Creativity (14 page)

Frank Offner illustrates a presented problem-solving process:

In contrast, Robert Galvin describes a problem that is discovered. His father had founded Motorola early in the century to make car radios. For several decades the business was a small one-room operation, with perhaps a dozen engineers and no large contracts, so Galvin’s father worked very hard to make ends meet. In 1936 he felt that he finally could afford to take a vacation. He took his wife and young Robert on a European tour. As they traveled across Germany, the elder Galvin became convinced that sooner or later Hitler would start a war. Upon his return home, he followed up
his hunch by sending Don Mitchell, one of his assistants, to Camp McCoy in Wisconsin to find out how the army passed on information among its various units.

Mitchell drove to Wisconsin, rang a bell at the gate of the camp, sat down with the major in charge, and in a short time found out that, as far as communications were concerned, the army hadn’t changed at all since World War I: A phone wire was run from the front line to the back trenches. Upon being told this, Galvin’s ears perked up. “Don,” he is supposed to have said, “if we can make a radio that fits in a car and receives signals, can’t we marry a little transmitter with it, and could we add some kind of power unit and put it into a box so someone could hold it, and he could talk from
the front trench to the back trench with radios instead of stringing out the wire?” They figured it was a good idea and went to work. By the time Hitler invaded Poland, Motorola was ready to produce what became the SCR 536, the walkie-talkie of World War II. Robert Galvin uses this story to illustrate what he means by anticipation and commitment: on the one hand, having the foresight to realize how you could contribute to the future and thereby profit from it, and on the other, to have faith in your intuition and work hard to actualize it.

Presented problems usually take a much shorter time to prepare for and to solve than discovered problems. Sometimes the solution appears with the immediacy of Offner’s example. Although it may require little time and effort, a novel solution to a presented problem could change the domain in significant ways and therefore be judged creative. Even in the arts, some of the most enduring paintings of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance were ordered by patrons who specified the size of the canvas, how many figures of what kind, the amount of expensive ground lapis lazuli pigment to be
used, the weight of gold foil to be used in the frame, down to the smallest detail. Bach turned out a new cantata every few weeks to satisfy his patron’s demands for religious hymns. Such cases show that, when approached with a desire to come up with the best solution, even the most rigidly predefined problems can result in creative outcomes.

Nevertheless, discovered problems have a chance to make a larger difference in the way we see the world. An example is Darwin’s slow development of the theory of evolution. Darwin was commissioned to travel with the
Beagle
around the coast of South America and describe the largely unrecorded plant and animal life he encountered there. This was not an assignment that required a creative solution, and Darwin did what he was expected to do. But at the same time, he became more and more interested in and then puzzled by subtle differences in otherwise similar species living in what we now would ca
ll different ecological niches. He saw the connection between specific physical traits and corresponding environmental opportunities, such as the shape of a bird’s beak and the kind of food available. These observations led to the concept of differential adaptation, which in turn, after many more detailed observations, led to the idea of natural selection and finally to the concept of the evolution of species.

The theory of evolution answered a great number of questions, ranging from why do animals look so different from each other to where do men and women come from. But perhaps the most remarkable feature of Darwin’s accomplishment was that these questions had not been stated in an answerable form before, and he had to formulate the problem as well as propose a solution to it. Most great changes in a domain share this feature of Darwin’s work: They tend to fall toward the discovered rather than the presented end on the continuum of problematic situations.

T
HE
M
YSTERIOUS
T
IME

After a creative person senses that on the horizon of his or her expertise there is something that does not fit, some problem that might be worth tackling, the process of creativity usually goes underground for a while. The evidence for incubation comes from reports of discoveries in which the creator becomes puzzled by an issue and remembers coming to a sudden insight into the nature of a problem, but does not remember any intermediate conscious mental steps. Because of this empty space in between sensing a problem and intuiting its solution, it has been assumed that an indispensa
ble stage of incubation must take place in an interval of the conscious process.

Because of its mysterious quality, incubation has often been thought the most creative part of the entire process. The conscious sequences can be analyzed, to a certain extent, by the rules of logic and rationality. But what happens in the “dark” spaces defies ordinary analysis and evokes the original mystery shrouding the work of genius: One feels almost the need to turn to mysticism, to invoke the voice of the Muse as an explanation.

