My Review on "The Cognitive Spiral: Creative Thinking and Cognitive Processing" by Edward Ebert

After reading Edward S. Ebert’s journal article titled “The Cognitive Spiral: Creative Thinking and Cognitive Processing” in the Journal of Creative Behavior, I have some thoughts and opinions on it that I would like to share. First of all, I would like to appreciate how information-packed this journal is, although, the choice of “embellished” words used made it a bit challenging to understand and hard to filter and highlight important parts. For me, it was a bit discouraging and at the end, I didn’t soak up all the information in this journal. Although, I do agree on lots of parts of this journal.

It starts off with the context of creativity and different definitions (up to 50-60 according to a paper by L.C Repucci!) of what creativity is. I come to a conclusion (and an opinion) that being creative and thinking creatively is bringing something new to something that's not new, it’s a way of solving problems most likely in a fresh way and different perspective, creative thinking is the process of thinking creatively more than the outcome or product to come out of it. My opinion was concluded after reading and agreeing Leary’s (1964) statement, “Creative refers to bringing direct and fresh interpretations to experience”. In terms of the attributes or features of creative thinking, I agree with Guilford’s (1959, 1967) statement that creative thinking has attributes such as fluency, flexibility, originality, and elaboration. I agree that in a process of thinking creatively, those attributes are necessary. Also, in this case of talking about creative thinking as a cognitive activity to find solutions for a problem (as Mayer, 1983, p.327 states) and/or that creativity is finding a novel solution to a problem (Mayer, 1983), maybe another feature of creative thinking could be usefulness.

The journal goes on talking about models of information processing and mainly focuses on Ebert and Ebert’s Cognitive Spiral model and their five components (perceptual thought, creative thought, inventive thought, metacognitive thought, and performance thought) after a few more different definitions on creative thinking. I also agree that creative thinking is a characteristic of cognitive processing because it obviously requires thinking and also knowledge from memory or past experience, it requires us to apply the knowledge that has been stored to something new. The basic assumption of this model is that the cognitive spiral is a brain’s natural problem solving system and creative thinking accomplishes the cognitive search for patterns that enables problem solving. Anyone with a functioning brain does cognitive thinking naturally, and creative thinking is a part of it. I also agree that the cognitive process will occur over and over again until the most suitable solution is found, based on new information that hasn’t been thought of before and that the new information gathered will be stored and possibly used in a next attempt to solve a problem.

Overall, this journal has made me gain and learned a lot of information I haven’t known  before. Although, I don’t think reading this whole journal is necessary to get to the main points. Well, this concludes my review and thoughts on Edward Ebert’s journal. I hope this review helped in some way!:) feel free to comment opinions.