From early childhood, we are encouraged to be creative – to use our imagination and discover innovative solutions. But can creativity be learned at all, or is it one of nature’s gifts bestowed on the lucky few? Psychologists who have Examined the nature of the creative process may have some answers.
It is often suggested that you can test creativity, like LQ, using standard exercises – such as listing in three minutes as many uses as you can for a brick or naming as many things as possible that are both white and edible. These exercises certainly measure your ability to think. Of alternatives, but this ability is not quite the same as creativity. A more convincing test would assess inspiration – your ability to solve problems with sudden flashes of insight. A classic exercise of this genre is the hat-rack problem. You are alone in a room with just two poles and a clamp. How do you make a peg steady enough to bang a hat? Try leaning a pole against the wall, and it will slip. Snapping the poles to make legs for a tripod is against the rules. And anyway, the clamp could not secure them. But then – eureka! – you look up at the ceiling and realize that if the two poles are clamped together to make a single, long pole, they could be wedged between ceiling and floor, leaving the clamp as the peg. This solution is both surprising and apt – the very essence of creativity.
Out of the blue
Geniuses, who can apparently conjure these side ways leaps of thought from thin air, say that they can not pinpoint their source of inspiration. Picasso said his paintings took him over, controlling his brushstrokes. Mozart claimed that whole symphonies sprang to life in an instant as if he had just heard them played. Einstein joked that he found shaving risky because this was often the time a good idea seized him. All remarked on the contrast between the usual hard graft of intellectual labor and the ease and completeness of their moments of sudden inspiration. So what goes on in a brain when it makes such jumps? How distinct is inspiration from ordinary problem-solving? Can we learn to tap into this power? The short answer from psychologists is that creativity increases when we relax our grip on established ways of thinking and free our minds to spot offbeat alternatives. And this kind of mental letting go involves a subtle interplay between the two hemispheres of the brain.
Taking sides
Popular belief has it that the brain is divided into a left hemisphere that is logical, verbal, and rational and a right hemisphere that is emotional and holistic. While there is some truth in this simple model, it is more accurate to say that the left hemisphere is specialized for taking a focused, sequential approach, while the right hemisphere looks at the broader context. Some neuroscientists think that the ct Us of the right hemisphere is rather more widely branched and connected. So, whenever there is any thought in mind, the right side houses a wealth of associated thoughts, feelings, and fringe meanings. When we think, the two hemispheres work in a complementary way. The right brain creates a mental backdrop – a sense of the known terrain – which the focused thinking of the left brain can then explore more systematically.
Of course, the problem comes when we want to break fresh ground. If we are faced with a puzzle, such as making the hat- rack, the right brain establishes a general mental picture – an image of the task, an empty room, a clamp, and two poles – then the left brain sets to work logically, considering the alternatives. However, if no answer is obvious, if no arrangement of the components seems to fit, we need to Jet go of our existing picture and find a different context within which to continue the search: the right brain has to relax its grip and start again.
So, while intelligence can be seen as an exploration within an established mental context, creativity is about broadening or changing the context – letting go and allowing your brain to come at a problem from a new angle.
Mental reframing
Professionally creative people seem to have discovered this fact for themselves. When they realize that they have reached a mental cul-de-sac, they step away from their desks, easels, or drawing boards and go for a run, meditate, look out of the window, or go to sleep. By engaging in a different activity, a strongly roused set of ideas can fade, and a different perspective may form in its place.
Most of us know from experience that holding a thought or image in mind can suppress alternative views of the same thing. For example, when struggling to remember a name that is ‘on the tip of your tongue, a similar but wrong name often arises and blocks correct recall. If you stop and forget about the task, the right name often pops into your mind a few minutes later. This happens because the roused brain cells have relaxed enough to let other, weaker-firing brain cells on the fringe through with the correct answer.
Just relaxing from a task at regular intervals is an easy way to boost creativity, and there are more systematic techniques that can also help to reframe a problem. But relaxation is not the only component. Creative thinking involves sweat as well as inspiration; the sudden snap of insight can only strike a mind that has prepared itself by forming a rich backdrop of knowledge and skill.
A recipe for genius?
This idea is borne out when we look at the lives of geniuses who claim ed that their best ideas came out of the blue. Psychologists have shown that most great achievers started early and usually had a family background that gave them. A flying start in their chosen field. They then spent many years patiently learning their trade.
Mozart’s father, for example, was a court musician and composer who was ambitious for his son and had him singing scales and tinkling the key board at an age when other children were still on nursery rhymes. By the age of 12, Mozart had already spent five years as a performer traveling around Europe and had written his first compositions. Similarly, Picasso had been taught by his father – an art teacher – to paint with classical virtuosity by the age of 15. And Einstein was encouraged to read the works of Euclid and Kant from an early age. Even after these head starts, Mozart,
Picasso and Einstein took at least ten years before they started to produce original, creative work in their unique style. They needed to master the complete set of tools of their respective trades before they could begin to experiment within the conventional framework and start producing their unique and innovative work.
As the inventor Thomas Edison famously said: ‘Genius is one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration.’ Creative ideas often do strike out of the blue, corning in moments of relaxation or when idly toying with ideas. But behind the ease of the creative flash lies the hard work that is always needed to bring the mind to the brink of inspiration.
The Four Stages Of Creation
British psychologist Graham Wallas has formulated an influential four-stage model of the creative act.
- Stage 1: preparation – the intense frontal assault on a problem that familiarises the thinker with all its aspects.
- Stage 2: incubation – a period of relaxation that lets established ways of looking at the problem fade so that alternatives can bubble closer to the surface.
- Stage 3: illumination – the mental click where some surprise connection suddenly makes sense of the problem: background thoughts finally break through into clear consciousness, or perhaps we idly note a key aspect – such as the ceiling in the hat-rack problem.
- Stage 4: verification – Wallas points out that the click of insight usually produces the feeling of suddenly having the right angle on the problem, but logical left-brain work is then needed to prove that the answer really works.
