Creativity (17 page)

More serious health, family, or financial problems could occupy the mind of a person so insistently that he or she is no longer able to devote enough attention to work. Then a long period of drought may follow, a writer’s block, a burnout, which may even end a creative career. It is this kind of distraction that Jacob Rabinow talks about:

Many of our respondents were thankful to their spouses for providing a buffer from exactly these kinds of distractions. This was
especially true of the men; the women sometimes mentioned pointedly that they also would have liked to have had a wife to spare them from worries that interfered with their concentration on work.

Forgetting Self, Time, and Surroundings

When distractions are out of the way and the other conditions for flow are in place, the creative process acquires all the dimensions of flow. Here it is described by the poet Mark Strand:

He captures precisely the sense of flowing along this extended present and the powerful sense of doing exactly the right thing the only way it could be done. It may not happen often, but when it does the beauty of it justifies all the hard work.

Creativity as Autotelic Experience

This then brings us back to where we started this chapter and the observation that all of the respondents placed the joy of working ahead of any extrinsic rewards they may receive from it. Like most of the others, the psychologist Donald Campbell gives unambiguous advice to young people entering the field:

Scientists often describe the autotelic aspects of their work as the exhilaration that comes from the pursuit of truth and of beauty. What they seem to describe, however, is the joy of discovery, of solving a problem, of being able to express an observed relationship in a simple and elegant form. So what is rewarding is not a mysterious and ineffable external goal but the activity of science itself. It is the
pursuit
that counts, not the attainment. Of course this distinction is to a certain extent misleading, because without occasional successes the scientist might become discoura
ged. But what makes science intrinsically rewarding is the everyday practice, not the rare success. This is how Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, the Nobel laureate physicist, describes his own motivation:

Certainly all of these people seem to have heeded their own advice. None pursued money and fame. Some became comfortably wealthy from their inventions or their books, but none of them felt fortunate because of it. What they felt fortunate about was that they could get paid for something they had such fun doing and that in the bargain they could feel that what they did might help the human condition along. It is indeed lucky to be able to justify one’s life activity with words such as those of C. Vann Woodward, who explains why he writes history:

F
LOW AND
H
APPINESS

What is the relation between flow and happiness? This is a very interesting and delicate question. At first, it is easy to conclude that the two must be the same thing. But actually the connection is a bit more complex. First of all, when we are in flow, we do not usually feel happy—for the simple reason that in flow we feel only what is relevant to the activity. Happiness is a distraction. The poet in the middle of writing or the scientist working out equations does not feel happy, at least not without losing the thread of his or her thought.

It is only after we get out of flow, at the end of a session or in moments of distraction within it, that we might indulge in feeling happy. And then there is the rush of well-being, of satisfaction that comes when the poem is completed or the theorem is proved. In the long run, the more flow we experience in daily life, the more likely we are to feel happy overall. But this also depends on what activity provides flow. Unfortunately, many people find the only challenges
they can respond to are violence, gambling, random sex, or drugs. Some of these experiences can be enjoyable, but these episodes of flow do not add up to a sense of satisfaction and happiness over time. Pleasure does not lead to creativity, but soon turns into addiction—the thrall of entropy.

So the link between flow and happiness depends on whether the flow-producing activity is complex, whether it leads to new challenges and hence to personal as well as cultural growth. Thus we might conclude that all our respondents must be happy, because they do enjoy their work, and their work is certainly complex. But there are further complications to consider. For instance, what if a person enjoyed being a physicist for thirty years, and then found out th
at his work resulted in a nuclear device that killed millions of people? How would Jonas Salk have felt if his vaccine, instead of saving lives, had been used by others for biological warfare? Certainly these are not idle questions in today’s world, and they suggest that it is possible for complex activities that produce flow to cause long-range unhappiness. Yet when all is said and done, it is much easier to be happy when one’s life has been enjoyable.

F
LOW AND THE
E
VOLUTION OF
C
ONSCIOUSNESS

There are many things that people enjoy: the pleasures of the body, power and fame, material possessions. Some enjoy collecting different beer bottles, and a few even enjoy causing pain to themselves or to others. Strangely enough, even though the means to obtain it are widely different, the resulting feeling of well-being is very much the same. Does that mean that all forms of enjoyment are equally worth pursuing?

Twenty-five centuries ago, Plato wrote that the most important task for a society was to teach the young to find pleasure in the right objects. Now Plato was conservative even for his times, so he had rather definite ideas about what those “right things” were that young people should learn to enjoy. We are much too sophisticated in this day and age to have strong feelings in the matter. Yet we probably agree that we would feel better if our children learned to enjoy cooperation rather than violence; reading rather than stealing; chess rather than dice; hiking rather than watching television
. In other words, no matter how relativistic and tolerant we have become, we
still have priorities. And we do want the next generation to share those priorities. Finally, many of us suspect that the next generation will not preserve what we value unless they now enjoy it to some extent.

