Fluency of thinking Able to think well and effortlessly Word fluency Can easily state words containing a given letter or combination of letters Associational fluency Can easily state synonyms for a given word Expressional fluency Can easily write well-formed sentences with a specified content. Ideational fluency Can easily produce ideas to fulfill certain requirements, for example to name objects that hare hard, white and edible, or to write an appropriate title for a given story. Flexibility of thinking Can easily abandon old ways of thinking and adopt new ones. Spontaneous flexibility Can produce a great variety of ideas. For example in suggesting uses for a brick, subject can jump among categories, from building material to weight to missile to source of red powder.
Adaptive flexibility Can generalize requirements of a problem to find a solution.
For example, in a problem of forming squares using a minimum number of lines, can abandon the usual idea that all squares have to be the same size. Again, these were found to be common properties of creative individuals. There was a considerable effort put into training people to have these characteristics, in the hope of increasing their creativity. Indeed, according to several recent authors, such as Csikszentmihalyi, this is still done, and most creativity training involves these characteristics. However, while such training can increase the level of the characteristics, it does not do much for increasing levels of creativity.