Creativity (58 page)

Problem-finding process.
One of the most pronounced differences between artists whose work was judged to be creative by expert judges and those whose work was deemed not creative is that the former approached an experimental drawing task not knowing what they wanted to draw, whereas the less creative artists started with a clear idea of what they wanted to do from the beginning (Getzels and Csikszentmihalyi 1976). The former “discovered” their problem in the process of drawing, in interaction with the medium and the developing image; the latter toiled on a problem that could already be visuali
zed before the creative process started. This kind of open-ended process that leads to discovery was typical of the working methods of the group reported on in this study, and is well described here by Mark Strand. For a recent update on studies of the relationship between problem finding and creativity, see Runco (1994).

“I could never stay in that frame of mind.
…” In fact, staying in the flow state for long periods is almost impossible. People who are fortunate to have a vocation or a hobby that is enjoyable and all-involving may experience flow every day, and sometimes for long periods. But even the most adept must take occasional breaks because of hunger, sleep, fatigue, or the sheer exhaustion that follows from the extreme concentration of the flow experience.

Struggles with the field.
It is probable that the less binding the rules of a domain are, the more free the field is to exploit young people who want to be recognized and advance in it. For this reason, an actress is more likely to be expected to sleep with a producer in order to get ahead than a young scientist is, because in science the value of a person’s contribution can be more clearly established with references to the rules of the domain. But of course this does not mean that even the most rigorously organized domains, such as mathematics, can keep the field entirely free of e
xploitation, politics, and personal vendettas.

Assimilating the style of predecessors.
There is a story about Pablo Picasso, who in his maturity was asked by an interviewer why he had spent so much time as a young man imitating the style of the great masters of painting. “If I had not imitated them,” Picasso is supposed to have answered, “I would have had to spend the rest of my life imitating myself.” Certainly Picasso cannot be accused of being a traditionalist, but even he recognized that without mastering the best
achievements of a domain, one is left only with one’s naked talents, having to reinvent the wheel without tools.

Too much encouragement.
L’Engle’s contention that too much parental encouragement can be an obstacle to the development of a child’s talent makes sense on two counts: In the first place, praise tends to heighten self-consciousness, which in turns interrupts the flow experience; thus it is important to reserve whatever praise one wants to give until the child’s episode of involvement with the talent area is over. Second, and more important, is the fact that parental encouragement often takes the form of heightening the child’s awareness of extrinsic rewards, thereby undermining th
e intrinsic rewards of the activity. For instance, if the parents keep stressing “You have to keep practicing that piano or you will never play in Carnegie Hall,” the child learns that the reason for playing is to get future recognition and success, not the present enjoyment of music. Unfortunately, indiscriminate praise is often advised as a parental technique that will raise children’s self-esteem (e.g., McKay and Fanning 1988), as if a self-esteem based on spurious praise was worth having. See also Damon (1995, chapter 4) for a similar argument. But feedback—including praise—that is directed at con
crete details of the performance can be very useful; see Dweck’s (1986) distinction between “learning” and “performance” goals, and Deci and Ryan’s (1985) distinction between “informational” and “controlling” feedback.

Owning Your Own Shadow.
L’Engle is referring here to an aspect of the recent revival of interest in Carl Gustav Jung’s thought, which includes the concept of the “shadow,” or the dialectical opposite of the traits a person usually acknowledges and displays (Jung 1946, 1968). This dark side of the personality can cause severe inner conflict if it remains repressed. For a contemporary interpretation of the influence of the shadow on consciousness and behavior, see the edited volume by Abrams and Zweig (1991) and O’Neil (1993).

“I would say that the chief obstacle is—oneself.”
The quote by Stern in which he describes vanity, pride—the rubbishy parts of oneself—as being the greatest obstacles in one’s life is a good illustration of what it means to “own one’s shadow,” as referred to in the preceding note.

