On the Growing Relevance of N.I. Zhinkin’s Ideas for Modern Research into the Problems of Creativity and Thinking

Abstract

In modern scientific literature, the concepts of “verbal thinking” and “visual thinking” are firmly established. They are usually viewed as separate phenom­ena, radically detached from each other. Similar processes occur as with the con­cepts of “thinking” and “imagination”. The 130th anniversary of the unique per­son and psychologist Nikolai Ivanovich Zhinkin, who gave his life to the service of science until his very last moments, allows us, his followers, to update his ideas of “code transitions in inner speech”, to show their significance for the modern synthetic interpretation of “thinking”. Problems of creativity and thinking are still the most difficult and confusing for researchers. Pedagogical conferences held in recent years show that even highly qualified teachers do not grasp the correlation between thinking and imagination. Meanwhile, even in the works of the 1960s, Zhinkin drew attention to the fundamental correlativity of these phenomena. The author of the article was convinced of the correctness of his point of view when she analyzed the empirically obtained data in an ex­periment on solving “creative problems” for her thesis (defended in 1958), com­paring them against those put forward by N.I. Zhinkin’s idea of internal code transitions, as well as the position of A.N. Sokolov about the switchability of mental activity from a visual analyzer to a verbal one and the possibility of in­ferences based on visual premises.