How to Be Creative the Science of Genius

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How to Be Creative: The Science of Genius

27 minutes ago by Josh Catone 1

Bob Dylan. Ludwig van Beethoven. William

Shakespeare. Steve Jobs. These are historical figures of

staggering creative genius that we often think of as freaks of

nature. That their creative talent is a God-given gift, or somebiological mutation that only affects a handful of special people.

But new research is beginning to shed light on the science

behind creativity and imagination. As it turns out, anyone can be

creative.

“Creativity shouldn’t be seen as something otherworldly. It

shouldn’t be thought of as a process reserved for artists and inventors and other ‘creative types.’ The human mind,

after all, has the creative impulse built into its operating system, hard-wired into its most essential programming

code,” writes Jonah Lehrer in his new book Imagine.

In his book, Lehrer examines the inner workings of what we call imagination. He looks at the neuroscience behind

sudden insights, how the brain solves different kinds of problems and which personal traits help foster creativity.

He also shares how external forces factor into the creative process, how to design a workspace to enhance your

chances of having an epiphany, why creativity tends to bubble up in certain places and how we can encourage our

collective imaginations.

Above all, though, the message of Lehrer’s book is that creativity is not a super power. Anyone can be creative —

it just takes hard work. “We should aspire to excessive genius,” says Lehrer, who took some time from his book

tour to sit down with Mashable and answer a few questions about the mysteries of how we imagine.

Q&A with Jonah Lehrer, Author of Imagine

Can creativity really be taught?

For sure. Creativity is not some gift of the gods. While there are

going to be inevitable differences in raw talent — human performance

is a bell curve — that doesn’t mean we can’t all learn to become

more creative. The imagination can be improved.

Yo-Yo Ma says his ideal state of creativity is “controlled

craziness.” How can we learn to harness that?

What Yo-Yo Ma is referring to is the kind of creativity that occurs

when we let ourselves go, allowing the mind to invent without

worrying about what it’s inventing. Such creative freedom has

inspired some of the most famous works of modern culture, from

John Coltrane’s saxophone solos to Jackson Pollock’s drip

paintings. It’s Miles Davis playing his trumpet in Kind of Blue —

most of the album was recorded on the very first take — and Lenny

Bruce inventing jokes at Carnegie Hall. It’s also the kind of creativity

that little kids constantly rely on, largely because they have no

choice. Because parts of the brain associated with impulse control

remain underdeveloped, they are unable to censor their imagination,







Why doesn’t brainstorming work? What should we do instead?

I think the failure of brainstorming is inseparable from its allure, which is that it makes us feel good about

ourselves. A group of people are put together in a room and told to free-associate, with no criticism allowed. (The

assumption is that the imagination is meek and shy — if it’s worried about being criticized, it will clam up.) Before

long, the whiteboard is filled with ideas. Everybody has contributed; nobody has been criticized. Alas, the

evidence suggests that the overwhelming majority of these free-associations are superficial and that most

brainstorming sessions actually inhibit the productivity of the group. We become less than the sum of our parts.

However, in recent years, scientists have shown that group collaborations benefit from debate and dissent; it is

the human friction that makes the sparks. (There’s a reason why Steve Jobs always insisted that new ideas

required “brutal honesty.”) In fact, some studies suggest that encouraging debate and dissent can lead to a 40%

increase in useful new ideas from the group.

Why does failure seem to be such an important part of innovation?

Because innovation is hard. If it were easy to invent an idea, that idea would already exist. Creative success is not

about the avoidance of failure. It’s about failing as fast as possible, going through endless iterations until the idea

is perfect.

What about Silicon Valley’s creativity and innovation allowed it to overtake Route 128 as the tech

center of America in the latter half of the last decade?

It’s a really interesting comparison, because if you time travel back to the 1960s, you never would have guessed

that Silicon Valley would become the tech center of the world. (It was still mostly walnut and apricot farms.)

Those Boston suburbs, meanwhile, were dense with engineering talent and technology firms. By 1970, the area

bounded by Route 128 included six of the ten largest technology firms in the world, such as Digital Computer and

Raytheon. The “Massachusetts Miracle” was underway.

