroscience-based approach to innovation, problem solving, and resilience that has proved effective in business executives, scientists, engineers, doctors, and students as young as eight. This Element offers a concise introduction to narrative creativity's theory and practice. It distinguishes narrative creativity from ideation, divergent thinking, design thinking, brainstorming, and other current approaches to cultivating creativity. It traces the biological origins of narrative creativity and explains why narrative creativity will always be mechanically impossible for computer artificial intelligences. It provides practical exercises, developed and tested in hundreds of classrooms and businesses, and validated independently by the US Army, for improving narrative creativity. It explains how narrative creativity contributes to technological innovation, scientific progress, cultural growth, and psychological well-being, and it describes how narrative creativity can be assessed. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.