Creativity (21 page)
Authors: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Robertson Davies wrote continuously in school and won prizes for his essays. As a young child, Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann, doyenne of public opinion research in Europe, built imaginary communities: “My favorite toy when I was a child was not dolls but wooden pieces to build up a village—trees, houses, fences, animals, and very different houses, for example, a town hall. And I would spend two or three days at a time when I was ten, twelve years old thinking up stories about the lives of the people in the village.” Jacob Rabinow, one of the most prolific inventors in terms of the number and variet
y of patents registered, became fascinated with his father’s shoe-making
machine as a small child in Siberia, and since then he has explored and tried to understand every machine he has encountered. The neuropsychologist Brenda Milner describes herself as follows:
The thing that has driven me my whole life, and I have always maintained this, is curiosity. I am incredibly curious about things, little things I see around me. My mother used to think that I was just very inquisitive about other people’s business. But it was not just people, it is things around me. I am a noticer.
The sociologist David Riesman says: “If you ask what drives me, I would say it’s curiosity.” Yet none of these individuals—not Darwin, not Riesman—were prodigies or even gifted children as we now define them. But they had a tremendous interest, a burning curiosity, concerning at least one aspect of their environment. Whether sounds or numbers, people or stars, machines or insects—the fascination was there, and generally it lasted all through the person’s life.
It is true that these memories of childhood may be even more open to retrospective distortion, to the kind of romancing that has led us to mistrust the accounts of prodigious early abilities, like the one about Giotto. Perhaps these stories are also largely post hoc fabrications. I am reasonably sure, however, that they are not. When people in the eighth or ninth decade of their life describe their first fascination, they do so with a concreteness that seems genuine. Sometimes the material evidence is also present: an old telescope built in childhood, a battered book that served as
inspiration many years ago, a juvenile poem or sketch. So while these people may not have been precocious in their achievements, they seem to have become committed early to the exploration and discovery of some part of their world.
But where does such intense interest come from? That, of course, is the really important question. Unfortunately, here too a definite answer has to wait until we know a lot more about creativity than we do now. Perhaps the best general answer we can give at this point is that each child becomes interested in pursuing whatever activity gives him or her an edge in the competition for resources—the attention and admiration of significant adults being the most important resource involved. Whereas later in life creative individuals learn to love what they do for its own sake, at fir
st this interest is often
motivated by competitive advantage. A child who gets recognized for her ability to jump and tumble is likely to become interested in gymnastics. A boy whose drawings get more favorable comments than those of his friends will become interested in art.
It is not necessarily the sheer amount of talent that matters but the competitive advantage one has in a particular milieu. A girl with very modest musical gifts may become intensely interested in music if everyone else around her is even less musical. On the other hand, a boy who is very good with numbers is unlikely to get involved in mathematics if his brother is already known as gifted in math, because as the younger sibling he would have to grow up in the older one’s shadow. He may choose to develop his second best suit and become interested in something else instead.
In some cases, the competitive edge is the result of the child’s heredity—what’s bred in the bone, so to speak. Especially among musically and mathematically gifted children, superior performance shows itself with such force that the audience has no choice but to recognize it (provided, of course, that the audience knows enough about music or math). In such cases, children will usually accept the gift of their ancestors and become more and more interested in developing it. In other cases—probably the majority—the initial curiosity is sparked by some feature of the social environ
ment. Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, who won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1983, was the nephew of the first scientist in India to earn the same prize in 1930. As a boy, everyone in the family expected him to emulate the eminent uncle. Chandrasekhar knew that if he wanted to be accepted and admired by his relatives he had better become interested in science.
However, not every creative scientist was interested in science as a child, nor was every creative writer committed to writing at an early age. A good example of the kind of career shifts that are common is the case of young Jonas Salk, who eventually discovered the polio vaccine named after him:
Well, as a child, I wanted to study law, so as to be elected to Congress and make just laws. This was when I was eight years old or thereabouts, ten years old. And then I decided to study medicine for reasons that had to do with my mother feeling that I wouldn’t make a good lawyer because I could never win an argument with her.
Hilde Domin, the eminent German poet, wrote her first poem when she reached middle age, after her mother’s death; and she did not start publishing her poetry until even later. Jane Kramer, who became a pioneering TV producer and later dean of the Columbia School of Journalism, was not aware of her vocation until she was in her twenties. György Faludy switched to poetry only after he discovered that he could not draw. Another poet, Anthony Hecht, said:
When I was very young, I felt that the greatest aptitude I had was for music, not poetry. And I think this was an inhibiting factor for me in trying to be a poet. I was thinking too much in musical terms, I was trying too hard to achieve musical effects, I was thinking and wishing that I could convert poetry into abstract music. And one of the things I had to learn was to stop thinking that way. It took enormous concentration and determination.
But even though these individuals may not have known what specific form their curiosity would take, they were open to the world around them and interested in finding out about it, in living life as fully as possible.
Few paths were as convoluted as that of the chemist Ilya Prigogine, who received the Nobel Prize in 1977. The son of a Russian emigré aristocrat, as a young man in Belgium he was mainly interested in philosophy, art, and music. His family, however, insisted that he study a respectable profession, and so he enrolled in law at the university. As he read criminal law, he became interested in the psychology of the criminal mind. Dissatisfied with superficial knowledge, he decided to understand better the underlying brain mechanisms that might explain deviant behavior, and this led
him to the study of neurochemistry. Enrolled in the chemistry department of the university, he realized that his initial interest was perhaps too amibitious, and started basic research in the chemistry of self-organizing systems.
