By David M. Maxfield
Why do some people have one good idea after another? Are they more intelligent and talented than others? Can creativity be taught? Creativity is a difficult concept to pin down. Even the most innovative individuals seem intrigued about how their own breakthrough ideas came about.
Rosalyn Tureck, the famed concert pianist, recalls playing a Bach fugue shortly before her 17th birthday and experiencing "a total loss of self-awareness, a state I can only describe as the non-being, for I have no memory whatever of my existence in that state."
She remembers "coming to" and having a "profound experience of insight" about the structure of Bach's music, which would require an entirely new way of performing. The idea was so conceptually and technically new that Tureck could learn only four lines of the fugue within the four days that preceded her regular lesson.
"The result of this insight," she says, "was that I had gone through a small door into an immense, living, green universe and the impossibility for me lay in returning through that door to the world I had known."
Creative acts can unfold in far less dramatic ways, according to David Perkins, of Harvard University. Although innovation should not be confused with novelty and routine things like remembering a phone number.
Perkins recalls a story of a friend who was traveling with his family in France and stopped for a picnic in the French countryside. All the ingredients were on hand--cheese, bread, wine. But one item was missing--a knife to cut the cheese. The friend thought for a moment, then took out his credit card and used it to slice the cheese.
Perkins calls this a great example of everyday creativity and adds that it's dangerous to conceptualize creativity as a kind of elitist, ivory-tower enterprise or to equate it with intelligence, talent and expertise. Such traits are simply the horsepower that fuels the creative process. In fact, Perkins and others have identified six shared traits that seem to drive creative people. The more you have, they say, the more creative you tend to be.
On is a deep concern for aesthetics--hidden truths--perhaps best demonstrated by Albert Einstein's restlessness with the asymmetries and inelegances of classical physics. Cellist Janos Starker spoke of his own "obsessive desire for reducing chaos and for finding beauty."
Creative people also seem to be motivated as much by "problem finding" as by problem solving. For example, much has been written about the "race to the Patent Office" of inventors like Alexander Graham Bell, Henry Ford and Thomas Edison. Creators don't quite know what they're seeking. They're exploring the unknown.
Challenging assumptions is also territory that creative scientists and artists regularly share. For example, Sinan, the most renowned architect in Islamic history, created majestic domes and vast interiors, using materials and methods that had all been used before. But he devised new approaches and expressions that differed from those commonly practiced.
Still another trait is the testing of ideas. Perkins believes that some typed of "objectivity" is needed in creative work to "clear away the blindness, the self-deception." Chemist Linus Pauling, who won a Nobel Prize for his work on the chemical bond, as well as the Nobel Prize for Peace, once told a student that the trick to having good ideas is to come up with "a lot of ideas and then throw the bad ones out." The sculptor George Segal put it differently. "If you're too original," he said, " you're crazy. You have to be connected to some kind of tradition."
Original thinkers also tend to work at the edge of their competence, although it can make them nervous or sick. Tureck recalled the reaction of her teacher to her leap in imagination. He called it "wonderful, but impossible to do." Yet she pressed on with her ideas, which required "a great deal of concentrated work for a good number of years." As Pauling said, "It's not enough to have a good idea. You need...to take action."
Lastly, creative people seem moved to action by "intrinsic motivation" rather than the rewards that entice others. "I had developed a very strong curiosity about the nature of the world at an early age," said Pauling. "I wasn't ambitious about a high salary or power."
Many stories show that the creative individuals tend to prepare themselves for discovery through four steps: saturation of subject, incubation of idea, illumination of question and verification of answers.
Pauling told how his discovery of the alpha helix structure in molecules came within just a few hours one day as he lay in bed with a bad cold and become bored reading detective stories. Yet he had been "thinking" about the matter for 11 years. It might look easy afterwards, but such discovery often come with hard work. "The more information in your memory bank," said one scientist, "and the more accustomed you are to connecting different pats of this memory bank, the easier it becomes." Or, as Louis Pasteur put it, "Chance favors the prepared mind."
Can creativity be nudged along? Perkins thinks so. "You can certainly do things to encourage question asking and searching for problems," he said. He also urged that the development of creativity be integrated into regular school work, "not as some separate course over in the corner but as part of history, but as a part of every subject." Then, he said, creativity would be within reach.
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