Imagine: How Creativity Works (17 page)

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The world is full of natural outsiders, except we don’t call them outsiders; we refer to them as young people. The virtue of youth, after all, is that the young don’t know enough to be insiders, cynical with expertise. While such ignorance has all sorts of obvious drawbacks, it also comes with creative advantages, which is why so many fields, from physics to punk rock, have been defined by their most immature members. The young know less, which is why they often invent more.

The practical advantages of youth were first identified by Adolphe Quetelet, a nineteenth-century French mathematician. Quetelet’s project was simple: he plotted the number of successful plays produced by playwrights over the course of their careers. That’s when he discovered something unexpected: creativity doesn’t increase with experience. The playwrights weren’t getting better at writing plays. Instead, the curve exhibited a steep rise followed by a long, slow decline, a phenomenon of creative output now known as the inverted U curve. According to Quetelet, his curve demonstrated that creativity tends to peak after a few years of work — when we know enough, but not too much — before it starts to fall, in middle age.

Dean Simonton, a psychologist at UC-Davis, has spent the last several decades expanding on Quetelet’s approach, sifting through vast amounts of historical data in search of the subtle patterns that influence creative production over time. For instance, Simonton has shown that physicists tend to make their most important discoveries early in their careers, typically before the age of thirty. The only field that peaks before physics is poetry.

Why are young physicists and poets more creative? One possibility is that time steals ingenuity, that the imagination starts to wither in middle age. But that’s not the case — we are not biologically destined to get less creative. Simonton argues that youth benefit from their outsider status — they’re innocent and ignorant, which makes them more willing to embrace radical new ideas. Because they haven’t become encultured, or weighted down with too much conventional wisdom, they’re more likely to rebel against the status quo. (This also helps explain the disconnect between education and creativity. According to Simonton’s data, the ideal amount of college for a creative career is two years of undergraduate work. After that, school seems to actually inhibit the imagination. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a psychologist at Claremont, is blunter. He notes that, in most instances, “school threatens to extinguish the interest and curiosity that the child had discovered outside its walls.) After a few years in the academy, Simonton says, the “creators start to repeat themselves, so that it becomes more of the same-old, same-old.” They have become insiders.

But there is nothing inevitable about this process — creativity doesn’t have to slowly slip away. As Simonton notes, we can continue to innovate for our entire careers as long as we work to maintain the perspective of the outsider. Just look at the mathematician Paul Erdos, who was one of the most productive scientists of all time. Erdos was famous for hopscotching around his discipline, working with new people on new problems. He embraced a multiplicity of subjects, publishing influential papers on number theory, topology, combinatorics, and probability. At the first hint of boredom — and Erdos got bored very quickly — he would begin again, starting over with a new challenge and a blank sheet of paper. As a result, his creative output never declined; there was no U curve for his career, just a sharp rise followed by a flat line. (The Benzedrine didn’t hurt either.) “If you can keep finding new challenges, then you can think like a young person even when you’re old and gray,” Simonton says. “That idea gives me hope.”

The moral is that outsider creativity isn’t a phase of life — it’s a state of mind. Of course, it’s not easy cultivating this useful mental state, at least once we get older. Sometimes we have to work a second job, mixing cocktails when we’re not programming insurance software. Sometimes we have to spend our free time working on confusing problems, or immersing ourselves in strange new fields, or wasting lots of bourbon on a crazy bacon experiment. We need to be willing to risk embarrassment, ask silly questions, surround ourselves with people who don’t know what we’re talking about. We need to leave behind the safety of our expertise.

But sometimes that’s not enough: we need to leave behind everything. One of the most surprising (and pleasurable) ways of cultivating an outsider perspective is through travel, getting away from the places we spend most of our time. The reason travel is so useful for creativity involves a quirk of cognition in which problems that feel close get contemplated in a more literal manner. This means that when we are physically near the source of the problem, our thoughts are automatically constricted, bound by a more limited set of associations. While this habit can be helpful — it allows us to focus on the facts at hand — it also inhibits the imagination. 

