Letter 50: December 14, 2008 (week of)
We tend to think of creative art as something mysterious - romantic, or even religious. Some people think they have to wait for inspiration. Others will tell you it's 90% perspiration, but when it comes down to it they believe in the same thing: after they've labored long enough, the creative idea will turn up in their conscious minds for no identifiable reason.
Today let's take the other view of creativity.
Cognitive science is the study of what the brain actually does when you are using your mind. Cog scientists do things like computer simulations of how we think and know. If you know what a neural network is, these guys were behind inventing that.
One such scientist is Thomas Ward, who created "creative cognition". His assumption is that "creative accomplishments, from the most mundane to the most extraordinary, are based on those ordinary mental processes that, at least in principle, are observable". So creative action is the same as any other action: a thing you do. Like changing a lightbulb, you decide to do it, and then go do it.
There's some evidence that human creativity does follow routine paths. Ward has found that if he asks people to draw a strange, alien creature from another planet and he tells them it has to have a beak, most people will also give it feathers. There's no reason an alien with a beak would be feathered. Maybe creativity is one of those tasks where the mind does as little work as it has to (I finished a 120 page draft yesterday and it wasn't until the last day that I realized that two or my characters were brother and sister.).
As so often happens in psychology, people who live in different pigeonholes, and maybe don't talk to each other, happen to be working on similar questions and coming to similar conclusions. Away from the cognitivists, over among the behaviorists, Robert Epstein has created something called Generativity Theory. We looked at that in letter #33. His assumption is that creative accomplishments, from the most mundane to the most extraordinary, are based on those ordinary mental processes that, at least in principle, are observable.
(Epstein is the person you may recall who, while editor of Psychology Today, set out seven years ago to fall in love with a random stranger. That tells you what he thinks of romance - it exists, but is not special.)
How come the world of creativity research is big enough for these rational people and for the more artistic-minded people? Does creativity work one way or the other way? One answer is that different folks have different definitions of "creative". And, although I have some nerd skills, I stand with the romantics on this. Not everything novel and weird is creative: quality (or utility) is important too.
But let's learn what we can from the rational people. Something you can try today is the same as six months ago, except this time please do it: keep a notebook for ideas. Sometimes just a word, sometimes a plot, sometimes a character, sometimes an excerpt. Most of them you'll trash later. Even so, years from now you'll thank me.
David
David Jung McGarva
+1 (818) 707 1871
Write me: david at todayiwrite dot com
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