Prof. Nikolay Vaitzman
Kfar Saba

Growth and Activation of Creative Thinking in Schoolchildren

Psychologists separate human thinking into practical and creative thinking. The structure of the first is constituted by “visual-action” and “visual-image” components. The structure of the second is constituted by conceptual and image thinking.

Creative thinking is the highest form of theoretical thinking since it can create the newness by means of fantasy, imagination, intuition. Creative thinking in the form of conscious non-deliberate reflection of reality by way of going out of the given paradigm, without any comparison with any future standard contributes to solution of not yet defined problems.

In ontogenesis creative thinking comes into being at the age of 6 - 7 and keeps on growing up to the age of 16 - 18 in accordance with the morphological maturing of the brain and its tertiary fields of the forehead sections.

Theoretical thinking should make itself evident at pre-school age, at the age of 5, and progress under the action of adults. Otherwise creative thinking will not come into being.

When approaching creative thinking in the context of neuro-psychology, in the light of the level theory of brain activity, one can refer to the inner picture of the process of thinking. We distinguish four levels of thinking: operational, objective, reflex, individual. One can consider the contents of the levels of thinking by the example of doing an arithmetic sum.

On the operational level such specific operations as adding, subtraction, division, multiplication are performed. Here sometimes some blunders occur, e.g. when subtraction is done instead of adding.

The object level provides a means of orientation in the condition of the problem, setting up the goal and the plan of doing (what is given, what is not given, what can be achieved on doing the first question, etc.).

The reflex level performs the self-check of the problem under doing, finding out and comparing mistakes, self-learning during the process of thinking.

The individual level of thinking activity controls the activities of all above-mentioned levels and is responsible for action motivation, activity and criticalness of thinking, self-dependency and adequacy of self-appraisal.

When doing the problem the thought “jumps” from one level to another. Sometimes it can get cycled with null results on the same level and only through self-regulation (level 4) the blockade is made, i.e. the action on this level is stopped.

Activation of creative thinking can be successfully carried out with the help of pedagogical psychotherapy, suggestion. Suggestion improves psychic processes influencing all levels of thinking.