Consider a field of corn. When you’re standing in the middle of a farm surrounded by the tall cellulose stalks and fraying husks, the air smelling faintly of fertilizer and popcorn, your mind is automatically drawn to thoughts related to the primary definition of corn, which is that it’s a plant, a cereal, a staple of midwestern farming. But imagine that same field of corn from a different perspective. Instead of standing on a farm, you’re now in a crowded city street dense with taxis and pedestrians. The plant will no longer be just a plant; instead, your vast neural network will pump out all sorts of associations. You’ll think about high-fructose corn syrup, obesity, and the Farm Bill; you’ll contemplate ethanol and the Iowa caucuses, those corn mazes for kids at state fairs, and the deliciousness of succotash made with bacon and lima beans. The noun is now a web of tangents, a vast loom of connections.

And this is why travel is so helpful: When you escape from the place you spend most of your time, the mind is suddenly made aware of all those errant ideas previously suppressed. You start thinking about obscure possibilities — corn can fuel cars! — that never would have occurred to you if you’d stayed back on the farm. Furthermore, this expansive kind of cognition comes with practical advantages, since you can suddenly draw on a whole new set of possible solutions. (But it’s not enough to simply get on a plane; if you want to experience the creative benefits of travel, then you have to rethink its raison d’être. Most people, after all, escape to Paris so they don’t have to think about those troubles they left behind. But here’s the ironic twist: your mind is most likely to solve your stubbornest problems while you’re sitting in a swank Left Bank café. So instead of contemplating that buttery croissant, mull over those domestic riddles you just can’t solve. You have the breakthrough while on break.)

Look, for instance, at a recent experiment led by the psychologist Lile Jia at Indiana University. He randomly divided a few dozen undergraduates into two groups, each of which were asked to list as many different modes of transportation as possible. (This is known as a creative generation task.) One group of students was told that the task was conceived by Indiana University students studying abroad in Greece, while the other group was told that it was conceived by Indiana students studying in Indiana. At first, it’s hard to believe that such a slight and seemingly irrelevant distinction would alter the performance of the subjects. Why would it matter where the task originated?

Nevertheless, Jia found a striking difference between the two groups: when students were told that the task was imported from Greece, they came up with significantly more transportation possibilities. They didn’t limit their list to cars, buses, trains, and planes; they cited horses, triremes, spaceships, bicycles, and Segway scooters. Because the source of the problem was far away, the subjects felt less constrained by their local transport options; they didn’t think about getting around just in Indiana, they thought about getting around all over the world.

In a second study, Jia found that Indiana University students were much better at solving a series of insight puzzles when told that the puzzles came from California and not from Indiana. Here’s a sample problem: 

A prisoner was attempting to escape from a tower. He found a rope in his cell that was half as long as required to permit him to reach the ground safely. He divided the rope in half, tied the two parts together, and escaped. How could he have done this?

The sense of distance from where the puzzle originated allowed these subjects to imagine a far wider range of alternatives, which made them more likely to solve the challenging brainteasers. (The answer to the sample problem is that the prisoner unraveled the rope lengthwise and tied the remaining strands together.) Instead of getting stuck and giving up, they were able to think about unusual associations, which eventually led to the right answer.

The larger lesson is that our thoughts are shackled by the familiar. The brain is a neural tangle of near infinite possibility, which means that it spends a lot of time and energy choosing what not to notice. As a result, creativity is traded for efficiency; people think in literal prose, not symbolist poetry. It’s not until we feel distant from the problems — far from our usual haunts — that the chains of cognition are loosened, and the insight becomes obvious.