But Prigogine continued to be inspired by his initial curiosity; he gradually realized that the statistical unpredictability in the behavior of simple molecules might shed light on some of the basic problems of philosophy, such as the question of choice, of responsibility, of freedom. Whereas the physical laws of Newton and Einstein were deterministic and expressed certitudes that applied equally to the past
and to the future, Prigogine found in the unstable chemical systems he studied processes that could not be predicted with certainty, and that could not be reversed once they happened.
If you can say that the universe is deterministic, a kind of automaton, then how can we hold to the idea of responsibility? All of Western philosophy was dominated by this problem. It seemed to me that we had to choose between a scientific view which was negating humanistic tradition, or a humanistic tradition which was trying to destroy what we learned from science…I was very sensitive to this conflict because I came to science, to hard science, from the human sciences…. But what I learned from thermodynamics confirmed my philosophical point of view. And gave me the energy
to continue to look on a deeper interpretation of time and of the laws of nature. So, I would say, it is a kind of feedback between the humanistic and the scientific point of view.
The synergy between the humanistic and the scientific quest has served Prigogine well. In addition to illuminating basic thermodynamic processes, his ideas have inspired a great variety of scholars in the natural and the social sciences. Concepts he familiarized such as “dissipative structures” and “self-organizing systems,” have found their way into discussions of urban planning and personality development. But like the molecular systems he studies, Prigogine’s career could not have been predicted from a knowledge of his initial interests alone. It took the subtle interaction
between his curiosity, the desires of his parents, the opportunities offered by the intellectual environment in which he lived, and the results of his experiments to give shape to that conceptual system we now associate with his name.
The Influence of Parents
In most cases it is the parents who are responsible for stimulating and directing the child’s interest. Sometimes the only contribution of the parents to their child’s intellectual development is treating him or her like a fellow adult. Donald Campbell, whose many novel methodological and theoretical contributions have enriched contemporary psychology, is one of the many respondents who feel “blessed” that his parents never talked down to them, and listened to their opinions
about all sorts of adult issues. What the novelist Robertson Davies says is typical of many other respondents:
My parents were like all parents. A hundred different things, it’s very hard to describe what they all were. But one of the things they were, which I very, very greatly appreciate: They were very generous. They never denied their children anything that would help them. And they were very generous to me because I showed an aptitude for education, and so they helped me get a lot of education. And also they helped me to get a kind of grounding in music and literature by their example and their advice, and just by sending me where that was to be found. And so I have great cause t
o be grateful to them. And though often we had strong differences of opinion, I always feel that they were very kind and generous to me.
In other cases the entire family is mobilized to help shape the child’s interest. Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann and each of her sisters had an aunt or uncle deputized to take them to museums and concerts at least twice a month. It was important, she says, that each sister had her own exclusive area of expertise—the one who was always taken to the ballet was not taken to the art museum and vice versa. This way sibling rivalry was minimized and personal interest reinforced.
A fairly typical childhood is the one recalled by Isabella Karle, one of the leading crystallographers in the world, a pioneer in new methods of electron diffraction analysis and X-ray analysis. Her parents were Polish immigrants with minimal formal education and limited means. Yet even during the worst years of the Great Depression Isabella’s mother saved from her housekeeping money so that the family could take two-week vacations to explore the East Coast. The parents took their children to the library, to museums, and to concerts. Before starting first grade in the Detroit
public schools, Karle had been taught by her parents to read and write in Polish. “They were very good at introducing us to the world,” says Isabella, “even though their resources were limited.” She remembers being an excellent student, receiving her Ph.D. degree in chemistry fifteen years after entering the first grade. Her early interest centered on historical novels before she was introduced to chemistry. Yet she never took a
science course until her junior year in high school, when a counselor advised that taking one would make it easier for her to get into a good college. So from a list of courses in biology, chemistry, and physics, she pointed at random to the one in the middle. “And the chemistry,” she says, “fascinated me absolutely.” So even though a child need not develop an early interest in a domain in order to become creative in it later, it does help a great deal to become exposed early to the wealth and variety of life.
Strong parental influence is especially necessary for children who have to struggle hard against a poor or socially marginal background. Lacking other advantages, such as good schools and access to mentors, it is almost impossible to succeed without parental support and guidance. Oscar Peterson, the renowned jazz pianist, remembers that when he was a child his father, who was a porter on the Canadian railroads, used to set him the task of learning to play a piece of music every time he left on a trip from Montreal to Vancouver. As soon as he came back, his father made sure that Osc
ar had done his homework. If not, he would get “his bum kicked.” But the most important influence of the family was building Oscar’s sense of strong personal standards and self-confidence, and encouraging his love for music:
They didn’t try to tether me and keep me in line. They would see me doing something and they’d say, “I think you know better than that. I think if you look in the mirror and take a good hard look you know you don’t really mean that. That’s not you.” So they let me know that they had great expectations, more so than I was living up to at that moment.
My family gave me, first of all, the love of music. They helped me appreciate some of the music that I was hearing, and that of course catapulted me into the medium. But they also gave me a set of personal rules to live by that kept me from getting into some of the troubles that musicians were getting into at the time. And they gave me a certain amount of self-esteem by feeling that if I wanted to, I would do well.
The sense of self-respect and discipline Oscar Peterson absorbed at home stood him in good stead later on, when the temptations of the jazz world became acute. While many of his peers succumbed to the
easy enticements of sex, drugs, and liquor, respect for his parents and their values kept Peterson on a steady course:
