请阅读Passage 1, 完成21-25小题。

Passage 1

       In thefield of psychology, there has long been a certain haziness surrounding thedefinition of creativity, an I-know-it-when-I-see-it attitude that has eluded aprecise formulation. During our conversation, Mark Beeman, acognitive neuroscientist at Northwestern University, told me that he used to bereluctant to tell people what his area of study was, for fear of beingdismissed or misunderstood. What, for instance, crosses your mind when youthink of creativity? Well, we know that someone is creative if he produces newthings or has new ideas. And yet, as John Kounios, a psychologist at DrexelUniversity who collaborates frequently with Beeman, points out, that view iswrong, or at least not entirely right. "Creativity is the process, not theproduct," he says.

       Toillustrate, Beeman offers an example. Imagine someone who has never used orseen a paperclip and is struggling to keep a bunch of papers together. Then theperson comes up with a new way of bending a stiff wire to hold the papers inplace. "That was very creative,"Beeman says. On the flip side, if someone works in a new field--Beeman givesthe example of nanotechnology--anything that he produces may be consideredinherently "creative." But was the act of producing it actuallycreative? As Beeman put it,"Not all artists are creative. And someaccountants are very creative."

       Insight,however, has proved less difficult to define and to study. Because it arrivesat a specific moment in time, you can isolate it, examine it, and analyze itscharacteristics. "Insight is only one part of creativity," Beemansays." But we can measure it. We have a temporal marker that somethingjust happened in the brain. I´d never say that´s all of creativity, but it´s acentral, identifiable component." When scientists examine insight in thelab, they are looking at what types of attention and thought processes lead tothat moment of synthesis: If you are trying to facilitate a breakthrough, arethere methods you can use that help? If you feel stuck on a problem, are theretricks to get you through?

       In arecent study, Beeman and Kounios followed people´s gazes as they attempted tosolve what´s called the remote-associates test, in which the subject is given aseries of words, like "pine," "crab," and"sauce," and has to think of a single word that can logically bepaired with all of them.

       Theywanted to see if the direction of a person´ s eyes and her rate of blinkingcould shed light on her approach and on her likelihood of success. It turnedout that if the subject looked directly at a word and focused on it--that is,blinked less frequently, signaling a higher degree of close attention--she wasmore likely to be thinking in an analytical, convergent fashion, going throughpossibilities that made sense and systematically discarding those that didn´ t.If she looked at "pine, "say, she might be thinking of words like"tree," "cone," and "needle," then testing eachoption to see if it fit with the other words. When the subject stopped lookingat any specific word, either by moving her eyes or by blinking, she was morelikely to think of broader, more abstract associations.

       Thatis a more insight-oriented approach. "You need to learn not just to starebut to look outside your focus," Beeman says. (The solution to thisremote-associates test: "apple. ")

       Asit turns out, by simple following someone´s eyes and measuring her blinks andfixation times, Beeman´s group can predict how someone will likely solve aproblem and when she is nearing that solution. That´s an importantconsideration for would-be creative minds: it helps us understand how distinctpatterns of attention may contribute to certain kinds of insights.