The problem is that it is easier to find pleasure in things that
are
easier, in activities like sex and violence that are already programmed into our genes. Hunting, fishing, eating, and mating have privileged places in our nervous system. It is also easy to enjoy making money, or discovering new lands, or conquering new territories, or building elaborate palaces, temples, or tombs because these projects are in synchrony with survival strategies established long ago in our physiological makeup. It is much more difficult to learn to enjoy doing things that were discovered recently in our
evolution, like manipulating symbolic systems by doing math or science or writing poetry or music, and learning from doing these things about the world and about ourselves.

Children grow up believing that football players and rock singers must be happy and envy the stars of the entertainment world for what they think must be fabulous, fulfilling lives. Asked what they would like to do when they grow up, most of them would choose to be athletes and entertainers. They don’t realize until much later, if at all, that the glamour of those lives is vulgar tinsel, that to be like them leads anywhere but to happiness.

Neither parents nor schools are very effective at teaching the young to find pleasure in the right things. Adults, themselves often deluded by infatuation with fatuous models, conspire in the deception. They make serious tasks seem dull and hard, and frivolous ones exciting and easy. Schools generally fail to teach how exciting, how mesmerizingly beautiful science or mathematics can be; they teach the routine of literature or history rather than the adventure.

It is in this sense that creative individuals live exemplary lives. They show how joyful and interesting complex symbolic activity is. They have struggled through marshes of ignorance, deserts of disinterest, and with the help of parents and a few visionary teachers they have found themselves on the other side of the known. They have become pioneers of culture, models for what men and women of the future will be—if there is to be a future at all. It is by following their example that human consciousness will grow beyond the limitations
of the past, the programs that genes and cultures have wired into our brains. Perhaps our children, or their children, will feel more joy in writing poetry and solving theorems than in being passively entertained. The lives of these creative individuals reassure us that it is not impossible.

E
ven the most abstract mind is affected by the surroundings of t
he body. No one is immune to the impressions that impinge on the senses from the outside. Creative individuals may seem to disregard their environment and work happily in even the most dismal surroundings: Michelangelo contorted on his scaffold below the Sistine ceiling, the Curies freezing in their shabby Parisian lab, and an infinitude of poets scribbling away in dingy rented rooms. But in reality, the spatiotemporal context in which creative persons live has consequences that often go unnoticed. The right milieu is important in more ways than one. It can aff
ect the production of novelty as well as its acceptance; therefore, it is not surprising that creative individuals tend to gravitate toward centers of vital activity, where their work has the chance of succeeding. From time immemorial artists, poets, scholars, and scientists have sought out places of natural beauty expecting to be inspired by the majestic peaks or the thundering sea. But in the last analysis, what sets creative individuals apart is that regardless of whether the conditions in which they find themselves are luxurious or miserable, they manage to give their surroundings a personal patter
n that echoes the rhythm of their thoughts and habits
of action. Within this environment of their own making, they can forget the rest of the world and concentrate on pursuing the Muse.

B
EING IN THE
R
IGHT
P
LACE

The great centers of learning and commerce have always acted as magnets for ambitious individuals who wanted to leave their mark on the culture. From the Middle Ages onward, master craftsmen traveled all over Europe to build cathedrals and palaces, attracted now by the wealth of one city, then by that of another. Milanese stonemasons built fortresses for Teutonic knights in Poland; Venetian architects and painters went to decorate the courts of the tsars of Russia. Even Leonardo, that paragon of creativity, kept serving one master after another depending on whether duke, pope, or k
ing could best finance his dreams.

The place where one lives is important for three main reasons. The first is that one must be in a position to access the domain in which one plans to work. Information is not distributed evenly in space but is clumped in different geographical nodes. In the past, when the diffusion of information was slower, one went to Göttingen to study some branches of physics, to Cambridge or Heidelberg for others. Even with our dazzling electronic means for exchanging information, New York is still the best place for an aspiring artist to find out firsthand what’s happening in the art world, what future
trends other artists are talking about now. But New York is not the best place to learn oceanography, or economics, or astronomy. Iowa might be the place to learn creative writing or etching, and one can learn things about neural networks in Pittsburgh that one cannot learn anywhere else.

