Creativity (9 page)

1. Creative individuals have a great deal of physical energy, but they are also often quiet and at rest. They work long hours, with great concentration, while projecting an aura of freshness and enthusiasm. This suggests a superior physical endowment, a genetic advantage. Yet it is surprising how often individuals who in their seventies and eighties exude energy and health remember a childhood plagued by illness. Heinz Maier-Leibnitz was bedridden for months in the Swiss mountains recovering from a lung ailment; György Faludy was often ill as a child, and so was the psychologis
t Donald Campbell. Public opinion analyst Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann was given no hope of survival by her physicians, but a homeopathic cure so improved her health that thirty years later she works harder than any four persons half her age. It seems that the energy of these people is internally generated and is due more to their focused minds than to the superiority of their genes. (Although it must be said that some respondents, such as Linus Pauling, answered “good genes,” when asked to explain what accounted for their achievements.)

This does not mean that creative persons are hyperactive, always “on,” constantly churning away. In fact, they often take rests and sleep a lot. The important thing is that the energy is under their own control—it is not controlled by the calendar, the clock, an external schedule. When necessary they can focus it like a laser beam; when it is not, they immediately start recharging their batteries. They consider the rhythm of activity followed by idleness or reflection very important for the success of their work. And this is not a biorhythm they inherited with their genes; it was lear
ned by trial and error, as a strategy for achieving their goals. A humorous example is given by Robertson Davies:

Well, you know, that leads me to something which I think has been very important in my life, and it sounds foolish and rather trivial. But I’ve always insisted on having a nap after lunch, and I inherited this from my father. And one time I said to him, “You know, you’ve done awfully well in the world. You came to Canada as an immigrant boy without anything and you
have done very well. What do you attribute it to?” And he said, “Well, what drove me on to be my own boss was that the thing that I wanted most was to be able to have a nap every day after lunch.” And I thought, What an extraordinary impulse to drive a man on! But it did, and he always had a twenty-minute sleep after lunch. And I’m the same. I think it is very important. If you will not permit yourself to be driven and flogged through life, you’ll probably enjoy it more.

One manifestation of energy is sexuality. Creative people are paradoxical in this respect also. They seem to have quite a strong dose of eros, or generalized libidinal energy, which some express directly into sexuality. At the same time, a certain spartan celibacy is also a part of their makeup; continence tends to accompany superior achievement. Without eros, it would be difficult to take life on with vigor; without restraint, the energy could easily dissipate.

2. Creative individuals tend to be smart, yet also naive at the same time. How smart they actually are is open to question. It is probably true that what psychologists call the
g
factor—meaning a core of general intelligence—is high among people who make important creative contributions. But we should not take seriously the lists that used to be printed on the sidebars of psychology textbooks, according to which John Stuart Mills must have had an IQ of 170 and Mozart an IQ of 135. Had they been tested at the time, perhaps they would have scored high. Perhaps not. And how many chi
ldren in the eighteenth century would have scored even higher but never did anything memorable?

The earliest longitudinal study of superior mental abilities, initiated at Stanford University by the psychologist Lewis Terman in 1921, shows rather conclusively that children with very high IQs do well in life, but after a certain point IQ does not seem to be correlated any longer with superior performance in real life. Later studies suggest that the cutoff point is around 120; it might be difficult to do creative work with a lower IQ, but beyond 120 an increment in IQ does not necessarily imply higher creativity.

Why a low intelligence interferes with creative accomplishment
is quite obvious. But being intellectually brilliant can also be detrimental to creativity. Some people with high IQs get complacent, and, secure in their mental superiority, they lose the curiosity essential to achieving anything new. Learning facts, playing by the existing rules of domains, may come so easily to a high-IQ person that he or she never has any incentive to question, doubt, and improve on existing knowledge. This is probably why Goethe, among others, said that naïveté is the most important attribute of genius.

Another way of expressing this dialectic is by the contrasting poles of wisdom and childishness. As Howard Gardner remarked in his study of the major creative geniuses of this century, a certain immaturity, both emotional and mental, can go hand in hand with deepest insights. Mozart comes immediately to mind.

Furthermore, people who bring about an acceptable novelty in a domain seem able to use well two opposite ways of thinking: the
convergent
and the
divergent
. Convergent thinking is measured by IQ tests, and it involves solving well-defined, rational problems that have one correct answer. Divergent thinking leads to no agreed-upon solution. It involves fluency, or the ability to generate a great quantity of ideas; flexibility, or the ability to switch from one perspective to another; and originality in picking unusual associations of ideas. These are the dimensions of thinking that most crea
tivity tests measure and that most workshops try to enhance.

It is probably true that in a system that is conducive to creativity, a person whose thinking is fluent, flexible, and original is more likely to come up with novel ideas. Therefore, it makes sense to cultivate divergent thinking in laboratories and corporations—especially if management is able to pick out and implement the most appropriate ideas from the many that are generated. Yet there remains the nagging suspicion that at the highest levels of creative achievement the generation of novelty is not the main issue. A Galileo or a Darwin did not have that many new ideas, but
the ones they fastened upon were so central that they changed the entire culture. Similarly, the individuals in our study often claimed to have had only two or three good ideas in their entire career, but each idea was so generative that it kept them busy for a lifetime of testing, filling out, elaborating, and applying.

Divergent thinking is not much use without the ability to tell a
good idea from a bad one—and this selectivity involves convergent thinking. Manfred Eigen is one of several scientists who claim that the only difference between them and their less creative colleagues is that they can tell whether a problem is soluble or not, and this saves enormous amounts of time and many false starts. George Stigler stresses the importance of fluidity, that is, divergent thinking on the one hand, and good judgment in recognizing a viable problem on the other:

I consider that I have good intuition and good judgment on what problems are worth pursuing and what lines of work are worth doing. I used to say (and I think this was bragging) that whereas most scholars have ideas which do not pan out more than, say, 4 percent of the time, mine come through maybe 80 percent of the time.