What’s more, the longer you’re away from home, the stronger the effect. In a 2009 study, researchers at INSEAD and the Kellogg School of Management reported that students who lived abroad for an extended period were significantly more likely to solve a difficult creativity problem than students who had never lived outside of their birth country. The experiment went like this: The students were given a cardboard box containing a few thumbtacks, a piece of corkboard, a book of matches, and a waxy candle. They were told to attach the candle to the piece of corkboard so that it could burn properly without dripping wax onto the floor. This is known as the Duncker candle problem, and it tends to make people very frustrated. In fact, nearly 90 percent of people pursue the same two failing strategies. They begin by tacking the candle directly to the board, which causes the candle wax to shatter. Then they attempt to melt the candle with the matches so that it sticks to the board. But the wax doesn’t hold; the candle falls to the floor. At this point, most people surrender. They assume thatthe puzzle is impossible, that it’s a stupid experiment and a waste of time. In fact, only a slim minority of subjects manage to come up with the solution, which involves attaching the candle to the cardboard box with wax and then tacking the cardboard box to the corkboard. Unless people have an insight about the box — that it can do more than hold thumbtacks — they’ll waste candle after candle, repeating their failures while waiting for a breakthrough. Psychologists refer to this as the bias of functional fixedness, since people are typically terrible at coming up with new functions for old things.

What does this have to do with living abroad? According to the researchers, the experience of another culture endows the traveler with a valuable open-mindedness, making it easier for him or her to realize that a single thing can have multiple meanings. (The same principle is also true of people with multiple social identities. According to a study led by Jeffrey Sanchez-Burks, a psychologist at the University of Michigan, people who describe themselves as both Asian and American, or see themselves as female engineers (and not just engineers), display higher levels of creativity. The reason is that social identities are often associated with distinct problem-solving approaches. As a result, when these types of people are faced with a challenging puzzle, their minds remain more flexible, better able to experiment with multiple creative strategies. Pluralism is always practical.) Consider the act of leaving food on one’s plate. In China, this is often seen as a compliment, a signal that the host has provided more than enough food. But in America the same act is an insult, an indication that the food wasn’t good enough to finish.

Such cultural contrasts mean that seasoned travelers are alive to ambiguity, more willing to realize that there are different (and equally valid) ways of interpreting the world. Because they’ve felt like outsiders before, immersed in foreign places, they’ve learned to examine alternative possibilities. This, in turn, allows them to expand the circumference of their “cognitive inputs,” as they refuse to settle for their first answers and initial guesses. Maybe the box has a different function. Maybe there’s a better way to attach a candle to a board.

Of course, this mental flexibility doesn’t come from mere distance. It’s not enough just to change time zones or schlep across the world only to eat Le Big Mac instead of a Quarter Pounder with Cheese. This increased creativity appears to be a side effect of experiencing difference: we need to change cultures, to feel the disorienting diversity of human traditions. The same details that make foreign travel so confusing — Do I tip the waiter? Where is this train taking me? — turn out to have a lasting impact, making us more creative because we’re less insular. We’re reminded of all that we don’t know, which is nearly everything; we’re surprised by the constant stream of surprises. Even in this globalized age, the world slouching toward similarity, we can still marvel at all the earthly things that weren’t included in the Let’s Go guidebook and that certainly don’t exist back in Indiana. When we get home, home is still the same. But something in our minds has been changed, and that changes everything. 

Ruth Handler learned this lesson firsthand. In the early 1950s, she spent countless hours watching her young daughter, Barbara, play with paper dolls. Although the cutouts looked like little children, Handler noticed that Barbara often gave her dolls adult roles. Sometimes she would play waitress with the paper figures or pretend that one of the paper children was actually a mother. And that’s when Handler had her “crazy idea,” which she would later describe in her memoir Dream Doll:

Barbara was using these dolls to project her dream of her own future as an adult woman. So one day it hit me: Wouldn’t it be great if we could take that play pattern and three-dimensionalize it so that little girls could do their dreaming and role-playing with real dolls instead of the flimsy paper ones? It dawned on me that this was a basic, much needed play pattern that had never before been offered by the doll industry to little girls.