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Bob Dylan. Ludwig van Beethoven. William Shakespeare. Steve Jobs. These
are historical figures of staggering creative genius that we often think of as
freaks of nature. That their creative talent is a God-given gift, or some
biological mutation that only affects a handful of special people. But new
research is beginning to shed light on the science behind creativity and
imagination. As it turns out, anyone can be creative.
“Creativity
shouldn’t be seen as something otherworldly. It shouldn’t be thought of as a
process reserved for artists and inventors and other ‘creative types.’ The
human mind, after all, has the creative impulse built into its operating
system, hard-wired into its most essential programming code,” writes Jonah
Lehrer in his new book Imagine.
In his book, Lehrer examines the inner workings of what we call
imagination. He looks at the neuroscience behind sudden insights, how the brain
solves different kinds of problems and which personal traits help foster
creativity. He also shares how external forces factor into the creative
process, how to design a workspace to enhance your chances of having an
epiphany, why creativity tends to bubble up in certain places and how we can encourage
our collective imaginations.
Above all,
though, the message of Lehrer’s book is that creativity is not a super power.
Anyone can be creative — it just takes hard work. “We should aspire to
excessive genius,” says Lehrer, who took some time from his book tour to sit
down with Mashable and answer a few
questions about the mysteries of how we imagine.
Can creativity really be taught?
For sure. Creativity is not some gift of the gods. While there are going
to be inevitable differences in raw talent — human performance is a bell curve
— that doesn’t mean we can’t all learn to become more creative. The imagination
can be improved.
Yo-Yo Ma says
his ideal state of creativity is “controlled craziness.” How can we learn to
harness that?
What Yo-Yo Ma
is referring to is the kind of creativity that occurs when we let ourselves go,
allowing the mind to invent without worrying about what it’s inventing. Such
creative freedom has inspired some of the most famous works of modern culture,
from John Coltrane’s saxophone solos to Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings. It’s
Miles Davis playing his trumpet in Kind of Blue —
most of the album was recorded on the very first take — and Lenny Bruce
inventing jokes at Carnegie Hall. It’s also the kind of creativity that little kids
constantly rely on, largely because they have no choice. Because parts of the
brain associated with impulse control remain underdeveloped, they are unable to
censor their imagination, to hold back their expression. This helps explain the
truth in that great Picasso quote: “Every child is an artist. The problem is
how to remain an artist once we grow up.”
“It turns out that that we can recover the creativity we’ve lost with
time. We just have to pretend we’re a little kid.”
And yet, there’s some good evidence that we can recover the creativity
we’ve lost with time, that we can learn to think again with the “controlled
craziness” celebrated by Ma. Take this clever experiment, led by the
psychologist Michael Robinson. He randomly assigned a few hundred undergraduates
to two different groups. The first group was given the following instructions:
“You are 7 years old, and school is canceled. You have the entire day to
yourself. What would you do? Where would you go? Who would you see?” The second
group was given the exact same instructions, except the first sentence was
deleted. As a result, these students didn’t imagine themselves as seven year
olds. After writing for ten minutes, the subjects were then given various tests
of creativity, such as trying to invent alternative uses for an old car tire,
or listing all the things you could do with a brick. Interestingly, the
students who imagined themselves as young kids scored far higher on the
creative tasks, coming up with twice as many ideas as the control group. It
turns out that that we can recover the creativity we’ve lost with time. We just
have to pretend we’re a little kid.
I often feel
like I have great ideas while taking a shower or just after waking up, which is
normal, according to your research — we’re more receptive to insights when
relaxed. But I have a terrible time remembering any of those great ideas. Do
you have any tips for retaining those insights? How do we stay aware enough to
remember what we come up with while daydreaming?
I have the same problem! I wish there was a simple fix. But the
unfortunate answer is that we need to practice. Productive daydreaming is an
important skill, which is why people who daydream more (and can maintain
awareness within the daydream) score much higher on tests of creativity. If it
were up to me, we’d teach kids how to effectively mind-wander in school.
How do you
encourage fruitful collaboration in the workplace? When teams get too close
they become too comfortable, and that stifles innovation, but when they’re too
far apart they don’t work well together. How do you find the sweet spot?
“The next time you’re assembling a creative team, be sure to seek out
the fresh voice.”
Look for your Stephen Sondheim. Let me explain.
Brian Uzzi is a marvelous sociologist at Northwestern. He undertook an
epic study of Broadway musicals, analyzing the collaborations behind thousands
of productions. As you point out, he found that plays produced when people knew
each other too well were more likely to fail at the box office and be panned by
critics. But the same thing was true of teams that didn’t know each other at
all and hadn’t formed crosscutting connections within the larger Broadway
community. Instead, Uzzi found that there was a very narrow sweet spot of collaboration
and that musicals within this sweet spot were three times more likely to
succeed. (Three times!)
Uzzi’s
favorite example of “intermediate Q” [Q is a designation for the density of
connections among collaborators] is West Side Story, one
of the most successful Broadway musicals ever. In 1957, the play was seen as a
radical departure from Broadway conventions, both for its focus on social
problems and for its extended dance scenes. The concept was dreamed up by
Jerome Robbins, Leonard Bernstein, and Arthur Laurents. They were all Broadway
legends, which might make West Side Story look
like a show with high Q. But the project also benefited from a crucial
injection of unknown talent, as the established artists realized that they
needed a fresh lyrical voice. After an extensive search, they chose a
twenty-five-year-old lyricist who had never worked on a Broadway musical
before. His name was Stephen Sondheim.
