The Mechanism of Creativity: Why We Discover the New

The article presents an attempt to substantiate the mechanism of creativity as a development of the activity on its own initiative, the emergence and develop­ment of which is the highest level of human cognitive activity. The author correl­ates this understanding of creativity with the phenomenon of giftedness and sees the fundamental difference between creative thinking and productive thinking – the latter does not go beyond the solution of the proposed problems and consists in mastering the required algorithm for this. The article describes in detail the method developed for research on the development of cognition in humans, and the experimental model, which differs from the traditional model of "stimu­lus-response", which, according to the author, allows us to observe the phe­nomenon of creativity as an activity initiated by the subject himself. Such an ex­periment was conducted by the author and his followers for half a century on the same subjects: first they were students of the physics and mathematics school, then graduates of universities and institutes, and eventually became scientists, teachers or employees of firms. As a proof of the validity and prognosticality of the method, the author considers not the sample size, but the stability of the in­dicators of creativity of the participants of the experiment shown in the diagnosis over half a century.