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September 27 - September 27, 2018
For one thing, as I will try to show, an idea or product that deserves the label “creative” arises from the synergy of many sources and not only from the mind of a single person.
And a genuinely creative accomplishment is almost never the result of a sudden insight, a lightbulb flashing on in the dark, but comes after years of hard work.
According to this view, creativity results from the interaction of a system composed of three elements: a culture that contains symbolic rules, a person who brings novelty into the symbolic domain, and a field of experts who recognize and validate the innovation.
In cultural evolution there are no mechanisms equivalent to genes and chromosomes. Therefore, a new idea or invention is not automatically passed on to the next generation.
The analogy to genes in the evolution of culture are memes, or units of information that we must learn if culture is to continue. Languages, numbers, theories, songs, recipes, laws, and values are all memes that we pass on to our children so that they will be remembered. It is these memes that a creative person changes, and if enough of the right people see the change as an improvement, it will become part of the culture.
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.
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.
Therefore, it follows that as culture evolves, specialized knowledge will be favored over generalized knowledge.
Another consequence of limited attention is that creative individuals are often considered odd—or even arrogant, selfish, and ruthless.
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.
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.
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 working on the
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But after several years of intensive listening and reading, I have come to the conclusion that the reigning stereotype of the tortured genius is to a large extent a myth created by Romantic ideology
Pessimism is a very easy way out when you’re considering what life really is, because pessimism is a short view of life. If you look at what is happening around us today and what has happened just since you were born, you can’t help but feel that life is a terrible complexity of problems and illnesses of one sort or another. But if you look back a few thousand years, you realize that we have advanced fantastically from the day when the first amoeba crawled out of the slime and made its adventure on land. If you take a long view, I do not see how you can be pessimistic about the future of man
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Therefore, creativity does not happen inside people’s heads, but in the interaction between a person’s thoughts and a sociocultural context. It is a systemic rather than an individual phenomenon.
Who is right: the individual who believes in his or her own creativity, or the social milieu that denies it?
A brilliant conversationalist, a person with varied interests and a quick mind, may be called creative in this sense.
The other term that is often used as a synonym for “creative” is genius. Again, there is an overlap. Perhaps we should think of a genius as a person who is both brilliant and creative at the same time. But certainly a person can change the culture in significant ways without being a genius.
A person cannot be creative in a domain to which he or she is not exposed. No matter how enormous mathematical gifts a child may have, he or she will not be able to contribute to mathematics without learning its rules.
This means that we are constantly reassessing the past. And that’s a good, valuable, and indeed necessary thing to do.
It was because the leading citizens, as well as the common people, were so seriously concerned with the outcome of their work that the artists were pushed to perform beyond their previous limits. Without the constant encouragement and scrutiny of the members of the Opera, the dome over the cathedral would probably not have been as beautiful as it eventually turned out to be.
Thus the sociologist of art Arnold Hauser rightly assesses this period: “In the art of the early Renaissance…the starting point of production is to be found mostly not in the creative urge, the subjective self-expression and spontaneous inspiration of the artist, but in the task set by the customer.”
Each species experiences and understands its environment in terms of the information its sensory equipment is programmed to process.
And the knowledge conveyed by symbols
is bundled up in discrete domains—geometry, music, religion, legal systems, and so on. Each domain is made up of its own symbolic elements, its own rules, and generally has its own system of notation. In many ways, each domain describes an isolated little world in which a person can think and act with clarity and concentration.
Despite the multiplicity of domains, there are some common reasons for pursuing them for their own sake. Nuclear physics, microbiology, poetry, and musical composition share few symbols and rules, yet the calling for these different domains is often astonishingly similar. To bring order to experience, to make something that will endure after one’s death, to do something that allows humankind to go beyond its present powers are very common themes.
In the current historical climate, a domain where quantifiable measurement is possible takes precedence over one where it does not. We believe that things that can be measured are real, and we ignore those that we don’t know how to measure.
Because of the scarcity of attention, we must be selective: We remember and recognize only a few of the works of art produced, we read only a few of the new books written, we buy only a few of the new appliances busily being invented.
