Creativity

T
his book is about creativity, based on histories of contemporary people who know about it firsthand. It starts with a description of what creativity is, it reviews the way creative people work and live, and it ends with ideas about how to make your life more like that of the creative exemplars I studied. There are no simple solutions in these pages and a few unfamiliar ideas. The real story of creativity is more difficult and strange than many overly optimistic accounts have claimed. For one thing, as I will try to show, an idea or product that deserves the label “creative” arises from the syne
rgy of many sources and not only from the mind of a single person. It is easier to enhance creativity by changing conditions in the environment than by trying to make people think more creatively. And a genuinely creative accomplishment is almost never the result of a sudden insight, a lightbulb flashing on in the dark, but comes after years of hard work.

Creativity is a central source of meaning in our lives for several reasons. Here I want to mention only the two main ones. First, most of the things that are interesting, important, and
human
are the results of creativity. We share 98 percent of our genetic makeup with chim
panzees. What makes us different—our language, values, artistic expression, scientific understanding, and technology—is the result of individual ingenuity that was recognized, rewarded, and transmitted through learning. Without creativity, it would be difficult indeed to distinguish humans from apes.

The second reason creativity is so fascinating is that when we are involved in it, we feel that we are living more fully than during the rest of life. The excitement of the artist at the easel or the scientist in the lab comes close to the ideal fulfillment we all hope to get from life, and so rarely do. Perhaps only sex, sports, music, and religious ecstasy—even when these experiences remain fleeting and leave no trace—provide as profound a sense of being part of an entity greater than ourselves. But creativity also leaves an outcome that adds to the richness and complexity of the future.

An excerpt from one of the interviews on which this book is based may give a concrete idea of the joy involved in the creative endeavor, as well as the risks and hardships involved. The speaker is Vera Rubin, an astronomer who has contributed greatly to our knowledge about the dynamics of galaxies. She describes her recent discovery that stars belonging to a galaxy do not all rotate in the same direction; the orbits can circle either clockwise or counterclockwise on the same galactic plane. As is the case with many discoveries, this one was not planned. It was the result of an acci
dental observation of two pictures of the spectral analysis of the same galaxy obtained a year apart. By comparing the faint spectral lines indicating the positions of stars in the two pictures, Rubin noted that some had moved in one direction during the interval of time, and others had moved in the opposite direction. Rubin was lucky to be among the first cohort of astronomers to have access to such clear spectral analyses of nearby galaxies—a few years earlier, the details would not have been visible. But she could use this luck only because she had been, for years, deeply involved with the sma
ll details of the movements of stars. The finding was possible because the astronomer was interested in galaxies for their own sake, not because she wanted to prove a theory or make a name for herself. Here is her story:

This account telescopes years of hard work, doubt, and confusion. When all goes well, the drudgery is redeemed by success. What is remembered are the high points: the burning curiosity, the wonder
at a mystery about to reveal itself, the delight at stumbling on a solution that makes an unsuspected order visible. The many years of tedious calculations are vindicated by the burst of new knowledge. But even without success, creative persons find joy in a job well done. Learning for its own sake is rewarding even if it fails to result in a public discovery. How and why this happens is one of the central questions this book explores.

E
VOLUTION IN
B
IOLOGY AND IN
C
ULTURE

For most of human history, creativity was held to be a prerogative of supreme beings. Religions the world over are based on origin myths in which one or more gods shaped the heavens, the earth, and the waters. Somewhere along the line they also created men and women—puny, helpless things subject to the wrath of the gods. It was only very recently in the history of the human race that the tables were reversed: It was now men and women who were the creators and gods the figments of their imagination. Whether this started in Greece or China two and a half millennia ago, or in Fl
orence two thousand years later, does not matter much. The fact is that it happened quite recently in the multimillion-year history of the race.

So we switched our views of the relationship between gods and humans. It is not so difficult to see why this happened. When the first myths of creation arose, humans were indeed helpless, at the mercy of cold, hunger, wild beasts, and one another. They had no idea how to explain the great forces they saw around them—the rising and setting of the sun, the wheeling stars, the alternating seasons. Awe suffused their groping for a foothold in this mysterious world. Then, slowly at first, and with increasing speed in the last thousand years or so, we began to understand how things work—from micr
obes to planets, from the circulation of the blood to ocean tides—and humans no longer seemed so helpless after all. Great machines were built, energies harnessed, the entire face of the earth transformed by human craft and appetite. It is not surprising that as we ride the crest of evolution we have taken over the title of creator.

Whether this transformation will help the human race or cause its downfall is not yet clear. It would help if we realized the awesome responsibility of this new role. The gods of the ancients, like Shiva,
like Yehova, were both builders and destroyers. The universe endured in a precarious balance between their mercy and their wrath. The world we inhabit today also teeters between becoming either the lovely garden or the barren desert that our contrary impulses strive to bring about. The desert is likely to prevail if we ignore the potential for destruction our stewardship implies and go on abusing blindly our new-won powers.

While we cannot foresee the eventual results of creativity—of the attempt to impose our desires on reality, to become the main power that decides the destiny of every form of life on the planet—at least we can try to understand better what this force is and how it works. Because for better or for worse, our future is now closely tied to human creativity. The result will be determined in large part by our dreams and by the struggle to make them real.

This book, which attempts to bring together thirty years of research on how creative people live and work, is an effort to make more understandable the mysterious process by which men and women come up with new ideas and new things. My work in this area has convinced me that creativity cannot be understood by looking only at the people who appear to make it happen. Just as the sound of a tree crashing in the forest is unheard if nobody is there to hear it, so creative ideas vanish unless there is a receptive audience to record and implement them. And without the assessment of compe
tent outsiders, there is no reliable way to decide whether the claims of a self-styled creative person are valid.

According to this view, creativity results from the interaction of a system composed of three elements: a culture that contains symbolic rules, a person who brings novelty into the symbolic domain, and a field of experts who recognize and validate the innovation. All three are necessary for a creative idea, product, or discovery to take place. For instance, in Vera Rubin’s account of her astronomical discovery, it is impossible to imagine it without access to the huge amount of information about celestial motions that has been collecting for centuries, without access to the ins
titutions that control modern large telescopes, without the critical skepticism and eventual support of other astronomers. In my view these are not incidental contributors to individual originality but essential components of the creative process, on a par with the individual’s own contributions. For this reason, in this book I devote almost as much attention to the domain
and to the field as to the individual creative persons.

Creativity is the cultural equivalent of the process of genetic changes that result in biological evolution, where random variations take place in the chemistry of our chromosomes, below the threshold of consciousness. These changes result in the sudden appearance of a new physical characteristic in a child, and if the trait is an improvement over what existed before, it will have a greater chance to be transmitted to the child’s descendants. Most new traits do not improve survival chances and may disappear after a few generations. But a few do, and it is these that account f
or biological evolution.

In cultural evolution there are no mechanisms equivalent to genes and chromosomes. Therefore, a new idea or invention is not automatically passed on to the next generation. Instructions for how to use fire, or the wheel, or atomic energy are not built into the nervous system of the children born after such discoveries. Each child has to learn them again from the start. The analogy to genes in the evolution of culture are
memes
, or units of information that we must learn if culture is to continue. Languages, numbers, theories, songs, recipes, laws, and values are all memes that we pass on to
our children so that they will be remembered. It is these memes that a creative person changes, and if enough of the right people see the change as an improvement, it will become part of the culture.