Our respondents unanimously agree that it is important to let problems simmer below the threshold of consciousness for a time. One of the most eloquent accounts of the importance of this stage comes again from the physicist Freeman Dyson. In describing his current work he has this to say:

Frank Offner is equally strong in his belief in the importance of not always thinking about one’s problem:

How long a period of incubation is needed varies depending on the nature of the problem. It may range from a few hours to several weeks and even longer. Manfred Eigen says that he goes to sleep every night mulling some unresolved problem in his mind, some experimental procedure that does not work, some laboratory process that is not quite right. Miraculously, when he wakes up in the morning he has the solution clearly in mind. Hazel Henderson jogs or does gardening when she runs dry of ideas, and when she returns to the computer they usually flow freely again. Elisabeth Noelle-Neum
ann needs plenty of sleep, otherwise she feels that her thoughts become routine and predictable. Donald Campbell is very clear about the importance of letting ideas make connections with each other without external distractions:

These short periods of incubation, usually having to do with a “presented” problem, tend to result in minuscule, perhaps imperceptible, changes in the domain. Examples of somewhat longer periods
of incubation are the few weeks Freeman Dyson spent in California sight-seeing and not thinking consciously at all about how to reconcile Feynman and Schwinger’s theories. In general, it seems that the more thorough the revolution brought about by the novelty, the longer it was working its way underground. But this hypothesis is difficult to verify. How long did Einstein’s theory of relativity incubate? Or Darwin’s theory of evolution? Or Beethoven’s ideas for the Fifth Symphony? Because it is impossible to determine with precision when the first germs of these great works appea
red in the minds of their authors, it is also impossible to know how long the process of incubation lasted.

The Functions of Idle Time

But what happens during this mysterious idle time, when the mind is not consciously preoccupied with the problem? There are several competing explanations of why incubation helps the creative process. Perhaps the best known is an offshoot of psychoanalytic theory. According to Freud, the curiosity at the roots of the creative process—especially in the arts—is triggered by a childhood experience of sexual origin, a memory so devastating that it had to be repressed. The creative person is one who succeeds in displacing the quest for the forbidden knowledge into a permissible curiosity. The artist’
s zeal in trying to find new forms of representation and the scientist’s urge to strip away the veils of nature are really disguised attempts to understand the confusing impressions the child felt when witnessing his parents having sex, or the ambivalently erotic emotions toward one of the parents.

But if the secondary creative process is to drain effectively the repressed primary interest, it has to dip occasionally below the threshold of consciousness, where it can connect again with its original libidinal source. This is presumably what happens during the period of incubation. The content of the conscious line of thought is taken up by the subconscious, and there, out of reach of the censorship of awareness, the abstract scientific problem has a chance to reveal itself for what it is—an attempt to come to terms with a very personal conflict. Refreshed by having been
able to commune with its true source, the subconscious thought can then reemerge in consciousness, its disguise back in place, and the scientist can continue his or her research with renewed vigor.

Many creative people use a watered-down version of this account to explain their own work and often drop hints as to the probable libidinal origin of their interests. It is difficult to know what to make of such intelligence. Often it turns out that the artists or scientists who are most convinced that in their works they are attempting to resolve a childhood trauma are those who have spent many years in therapy and have been well socialized into Freudian ideology. It could be that analysis helped them uncover the repressed sources of their curiosity. Or it could be that it helped
them come up with an interesting explanation for what is mysterious about their experiences—an explanation, however, that may have little basis in reality.

In any case, although a psychoanalytic approach might explain some of the motivation for a person to engage in the process of discovery, it provides very little guidance as to why a vacation in California yielded Dyson the key to quantum electrodynamics. The transformation of libido in such a case is so spectacularly implausible as to lack credibility.

Cognitive accounts of what happens during incubation assume, like the psychoanalytic ones, that some kind of information processing keeps going on in the mind even when we are not aware of it, even when we are asleep. The difference is that cognitive theories do not posit any direction to subconscious thought. There is no trauma at the center of the unconscious, seeking resolution through disguised curiosity. Cognitive theorists believe that ideas, when deprived of conscious direction, follow simple laws of association. They combine more or less randomly, although seemingly irrelev
ant associations between ideas may occur as a result of a prior connection: For example, the German chemist August Kekulé had the insight that the benzene molecule might be shaped like a ring after he fell asleep while watching sparks in the fireplace make circles in the air. If he had stayed awake, Kekulé would have presumably rejected as ridiculous the thought that there might be a connection between the sparks and the shape of the molecule. But in the subconscious, rationality could not censor the connection, and so when he woke up he was no longer able to ignore its possibility. According t
o this perspective, truly irrelevant connections dissolve and disappear from memory, while the ones that are robust survive long enough to emerge eventually into consciousness.

The distinction between serial and parallel processing of informa
tion 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.

Something similar to parallel processing may be taking place when the elements of a problem are said to be incubating. When we think consciously about an issue, our previous training and the effort to arrive at a solution push our ideas in a linear direction, usually along predictable or familiar lines. But intentionality does not work in the subconscious. Free from rational direction, ideas can combine and pursue each other every which way. Because of this freedom, original connections that would be at first rejected by the rational mind have a chance to become established.