What is it about?

Though contemplative, deep thinking is publicized as a key ingredient of success, it has become an 'endangered species' in our rushing world of Tweets, elevator pitches and fast decisions. Conversation about contentious issues is often described as the soul of deliberative democracy. Thus, the lack of time for deep thinking, as well as shrinking world-discourse, desire of “strong leaders” and pauperization of social response repertoire seem to be related phenomena. All of these do not only indicate changes in personal life histories, but also stem from the emergent properties of rapidly expanding, globalized social networks. Deep thinking requires creative exploration and careful judgment of nontrivial responses. Deep thinking embeds our starting idea to a high number of potential contexts, which helps to rephrase the starting idea in a more original way. The paper explains by three talent support networks how can both deep thinking and creativity increased by helping talented young people to enrich their social networks.

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Why is it important?

This paper describes that key aspects of creativity and deep, contemplative, deliberative thinking can be understood as network phenomena of both human conceptual and social networks. Through three case studies the paper shows that the exposure of talented people to novel situations and new acquaintances (especially those cross-cutting social circles and cultural boundaries); the increase of their novelty seeking networking ability, as well as discussions on major questions of mankind and good purpose joint projects increases creative, deep thinking. Moreover, these actions enriched talented people with a mindset and social skills that enables them to influence social opinion and lead community actions.

Perspectives

The paper prompts future studies to elaborate the quantitative effects and relative efficiency of the 1.) exposure to novel situations; 2.) increase of networking skills and 3.) discussions of major questions of mankind and related good purpose joint projects to induce creative, deep, visionary thinking and to increase leadership skills. It will be an important future task of talent support actions to use these techniques to increase the potential of talented people to influence social opinion, lead community action and develop charismatic leadership skills.

Professor Peter Csermely
Semmelweis University, Department of Medical Chemistry, Budapest

Read the Original

This page is a summary of: The Network Concept of Creativity and Deep Thinking: Applications to Social Opinion Formation and Talent Support, Gifted Child Quarterly, April 2017, SAGE Publications,
DOI: 10.1177/0016986217701832.
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