People in our sample often moved to places where information of interest was stored: Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar took a boat from India to study physics at Cambridge; Freeman Dyson joined Richard Feynman at Cornell; Nina Holton went to Rome to learn bronze casting techniques. Sometimes it is not the person who chooses the place to further his or her knowledge: The opportunities for learning that a place offers capture the person’s interest, and involvement with the domain follows. Brenda Milner happened to be in Montreal when the neurophysiologist D. O. Hebb started to teach a
t McGill University. She was so impressed by his seminars that both she and
her husband changed the direction of their research, and she became one of the pioneers of the field. Margaret Butler found herself at the Argonne National Laboratories when computers were first put to use in biochemical research, and her lifelong interest in this domain was started by the opportunity to be a pioneer in this area. Rosalyn Yalow became interested in nuclear medicine because she happened to be where the instruments that made such studies possible were available. Of course, it is not that knowledge is stored in the place; rather it resides in an institution, a local t
radition, or a particular person who happens to live in that place. To learn to cast bronze it helps to see how the old Italian craftsmen do it, and if one wanted to learn psychology from Hebb, one just had to go to Montreal.

The second reason why a place may help creativity is that novel stimulation is not evenly distributed. Certain environments have a greater density of interaction and provide more excitement and a greater effervescence of ideas; therefore, they prompt the person who is already inclined to break away from conventions to experiment with novelty more readily than if he or she had stayed in a more conservative, more repressive setting. The young artists who were drawn to Paris from all over the world at the end of the last century lived in a heady atmosphere where new ideas, new express
ions, and new ways of living constantly jostled one another and called forth further novelty. The novelist Richard Stern describes how an artist may depend on such variety for his inspiration:

For a theoretical physicist like Freeman Dyson, the stimulation of colleagues in neighboring offices is indispensable. Science, even more than art, is a collective enterprise where information grows much faster in “hot spots” where the thought of one person builds on that of many others. And then there are places that inhibit the generation of novelty. According to some, universities are too committed to their primary function, which is the preservation of knowledge, to be very good at stimulating creativity. Here Anthony Hecht comments on the pros and cons of this position from a poet’s pe
rspective, but his argument applies to other domains as well:

Finally, access to the field is not evenly distributed in space. The centers that facilitate the realization of novel ideas are not necessarily the ones where the information is stored or where the stimulation is greatest. Often sudden availability of money at a certain place attracts artists or scientists to an otherwise barren environment, and that place becomes, at least for a while, one of the centers of the field. When in the 1890s William R. Harper was able to convince John D. Rockefeller, flush with dollars made in the oil fields, to part with a few million to start a univer
sity in the cornfields south of Chicago, he almost immediately attracted a number of leading scholars from the Northeast who flocked to the wilderness and established a great center of research and scholarship. Eighty years later the same phenomenon repeated itself farther west, when oil money made it possible for the University of Texas to attract a new generation of intellectual leaders to Austin. Oil is just one source of financial lure that
greases the movement of academic fields from one place to another. After luminaries settle down in a particular place, it becomes difficult for young people with similar interests to resist their attraction. George Stigler, member of a department that has collected more Nobel Prizes in economics than any other in the world, explains some of the reasons why this is so:

The career of John Bardeen is typical. He went to graduate school at Princeton, where he became the second doctoral student of Eugene Wigner, a distinguished theoretical physicist who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1963. Not surprisingly, many of Wigner’s students also became leaders in the field. Bardeen then went to work at the Bell Research Laboratories, where many of the bright young physicists were being hired. This is how he describes the atmosphere there:

While working at Bell Labs, Bardeen developed the theory of semiconductors, which eventually led to the revolutionary invention of transistors. (For this work, he and two colleagues received the Nobel Prize in 1956.) Then Bardeen left for the University of Illi
nois, where he became fascinated by superconductivity, which promised to fulfill the medieval dream of the
perpetuum mobile
, the frictionless machine that in principle might go on working forever. In 1957 he contributed to a theory that became the benchmark in that domain, and for that he shared the 1972 Nobel Prize with two new colleagues. This is how he explains why he moved from Bell Labs:

In sciences and in the arts, in business and in politics, location matters almost as much as in buying real estate. The closer one is to the major research laboratories, journals, departments, institutes, and conference centers, the easier it is for a new voice to be heard and appreciated. At the same time, there is a downside to being near the centers of power. No one is more aware of this than Donald Campbell, whose warnings about the dangers young scholars run by being immersed too soon in a competitive, high-pressure environment are relevant beyond the confines of academia:

As with so many other things we have learned from these people’s lives, there is no recipe for deciding, once and for all, which place is most suitable for the development of creativity. Certainly moving to the center of information and action makes sense; occasionally, it may even be indispensable. In certain domains there is really only one place in the world where one can learn and practice. But there might be disadvantages to being where the action, and therefore the pressure, is most intense. Where is the right place to be? Unfortunately, there is no single answer. Creativity
is not determined by outside factors but by the person’s hard resolution to do what must be done. Which place is best depends on the total configuration of a person’s characteristics and those of the task he or she is involved in. Someone who is relatively more introverted may wish to perfect his act before stepping before the limelight. A more extroverted person may enjoy competitive pressures from the very beginning of her career. In either case, however, choosing the wrong environment will probably hinder the unfolding of creativity.