The Geography of Genius: A Search for the World's Most Creative Places From Ancient Athens to Silicon Valley (26 page)

I want to explore this connection between surprise and creativity more deeply and would love nothing more than to share a single malt with Robert Louis Stevenson, but he, inconveniently, lives in that foreign land known as the past. So I call Donald Campbell. He knows Edinburgh, past and present, better than anyone else. A playwright and essayist, he penned a lovely little cultural history of Edinburgh that captures the essence of the city. When I read it, I knew I had to meet him.

He wasn’t easy to find but I persisted—the Zeigarnik effect in action—and now find myself sitting in his cozy living room in central Edinburgh. It is cold and gray outside, a spring tease having proved to be nothing more than that. I’m sipping my tea slowly, genius-style, as I did in Hangzhou, trying to wrap my mind around what Donald has just told me: Edinburgh is a city that has, for centuries, not only tolerated surprise but thrived on it. What does he mean?

“Well”—he pauses to replenish my tea—“I’ve lived in Edinburgh for a very long time, yet very often I come across things and places that I didn’t know were there before. I just suddenly stumble on them.”

The other day, for instance, he was wandering around a neighborhood called the Grass Market when, down an alleyway and up a flight of stairs, he spotted a restaurant, a good restaurant it turns out. “Yet there was absolutely nothing to indicate that it was a restaurant—no sign, nothing. They made absolutely no attempt to advertise. It was like they were hiding.”

Then there is his friend, a fellow playwright, who was promoting a new production. “He calls me the other day and says, ‘Our play is opening next weekend, but don’t tell anyone.’ ” Campbell laughs at the absurdity of promoting a play by keeping it a secret.

I take a long, slow sip of my tea, hoping the proven therapeutic
qualities of the beverage will help me make sense of this. There are two possibilities, I realize. One is that the Scots are nuts, and this whole Enlightenment business was a ruse, an intellectual Nessie. The second possibility is that they are onto something. I’m feeling generous—compensatory, you might say—so I choose the second option. Perhaps the Scots have long known intuitively that we cherish the hidden more than the exposed. That is why God invented wrapping paper and lingerie.

The surprise, and joy, of discovering what had previously been hidden lies at the heart of creativity. Archimedes shouting, “Eureka!” The physicist Richard Feynman upon hearing a single phrase about the possible nature of neutron decay, jumping to his feet and exclaiming, “Then I understand
evvvvery
thing!”

Let’s peel the onion some more. We’ve seen how genius always begins with observation. What distinguishes the creative genius from the merely talented is not knowledge or intelligence but vision. As the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer said, “Talent hits a target no one else can hit; genius hits a target no one else can see.” The target is hidden, like Donald Campbell’s restaurant. Or Robert Louis Stevenson’s “theatre tricks.” Both are describing a world turned upside down, with incompatible images colliding.

This is what psychiatrist Albert Rothenberg calls “homospatial thinking,” conceiving of two or more disparate ideas in the same mental space. To investigate this phenomenon, Rothenberg designed a fascinating experiment. He assembled two groups of artists and writers. One group was shown unusual photographs juxtaposed. For instance, an image of a French four-poster bed superimposed over an image of a platoon of soldiers taking cover behind a tank. A second group was shown the same images, but this time they were not juxtaposed but, rather, presented individually. Both groups were then asked to produce a creative product—a metaphor in the case of the writers, a pastel drawing in the case of the artists. The first group—the one shown juxtaposed images—produced the more creative products. Rothenberg concluded that “creative imagery is excited by sensory input that is random, or at least unusual.” And, he might have added, hidden.

Many artists intuitively engage in homospatial thinking, even if they don’t know what it’s called. The surrealist painter Max Ernst developed a technique he called “frottage.” He describes placing a series of random drawings on the floor and how he was “surprised at the sudden intensification of my visionary capacities and by the hallucinatory succession of contradictory images superimposed one upon the other.” Creative places such as Enlightenment Edinburgh encourage these sort of improbable juxtapositions.

