Reasearch on creativity shows that a vast majority of small children are actually creative geniuses. Dr. Calvin Taylor, one of the great pioneers in education for the gifted and talented, found some great surprises in his research. He gave eight tests of divergent creative thinking to 1600 children in the Headstart program. He gave the same test to these children over several years. The first test were given when the children were between three and five years of age. Ninty-eight percent of the children scored in the genius category. When these same children took identical tests five years later, only 32 percent scored that high.
Five years later it was down to 10 persent. Two hundred thousand adults over the age of twenty-five have taken the same test. Only 2 percent scored at the genius level. What happens? One thing we know is that the brain doesn't disappear. All of us can guess.
The socialization process of bad words restricts the natural creativity of our thinking potential by automatically assigning value judgements such as good, bad, right, wrong, proper, improper, ugly, beautiful. Small children have not been programed with negative "'Truth-talk"'. Our proficiency in expressing our creativity gradually drops off as we learn to accept other's negative words. What we have seen in our work with adults is that the five-year old creative genius is still lurking inside - just waiting to hear positive "'Truth-talk"'.