We’re All Creative. We Just Forgot.
Walk into a preschool classroom and ask the kids to raise their hand if they think they’re creative. Tessa Forshaw has done exactly this — and what she saw stopped her in her tracks.
“Every kid had two hands in the air. There were feet in the air,” she recalls, laughing. “These kids were bursting to tell me how creative they were.”
Now ask the same question to a room full of adults — teachers, professionals, executives. Forshaw does this too, at the Harvard Next Level Lab, in classrooms, in boardrooms across the country. The result? Somewhere between 10 and 25 percent of hands go up. On a good day.
That gap — between the preschooler with both arms stretched toward the ceiling and the grown adult who quietly keeps their hands in their lap — is what Forshaw has dedicated her career to bridging.
A cognitive scientist, co-founder of Harvard’s Next Level Lab, and co-author of Innovation-ish, Forshaw isn’t just asking why creativity disappears. She’s using the science of how the brain actually works to help educators bring it back.
The Myth We’re All Living Inside
Before she can help anyone reclaim their creativity, Forshaw has to dismantle something first: the idea that creativity belongs to certain people and not others.
Most of us grew up with some version of the left-brain/right-brain split — the idea that creative people are right-brained and analytical people are left-brained, and that you’re simply born as one or the other. It’s one of the most widespread ideas in education. It’s also, according to Forshaw, completely unsupported by science.
“In cognitive science, this idea is called personality-based hemispheric dominance,” she explains. “There have been dozens of studies by hundreds of academics looking at thousands of fMRIs — brain scans — and there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever to support it.”
None. Zero.
To make the point land, Forshaw tends to reach for a couple of well-chosen examples. The first is choreography. “I think choreography, or being a choreographer, is probably one of the most creative acts out there,” she says. “Except that it is also an incredibly analytical act. You have to think about multiple people, how their bodies move through space, you have to think about time in, you know, beats and subbeats, and you have to think about staging and movement.” You have to go deep into the details, she explains, and then zoom back out to the big picture — skills we’d typically call analytical, sitting right at the heart of one of the most creative professions imaginable.
The second comes from her co-author Rich Braden, and it involves Apollo 13. When the spacecraft’s CO2 scrubber broke mid-mission, engineers on the ground were given a pile of objects — whatever happened to be on board — and told to figure it out. What followed was an explosion of wild prototyping, of using things in ways they were never designed to be used, of abundance and iteration and creative possibility. “That’s incredibly creative,” Forshaw says, “even though we think of space engineers as purely analytical.”
Her point is simple but worth sitting with: nothing out there exists as purely one or the other. Creativity and analysis aren’t opposites. They’re teammates.
What Actually Happens Around Age 12
So if we’re all born with creative capacity, what goes wrong?
Forshaw points to two forces that collide right around the time kids hit middle school, and together, they do a lot of damage.
The first is cognitive and developmental. As children move through puberty and into adolescence, the brain begins to prioritize social cohesion — fitting in, belonging, not standing out. Signalling to the tribe that you were an agreeable team member, happy to assimilate to the rules — that, Forshaw explains, kept you in the group and not off by yourself. This isn’t a design flaw. It’s a survival instinct that served our species for hundreds of thousands of years. The problem is that in the context of creative expression, it quietly trains kids to stop taking risks.
The second force is environmental, and schools — however unintentionally — often make it worse. Dress codes, standardized expectations, systems that reward the right answer over the interesting one: these all send the same message. Play within these boundaries. Don’t express the individual.
Forshaw grew up in Australia, where school uniforms are standard from age five all the way through to eighteen. Hers, she mentions with barely concealed horror, was a shade officially described as “poached asparagus.”
The humor aside, her point is serious: when you layer cognitive pressure toward conformity on top of environmental systems that reward compliance, you end up with adults who have genuinely convinced themselves that creativity is something other people have.
Three Cognitive Processes Every Student Already Owns
Here is where Forshaw shifts from diagnosis to possibility.
Creative problem solving, she argues, relies on three core cognitive processes — and critically, none of them are personality traits. They are learnable, teachable, and present in every student to varying degrees.
The first is divergent thinking: generating ideas, going wide, embracing abundance and possibility. This is the one most people think of when they hear the word “creative” — brainstorming, wild ideas, thinking outside the box.
The second is convergent thinking: narrowing, analyzing, finding patterns, making decisions. This is what most people think of as “analytical” — and it is, but it’s also an indispensable part of creativity. Without it, all that divergent energy goes nowhere.
Forshaw uses the metaphor of flight to explain how they work together. Divergent thinking is lift — the exhilarating upward thrust of taking off. Convergent thinking is weight — what brings you back down. But if you only go up and down, you’re not actually going anywhere. That’s where the third process comes in: executive function — the capacity to plan, sustain, monitor your own thinking, and follow through. In the aerodynamics analogy: lift, weight, and thrust.
Once students understand these three processes, Forshaw argues, they realize they already have them — to varying degrees — and can start learning to work with them intentionally.
For educators, this framework opens a powerful classroom strategy: instead of asking a student who feels creatively blocked to suddenly become a free-spirited idea generator, meet them where they already are. If someone is strong in convergent thinking, give them the synthesis task first. Let them step into the creative process through the door that already feels natural — and then gently expand from there.
The Teacher as the “More Experienced Other”
One of the more striking findings from Forshaw’s own research on adult learners involves what she calls the “more experienced other” — and it has significant implications for how we think about the teacher’s role.
In a study of adults learning tasks in workplace settings, one of the strongest predictors of whether learners could successfully transfer existing knowledge to an unfamiliar task was whether someone more experienced actively helped them see the connection. Not just modeled it. Not just explained it. But pointed to it explicitly — saying, in effect: what you already know is relevant here.
“When they had a more experienced other who did that,” Forshaw says, “they were more likely to successfully transfer the knowledge, as measured by how quickly they reached competency and how they performed on the task.”
This connects to a broader principle that runs through all of Forshaw’s work on learning: new knowledge doesn’t stick when it arrives in a vacuum. The brain needs an anchor. The job of the teacher — whether in a kindergarten classroom, a university seminar, or a corporate training room — is to help learners surface what they already know, so that new learning has somewhere to connect.
“If you always start by helping students figure out what they know about a thing, and then connect to it,” she says, “even if what you’re doing is correcting it — starting with what they know is better than trying to teach the new thing without bringing forward the old thing.”
The Most Important Thing We Can Give Students
As AI reshapes the world of work faster than any of us can keep track of, the question of what skills will actually matter has never felt more urgent. Forshaw’s answer is clear, and it’s not the one most people expect.
It’s not coding. It’s not prompt engineering. It’s not any specific technical fluency that will age out in a few years anyway.
It’s creative problem solving — the capacity to face the genuinely novel and not freeze.
“The best gift we can give young people heading into this wild and uncertain future,” she says, “is to be empowered in their ability to creatively problem-solve.”
That starts, she insists, not with a curriculum overhaul or a new program or a special elective. It starts with something much simpler: when you meet a student who doesn’t believe they’re creative, help them see that isn’t true. As early as possible. As often as needed.
Because somewhere inside that student, there’s still a kid with both hands in the air.
Reference
Forshaw, T., & Braden, R. (2025). Innovation-ish: How anyone can create breakthrough solutions to real problems in the real world. Wiley.
Tessa Forshaw is a cognitive scientist, co-founder of the Next Level Lab at Harvard University, and co-author of Innovation-ish (Wiley, 2025). This post is drawn from her conversation on the ShiftED Podcast.
