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Everyone has creativity, some a lot more than others. The development
of humans, and possibly the universe, depends on it. Yet creativity is an
elusive creature. What do we mean by it? What is going on in our brains
when ideas form? Does it feel the same for artists and scientists? We asked
writers and neuroscientists, pop stars and AI gurus to try to deconstruct
the creative process – and learn how we can all ignite the spark within.
In the early 1970s, creativity was still seen as a type of
intelligence. But when more subtle tests of IQ and creative skills were
developed in the 1970s, particularly by the father of creativity testing,
Paul Torrance, it became clear that the link was not so simple. Creative
people are intelligent, in terms of IQ tests at least, but only averagely
or just above. While it depends on the discipline, in general beyond a
certain level IQ does not help boost creativity; it is necessary, but not sufficient
to make someone creative.
Because of the difficulty of studying the actual process, most early
attempts to study creativity concentrated on personality. According to
creativity specialist Mark Runco of California State University, Fullerton,
the “creative personality” tends to place a high value on aesthetic
qualities and to have broad interests, providing lots of resources to draw
on and knowledge to recombine into novel solutions. “Creatives” have an
attraction to the complexity and an ability to handle conflict. They are
also usually highly self-motivated, perhaps even a little obsessive. Less
creative people, on the other hand, tend to become irritated if they cannot
immediately fit all the pieces together. They are less tolerant of
confusion. Creativity comes to those who wait, but only to those who are
happy to do so in a bit of a fog.
But there may be a price to pay for having a creative personality.
For centuries, a link has been made between creativity and mental illness.
Psychiatrist Jamison of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland,
found that established artists are significantly more likely to have mood
disorders. But she also suggests that a change of mood state might be the
key to triggering a creative event, rather than the negative mood itself.
Intelligence can help channel this thought style into great creativity, but
when combined with emotional problems, lateral, divergent or open thinking
can lead to mental illness instead.
Jordan Peterson, a psychologist at the University of Toronto, Canada,
believes he has identified a mechanism that could help explain this. He
says that the brains of creative people seem more open to incoming stimuli
than less creative types. Our senses are continuously feeding a mass of
information into our brains, which have to block or ignore most of it to
save us from being snowed under. Peterson calls this process latent
inhibition, and argues that people who have less of it, and who have a
reasonably high IQ with a good working memory can juggle more of the data,
and so maybe open to more possibilities and ideas. The downside of
extremely low latent inhibition may be a confusing thought style that
predisposes people to mental illness. So for Peterson, mental illness is
not a prerequisite for creativity, but it shares some cognitive traits.
But what of the creative act itself? One of the first studies of the
creative brain at work was by Colin Martindale, a psychologist from the
University of Maine in Orono. Back in 1978, he used a network of scalp
electrodes to record an electroencephalogram, a record of the pattern of
brain waves, as people made up stories. Creativity has two stages:
inspiration and elaboration, each characterised by very different states of
mind. While people were dreaming up their stories, he found their brains
were surprisingly quiet. The dominant activity was alpha waves, indicating
a very low level of cortical arousal: a relaxed state, as though the
conscious mind was quiet while the brain was making connections behind the
scenes. It’s the same sort of brain activity as in some stages of sleep,
dreaming or rest, which could explain why sleep and relaxation can help
people be creative. However, when these quiet-minded people were asked to
work on their stories, the alpha wave activity dropped off and the brain
became busier, revealing increased cortical arousal, more corralling of
activity and more organised thinking. Strikingly, it was the people who
showed the biggest difference in brain activity between the inspiration and
development stages who produced the most creative storylines. Nothing in
their background brain activity marked them as creative or uncreative.
“It’s as if the less creative person can’t shift gear,” says Guy Claxton, a
psychologist at the University of Bristol, UK. “Creativity requires
different kinds of thinking. Very creative people move between these states
intuitively.” Creativity, it seems, is about mental flexibility: perhaps
not a two-step process, but a toggling between two states. In a later
study, Martindale found that communication between the sides of the brain
is also important.
Paul Howard-Jones, who works with Claxton at Bristol, believes he has
found another aspect of creativity. He asked people to make up a story
based on three words and scanned their brains using functional magnetic
resonance imaging. In one trial, people were asked not to try too hard and
just report the most obvious story suggested by the words. In another, they
were asked to be inventive. He also varied the words so it was easier or
harder to link them. As people tried harder and came up with more creative
tales, there was a lot more activity in a particular prefrontal brain
region on the right-hand side. These regions are probably important in
monitoring for conflict, helping us to filter out many of the unhelpful
ways of combining the words and allowing us to pull out just the desirable
connections, Howard-Jones suggests. It shows that there is another side to
creativity, he says. The story-making task, particularly when we are
stretched, produces many options which we have to assess. So part of
creativity is a conscious process of evaluating and analysing ideas. The
test also shows that the more we try and are stretched, the more creative our
minds can be.
And creativity need not always be a solitary, tortured affair,
according to Teresa Amabile of Harvard Business School. Though there is a
slight association between solitary writing or painting and negative moods
or emotional disturbances, scientific creativity and workplace creativity
seem much more likely to occur when people are positive and buoyant. In a
decade-long study of real businesses, to be published soon, Amabile found
that positive moods relate positively to creativity in organisations and
that the relationship is a simple linear one. Creative thought also
improves people’s moods, her team found, so the process is circular. Time
pressures, financial pressures and hard-earned bonus schemes, on the other
hand, do not boost workplace creativity” internal motivation, not coercion,
produces the best work.
Another often forgotten aspect of creativity is social. Vera
John-Steiner of the University of New Mexico says that to be really
creative you need strong social networks and trusting relationships, not
just active neural networks. One vital characteristic of a highly creative
person, she says, is that they have at least one other person in their life
who doesn’t think they are completely nuts.
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