3. A third paradoxical trait refers to the related combination of playfulness and discipline, or responsibility and irresponsibility. There is no question that a playfully light attitude is typical of creative individuals. John Wheeler says that the most important thing in a young physicist is “this bounce, which I always associate with fun in science, kicking things around. It’s not quite joking, but it has some of the lightness of joking. It’s exploring ideas.” David Riesman, in describing the attitude of “detached attachment” that makes him an astute observer of the social scene, stresses the
fact that he always “wanted at the same time to be irresponsible and responsible.”

But this playfulness doesn’t go very far without its antithesis, a quality of doggedness, endurance, perseverance. Much hard work is necessary to bring a novel idea to completion and to surmount the obstacles a creative person inevitably encounters. When asked what enabled him to solve the physics problems that made him famous, Hans Bethe answered with a smile: “Two things are required. One is a brain. And second is the willingness to spend long times in thinking, with a definite possibility that you come out with nothing.”

Nina Holton, whose playfully wild germs of ideas are the genesis of her sculpture, is very firm about the importance of hard work:

Tell anybody you’re are a sculptor and they’ll say, “Oh, how exciting, how wonderful.” And I tend to say, “What’s so wonderful?” I mean, it’s like being a mason, or being a carpenter, half the time. But they don’t wish to hear that because they really only imagine the first part, the exciting part. But, as Khrushchev once said, that doesn’t fry pancakes, you see. That germ of an idea does not make a sculpture which stands up. It just sits there. So the next stage, of course, is the hard work. Can you really translate it into a piece of sculpture? Or will it be a wild thing whic
h only seemed exciting while you were sitting in the studio alone? Will it look like something? Can you actually do it physically? Can you, personally, do it physically? What do you have by way of materials? So the second part is a lot of hard work. And sculpture is that, you see. It is the combination of wonderful wild ideas and then a lot of hard work.

Jacob Rabinow uses an interesting mental technique to slow himself down when work on an invention requires more endurance than intuition:

Yeah, there’s a trick I pull for this. When I have a job to do like that, where you have to do something that takes a lot of effort, slowly, I pretend I’m in jail. Don’t laugh. And if I’m in jail, time is of no consequence. In other words, if it takes a week to cut this, it’ll take a week. What else have I got to do? I’m going to be here for twenty years. See? This is a kind of mental trick. Because otherwise you say, “My God, it’s not working,” and then you make mistakes. But the other way, you say time is of absolutely no consequence. People start saying how much will it cost me in time? If
I work with somebody else it’s fifty bucks an hour, a hundred dollars an hour. Nonsense. You just forget everything except that it’s got to be built. And I have no trouble doing this. I work fast, normally. But if something will take a day gluing and then next day I glue the other side—it’ll take two days—it doesn’t bother me at all.

Despite the carefree air that many creative people affect, most of them work late into the night and persist when less driven individuals would not. Vasari wrote in 1550 that when the Renaissance painter Paolo Uccello was working out the laws of visual perspec
tive, he would walk back and forth all night, muttering to himself: “What a beautiful thing is this perspective!” while his wife kept calling him back to bed with no success. Close to five hundred years later, physicist and inventor Frank Offner describes the time he was trying to understand how the membrane of the ear works:

Ah, the answer may come to me in the middle of the night. My wife, when I was first into this membrane stuff, would kick me in the middle of the night and say, “Now get your mind off of membranes and get to sleep.”

4. Creative individuals alternate between imagination and fantasy at one end, and a rooted sense of reality at the other. Both are needed to break away from the present without losing touch with the past. Albert Einstein once wrote that art and science are two of the greatest forms of escape from reality that humans have devised. In a sense he was right: Great art and great science involve a leap of imagination into a world that is different from the present. The rest of society often views these new ideas as fantasies without relevance to current reality. And they are right. But t
he whole point of art and science is to go beyond what we now consider real, and create a new reality. At the same time, this “escape” is not into a never-never land. What makes a novel idea creative is that once we see it, sooner or later we recognize that, strange as it is, it is true.

This dialectic is reflected by the way that, many years ago, the artists we studied responded to so-called projective tests, like the Rorschach or the Thematic Apperception Test. These require you to make up a story about some ambiguous stimuli, such as inkblots or drawings, that could represent almost anything. The more creative artists gave responses that were definitely more original, with unusual, colorful, detailed elements. But they never gave “bizarre” responses, which normal people occasionally do. A bizarre response is one that, with all the goodwill in the world, one could not see
in the stimulus. For instance if an inkblot looks vaguely like a butterfly, and you say that it looks like a submarine without being able to give a sensible clue as to what in the inkblot made you say so, the response would be scored as bizarre. Normal people are rarely original, but they are sometimes bizarre. Creative people, it seems, are original without being bizarre. The novelty they see is rooted in reality.

Most of us assume that artists—musicians, writers, poets, painters—are strong on the fantasy side, whereas scientists, politicians, and businesspeople are realists. This may be true in terms of day-to-day routine activities. But when a person begins to work creatively, all bets are off—the artist may be as much a realist as the physicist, and the physicist as imaginative as the artist.

We certainly think of bankers, for example, as having a rather pedestrian, commonsense view of what is real and what is not. Yet a financial leader such as John Reed has much to say that dispells that notion. In his interview, he returns again and again to the theme that reality is relative and constantly changing, a perspective that he thinks is essential to confronting the future creatively: