Creativity (2 page)

Therefore, to understand creativity it is not enough to study the individuals who seem most responsible for a novel idea or a new thing. Their contribution, while necessary and important, is only a link in a chain, a phase in a process. To say that Thomas Edison invented electricity or that Albert Einstein discovered relativity is a convenient simplification. It satisfies our ancient predilection for stories that are easy to comprehend and involve superhuman heroes. But Edison’s or Einstein’s discoveries would be inconceivable without the prior knowledge, without the intellectual and social netw
ork that stimulated their thinking, and without the social mechanisms that recognized and spread their innovations. To say that the theory of relativity was created by Einstein is like saying that it is the spark that is responsible for the fire. The spark is necessary, but without air and tinder there would be no flame.

This book is not about the neat things children often say, or the creativity all of us share just because we have a mind and we can think. It does not deal with great ideas for clinching business deals,
new ways for baking stuffed artichokes, or original ways of decorating the living room for a party. These are examples of creativity with a small
c
, which is an important ingredient of everyday life, one that we definitely should try to enhance. But to do so well it is necessary first to understand Creativity—and that is what this book tries to accomplish.

A
TTENTION AND
C
REATIVITY

Creativity, at least as I deal with it in this book, is a process by which a symbolic domain in the culture is changed. New songs, new ideas, new machines are what creativity is about. But because these changes do not happen automatically as in biological evolution, it is necessary to consider the price we must pay for creativity to occur. It takes effort to change traditions. For example, memes must be learned before they can be changed: A musician must learn the musical tradition, the notation system, the way instruments are played before she can think of writing a new song; befo
re an inventor can improve on airplane design he has to learn physics, aerodynamics, and why birds don’t fall out of the sky.

If we want to learn anything, we must pay attention to the information to be learned. And attention is a limited resource: There is just so much information we can process at any given time. Exactly how much we don’t know, but it is clear that, for instance, we cannot learn physics and music at the same time. Nor can we learn well while we do the other things that need to be done and require attention, like taking a shower, dressing, cooking breakfast, driving a car, talking to our spouse, and so forth. The point is, a great deal of our limited supply of attention is committe
d to the tasks of surviving from one day to the next. Over an entire lifetime, the amount of attention left over for learning a symbolic domain—such as music or physics—is a fraction of this already small amount.

Some important consequences follow logically from these simple premises. To achieve creativity in an existing domain, there must be surplus attention available. This is why such centers of creativity as Greece in the fifth century B.C., Florence in the fifteenth century, and Paris in the nineteenth century tended to be places where wealth allowed individuals to learn and to experiment above and beyond what was necessary for survival. It also seems true that centers of cre
ativity tend to be at the intersection of different cultures, where beliefs, lifestyles, and knowledge mingle and allow individuals to see new combinations of ideas with greater ease. In cultures that are uniform and rigid, it takes a greater investment of attention to achieve new ways of thinking. In other words, creativity is more likely in places where new ideas require less effort to be perceived.

As cultures evolve, it becomes increasingly difficult to master more than one domain of knowledge. Nobody knows who the last Renaissance man really was, but sometime after Leonardo da Vinci it became impossible to learn enough about all of the arts and the sciences to be an expert in more than a small fraction of them. Domains have split into subdomains, and a mathematician who has mastered algebra may not know much about number theory, combinatorix, topology—and vice versa. Whereas in the past an artist typically painted, sculpted, cast gold, and designed buildings, now all
of these special skills tend to be acquired by different people.

Therefore, it follows that as culture evolves, specialized knowledge will be favored over generalized knowledge. To see why this must be so, let us assume that there are three persons, one who studies physics, one who studies music, and one who studies both. Other things being equal, the person who studies both music and physics will have to split his or her attention between two symbolic domains, while the other two can focus theirs exclusively on a single domain. Consequently, the two specialized individuals can learn their domains in greater depth, and their expertise will be pr
eferred over that of the generalist. With time, specialists are bound to take over leadership and control of the various institutions of culture.

Of course, this trend toward specialization is not necessarily a good thing. It can easily lead to a cultural fragmentation such as described in the biblical story of the building of the Tower of Babel. Also, as the rest of this book amply demonstrates, creativity generally involves crossing the boundaries of domains, so that, for instance, a chemist who adopts quantum mechanics from physics and applies it to molecular bonds can make a more substantive contribution to chemistry than one who stays exclusively within the bounds of chemistry. Yet at the same time it is important to re
cognize that given how little attention we have to work with, and given the increasing amounts of information that are constantly being added to domains, specialization seems inevitable. This trend might be
reversible, but only if we make a conscious effort to find an alternative; left to itself, it is bound to continue.

Another consequence of limited attention is that creative individuals are often considered odd—or even arrogant, selfish, and ruthless. It is important to keep in mind that these are not traits
of
creative people, but traits that the rest of us attribute to them on the basis of our perceptions. When we meet a person who focuses all of his attention on physics or music and ignores us and forgets our names, we call that person “arrogant” even though he may be extremely humble and friendly if he could only spare attention from his pursuit. If that person is so taken with his domain
that he fails to take our wishes into account we call him “insensitive” or “selfish” even though such attitudes are far from his mind. Similarly, if he pursues his work regardless of other people’s plans, we call him “ruthless.” Yet it is practically impossible to learn a domain deeply enough to make a change in it without dedicating all of one’s attention to it and thereby appearing to be arrogant, selfish, and ruthless to those who believe they have a right to the creative person’s attention.

