Culture, Creativity and Imagination

My definitions of Culture, Creativity and Imagination

Culture: I feel as though this work has no concrete definition. The dictionary defines culture as the behaviors, beliefs and characteristic of a particular social, ethnic, or age group. So culture is just a way to categorize people into groups that believe the same things or have the same behaviors. If you were to say be immersed in somebody else’s culture, that would include the customs, behaviors, traditions, food, clothing and language among many other factors that make a people group who they are.

Creativity: According to wikipedia, creativity largely has to do with ideas: the creation of new ideas and playing around with old ideas. I agree with this rather vague definition and strongly believe that creativity is something that is extremely individualistic. Everybody is creative in some way or another and no two people are creative in the same way. Individual creativity is how we express ourselves.

Imagination: I like the way that Figment portrays imagination. He is a small purple dragon and he is the Figment of your imagination. He comes from the ride Journey into Imagination at Epcot
in Disney World. This is a video of his ride:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kF25QnrdgaY&eurl=http://www.facebook.com/home.php
The basic definition of imagination is that of forming mental images or concepts of what is not actually present to the senses. But the thing to remember is that even though the things you imagine are not present to the senses, things that are present to the senses can spark your imagination. According to Figment; for every sound your ears are hearing a thousand thoughts can start appearing and your mind sees more than what your eyes see. I think that kids need to be encouraged at a young age to use their imaginations: to be silly, make up stories and play pretend. Imagination is a skill that can be worked on and one that is extremely important to every person. I believe that it is also crucial to one’s critical thinking skills.

When it comes to defining the difference between creativity and imagination I think it is easiest to just look at the basic root of each word. Creativity: create, and Imagination: imagine. So creativity is actually creating something tangible and imagination implies something you’ve only imagined.