As Donald Campbell heats another pot of tea, I ponder the implications of this culture of surprise, past and present. You can tell a lot about a place, I realize, by its relationship with surprise. Does it celebrate life’s small serendipities or shy away from them? Does it carve out space for the unexpected? In short, are miracles allowed? For “nothing stifles the spirit of discovery more effectively than the assumption that miracles have ceased,” observes the writer Robert Grudin.

Perhaps that statement strikes you as odd, absurd even. Perhaps you are highly skeptical of miracles, as am I. But let’s not forget that every act of genius, from the invention of the wheel to Mozart’s
Requiem
to the Internet, has been infused with hints of the miraculous. Not only is life more interesting in a world where miracles are still possible, but creative breakthroughs are more likely to happen in such a world.

Edinburgh’s most impressive miracle is that it exists at all, given the challenges posed by topography and climate. As a stray ray of sunshine pierces the living room like an alien space beam, I ask Donald about this.

It’s true, he says. What made, and still makes, Edinburgh so creative is not that it is a nice place but rather that it is difficult. “The great thing about being Scottish is that you’ve got something to push against. Instead of having to live up to something, you have to push against something. It forces you to make that extra effort.” That is, I realize, an apt description not only of Edinburgh but all places of genius.

I decide to walk back to my hotel. Walking, as I learned in Athens, is good for thinking. Besides, Edinburgh makes for an excellent classroom. The divided self exists not only in the Scottish mind but also on the
Scottish streets. Edinburgh’s two selves are reflected in the two halves of the city, New Town and Old Town, representing, as one historian put it, “elegance and filth, humanity and cruelty.”

New Town is indeed pleasant and well planned, the angular layout instantly recognizable to our modern (read rational) sensibilities. I have to confess, though, I prefer the zigzaggy chaos and messiness of Old Town. Here I can picture what life was like in the peak of the Scottish Enlightenment, how these geniuses were living on top of one another, the wealthy and the destitute in the same building.

And here we run headlong into the sticky issue of urban density. The supposition that density is the secret to creative places has, in some quarters, risen to the level of received truth. A group of urbanists, most prominently Richard Florida, has fashioned a cottage industry out of it. At the heart of this industry is a single mantra: “Cities are places where ideas go to have sex.” It’s a clever line, but is it true?

First, we must, as academics are so fond of saying, unpack it. Behind the density mantra lies a presumed scenario. Take a bunch of smart people, put them in the same densely populated city, add sushi bars and experimental theater and gay-friendly policies, and watch the creative genius happen. It’s a nice theory but fuzzy. No one has yet to explain how we get from point A (urban density) to point B (creativity). When pressed, these density theorists point to “interaction opportunities.” If all creativity is, in essence, about molecules colliding, then naturally the more interactions the better, since it increases the number of interactions that may result in something brilliant.

I find this explanation less than satisfying. For starters, not all interactions are equally good, any more than all ideas are equally good. Prisons are extremely dense, with lots of interactions, but not a lot of creativity happens there. Slums are dense, too, and while people there may excel in the art of everyday creativity, they do not generally win Nobel Prizes or invent new genres of literature. No, something else besides density must be going on.

I recall what Donald Campbell said when I asked him what he loved about Edinburgh. What keeps him here? He thought about it before
answering with a single word: “Intimacy.” It was not a word I was expecting, but when I heard it, something clicked.
Now I understand evvvvery
thing, I thought. Places of genius are not only densely populated, they are also intimate, and intimacy always includes a degree of trust. The Greek philosophers and poets gathered at a symposium trusted one another, so a degree of intimacy was established. Verrocchio trusted his craftsmen to complete their assigned tasks. Today, the cities and companies that excel creatively are those where trust and intimacy are high.

Yet we continue to focus on density as the pixie dust of creativity. Why? Because it’s easier to measure. Mark off a square mile of a city, count the number of inhabitants within that zone, and, voilà, you have measured its density. Intimacy is much more difficult to quantify. We’re like the person looking for his keys in a lit parking lot, rather than the darkened alleyway where he actually lost them. When asked why, he replies, “Because this is where the light is.” If we are going to unravel the mystery of creative places, we need to spend more time looking in the dark.

“Why don’t we meet at my office?” says the voice on the other end of the line. He gives me the address of the old medical school. This strikes me as odd since he is a historian, not a doctor, but it’s early, and besides, after a few weeks in Edinburgh, I’ve stopped questioning such seeming incongruities. I’m about to hang up when he adds, “Oh, by the way, I’m on floor one and a half.”

