ABSTRACT
The creative act, as we wrote in the previous chapter, is defined by ‘effective surprise’. How can we investigate this process; how can we measure the ability to be creative or predict creative production? This problem falls into the province of scientific psychology and psychologists have wrestled with it for quite some time. Not being able to come to grips with the creative process as a whole, such as poets, artists and scientists have introspectively described it, psychologists have indulged in something of a sleight-of-hand and have fallen back on small segments of behaviour that are, on the face of it, integral parts of creativity and that, above all, are measurable. I will discuss below the difficulties involved in relying on what must to the layman appear as fragmentary, trivial tasks, as an approximation to creativity.
