Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention

by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi

his later attempts to assemble men and women from very different domains at his center were also directed at making the invisible visible through conversations that would bring out new ideas that could not arise in the minds of the single individuals but might emerge as a result of the interaction. This is how he described this latter form of creativity: I find that that kind of creativity is very interesting and very exciting—when this is done interactively between two sets of minds. I can see this done in the form of a collective mind, by a group of individuals whose minds are open and creative and are able to bring forth even more interesting and more complex results. All of which leads me to the idea that we can guide this process—this is in fact part of the process of evolution, and ideas that emerge in this way are equivalent to genes that emerge in the course of time. I see that ideas are to metabiological evolution what genes are to biological evolution.