I dutifully jot down that last bit of information. Only later, fully caffeinated, do I take a closer look at the scrap of paper and do a double take. Floor one and a half? It sounds an awful lot like boarding a train at platform nine and three-quarters. It’s possible. After all, J. K. Rowling penned the Harry Potter books here. Flat broke, she lugged her laptop every morning to a local café.

The man on floor one and a half is Tom Devine, historian, rabble-rouser, and, according to the
Times
of London, the closest thing Scotland has to a national bard. (“A
living
national bard,” he would later clarify.) Devine imbibes his nation’s history the way others imbibe a very old
Scotch, slowly and with a deep appreciation that borders on reverence. In recent years, Tom has devoted much of his considerable intellectual horsepower to solving the riddle that was the Scottish Enlightenment.

Fittingly, the building, heavy and castlelike, looks like something straight out of Hogwarts. I climb the stairs, stopping midway between floors one and two, briefly worrying—irrationally, I know—that I might slip into some strange Scottish tear in the fabric of the space-time continuum. I don’t. Instead, I find myself in a perfectly ordinary hallway, illuminated in perfectly normal academic fluorescence, that exists between floors one and two. I am relieved, and a bit disappointed.

Tom Devine is a munchkin of a man, with eyes stuck in a permanent twinkle. Hunched over his desk, he scribbles furiously, not acknowledging my presence. Without looking up, he says, loudly and definitively and with the broadest Scottish brogue I’ve ever heard, “Did you know that the man who invented Ceylon tea was Scottish?”

“Um, no, Professor Devine, I did not know that.”

“Well, he was.” The Scots are big on this sort of name-dropping. It is a form of Jewish geography.
Did you know so-and-so was Jewish? Yep, he was.
Both the Jewish and Scottish variants of this game are prone to wildly exaggerated claims, and both, I suspect, stem from a deeply felt tribal insecurity, a need to prove something to the world.
We’re a small people, a demographic blip, but we’re everywhere, doing miraculous things.

“It’s a riddle,” Tom says, speaking now of the Scottish Enlightenment, and I can tell by the way he lingers over the word
riddle—
drawing it out, adding syllables and diphthongs and other linguistic flourishes I can’t identify—that he loves, simply
loves
, that such a riddle exists.

One of the University of Edinburgh’s more famous graduates, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, would no doubt enjoy the mystery that was the Scottish Enlightenment. It’s not so much a whodunit—we know that—it’s more a question of motive and method. Why and how did this tiny city on the edge of the world experience “the most vivacious intellectual shindig in history,” as my guidebook puts it, without exaggeration. It is a tough case to crack, and therefore catnip to the likes of Tom Devine.

One of the secret ingredients that made Edinburgh such a hothouse
of genius, Tom tells me in that sly way of his, as if divulging state secrets, or the meaning of life, was conversation. Edinburgh, like Socrates’s Athens, was a city of gab, and therein lay its genius.

It’s a tempting conclusion, one that Socrates would no doubt agree with, but I’m skeptical of this genius recipe. Throw a bunch of smart people together, add food and booze, simmer while stirring occasionally, then stand back and let the brilliant ideas sizzle. Allow to cool and enjoy.

I’m not buying it. Smart people plus conversation do not necessarily add up to genius. It certainly wasn’t what emerged from the oven after President John F. Kennedy held a series of closed-door meetings with his closest, and smartest, advisers. No, the result was the ill-conceived 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. Nearly all of the fourteen hundred CIA-trained Cuban exiles were captured or killed. Cuba moved even deeper into the Soviet orbit. It was one of the worst foreign policy blunders in American history. How could it have happened, given the combined intellectual throw weight gathered in that room?

A decade later, a psychologist named Irving Janis investigated the meetings that led to the botched invasion and concluded that the profound error in judgment was due not to stupidity, but rather to a quirk of human nature. When people from similar backgrounds get together, are isolated from dissenting views, and are trying to please a strong leader, the result is consensus around the preferred position, even if it is clearly wrongheaded. Janis coined a term for this tendency: groupthink.