If we can all be creative, why is it so hard to come up with truly original ideas?It's because creativity is mysterious. Just ask any scientist, artist, writer or other highly creative person to explain how they come up with brilliant ideas and, if they're honest, they don't really know.But over the decades psychologists have given ordinary participants countless tests, forms and tasks and conducted hundreds of hours of interviews. From these emerge the psychological conditions of creativity. Not what you should do, but how you should be. In the scientific literature six principles of creativity recur again and again:Knowledge - explores the dangers of expertise.Problem construction - how creative problems should be approached.Emotion - explains which types of emotions are most creative.Combining concepts - why the raw materials are already out there.Abstraction - how to see your creative problem more clearly.The wandering mind - reveals how to think flexibly.Each are explained with examples from the research and are directly applicable to everyday creativity.As Pablo Picasso once pointed out, all children are creative; the challenge is to remain creative into adulthood. Unfortunately public education systems around the world seem designed to crush creativity in favor of rote learning and test passing. As the years pass a fear of being wrong takes over from our natural creative tendencies.Unlike mathematics, languages or the humanities, we are rarely taught about creativity, despite its importance to our lives. Yet the information is out there, waiting to be used.If you would like to be more creative at work and at home—and that has to be most of us—the insights in this ebook will be useful.