For though it is true that behind every new idea or product there is a person, it does not follow that such persons have a single characteristic responsible for the novelty.
Perhaps being creative is more like being involved in an automobile accident. There are some traits that make one more likely to be in an accident—being young and male, for instance—but usually we cannot explain car accidents on the basis of the driver’s characteristics alone. There are too many other variables involved: the condition of the road, the other driver, the type of traffic, the weather, and so on.
Luck is without doubt an important ingredient in creative discoveries. A very successful artist, whose work sells well and hangs in the best museums and who can afford a large estate with horses and a swimming pool, once admitted ruefully that there could be at least a thousand artists as good as he is—yet they are unknown and their work is unappreciated. The one difference between him and the rest, he said, was that years back he met at a party a man with whom he had a few drinks. They hit it off and became friends. The man eventually became a successful art dealer who did his best to push
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So you need three things to be an original thinker. First, you have to have a tremendous amount of information—a big database if you like to be fancy.
First of all, it’s too complicated. Secondly, it’s been tried before. Thirdly, he could have done it in three different easier ways. In other words, you can evaluate the thing. That doesn’t mean that he wasn’t original. But he simply didn’t do enough.
And a good creative person is well trained. So he has first of all an enormous amount of knowledge in that field. Secondly, he tries to combine ideas, because he enjoys writing music or enjoys inventing. And finally, he has the judgment to say, “This is good, I’ll pursue this further.”
there’s an amazing lack of consistency on any other dimension. How you do it seems to be a wide-open variable. There isn’t a clear pattern, tremendously different personality types. And it doesn’t seem to run by industry either.
Without a good dose of curiosity, wonder, and interest in what things are like and in how they work, it is difficult to recognize an interesting problem. Openness to experience, a fluid attention that constantly processes events in the environment, is a great advantage for recognizing potential novelty. Every creative person is more than amply endowed with these traits.
It does no good to be extremely intelligent and curious if I cannot learn what it takes to operate in a given symbolic system. The ownership of what sociologist Pierre Bourdieu calls “cultural capital” is a great resource.
Are there then no traits that distinguish creative people? If I had to express in one word what makes their personalities different from others, it would be complexity. By this I mean that they show tendencies of thought and action that in most people are segregated. They contain contradictory extremes—instead of being an “individual,” each of them is a “multitude.” Like the color white that includes all the hues in the spectrum, they tend to bring together the entire range of human possibilities within themselves.
This kind of person has many traits in common with what the Swiss analytic psychologist Carl Jung considered a mature personality.
They consider the rhythm of activity followed by idleness or reflection very important for the success of their work. And this is not a biorhythm they inherited with their genes; it was learned by trial and error, as a strategy for achieving their goals.
willingness to spend long times in thinking, with a definite possibility that you come out with nothing.”
Despite the carefree air that many creative people affect, most of them work late into the night and persist when less driven individuals would not.
Creative individuals alternate between imagination and fantasy at one end, and a rooted sense of reality at the other.
the whole point of art and science is to go beyond what we now consider real, and create a new reality.
Another way of expressing this duality is to see it as a contrast between ambition and selflessness, or competition and cooperation. It is often necessary for creative individuals to be ambitious and aggressive. Yet at the same time, they are often willing to subordinate their own personal comfort and advancement to the success of whatever project they are working on.
Things bother them.”
(learn the craft, and then set it aside).
Many people are introduced to the wonders of a domain by a teacher. There is often a particular teacher who recognizes the child’s curiosity or ability and starts cultivating his or her mind in the discipline.
The distinction between serial and parallel processing of information may also explain what happens during incubation. In a serial system like that of an old-fashioned calculator, a complex numerical problem must be solved in a sequence, one step at a time. In a parallel system such as in advanced computer software, a problem is broken up into its component steps, the partial computations are carried out simultaneously, and then these are reconstituted into a single final solution.
And I really enjoy seeing the audience paying attention—listening, understanding it.
