Creativity can seem like magic. We look at people
like Steve Jobs and Bob Dylan, and we conclude that they must possess
supernatural powers denied to mere mortals like us, gifts that allow
them to imagine what has never existed before. They're "creative types."
We're not.
The myth of the "creative type" is just
that--a myth, argues Jonah Lehrer. In an interview with WSJ's Gary Rosen
he explains the evidence suggesting everyone has the potential to be
the next Milton Glaser or Yo-Yo Ma.
But creativity is not magic, and there's no
such thing as a creative type. Creativity is not a trait that we inherit
in our genes or a blessing bestowed by the angels. It's a skill. Anyone
can learn to be creative and to get better at it. New research is
shedding light on what allows people to develop world-changing products
and to solve the toughest problems. A surprisingly concrete set of
lessons has emerged about what creativity is and how to spark it in
ourselves and our work.
The science of creativity is relatively new. Until the Enlightenment,
acts of imagination were always equated with higher powers. Being
creative meant channeling the muses, giving voice to the gods.
("Inspiration" literally means "breathed upon.") Even in modern times,
scientists have paid little attention to the sources of creativity.
But over the past decade, that has begun to
change. Imagination was once thought to be a single thing, separate from
other kinds of cognition. The latest research suggests that this
assumption is false. It turns out that we use "creativity" as a catchall
term for a variety of cognitive tools, each of which applies to
particular sorts of problems and is coaxed to action in a particular
way.
Philip Montgomery for The Wall Street Journal; Illustrations by Serge Bloch
It isn't a trait that we
inherit in our genes or a blessing bestowed on us by the angels. It's a
skill that anyone can learn and work to improve.
Does the challenge that we're facing
require a moment of insight, a sudden leap in consciousness? Or can it
be solved gradually, one piece at a time? The answer often determines
whether we should drink a beer to relax or hop ourselves up on Red Bull,
whether we take a long shower or stay late at the office.
The new research also suggests how best to approach the thorniest
problems. We tend to assume that experts are the creative geniuses in
their own fields. But big breakthroughs often depend on the naive daring
of outsiders. For prompting creativity, few things are as important as
time devoted to cross-pollination with fields outside our areas of
expertise.
Let's start with the hardest problems, those challenges that at first
blush seem impossible. Such problems are typically solved (if they are
solved at all) in a moment of insight.
Consider the case of Arthur Fry, an engineer at 3M in the paper
products division. In the winter of 1974, Mr. Fry attended a
presentation by Sheldon Silver, an engineer working on adhesives. Mr.
Silver had developed an extremely weak glue, a paste so feeble it could
barely hold two pieces of paper together. Like everyone else in the
room, Mr. Fry patiently listened to the presentation and then failed to
come up with any practical applications for the compound. What good,
after all, is a glue that doesn't stick?
On a frigid Sunday morning, however, the paste would re-enter Mr.
Fry's thoughts, albeit in a rather unlikely context. He sang in the
church choir and liked to put little pieces of paper in the hymnal to
mark the songs he was supposed to sing. Unfortunately, the little pieces
of paper often fell out, forcing Mr. Fry to spend the service
frantically thumbing through the book, looking for the right page. It
seemed like an unfixable problem, one of those ordinary hassles that
we're forced to live with.
But then, during a particularly tedious sermon, Mr. Fry had an
epiphany. He suddenly realized how he might make use of that weak glue:
It could be applied to paper to create a reusable bookmark! Because the
adhesive was barely sticky, it would adhere to the page but wouldn't
tear it when removed. That revelation in the church would eventually
result in one of the most widely used office products in the world: the
Post-it Note.
Mr. Fry's invention was a classic
moment of insight. Though such events seem to spring from nowhere, as if
the cortex is surprising us with a breakthrough, scientists have begun
studying how they occur. They do this by giving people "insight"
puzzles, like the one that follows, and watching what happens in the
brain:
A man has married 20 women in a small town. All of
the women are still alive, and none of them is divorced. The man has
broken no laws. Who is the man?