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Alexander von Humboldt
(1769-1859). His five-volume description of the cosmos was translated from German into English in the last decade of the last century (von Humboldt 1891-93). Some people claim that our understanding of nature took a wrong turn when Dar
win’s vision of natural selection, which was very compatible with the competitive capitalistic ideology of late Victorian England, prevailed over Humboldt’s more systemic vision. Whether this is true or not, the issue suggests how social systems might influence fields in the shaping of domains; in this case, the competitive Victorian social milieu might have recognized itself in Darwin’s theory, and encouraged naturalists to adopt it as the dogma of biology.

Sociobiology.
This perspective for explaining human behavior, based on an elaboration of Darwinian principles, has been perhaps the most mo
mentous paradigm shift affecting the social sciences in the second half of this century. While Freudians explain our actions with reference to repressed sexual desire, Marxists in terms of conflicts brought about by unequal control of the means of production, Skinnerians in terms of learned responses to pleasant stimuli, sociobiologists explain them in terms of the reproductive advantages that different actions give. In other words, other things being equal, we choose to do things that give us a greater chance to leave offspring who, in their turn, will grow up to leave offspring.
Simple as this assumption sounds, it can be applied to a very wide range of actions, and with a certain amount of mathematical precision. The widespread impact of this concept is in large part due to the work of E. O. Wilson (1975).

Ernst Mayr.
Some of the relevant references are to Mayr (1947), James Watson (1980), Konrad Lorenz (1966), Ellsworth Huntington (1945), and William Hamilton (1964).

Thomas Kuhn.
The seminal description of the sudden changes that transform domains, namely “paradigm shifts,” is in Kuhn (1970). Before it was thought that science proceeded slowly by logical steps based on prior knowledge rather than radical reformulations.

“I still remember
…” The quote is from the Kleins’ autobiographical essay (Klein and Klein 1989, p. 7).

“My own boss
…”
Ibid
., p. 14.

Responsibility to the living world.
This attitude is well expressed in the concept of “biophilia” (Wilson 1984), as well as in the writings of the other life scientists discussed in this chapter, e.g., Salk (1983) and Klein (1992).

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“Most people in the university work for the admiration of their peers.”
Commoner here puts his finger on a problem that is typical of the history of fields in general. At first, they are constituted to solve a genuine problem: The priesthood exists for the sake of providing meaning to people’s lives, doctors for the sake of curing disease,
the army to protect us from enemies, the universities to teach specialized knowledge…but as time passes, each institution unconsciously changes its priorities to that of aggrandizing and preserving itself. This is the kind of “mimetic exploitation” I discuss in Csikszentmihalyi (1993, pp. 109-14) and which we have to learn to avoid lest the culture become stagnant.

Those who are not properly socialized.
One of the paradoxes of creativity is that a person must be socialized to a field, that is, learn its rules and expectations, yet at the same time remain to a certain extent aloof from it. A person who identifies too strongly with the field and its problems has no incentives to break into new territory, and is not interested in exploring knowledge that lies outside the boundaries of the domain. This is why creative persons are so often marginal, with one foot in the field and one outside of it (compare Therivel 1993).

C. S. Peirce.
According to the pragmatic philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce, an act of
recognition
is one in which the object is simply assimilated to previous conceptual schemas, and nothing new happens in the mind; whereas an act of
perception
is one in which the object stimulates new thoughts or feelings that result in the expansion of consciousness (Peirce 1931). This distinction is echoed in the teachings of the Yaqui Indian sorcerer Don Juan, described by Carlos Castaneda, one of whose basic techniques involved breaking down the conventional conceptual categories of experience (Castaneda 1
971).

Lack of formal education.
Dean Simonton’s research into the background of recent historical figures suggests that the most creative ones reached the sophomore year of a college education. More education than that seems to be as detrimental as less (Simonton 1990a). Of course, in some domains it is impossible to get started, let alone make a creative contribution, without advanced degrees.

“I learned through the school of hard knocks.
…” The quote by Henderson gives a very good prescription of how one can build flow and intrinsic rewards into the plan of an organization, an important topi
c about which we unfortunately know very little as yet.

