ABSTRACT
By “cognitive style” we mean a compendium of identifiable and idiosyncratic patterns or regularities in an artificer’s ways of thinking, doing and reasoning in the course of his or her creative life. One’s cognitive style is, in some sense, a schema that is an abstraction of the artificer’s many acts of production spanning her entire creative life. Cognitive style tells us the nature of an artificer’s creative identity and because of its idiosyncratic nature we may expect it as unique to the individual in question. Eliciting an artificer’s cognitive style demands the cognitive historian or creativity researcher to establish a biographical engagement with the artificer.
We elaborate on the nature of cognitive style by way of a number of detailed case studies of: the short story writer Flannery O’Connor, the physicist/plant biophysicist Jagadis Chandra Bose, the painter Amrita Sher-Gil, the scientific polymath Herbert Simon and the filmmaker Satyajit Ray.
Apart from the fact that one’s cognitive style gives us insight into an artificer’s overall creative life, there is also this larger significance: artificers such as those discussed in this chapter invent their respective cognitive styles. And since a cognitive style is unique to the artificer, this invention is not necessarily of consequence to the overall creative tradition; it is an instance of what Margaret Boden called personal or P-creativity (discussed in Chapter 3) except that it is surely the highest form of P-creativity
