According to these paragraphs, One’s ability to be innovative and creativity dim
ID: 3445284 • Letter: A
Question
According to these paragraphs, One’s ability to be innovative and creativity diminish starting around the age of 35. What can one do to combat this natural downward process?
If you ask psychologists and creativity researchers, they'll tell you
that it's a myth: humans, young and old, are built for creative
thinking. We've yet to find special creativity brain cells that die
when you hit 35, or hidden organs only the gifted are born with
that pass ideas to their minds. Many experts even discount genius,
claiming that the amazing works by Mozart or Picasso, for
example, were created through ordinary means, exercising similar
thinking processes to what we use to escape shopping mall
parking lot mazes or improvise excuses when late for dinner.1
Much like children, the people who earn the labelcreative are, as
Howard Gardner explains in Frames of Mind2 "not bothered by
inconsistencies, departures from convention, non-literalness...",
and run with unusual ideas that most adults are too rigid, too
arrogant, or too afraid to entertain.
The difference between creatives and others is more attitude and
experience than nature. We survived hundreds of thousands of years
not because of our sharp claws, teleporting talents, or regenerative
limbs, but because our oversized brains adapt, adopt, and make use
of what we have. If we weren't naturally creative and couldn't
find ideas, humans would have died out long ago. A sufficiently motivated bear or lion can easily kill any man—even the meanest
all-pro NFL linebacker. However, given creative problems to
solve, an average human being is hard to beat. We make tools,
split atoms, and have more patents than the world's species' com
bined (but please don't tell the bears—they get pissy about pat
ents). Our unique advantage on this planet is the inventive
capacity of our minds. We even make tools for thought, like
writing, so that when we find good ideas—such as how to tame
and cage lions—we can pass that knowledge to future generations,
giving them a head start.
But with the advance of civilization, creativity may have moved,
for many, to the sidelines. Idea reuse is so easy—in the form of
products, machines, websites, and services—that people are
enabled to go for years without finding ideas on their own.
Modern businesses thrive on selling prepackaged meals, clothes,
holidays, entertainments, and experiences, tempting people to buy
convenience rather than make things themselves. I don't believe
everyone should make everything themselves, or even most things.
But I do believe everyone has the capacity to enjoy creating some
thing, and the temptation for convenience inhibits many people
from discovering what it is they'd like to make. Passive consump
tion of television and the Web has absorbed time we could be
using for active hobbies and pastimes, age-old places for nurturing
our creative selves. The need for craftsmen and artists, professional
idea finders, has thus faded; more people than ever make
livings in careers Lloyd Dobler would hate: selling, buying, and
processing other things.3 Even when charged to work with ideas,
few adults can do so as easily as they could in their youth.
Explanation / Answer
According to me creativity is something which is innate. We all are creative in our own ways. Its just with time and age we start using it less. We have become accustomed to a life wherein we get things by jyst one click or a swipe. Everything is available for us on the platter and therefore we have stopped using our minds to innovate and try or make something new for us. Late 30s and 40s is the time where we are busy with our personal and professional lives. Some creativity is only limited to the workplace only since we dont want to lose our jobs but personally for ourselves we do nothing. Middle age is not an age. It’s a point in time at which we all arrive individually. It’s when we begin to look back at our body of work and history of making decisions and then look ahead at the rest of our lives to determine if we are on the right track. It is not selfish to decide to find meaning in your life. Making a living is important, but so is leading a fulfilling life. Maybe the job is fulfilling, maybe it simply provides the means to support what is important to for a person, if not, they should not give up on one's soul. Creativity may involve an art, a craft, learning an instrument or any other medium. It also might be about living a life using your own passion and originality to continue on a path you’ve chosen. One can create without being someone who paints, or writes, or dances. An individual is an artist when he/she brings passion to their life. Work from emotion, express one's fears, one's joys, one'spain, one's love. Embracing ones diminishing but innate creativity is important by tapping into what makes one happy in life. Regular mental workouts can actually alter the brain’s neural circuits in middle-age and older adults, making regions like the hippocampus, a center for memory and learning, more responsive. Cognitive exercise also helped improve executive functioning, the kind of decision-making ability associated with a mission control center.
Related Questions
drjack9650@gmail.com
Navigate
Integrity-first tutoring: explanations and feedback only — we do not complete graded work. Learn more.