So the next time you’re assembling a creative team, be sure to seek out
the fresh voice. Get a Sondheim in the room.
Why doesn’t
brainstorming work? What should we do instead?
I think the failure of brainstorming is inseparable from its allure,
which is that it makes us feel good about ourselves. A group of people are put
together in a room and told to free-associate, with no criticism allowed. (The
assumption is that the imagination is meek and shy — if it’s worried about
being criticized, it will clam up.) Before long, the whiteboard is filled with
ideas. Everybody has contributed; nobody has been criticized. Alas, the
evidence suggests that the overwhelming majority of these free-associations are
superficial and that most brainstorming sessions actually inhibit the
productivity of the group. We become less than the sum of our parts.
However, in recent years, scientists have shown that group
collaborations benefit from debate and dissent; it is the human friction that
makes the sparks. (There’s a reason why Steve Jobs always insisted that new
ideas required “brutal honesty.”) In fact, some studies suggest that
encouraging debate and dissent can lead to a 40% increase in useful new ideas
from the group.
Why does
failure seem to be such an important part of innovation?
Because innovation is hard. If it were easy to invent an idea, that idea
would already exist. Creative success is not about the avoidance of failure.
It’s about failing as fast as possible, going through endless iterations until
the idea is perfect.
What about
Silicon Valley’s creativity and innovation allowed it to overtake Route 128 as
the tech center of America in the latter half of the last decade?
It’s a really interesting comparison, because if you time travel back to
the 1960s, you never would have guessed that Silicon Valley would become the
tech center of the world. (It was still mostly walnut and apricot farms.) Those
Boston suburbs, meanwhile, were dense with engineering talent and technology
firms. By 1970, the area bounded by Route 128 included six of the ten largest
technology firms in the world, such as Digital Computer and Raytheon. The
“Massachusetts Miracle” was underway.
So what
happened? The downfall of the Boston tech sector was caused by the very same
features that, at least initially, seemed like such advantages. As Annalee
Saxenian notes in her extremely insightful book Regional
Advantage, the Route 128 area had been defined for decades by the
presence of a few large firms. (At one point, Digital Equipment alone employed
more than 120,000 people.) These companies were so large, in fact, that they
were mostly self-sufficient. Digital Equipment didn’t just make minicomputers —
it also made the microchips in its computers, and designed the software that
ran on those microchips. (Gordon Bell, the vice-president in charge of research
at Digital, described the company as “a large entity that operates as an island
in the regional economy.”)
As a result, the Boston firms took secrecy very seriously — a scientist
at Digital wasn’t allowed to talk about his work with a scientist at Wang, or
to share notes with someone at Lotus. These companies strictly enforced
non-disclosure agreements so that former employees couldn’t work for
competitors and prohibited their scientists from publishing peer-reviewed
articles. This meant that, at Route 128 companies, information tended to flow
vertically, as ideas and innovations were transferred within the firms.
While this vertical system made it easier for Route 128 companies to
protect their intellectual property, it also made them far less innovative. This
is because the creativity of an urban area depends upon its ability to
encourage the free-flow of information — we need that knowledge spillover — as
all those people in the same zip code exchange ideas and work together. But
this didn’t happen around Route 128. Although the Boston area had a density of
talent, the talent couldn’t interact — each firm was a private island. The end
result was a stifling of innovation.
The vertical culture of the Boston tech sector existed in stark contrast
to the horizontal interactions of Silicon Valley. Because the California firms
were small and fledgling, they often had to collaborate on projects and share
engineers. This led to the formation of cross-cutting relationships, so that it
wasn’t uncommon for a scientist at Cisco to be friends with someone at Oracle,
or for a co-founder of Intel to offer management advice to a young executive at
Apple. Furthermore, these networks often led to high employee turnover, as
people jumped from project to project. In the 1980s, the average tenure at a
Silicon Valley company was less than two years. (It also helped that
non-compete clauses were almost never enforced in California, thus freeing
engineers and executives to quickly reenter the job market and work for
competitors.) This meant that the industrial system of the San Jose area wasn’t
organized around individual firms. Instead, the region was defined by its
professional networks, by groups of engineers trading knowledge with each
other. And that’s when new knowledge is made.
You talk a lot
about the benefits of cultural mixing — how good ideas multiply when they’re
allowed to move freely and new perspectives are introduced. What legislative
changes would encourage more of this?
More immigrants! The numbers speak for themselves. According to the
latest figures from the U.S. Patent Office, immigrants invent patents at double
the rate of non-immigrants, which is why a 1% increase in immigrants with
college degrees leads to a 15% rise in patent production. (In recent years,
immigrant inventors have contributed to more than a quarter of all U.S. global
patent applications.) These new citizens also start companies at an accelerated
pace, co-founding 52% of Silicon Valley firms since 1995.
Many of the
anecdotes in Imagine have a disconcerting common theme of
drugs or mental illness. Are creative people all doomed to be addicts or mad
men?
I don’t think so. (Yo Yo Ma, for instance, is a very nice guy.) But I do
think the prevalence of such stories reminds us that creativity is damn difficult,
which is why those in the creativity business are always looking for every
possible edge. That’s why many great writers experimented with amphetamines and
why performers have always searched for compounds that let them get out of
their head, silencing that voice that kills their spontaneity. In the end, of
course, these chemical shortcuts rarely work out — there’s nothing creative
about addiction. And that’s why I remained convinced that the best creativity
booster is self-knowledge. Once we know how the imagination works, we can make
it work better.
