Creativity and the Wandering Mind

David D. Preiss, PhD, is Director and Associate Professor at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile School of Psychology. He is co-editor of 3 books on educational psychology and related topics, author of more than 40 papers and book chapters on writing, creativity, and instructional processes and recipient of several grants from diverse Chilean research agencies to investigate instructional processes as well as individual differences in creativity and writing. As a poet he has published 5 books of poetry. Diego Cosmelli is a Biochemist and holds a PhD in Cognitive Sciences from the École Polytechnique, France. He is Associate Professor at the School of Psychology of the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, where he is the Vice-director for Research and Graduate Studies and head of the Psychophysiology Lab. His research interests focus on the mechanisms of attentional and perceptual processes in human beings. He has published over 30 articles in peer reviewed journals including Psychophysiology, NeuroImage, Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience and PLoS ONE, among others. James C. Kaufman is a Professor of Educational Psychology at the University of Connecticut. He is the author/editor of more than 45 books and 300 papers, which include theoretical contributions such as the Four-C Model of Creativity (with Ron Beghetto) and empirical work, such as the study that spawned the “Sylvia Plath Effect. He is a past president of Division 10 (Society for Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, & the Arts) of the American Psychological Association (APA). James has won many awards, including Mensa’s research award, the Torrance Award from the National Association for Gifted Children, and APA’s Berlyne, Arnheim, and Farnsworth awards. He co-founded two major journals (Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts and Psychology of Popular Media Culture). He has tested Dr. Sanjay Gupta’s creativity on CNN, appeared in the hit Australian show Redesign Your Brain, narrated the comic book documentary Independents, and is set to appear in a 2021 Netflix documentary. He wrote the book and lyrics to Discovering Magenta, which had its NYC premiere in 2015, and co-authored a book on bad baseball pitchers with his father.

• Section I Spontaneous and controlled processes in creativity1. Mind wandering: framework of a lexicon and musings on creativity Paul Joseph Barnett and James C. Kaufman2. Autonomy and control across cognition: insights from creativity, memory, mind wandering, and reasoning researchNathaniel Barr, Roger Beaty and Paul Seli3. Capturing the dynamics of creative daydreaming Claire M. Zedelius and Jonathan W. Schooler 4. The relationships between abstraction and creativity Massimiliano Palmiero Section II Mind wandering, consciousness, and imagination 5. Imagination and mind wandering: two sides of the same coin? A brain dynamics perspective Mario Villena-Gonza´lez and Diego Cosmelli 6. Altered states of consciousness and creativity Luisa Prochazkova and Bernhard Hommel 7. Creating the “stuff of experience”: spontaneous thoughts, memory, and hypnosis in clinical and forensic contextsSteven Jay Lynn, Craig Polizzi, Vladimir Miskovic and Damla Aksen Section II Imagination, play, and learning8. Relations between imagination and creativity Jacqueline D. Woolley, Louise Bunce and Elizabeth A. Boerger 9. Pretend play in young children and the emergence of creativity David Whitebread and Lisha O’Sullivan 10. Mind wandering, fantasy, and pretend play: a natural combinationSandra W. Russ11. Exploring the connection between imagination and creativity in academic learning Ronald A. Beghetto and Kathy L. Schuh12. Productive mind wandering in design practice Charles Dobson and Kalina Christoff13. Poetry, meaning making, and mind wandering David D. Preiss Section V Conclusion 14. Fragments from a notebook on novelty and constraint Patrick Colm Hogan