If you solved the question, the
solution probably came to you in an incandescent flash: The man is a
priest. Research led by Mark Beeman and John Kounios has identified
where that flash probably came from. In the seconds before the insight
appears, a brain area called the superior anterior temporal gyrus (aSTG)
exhibits a sharp spike in activity. This region, located on the surface
of the right hemisphere, excels at drawing together distantly related
information, which is precisely what's needed when working on a hard
creative problem.
Interestingly, Mr. Beeman and his
colleagues have found that certain factors make people much more likely
to have an insight, better able to detect the answers generated by the
aSTG. For instance, exposing subjects to a short, humorous video—the
scientists use a clip of Robin Williams doing stand-up—boosts the
average success rate by about 20%.
Alcohol also works. Earlier this year,
researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago compared
performance on insight puzzles between sober and intoxicated students.
The scientists gave the subjects a battery of word problems known as
remote associates, in which people have to find one additional word that
goes with a triad of words. Here's a sample problem:
Pine Crab Sauce
In this case, the answer is "apple."
(The compound words are pineapple, crab apple and apple sauce.) Drunk
students solved nearly 30% more of these word problems than their sober
peers.
What explains the creative benefits of
relaxation and booze? The answer involves the surprising advantage of
not paying attention. Although we live in an age that worships focus—we
are always forcing ourselves to concentrate, chugging caffeine—this
approach can inhibit the imagination. We might be focused, but we're
probably focused on the wrong answer.
And this is why relaxation helps: It
isn't until we're soothed in the shower or distracted by the stand-up
comic that we're able to turn the spotlight of attention inward,
eavesdropping on all those random associations unfolding in the far
reaches of the brain's right hemisphere. When we need an insight, those
associations are often the source of the answer.
This research also explains why so
many major breakthroughs happen in the unlikeliest of places, whether
it's Archimedes in the bathtub or the physicist Richard Feynman
scribbling equations in a strip club, as he was known to do. It reveals
the wisdom of Google putting ping-pong tables in the lobby and confirms
the practical benefits of daydreaming. As Einstein once declared,
"Creativity is the residue of time wasted."
Of course, not every creative
challenge requires an epiphany; a relaxing shower won't solve every
problem. Sometimes, we just need to keep on working, resisting the
temptation of a beer-fueled nap.
There is nothing fun about this kind
of creativity, which consists mostly of sweat and failure. It's the red
pen on the page and the discarded sketch, the trashed prototype and the
failed first draft. Nietzsche referred to this as the "rejecting
process," noting that while creators like to brag about their big
epiphanies, their everyday reality was much less romantic. "All great
artists and thinkers are great workers," he wrote.
This relentless form of creativity is
nicely exemplified by the legendary graphic designer Milton Glaser, who
engraved the slogan "Art is Work" above his office door. Mr. Glaser's
most famous design is a tribute to this work ethic. In 1975, he accepted
an intimidating assignment: to create a new ad campaign that would
rehabilitate the image of New York City, which at the time was falling
apart.
Mr. Glaser began by experimenting with
fonts, laying out the tourist slogan in a variety of friendly
typefaces. After a few weeks of work, he settled on a charming design,
with "I Love New York" in cursive, set against a plain white background.
His proposal was quickly approved. "Everybody liked it," Mr. Glaser
says. "And if I were a normal person, I'd stop thinking about the
project. But I can't. Something about it just doesn't feel right."
So Mr. Glaser continued to ruminate on
the design, devoting hours to a project that was supposedly finished.
And then, after another few days of work, he was sitting in a taxi,
stuck in midtown traffic. "I often carry spare pieces of paper in my
pocket, and so I get the paper out and I start to draw," he remembers.
"And I'm thinking and drawing and then I get it. I see the whole design
in my head. I see the typeface and the big round red heart smack dab in
the middle. I know that this is how it should go."
The logo that Mr. Glaser imagined in
traffic has since become one of the most widely imitated works of
graphic art in the world. And he only discovered the design because he
refused to stop thinking about it.
But this raises an obvious question: If
different kinds of creative problems benefit from different kinds of
creative thinking, how can we ensure that we're thinking in the right
way at the right time? When should we daydream and go for a relaxing
stroll, and when should we keep on sketching and toying with
possibilities?
The good news is that the human mind
has a surprising natural ability to assess the kind of creativity we
need. Researchers call these intuitions "feelings of knowing," and they
occur when we suspect that we can find the answer, if only we keep on
thinking. Numerous studies have demonstrated that, when it comes to
problems that don't require insights, the mind is remarkably adept at
assessing the likelihood that a problem can be solved—knowing whether
we're getting "warmer" or not, without knowing the solution.
This ability to calculate progress is
an important part of the creative process. When we don't feel that we're
getting closer to the answer—we've hit the wall, so to speak—we
probably need an insight. If there is no feeling of knowing, the most
productive thing we can do is forget about work for a while. But when
those feelings of knowing are telling us that we're getting close, we
need to keep on struggling.
Of course, both moment-of-insight
problems and nose-to-the-grindstone problems assume that we have the
answers to the creative problems we're trying to solve somewhere in our
heads. They're both just a matter of getting those answers out. Another
kind of creative problem, though, is when you don't have the right kind
of raw material kicking around in your head. If you're trying to be more
creative, one of the most important things you can do is increase the
volume and diversity of the information to which you are exposed.
Steve Jobs famously declared that
"creativity is just connecting things." Although we think of inventors
as dreaming up breakthroughs out of thin air, Mr. Jobs was pointing out
that even the most far-fetched concepts are usually just new
combinations of stuff that already exists. Under Mr. Jobs's leadership,
for instance, Apple didn't invent MP3 players or tablet computers—the
company just made them better, adding design features that were new to
the product category.
And it isn't just Apple. The history
of innovation bears out Mr. Jobs's theory. The Wright Brothers
transferred their background as bicycle manufacturers to the invention
of the airplane; their first flying craft was, in many respects, just a
bicycle with wings. Johannes Gutenberg transformed his knowledge of wine
presses into a printing machine capable of mass-producing words. Or
look at Google: Larry Page and Sergey Brin came up with their famous
search algorithm by applying the ranking method used for academic
articles (more citations equals more influence) to the sprawl of the
Internet.
How can people get better at making
these kinds of connections? Mr. Jobs argued that the best inventors seek
out "diverse experiences," collecting lots of dots that they later link
together. Instead of developing a narrow specialization, they study,
say, calligraphy (as Mr. Jobs famously did) or hang out with friends in
different fields. Because they don't know where the answer will come
from, they are willing to look for the answer everywhere.
Recent research confirms Mr. Jobs's
wisdom. The sociologist Martin Ruef, for instance, analyzed the social
and business relationships of 766 graduates of the Stanford Business
School, all of whom had gone on to start their own companies. He found
that those entrepreneurs with the most diverse friendships scored three
times higher on a metric of innovation. Instead of getting stuck in the
rut of conformity, they were able to translate their expansive social
circle into profitable new concepts.
Many of the most innovative companies
encourage their employees to develop these sorts of diverse networks,
interacting with colleagues in totally unrelated fields. Google hosts an
internal conference called Crazy Search Ideas—a sort of grown-up
science fair with hundreds of posters from every conceivable field. At
3M, engineers are typically rotated to a new division every few years.
Sometimes, these rotations bring big payoffs, such as when 3M realized
that the problem of laptop battery life was really a problem of energy
used up too quickly for illuminating the screen. 3M researchers applied
their knowledge of see-through adhesives to create an optical film that
focuses light outward, producing a screen that was 40% more efficient.