Simple cultures’ views of the cosmos.
See, for example, Massimini and Delle Fave (1991).

Myth of Gaia.
A review of how the idea that the Earth is a self-correcting organism developed can be found in Joseph (1990). The original Gaia hypothesis, stating that the temperature of the planet and the chemistry of the gases surrounding it are produced and maintained by the sum of living organisms, was developed by James E. Lovelock(1979).

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The axemaker’s gift.
See Burke and Ornstein (1995) and also Csikszentmihalyi (1993, chapter 5).

The reasons for the decline of the
Maya
civilization were discussed at a recent archaeological meeting reported in the
San Francisco Chronicle
of April 12, 1995, p. A7.

Géza Róheim.
Róheim was a psychoanalytically trained ethnographer who studied, among other native cultures, that of the Australian aborigine. He became convinced that the ideal condition of existence was that of inorganic matter, and that life forms, including human life, were transient forms of irritation or disease (Róheim 1945). In this sense, his views are diametrically opposed to those expressed by Wilson (1984). Such conflicting ways of interpreting the same phenomena are a good example of the sort of differences based on conflicting metaphysical assumptions that Popper (1959) claim
ed could not be resolved scientifically.

Standards for the arts.
For an overview of one of these approaches see Smith (1989) and Dobbs (1993).

Supportive families.
While there is no direct evidence about the relationship between family practices and creativity, the retrospective interviews collected by Benjamin Bloom (1985) with scientists and artists reveal an enormous amount of parental investment in their gifted children. See also Harrington, Block, and Block (1992). In general, a combination of parental love and discipline seems to work best in nurturing the development of talent in children (e.g., Baumrind 1989; Rathunde and Csikszentmihalyi 1993).

Self-esteem of Asian and African-American students.
The popular belief is that disadvantaged minorities suffer from low self-esteem, and if only their self-esteem could be raised, their academic performance and success in general would improve. But the facts seem to be different. For instance, the self-esteem of African-American students tends to be higher than that of Caucasians, which in turn is higher than Asian students’—in inverse proportion to their academic achievement (Bidwell, Csikszentmihalyi, Hedges, and Schneider, still in press). The reasons for this are not so difficult
to understand, if one keeps in mind William James’s (1890) formula for self-esteem: the ratio of achievements over expectations. If expectations are very high, as they usually are among Asian-Americans, one would expect their self-esteem to be low, even when their achievements are relatively high.

Expectations of American and Asian parents.
How Asian-American families communicate high expectations for academic achievement
is described in Sue and Okazaki (1990), Schneider et al. (1992), Stevenson and Stigler (1992), and Asakawa and Csikszentmihalyi (1995).

10 percent of thirteen-year-olds wanted to be architects.
This is one of the findings of a cross-national sample of American adolescents (Bidwell, Csikszentmihalyi, Hedges, and Schneider, still in press).

Benvenuto Cellini (1500-1571).
One English translation of the autobiography of this exemplar of a Renaissance artist is in Cellini (1952).

Getty Center for Education in the Arts.
Discipline-Based Arts Education, or DBAE for short, is the method for teaching art in schools that was developed under the auspices of the Getty Center. See, for instance, Alexander and Day (1991) and Dobbs (1993).

Four-year-olds who learn calculus.
An example of a child with extremely precocious mathematical gifts is described in Feldman(1986).

Creativity and material advantages.
Occasionally it is claimed that creative persons have no interest in material success; this, in my opinion, is a romanticized exaggeration of the obviously strong intrinsic motivation such people possess. In line with the complexity of their personality, one should not expect that the strong intrinsic motivation of creative individuals needs to exclude an interest in fame and fortune. Recently Sternberg and Lubart (1991) have proposed an “economic” theory of creativity, based on the maxim “buy low, sell high”; in other words, the notion that creativity involve
s, at least in part, interest in developing unpopular ideas that might eventually catch on.