Critical vs. Creative Thinking
An overlap between the critical and the visual way of thinking allows integration of art and science. Critical thinking skills, in accord with widely held positions, entail logical thinking and reasoning. This may include skills such as comparison, classification, sequencing, cause/effect, patterning, webbing, analogies, deductive and inductive reasoning, forecasting, planning, hypothesizing, and critiquing. Critical thinking, which traditionally has been ascribed to left-brain reasoning, is typified as analytic, convergent, verbal, linear, objective, judgmental, focused on a subject, and probability of its change. Scientific thinking is used in investigating processes and events, acquiring new information, and integrating previous scientific knowledge. Scientists use analogies from similar domains in proposing new hypotheses. Research on scientific thinking (Dunbar, 1997) revealed that over 50% of the findings resulted from interpreting unexpected findings that were very different from the hypotheses based on literature.
Our creative thinking supports our visual way of thinking. Traditionally ascribed to right-brain activity, our ability to think in non-verbal, visual terms, allows us to see connections and relationships where others have not, and to imagine or invent something new. Creative thinking has been described as involving the skills of flexibility, originality, fluency, elaboration, brainstorming, modification, imagery, associative thinking, attribute listing, metaphorical thinking, and forced relationships occurring when we compare seemingly unrelated items. The aim of creative thinking is to stimulate curiosity and promote divergence. Creativity has been also described as an attitude: the ability to accept change and newness, a willingness to play with ideas and possibilities, a flexibility of outlook, the habit of enjoying the good, while looking for ways to improve it. With this approach, we may continually improve our ideas and solutions by making refinements to our work. Studies have shown that creative individuals are more spontaneous, expressive, and less controlled or inhibited. They also tend to trust their own judgment and ideas, they are not afraid of trying something new. “The goal of art is to aid in the comprehension of the world's ideas,” wrote Georg Wilhelm Hegel (Macdonald, 1970, p. 372).