In fact, creative people are neither single-minded, specialized, nor selfish. Indeed, they seem to be the opposite: They love to make connections with adjacent areas of knowledge. They tend to be—in principle—caring and sensitive. Yet the demands of their role inevitably push them toward specialization and selfishness. Of the many paradoxes of creativity, this is perhaps the most difficult to avoid.

W
HAT’S THE
G
OOD OF
S
TUDYING
C
REATIVITY
?

There are two main reasons why looking closely at the lives of creative individuals and the contexts of their accomplishments is useful. The first is the most obvious one: The results of creativity enrich the culture and so they indirectly improve the quality of all our lives. But we may also learn from this knowledge how to make our own lives directly more interesting and productive. In the last chapter of this volume I summarize what this study suggests for enriching anyone’s everyday existence.

Some people argue that studying creativity is an elite distraction from the more pressing problems confronting us. We should focus all our energies on combating overpopulation, poverty, or mental retardation instead. A concern for creativity is an unnecessary luxury,
according to this argument. But this position is somewhat shortsighted. First of all, workable new solutions to poverty or overpopulation will not appear magically by themselves. Problems are solved only when we devote a great deal of attention to them and in a creative way. Second, to have a good life, it is not enough to remove what is wrong from it. We also need a positive goal, otherwise why keep going? Creativity is one answer to that question: It provides one of the most exciting models for living. Psychologists have learned much about how healthy human beings think and feel
from studying pathological cases. Brain-damaged patients, neurotics, and delinquents have provided contrasts against which normal functioning may better be understood. But we have learned little from the other end of the continuum, from people who are extraordinary in some positive sense. Yet if we wish to find out what might be missing from our lives, it makes sense to study lives that are rich and fulfilling. This is one of the main reasons for writing the book: to understand better a way of being that is more satisfying than most lives typically are.

Each of us is born with two contradictory sets of instructions: a conservative tendency, made up of instincts for self-preservation, self-aggrandizement, and saving energy, and an expansive tendency made up of instincts for exploring, for enjoying novelty and risk—the curiosity that leads to creativity belongs to this set. We need both of these programs. But whereas the first tendency requires little encouragement or support from outside to motivate behavior, the second can wilt if it is not cultivated. If too few opportunities for curiosity are available, if too many obstacl
es are placed in the way of risk and exploration, the motivation to engage in creative behavior is easily extinguished.

You would think that given its importance, creativity would have a high priority among our concerns. And in fact there is a lot of lip service paid to it. But if we look at the reality, we see a different picture. Basic scientific research is minimized in favor of immediate practical applications. The arts are increasingly seen as dispensable luxuries that must prove their worth in the impersonal mass market. In one company after another, as downsizing continues, one hears CEOs report that this is not an age for innovators but for bookkeepers, not a climate for building and risking
but for cutting expenses. Yet as economic competition heats up around the globe, exactly the opposite strategy is needed.

And what holds true for the sciences, the arts, and for the economy also applies to education. When school budgets tighten and test scores wobble, more and more schools opt for dispensing with frills—usually with the arts and extracurricular activities—so as to focus instead on the so-called basics. This would not be bad if the “three Rs” were taught in ways that encouraged originality and creative thinking; unfortunately, they rarely are. Students generally find the basic academic subjects threatening or dull; their chance of using their minds in creative ways comes from workin
g on the student paper, the drama club, or the orchestra. So if the next generation is to face the future with zest and self-confidence, we must educate them to be original as well as competent.

H
OW THE
S
TUDY
W
AS
C
ONDUCTED

Between 1990 and 1995 I and my students at the University of Chicago videotaped interviews with a group of ninety-one exceptional individuals. The in-depth analysis of these interviews helps illustrate what creative people are like, how the creative process works, and what conditions encourage or hinder the generation of original ideas.

There were three main conditions for selecting respondents: The person had to have made a difference to a major domain of culture—one of the sciences, the arts, business, government, or human well-being in general; he or she had to be still actively involved in that domain (or a different one); and he or she had to be at least sixty years old (in a very few cases, when circumstances warranted, we interviewed respondents who were a bit younger). A list of the respondents interviewed thus far is in appendix A.

The selection process was slow and lengthy. I set out to interview equal numbers of men and women who met our criteria. A further desideratum was to get as wide a representation of cultural backgrounds as possible. With these conditions in mind, I began generating lists of people who met these attributes. In this task I availed myself of the best advice of colleagues and experts in different disciplines. After a while the graduate students involved in the project also suggested names, and other leads were provided by the respondents after each interview, producing what is sometimes
called a “snowball sample.”

When the research team agreed that the achievements of a person nominated for the sample warranted inclusion, he or she was sent a letter that explained the study and requested participation. If there was no response within three weeks or so, we repeated the request, and then tried to contact the person by phone. Of the 275 persons initially contacted, a little over a third declined, the same number accepted, and a quarter did not respond or could not be traced. Those who accepted included many individuals whose creativity had been widely recognized; there were fourteen Nobel prize
s shared among the respondents (four in physics, four in chemistry, two in literature, two in physiology or medicine, and one each in peace and in economics). Most of the others’ accomplishments were of the same order, even if they were not as widely recognized.

A few declined for health reasons, many more because they could not spare the time. The secretary to novelist Saul Bellow wrote: “Mr. Bellow informed me that he remains creative in the second half of life, at least in part, because he does not allow himself to be the object of other people’s ‘studies.’ In any event, he’s gone for the summer.” The photographer Richard Avedon just scrawled the answer “Sorry—too little time left!” The secretary of composer George Ligeti had this to say: