6
BEING CREATIVE
“When people find their medium, they discover their real creative strengths and come into their own. Helping people to connect with their personal creative capacities is the surest way to release the best they have to offer.”
MY WIFE TERRY AND I have lived and worked together for over 40 years. In 2007, it was our 25th wedding anniversary and we decided to renew our vows at the Elvis Chapel in Las Vegas. We went with 30 friends and family, including our two children, James and Kate. It was a great weekend. We had the Blue Hawaii package. There are others, but we liked this one. The package included the Elvis impersonator, four songs and smoke. As we came into the chapel there was a puff of smoke from a pipe near the altar, presumably to add to the air of mystery and sacredness. There was also a hula girl, who was optional. I had opted for her, for reasons I was rather pleased about in the event. For another $100 we could have had a pink Cadillac, but we thought that was a bit tacky. It could have lowered the tone of the whole occasion.
After the ceremony, we had a reception at the Venetian Hotel, which is the size of a small town and includes, on the second floor, an indoor replica of San Marco’s Square in Venice, complete with the Grand Canal, gondolas and gondoliers. I have been to Venice, and in some ways the Venetian Hotel is better. It’s more authentic and it doesn’t smell of sewage.
I mention Las Vegas for a reason. If you think of it, there is no reason for it to be there. Most other cities have a reason to be where they are. Some cities, like New York or Barcelona, are in natural harbors, so they’re good for trade. Others are in fertile plains or valleys that are perfect for agriculture; or on major rivers, so they’re good for transport and settlement; or on hilltops, so they’re good for defense. None of these are true of Las Vegas. As far as I know, nobody is trying to invade Nevada. Las Vegas is in the middle of an arid wilderness. It has no natural water supply, no local sources of agriculture and it suffers from extremely high temperatures. It is the most unlikely place on earth for a major city. Yet for years Las Vegas has been one of the fastest growing cities in America and is known all around the world. In one sense, Las Vegas really does occupy the most fertile place on earth: the human imagination.
“In one respect at least, human beings are radically different from the rest of life on earth. We have the ability to imagine. As a result, we have unlimited powers of creativity.”
Las Vegas began life as an idea. It proved to be such a compelling idea that it has generated a maelstrom of imaginative energy. I’m not asking you to approve of the idea of Las Vegas: simply to recognize that it’s wholly the product of human imagination. So too is every uniquely human achievement.
THE VEIL OF CONCEPTIONS
We see the world not as it is, but through a veil of conceptions. The nature of our senses determines what we can perceive. Even so, people often see the same events differently, because they have different points of view. They may be in different physical places and literally have a different angle on what is going on. If there was no more to it than that, any dispute could be settled by comparing everyone’s point of view and putting together an objective overview. In theory this is what’s meant to happen in a court of law. In practice, comparing everyone’s points of view often deepens the dispute. Our own view of what is going on is influenced by the ideas, values and beliefs through which we interpret our experience. These affect what we actually do perceive and what we make of it all.
If you take your dog outside and point at the moon, the dog will probably look at your finger and then at you. If you take a young child outside and point a finger at the moon, the child will look at the moon. This is called joint attention: the ability to share words and a point of focus. As the brain develops, children learn to understand the idea that one thing can represent another. This ability is the foundation of the most significant achievement of the creative mind: the power of symbolic thought. Language is the most obvious example. When learning to speak, a child learns that the sounds can have meaning and, eventually, that letters represent sounds. Other animals have only a limited capacity for this. If you say, “fetch” to a dog, it will sit up and be ready to move. If you were to talk to it about the importance of fetching or great fetchers you have known, it would sit blankly until you threw the stick. Show it a picture of the stick and it will probably sniff it. The dog’s abilities don’t go far beyond the association of sounds with actions. They don’t extend, as they quickly do for children, to sophisticated powers of thinking and communication.
The power of representation has given rise to intricate forms of thought and communication, which permeate human consciousness and frame our ideas and feelings about the world. We don’t just look at the moon, we locate it within complex theories of the universe; we don’t just have feelings for each other, we can capture them in music and poetry. We don’t just live in communities: we construct elaborate political theories and constitutions.
“Creativity involves putting your imagination to work. In a sense, creativity is applied imagination.”
Some theories of intelligence argue that there is a direct line from the senses to the brain to the actions we take. Susanne Langer argues that there is an intermediate process. The brain, she says, is like a great transformer: “The current of experience that passes through it undergoes a change of character not through … the sense by which the perception entered but by virtue of a primary use, which is made of it immediately. It is sucked into the stream of symbols which constitute a human mind.”1 Take language.
SPEAKING YOUR MIND
There is a common-sense assumption that language is principally a system of communication: first we have our thoughts and then we find the words to convey them. While language is a sophisticated way of communicating, its role in what and how we think is more complex. As a child learns to speak she does more than learn that things have names. She absorbs ways of thinking that the words make possible. For example, the word “camel” in Arabic can be expressed in many different ways. As well as the standard Arabic word djemal, the spoken language uses several hundred other nouns, depending on the local dialect. Having the words to describe the nuances makes it easier to see the differences between them.2 Languages consist of more than the names of things. They are made up of grammatical structure, tenses, moods and syntax, which vary between languages, often profoundly. In some North American Indian languages, for example, the simple idea “I see a man” cannot be expressed without indicating with other parts of speech whether the man is sitting, standing or walking.3 The Greek language has tenses and moods that are not available in English.
These differences illustrate the different “natural” ways of thinking within different language communities. It is relatively easy for an English speaker to learn French or Italian, in part because many of the words are similar, but also because the conventions of these languages are similar. All three are part of the family of Indo-European languages. It can be harder for a European to learn Chinese, because the conventions are so different. Chinese is a monosyllabic and tonal language. Indeed, Chinese is tonal because it is monosyllabic. Each word is limited to one syllable and is represented by a single character in the written language. The number of similar-sounding words would be unmanageable without some means of differentiating for meaning, which is where the voice itself comes in. Words are given a pitch – high, medium, low – and a tone or contour. The voice stays level or rises or falls as the word is pronounced. Almost literally, Chinese is sung. If you sing a wrong note, the person you are speaking to will hear a different meaning altogether. The foreigner first learning to speak Chinese cannot avoid frequent misunderstandings and gaffes; some more serious than others.
Unlike English, French or Italian, Chinese does not use inflections to show agreement, tense or number; these have to be inferred from the context and word order. Written Chinese also differs from European languages in that there is no alphabet. Each word is a distinctive character, which has to be learned in toto without the benefit of letters to guide pronunciation. For this reason, a number of different dialects have developed over the centuries in China, all based on a common written language. Chinese people from different parts of the country may have difficulty in understanding each other in conversation yet are still able to communicate in writing. An easy way to grasp this concept is to look at the keypad on a computer: whether English, French or Italian, everyone would understand the letters and numbers even though they would give the letters different names and sounds if they read them out loud.4
As they grow into their cultures, children absorb ways of thinking that are embedded in the particular languages they learn. In this way, languages play a central role in the growth of consciousness. Important as they are, words are not the only way in which we think.
WHAT DO YOU MEAN?
Language is a system of symbols. A symbol is something that represents something else. Anything may be a symbol. Symbols may be informal or formal. Informal symbols are not intended to mean anything in particular; we just see them that way. A sunset may symbolize sadness for you and euphoria for someone else, according to personal associations or state of mind. Formal symbols are intended to mean something and there is some level of agreement among those who use them about what they do or can mean. Let me suggest a broad distinction between forms of symbolic representation that are systematic and those that are schematic.
Systematic symbols
Words and numbers are examples of systematic symbolism. Systems of numbers are built from a small set of basic units that can be combined in an infinite variety of ways to express precise meanings. Just as numbers have accepted values, words too have conventional meanings that are definable in terms of each other, and rules that affect how they can be used and still mean something. In verbal language, one word follows another in sequences that are governed by conventions of grammar and syntax, which divide sense from nonsense. In such systems there are only certain ways in which the various elements can be composed and still have meaning. We may not be able to understand every word in a given sentence, but we can generally recognize that the sentence means something because we understand the rules of the system. If we meet a new word, we can look up the definition, and find its meaning described in other words. Often we don’t need to look it up because what it means is clear from its context.
The systematic nature of language is illustrated by the scientist and philosopher, Michael Polanyi, who asked what would happen if we were to replace each different sentence in the English language by a unique word. “We must first envisage,” he said, “that from an alphabet of 26 letters we could construct 268 eight-letter words: that is about 100 billion.” That number is roughly the number of neurons in a human brain, of course. This million-fold enrichment of the English language “would completely destroy it not only because nobody could remember so many words but for the important reason that many would be meaningless. For the meaning of a word is formed and made clear by repeated use and the vast majority of our eight-letter words would be used only once or too rarely to acquire a definite meaning.”
Chemistry, for example, says that the millions of different compounds are composed of about 100 chemical elements: “Since each element has a name and characteristic symbol attached to it, we can write down the composition of any compound in terms of the elements it contains. To classify things in terms of features for which we have names, as we do in talking about things, requires the same kind of connoisseurship as the naturalist must have for identifying specimens of plants or animals. Thus, the art of speaking precisely, by applying a rich vocabulary exactly, resembles the delicate discrimination practised by the expert taxonomist.”5
Schematic symbols
Paintings, poems, music and dance are examples of schematic symbols. Words and numbers work well for ideas that can be laid out sequentially. Visual images present the whole pattern of ideas simultaneously. In visual form we can express thoughts that do not fit the structures of words. Their meanings are uniquely expressed in the forms they take. If you want to understand the meaning of a painting, you can’t turn to a dictionary of colors to see what blue and green usually mean when they are put together. There is no manual of chords and harmonies that will tell us what a symphony is driving at and no dramatic codebook to tell us what a play means. There are no fixed meanings for the symbolic forms of art, to divide sense from nonsense. The meaning of a work of art is available only in the particular form in which it is expressed. The sound and feel of work in the arts is inseparable not only from what it means but from how it means. A painting, a play, a symphony, a novel are complex and unique forms created out of a sense of form and cultural knowledge rather than from systematic meanings.
Schematic forms may use systematic symbols. Plays, novels and poems are written in words, after all; and musical notation allows us to see each note in written form. The score is not the music, just as the text is not the play. They are the systematic symbols in which the schematic work is encoded and from which it must be interpreted either in performance or by the reader. Words can be used in a functional way to get the world’s business done. Few of us spend much time refining a quick note or email to a friend or someone we work with. Our interest is in what is being said rather than in how it is expressed: in content rather than form. Poetry is a different matter. Consider this by W.B. Yeats:
When You Are Old
When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;
How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;
And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.
W B Yeats (1865–1939)
Poets are concerned not only with literal meanings but also with the layered associations of words and of the rhythms and cadences of the poem as a whole. We do not only respond to a poem, or a play, or to music, line by line or note by note. It is a feature of schematic symbols that we respond to them as a whole. The complete work is more than the sum of its parts.
We use different modes of representation to express different types of ideas. It is said that the composer Gustav Mahler was sitting in his studio completing a new piano piece. As he was playing, one of his students came into the room and listened quietly. At the end of the piece the student said, “Maestro, that was wonderful. What is it about?” Mahler turned to him and said, “It’s about this,” and he played it again. If the ideas in music could be expressed in words, there’d be no need to write the music in the first place.
Some ideas can only be expressed in mathematics. As the Nobel physicist, Richard Feynman, put it: “If you’re interested in the ultimate character of the physical world, at present time our only way to understand it is through a mathematical type of reasoning. I don’t think a person can appreciate much of these particular aspects of the world, the great depth and character of the universality of the laws, relationships of things, without an understanding of mathematics. There are many aspects of the world where mathematics is unnecessary, such as love, which are very delightful and wonderful to appreciate and to feel awe about. But if physics is what we are talking about, then not to know mathematics is a severe limitation in understanding the world.”6
Mathematics is the best medium for some forms of understanding but relatively poor for others. If you want to describe the movement of electrons, you need algebra. If you want to express your love for someone, it would be better to use poetry. If someone asks you, “How much do you love me?” don’t give them a calculator and say, “Here, you work it out.”
YOUR CREATIVE MIND
Our ideas can liberate or imprison us. As psychologist George A. Kelly put it: “to make sense out of events we thread them through with ideas and to make sense of the ideas we must test them against events.”7 He describes this process as one of successive approximations. In this way we create the worlds in which we live; and there is always the possibility of re-creation. The generative ideas in human history have transformed the worldview of their times and helped to reshape their cultures. This may be what the comedian George Carlin had in mind when he said, “Just when I found out the meaning of life, they changed it.”
What is true of the long cycles of creative change in a social culture is also true of the shorter cycles of creative work by individuals and groups. Creativity is a process of successive approximations.
IMAGINATION, CREATIVITY AND INNOVATION
Imagination is the source of our creativity, but imagination and creativity are not the same thing. Imagination is the ability to bring to mind things that are not present to our senses. Creativity is putting your imagination to work.
Imagination includes mental experiences that are imaginal, imaginative and imaginary. We can imagine things that have existed, do exist, might exist or do not exist at all. If I ask you to think of an elephant, your old school, or your best friend you can bring to mind mental images that are drawn from real experience. We would not normally think of mental images of real experiences as imaginative.More properly, they are imaginal. If I ask you to think of a green polar bear wearing a dress, you can imagine that too. Now you are bringing to mind something you haven’t experienced; at least I assume not. These sorts of images are of possibilities composed in the mind rather than recalled to mind. They are imaginative. Sometimes we mistake imaginative experiences for real ones. These sorts of experience are imaginary.
Imagination enables you to step out of the here and now. You can revisit and review the past. You can take a different view of the present by putting yourself in the minds of others and can try to see with their eyes and feel with their hearts. In imagination you can anticipate many possible futures. You may not be able to predict the future, but by acting on the ideas produced in your imagination you can help to create it.
Creativity is a step on from imagination. Imagination can be an entirely private experience of internal consciousness. You might be lying motionless on your bed in a fever of imagination and no one would ever know. Private imaginings may have no outcomes in the world at all. Creativity does. Being creative involves doing something. It would be odd to describe as creative someone who never did anything. To call somebody creative suggests they are actively producing something in a deliberate way.8 People are not creative in the abstract; they are creative in something: in mathematics, in engineering, in writing, in music, in business, in whatever. In a sense, creativity is applied imagination. How does creativity work?
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
I define creativity as the process of having original ideas that have value. There are three key terms here: process, original and value. Creativity is a process more often than it is an event. To call something a process indicates a relationship between its various elements, so that each aspect of what happens affects every other. Being creative involves two main processes that interweave with each other. The first is generative, the second is evaluative. In most creative work there are many shifts between these two modes. The quality of creative achievement is related to both. Helping people to understand and manage how they leaven each with the other is a pivotal task of creative development.
“Creativity is the process of having original ideas that have value.”
Generating ideas
Professor Sir Harry Kroto won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry. He was also a professional designer. I asked him what differences there are, if any, between creativity in the arts and sciences: in the studio and the laboratory. He said that for him the process is the same, even though the outcomes are different (as we’ll see in Chapter 7). In all creative processes we are pushing the boundaries of what we know now, to explore new possibilities; we are drawing on the skills we have now, often stretching and evolving them as the work demands.
In the early stages, being creative may involve playing with an idea, doodling or improvising around the theme. It may begin with a thought that is literally half-formed: with a sketch, a first plan or a design; the first notes of a melody or the intimation of a solution to a problem. There may be several ideas in play and a number of possible starting points. Creativity doesn’t always require freedom from constraints or a blank page. A lot of creative work has to conform to a specific brief or set of conventions, and great work often comes from working within formal constraints. When President Kennedy declared in September 1962 that America would land a man on the moon and bring him safely back to earth, he mobilized a ferment of creativity and innovation that involved billions of dollars, millions of individuals and hundreds of institutions embracing scores of disciplines. The challenge was clear and so were the constraints. No one asked if he could adjust the laws of gravity or possibly move the moon a little closer.
The sonnet has a fixed form to which the writer must submit. Japanese haiku makes specific formal demands on the poet, as do many other forms of poetic structure. These do not inhibit the writer’s creativity; they set a framework for it. The creative achievement and the aesthetic pleasure lie in using standard forms to achieve unique effects and original insights.
Because being creative involves doing something, it will always involve using some form of media. These may be physical media, such as steel, wood, clay, fabric or food; they may be sensory media, like sound, light, the voice or the body; they may be cognitive media, including words, numbers, or notation. Whatever the media, there is an intimate relationship between the ideas and the media through which they take shape. This is true whether the task is designing a building, developing a mathematical theorem, a scientific hypothesis or a musical composition. Creativity is a dialogue between the ideas and the media in which they are being formed. Dancers do not begin from a verbal proposition and try to dance it. Dance evolves in the making. It is a material process of movement and reflection on movement. Often it is only in developing the dance, the image or music that the idea emerges at all.
Making judgments
Creativity is not only about generating ideas; it involves making judgments about them. It involves elaborating on the initial ideas, testing and refining them and even rejecting them in favor of others that emerge along the way. Sometimes creative works arrive in the world more or less fully formed and need no further work. It’s said that Mozart made few revisions to many of his compositions. The poet John Milton was blind. Each morning he dictated whole sections of his epic work Paradise Lost to his daughters and made only minor changes to the text. Good for them. Usually, creative work is more tentative and exploratory.
“If you’re not prepared to be wrong, it’s unlikely that you’ll ever come up with anything original.”
Evaluating which ideas work and which do not can involve standing back in quiet reflection, it can be individual or collective, involve instant judgments or long-term testing. There are likely to be dead ends: ideas and designs that do not work. There may be failures and changes before the best outcome is produced. You can see examples of the iterative nature of creative work in the successive drafts of poems and novels, of scholarly papers or in designs for inventions and so on. Thomas Edison famously ran through dozens of ideas and designs for the light bulb before settling on the final version.
Terrance Tao may be the greatest living mathematician. In 2002, at the age of 31, he received the Fields Medal for Mathematics, the equivalent of the Nobel Prize. He says that discovery in mathematics is always about trial and error: “You come up with a wrong idea,” he says, “work on it for a month and realize it doesn’t work and then you come up with the next wrong idea and then finally, by process of elimination, you come up with something that does work.” I asked Sir Harry Kroto how many of his experiments failed. He said about 95% of them. Of course failure is not the right word, he said: “You’re just finding out what doesn’t work.” Albert Einstein put the point sharply: “Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.” I don’t mean to say that being wrong is the same thing as being creative, but if you are not prepared to be wrong, it is unlikely that you’ll ever come up with anything original.
Michael Polanyi makes a distinction between focal and subsidiary awareness. If you’re knocking a nail into a piece of wood with a hammer, the focus of your attention is on the head of the nail. You also have to be aware, in a subsidiary way, of the weight of the hammer and the arc of your arm. It is important that this relationship is the right way round. If you start to focus on what your arm is doing, you’re likely to miss the nail. Polanyi continues: “Subsidiary awareness and focal awareness are mutually exclusive. If a pianist shifts his attention from the piece he is playing to the observation of what he’s doing with his fingers while playing it, he gets confused and may have to stop. This happens generally if we switch our focal attention to particulars on which we had previously been aware only in their subsidiary role.”9
In any creative work the focus of our attention has to be right. Although there are always points where criticism is necessary, generative thinking has to be given time to flower. At the right time and in the right way, critical appraisal is essential. At the wrong point, it can kill an emerging idea. Similarly, creativity can be inhibited by trying to do too much too soon or at the same time. The final phases are often to do with refining the detail of the expression: with producing the neat copy so to speak. Trying to produce a finished version in one move is usually impossible. Unless you are dealing with John Milton, asking people to write a poem right away in their best handwriting can inhibit the spontaneity they need in the initial phase of generating ideas. They need to understand that creativity moves through different phases, and to have some sense of where they are in the process. Not understanding this can make people think that they are not creative at all.
“At the right time and in the right way, critical appraisal is essential. At the wrong point, it can kill an emerging idea.”
JUDGING VALUE
When I was a teenager, one of my cousins came to the house flushed with excitement. He’d thought of an invention that he was convinced was going to make us all rich. He’d been walking down the road and was watching an elderly woman inching painfully along with a walking stick. In a moment of inspiration, he thought how much easier it would be if the walking stick had a little wheel on the end of it. Instead of lifting it every time she took a step she could just push it along. He couldn’t believe that no one had thought of it before. We made him some tea to drink and broke it to him gently. It was a good idea but for the one catastrophic flaw.
Judging the value of new ideas can be difficult. By definition, creative ideas are often ahead of their times. In the mid-1830s, Michael Faraday gave the first demonstration of electromagnetism at the Royal Institution in London. He stood in a gas-lit lecture theater before a distinguished audience of scientists and showed bright blue sparks leaping between two copper spheres. The audience was impressed but many were at a loss to know what to make of it all. “This is all very interesting, Mr Faraday,” said one of them. “But what use is it?” “I don’t know,” Faraday is purported to have said, “What use is a newborn baby?” A world without electricity is now unthinkable. Our lives depend on it in almost every way, from food supplies to transport to heating, lighting and telecommunications. The nineteenth century saw few of the uses of electricity that we now take for granted. It was not as if people’s homes were cluttered with dormant dishwashers and televisions, waiting for Faraday to complete his experiments so they could be switched on. The applications of electricity followed the harnessing of electricity itself. Faraday’s discoveries helped to create circumstances in which these applications were developed. At the time, many people couldn’t see the point of it. This is often the way with creative insights. They run ahead of their times and confuse the crowd.
Original thinkers are often appreciated more by subsequent generations because values change. Many scientists, inventors, artists and philosophers were ridiculed in their own times, though their work has been revered by later generations. Think of Galileo, whose work on heliocentrism was denounced as heretical and not considered science at all. Avant-garde artists are constantly asked, “But is it art?”10 There are many examples of artists who died in penury, whose work now changes hands for fortunes. People who were thought of as visionary in their own times can be discredited by history for exactly the same reason. Think of phrenology. Few scientists now take seriously the idea that personality can be interpreted by bumps on the human skull. But in the mid-nineteenth century it was highly influential in shaping ideas about psychiatry.
Our view of the past is rarely settled. We live in a perpetual present tense. Our knowledge of other periods can never match their vast complexity as they were experienced and understood at the time. Our perception of the past is selective and always open to revision, often because of changes in contemporary values. Individuals long forgotten or overlooked may be reinterpreted as key agents of cultural progress because of a shift in current fashion or political outlook. The strong sentiment and self-assurance of Raphael, for example, endeared him to many Victorians as the central figure in the Renaissance. There are those today who think more of Michelangelo, for his restless self-doubt, and build their image of the period around him. In these ways, our sense of history and of ourselves involves a continual selection and reselection of ancestors. History is not dead because the present is so alive.
Being original
Creativity is about coming up with new ideas. What qualifies them as new? Do you have to come up with something no one has thought of before? Common sense suggests not. A creative outcome can be original on different levels: for the person involved; for a particular community; for humanity as a whole. The towering figures of science, the arts, technology and the rest produced works of historic originality. Teachers do not expect that of young children. Some may be capable of historic originality – Shakespeare was in someone’s English class. But generally they try to encourage work that is original for the children themselves.
“Creativity moves through different phases. Trying to produce a finished version in one move is usually impossible. Not understanding this can make people think that they are not creative at all.”
Making connections
Creative insights often occur by making unusual connections between things or ideas that have not previously been related. All of our existing ideas have creative possibilities. Creative insights occur when they are combined in unexpected ways or applied to questions or issues with which they are not normally associated. Arthur Koestler describes this as a process of bi-association.11 It happens when we think not on one plane, as in routine linear thinking, but on several planes at once. As I noted in Chapter 5, some modes of thinking dominate in different types of activity: the aural in music, the kinesthetic in dance and the mathematical in physics. Often they draw on different areas of intelligence simultaneously. Mathematicians often talk of visualizing problems and solutions. Dance is closely related to musical understanding; visual arts draw deeply on spatial intelligence. The composition of music is often informed by mathematics.
FREEDOM AND CONTROL
Creative achievement is related to control of the medium. Simply asking people to be creative is not enough. Children and adults need the means and the skills to be creative. I can’t play the piano. I don’t mean I’m incapable of playing; I have never learnt how to do it. To that extent, I cannot be creative on the piano. I can make noises on it and give vent to my immediate feelings but not be musically creative in the same way as those who can play it.
Many people have problems with mathematics. They see it as a sort of puzzle, the point of which is not wholly clear. Trying to appreciate equations if you do not “speak” mathematics is like trying to appreciate a musical score if you do not read music. Non-musicians see a puzzle; musicians hear a symphony. Those who speak mathematics look through equations to the beauty of the ideas they express. They hear the music. For some of us, grasping mathematical beauty is like trying to read Proust with a French phrasebook.
Many adults say they can’t draw. They’re right, they can’t. They are not incapable of it any more than I am of learning the piano. They don’t know how. Given adequate hand–eye co-ordination, most people can learn to draw, but most people have not acquired the necessary skills. The problems they face are often of two kinds. The first is perceptual. They try to draw in a photographic way rather than seeing the object more schematically. The second problem is technical. Like learning to write, learning to draw is a technical and cultural achievement not a biological one. Unless these things are taught and learnt, the creative possibilities of drawing remain limited.
If they don’t practice or have guidance, most children’s drawings follow a recognizable pattern up to the age of 13 or so. At about the age of 8, for example, they begin to develop a sense of perspective. As they mature, they pay increasing attention to details and attempt more sophisticated pictures. At about the age of 12 or 13, their drawings often reach a plateau. Many people give up drawing altogether at this point, often through frustration. Their creative ambitions outrun their technical abilities. As a result, most adults have the graphic skills of a young adolescent. This is hardly surprising. Children don’t develop these abilities just by getting older, any more than they wake up on their 16th birthday to discover they know how to drive a car.
None of this means that people with limited skills can’t be creative. There are different levels and phases of creative development. Some people produce highly creative work with relatively undeveloped techniques. In general though, creative development goes hand in hand with increasing technical facility with the instruments or materials that are being used. Here, as everywhere, it is a question of balance. Technical control is necessary for creative work but it is not enough. Being creative is about speculating, exploring new horizons and using imagination. Many highly trained people – musicians, dancers, engineers, scientists – are very skilled but not especially original. They may not be working in their best medium. A musician may be competent in an instrument but not excited by it. There are other possibilities. One of them is bad teaching. I know many would-be musicians who endured the drudgery of practicing scales and harmonies only until they could put the instrument away forever. Facilitating creative development is about finding a balance between exploring new ideas and acquiring the skills to realize them.
THIS TIME IT’S PERSONAL
There is a difference between general and personal creativity.
General creativity
Original thinking is possible in anything that we do. In the general run of our lives we settle into routines of behavior and habits of thought. When we encounter a new problem or situation, our established habits can make it difficult to see novel solutions. There are various techniques to help unblock conventional ways of thinking and encourage what Edward de Bono has called lateral thinking.12 In logico-deductive thought, ideas build on each another in consistent steps and lead to a limited number of answers and sometimes to only one. Lateral and divergent thought works by making freer associations: often by thinking in metaphors or analogies, or even reframing the question itself to open up more possibilities. There are some tests for divergent thinking just as there are for IQ. You might be asked how many uses you can think of for a paperclip. An average score might be 10 or 15, all involving paper. People who are good at these tests might come up with over 100 ideas, and be able to see beyond the conventional use of a paperclip. They might consider a use for a paperclip that is 50 feet high and made out of rubber. The question didn’t say it couldn’t be.
Some of the most interesting breakthroughs in science, technology and the arts come from reframing the question, just as Copernicus and Galileo chose to question whether the earth was at the center of the universe. As Susanne Langer observed, the questions we ask are as important as the answers we search for. Every question leads to particular lines of inquiry. Change the question and whole new horizons may open up to us. The true value of a generative idea is that it leads to new sorts of questions.
These general techniques of creative thinking can be used to generate a flow of ideas and possibilities, especially in groups and committees. They include the repertoire of thinking skills developed by Edward De Bono, and Synectics, developed by William Gordon and George Prince.13 Used properly they can have genuine benefits in business, in the community and in our personal lives. Often they focus separately on identifying and analyzing problems, generating solutions and evaluating the best options. They also focus on giving positive rather than negative responses to people’s ideas and the value of sharing multiple points of view.
Personal creativity
Herb Alpert is one of the great musicians of his generation. When he plays the trumpet, it’s as if he’s speaking to you. In a sense, he is. His personal creativity as a musician is indivisible from his passion for the expressive qualities of the trumpet itself. He’s also a distinguished sculptor and painter. In each medium, his creative achievements have been inspired by his love for the materials he uses and the possibilities he sees in them. For other musicians, their best medium may be the guitar, the piano, or the violin. There are many examples of people whose creativity is fired by particular media: not water colors but pastels, not mathematics in general but algebra in particular. I spoke once with a professor of physics from California. He described himself as a native speaker of algebra. When he came across algebra at school, he had an intuitive feel for it. He said that English has become his second language. He now spends most of his life speaking algebra.
In addition to general capacities for creative thinking, we all have unique talents and passions and our own personal creative potential. It may be for a particular form of music or specific instrument, or music in general; it may be for mathematics or chemistry or contemporary dance; you may have a vocation for becoming a fireman, a homemaker, a physician or a teacher. We each have skills and abilities that can be developed. In The Element, I talk about this personal dimension of creative achievement: the point where individual talent meets personal passion. Personal creativity often comes from a love for particular materials. A sculptor will feel inspired by the shape of a piece of wood or the texture of stone; musicians love the sounds they make and the feel of the instruments. Mathematicians love the art of mathematics just as dancers love to move; writers may feel inspired by a love of the expressive power of words; and painters by the potential of a blank canvas and their color palette. Discovering the right medium is often a tidal moment in the creative life of the individual.
The composer and conductor, Leonard Bernstein, once talked about the moment when he fell in love with music. When he was a young child, he came downstairs one morning to find an upright piano in the hallway of his home. Bernstein’s family was not especially musical but his parents had agreed to look after the piano while some friends were out of the country. He had never been close to a piano before. With a child’s curiosity he lifted the lid and pressed on the keys and felt the sounds vibrate from the instrument. A wave of excitement rushed through him. He didn’t know why this happened but he knew then that he wanted to spend as much time as he could making such sounds. He had found his medium. In doing so he opened the door to his own creative potential.
Porcelain was introduced into Britain in the eighteenth century. Some of the most exquisite pieces of porcelain were made in the Chelsea Porcelain Factory, which was founded by Nicholas Sprimont in 1743. Before Sprimont discovered porcelain, he was a silversmith by trade. He was a competent silversmith and made a good living. He came upon this new material and it fired his imagination like nothing before. He loved the feel of it and the possibilities it held. Over the next 20 years he produced beautiful objects that far surpassed his achievements in silver. His creative accomplishments were driven by his relationship with the material itself.14
Equally, creativity can be inhibited by the wrong medium. Some years ago, I worked with an outstanding literary editor on a book I had written. She was an excellent judge of style and added hugely to the quality of the book, as good literary editors do. She had become a literary editor in her 40s. Before that she was a concert pianist. I asked why she had changed professions. She said she had been giving a concert in London with a distinguished conductor. After the concert they had dinner. Over the meal, he mentioned how good her performance had been and she thanked him. “But you didn’t enjoy it, did you?” he said. She was taken aback. This hadn’t occurred to her. She said she hadn’t enjoyed it particularly, but then she never did. He asked why she did it and she said, “Because I’m good at it.”
She’d been born into a musical family and taken piano lessons. She showed a talent and went on to take a music degree, then a doctorate of music and, as the night follows the day, went on to a career as a concert pianist. Neither she nor anyone else had stopped to ask whether she wanted to do this or whether she enjoyed it. She did it because she was good at it. The conductor said, “Being good at something isn’t a good enough reason to spend your life doing it.” In the weeks that followed she wrestled with this idea and decided that he was right. She finished the season, closed the lid of the piano and never opened it again. She turned instead to books, the art form she really loved. When people find their medium, they discover their real creative strengths and come into their own.
“The capacity for creativity is essentially human and it holds the constant promise of alternative ways of seeing, of thinking and of doing.”
CONCLUSION
Intelligence is diverse, dynamic and distinct. So too is the creative process. It can operate in all fields of human intelligence, it is about making dynamic connections, and the results are always in some way unique. Creativity is not a single power that people simply have or do not have. It involves many different mental functions, combinations of skills and personal attributes. We all have creative capacities but many people conclude that they’re not creative when they haven’t learnt and practiced what’s involved. The capacity for creativity is essentially human and it holds the constant promise of alternative ways of seeing, of thinking and of doing. It means, as George Kelly put it, that no one needs to be completely hemmed in by circumstances: “No one needs to be the victim of their own biography.” As Carl Jung once said, “I am not what has happened to me. I am what I choose to become.” That is the power and the promise of being creative.