题型:阅读理解 题类:常考题 难易度:普通
浙江省“温州十五校联合体”2018-2019学年高二下学期英语期中考试试卷(音频暂未更新)
I have a pair of pants. Tell me: How many different ways can I put a pair of pants to use?
Now imagine you're Lady Gaga. Bill Gates. A scuba diver. An architect. You still have the pants. What other uses come to mind?
What you just practiced—the conscious act of "wearing" another self—is an exercise that, according to psychiatrist Srini Pillay, MD, is essential to being creative.
One problem about our understanding of creativity is that we tend to connect it to our concept of self: Either we're "creative" or we aren't, without much of a middle ground. "I'm just not a creative person!" a frustrated student might say in art class.
Dr. Pillay, an assistant professor at Harvard University, has spent a good part of his career challenging these ideas. He believes that the key to unlocking your creative potential is to reject the old advice that urges you to "believe in yourself." In fact, you should do the opposite: Believe you are someone else.
Dr. Pillay points to a 2016 study where the authors – educational psychologists Denis Dumas and Kevin Dunbar-divided their college-student subjects into three groups, instructing one group to think of themselves as "poets" and another to imagine they were "librarians" (the third group was the control). The researchers then presented all the participants with ten ordinary objects, including a fork, a carrot, and a pair of pants, and asked them to come up with as many different uses as possible for each one.
Those who were asked to imagine themselves as poets came up with the widest range of ideas, whereas those in the librarian group had the fewest. Meanwhile, the researchers found only small differences in students' creativity levels across academic majors. In fact, the physics majors pretending to be poets came up with more ideas than the art majors did.
These results, write Dumas and Dunbar, suggest that creativity is not an individual trait but a "product of context and perspective." Everyone can be creative, as long as he or she feels like a creative person.
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