So what happened? The downfall of the Boston tech sector was caused by the very same features that, at leastinitially, seemed like such advantages. As Annalee Saxenian notes in her extremely insightful book Regional

Advantage, the Route 128 area had been defined for decades by the presence of a few large firms. (At one point,

Digital Equipment alone employed more than 120,000 people.) These companies were so large, in fact, that they

were mostly self-sufficient. Digital Equipment didn’t just make minicomputers — it also made the microchips in its

computers, and designed the software that ran on those microchips. (Gordon Bell, the vice-president in charge of

research at Digital, described the company as “a large entity that operates as an island in the regional economy.”)

As a result, the Boston firms took secrecy very seriously — a scientist at Digital wasn’t allowed to talk about his

work with a scientist at Wang, or to share notes with someone at Lotus. These companies strictly enforced non-

disclosure agreements so that former employees couldn’t work for competitors and prohibited their scientists frompublishing peer-reviewed articles. This meant that, at Route 128 companies, information tended to flow vertically,

as ideas and innovations were transferred within the firms.





While this vertical system made it easier for Route 128 companies to protect their intellectual property, it also

made them far less innovative. This is because the creativity of an urban area depends upon its ability to

encourage the free-flow of information — we need that knowledge spillover — as all those people in the same zip

code exchange ideas and work together. But this didn’t happen around Route 128. Although the Boston area had

a density of talent, the talent couldn’t interact — each firm was a private island. The end result was a stifling of

innovation.

The vertical culture of the Boston tech sector existed in stark contrast to the horizontal interactions of Silicon

Valley. Because the California firms were small and fledgling, they often had to collaborate on projects and share

engineers. This led to the formation of cross-cutting relationships, so that it wasn’t uncommon for a scientist at

Cisco to be friends with someone at Oracle, or for a co-founder of Intel to offer management advice to a young

executive at Apple. Furthermore, these networks often led to high employee turnover, as people jumped from

project to project. In the 1980s, the average tenure at a Silicon Valley company was less than two years. (It also

helped that non-compete clauses were almost never enforced in California, thus freeing engineers and executives

to quickly reenter the job market and work for competitors.) This meant that the industrial system of the San Jose

area wasn’t organized around individual firms. Instead, the region was defined by its professional networks, by

groups of engineers trading knowledge with each other. And that’s when new knowledge is made.

You talk a lot about the benefits of cultural mix ing — how good ideas multiply when they’re allowed to

move freely and new perspectives are introduced. What legislative changes would encourage more of

this?

More immigrants! The numbers speak for themselves. According to the latest figures from the U.S. Patent Office,

immigrants invent patents at double the rate of non-immigrants, which is why a 1% increase in immigrants with

college degrees leads to a 15% rise in patent production. (In recent years, immigrant inventors have contributed to

more than a quarter of all U.S. global patent applications.) These new citizens also start companies at an

accelerated pace, co-founding 52% of Silicon Valley firms since 1995.

Many of the anecdotes in Imagine have a disconcerting common theme of drugs or mental il lness. Are

creative people all doomed to be addicts or mad men?

I don’t think so. (Yo Yo Ma, for instance, is a very nice guy.) But I do think the prevalence of such stories reminds





us that creativity is damn difficult, which is why those in the creativity business are always looking for every

possible edge. That’s why many great writers experimented with amphetamines and why performers have always

searched for compounds that let them get out of their head, silencing that voice that kills their spontaneity. In the

end, of course, these chemical shortcuts rarely work out — there’s nothing creative about addiction. And that’s

why I remained convinced that the best creativity booster is self-knowledge. Once we know how the imagination

works, we can make it work better.

Author image via Nina Subin; map image courtesy of iStockphoto, gmutlu

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1 Comment

1. utseo Follow

What no comments? “How to be creative” is trending on twitter and this article makes up a good

percentage of the tweets. Kudos to Mr. Lehrer for the book and Mr. Catone for the article. Guess I’ll have to

buy the book now.

10 minutes ago Reply 0 Flag this comment

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How to Be Creative the Science of Genius