Such solutions are known as "mental
restructurings," since the problem is only solved after someone asks a
completely new kind of question. What's interesting is that expertise
can inhibit such restructurings, making it harder to find the
breakthrough. That's why it's important not just to bring new ideas back
to your own field, but to actually try to solve problems in other
fields—where your status as an outsider, and ability to ask naive
questions, can be a tremendous advantage.
This principle is at work daily on
InnoCentive, a crowdsourcing website for difficult scientific questions.
The structure of the site is simple: Companies post their hardest
R&D problems, attaching a monetary reward to each "challenge." The
site features problems from hundreds of organization in eight different
scientific categories, from agricultural science to mathematics. The
challenges on the site are incredibly varied and include everything from
a multinational food company looking for a "Reduced Fat
Chocolate-Flavored Compound Coating" to an electronics firm trying to
design a solar-powered computer.
The most impressive thing about
InnoCentive, however, is its effectiveness. In 2007, Karim Lakhani, a
professor at the Harvard Business School, began analyzing hundreds of
challenges posted on the site. According to Mr. Lakhani's data, nearly
30% of the difficult problems posted on InnoCentive were solved within
six months. Sometimes, the problems were solved within days of being
posted online. The secret was outsider thinking: The problem solvers on
InnoCentive were most effective at the margins of their own fields.
Chemists didn't solve chemistry problems; they solved molecular biology
problems. And vice versa. While these people were close enough to
understand the challenge, they weren't so close that their knowledge
held them back, causing them to run into the same stumbling blocks that
held back their more expert peers.
It's this ability to attack problems
as a beginner, to let go of all preconceptions and fear of failure,
that's the key to creativity.
The composer Bruce Adolphe first met
Yo-Yo Ma at the Juilliard School in New York City in 1970. Mr. Ma was
just 15 years old at the time (though he'd already played for J.F.K. at
the White House). Mr. Adolphe had just written his first cello piece.
"Unfortunately, I had no idea what I was doing," Mr. Adolphe remembers.
"I'd never written for the instrument before."
Mr. Adolphe had shown a draft of his
composition to a Juilliard instructor, who informed him that the piece
featured a chord that was impossible to play. Before Mr. Adolphe could
correct the music, however, Mr. Ma decided to rehearse the composition
in his dorm room. "Yo-Yo played through my piece, sight-reading the
whole thing," Mr. Adolphe says. "And when that impossible chord came, he
somehow found a way to play it."
Mr. Adolphe told Mr. Ma what the
professor had said and asked how he had managed to play the impossible
chord. They went through the piece again, and when Mr. Ma came to the
impossible chord, Mr. Adolphe yelled "Stop!" They looked at Mr. Ma's
left hand—it was contorted on the fingerboard, in a position that was
nearly impossible to hold. "You're right," said Mr. Ma, "you
really can't play that!" Yet, somehow, he did.
When Mr. Ma plays today, he still
strives for that state of the beginner. "One needs to constantly remind
oneself to play with the abandon of the child who is just learning the
cello," Mr. Ma says. "Because why is that kid playing? He is playing for
pleasure."
Creativity is a spark. It can be
excruciating when we're rubbing two rocks together and getting nothing.
And it can be intensely satisfying when the flame catches and a new idea
sweeps around the world.
For the first time in human history,
it's becoming possible to see how to throw off more sparks and how to
make sure that more of them catch fire. And yet, we must also be honest:
The creative process will never be easy, no matter how much we learn
about it. Our inventions will always be shadowed by uncertainty, by the
serendipity of brain cells making a new connection.
Every creative story is different. And
yet every creative story is the same: There was nothing, now there is
something. It's almost like magic.
—Adapted from "Imagine: How Creativity Works" by
Jonah Lehrer, to be published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt on March 19.
Copyright © 2012 by Jonah Lehrer.
10 Quick Creativity Hacks
1. Color Me Blue
A
2009 study found that subjects solved twice as many insight puzzles
when surrounded by the color blue, since it leads to more relaxed and
associative thinking. Red, on other hand, makes people more alert and
aware, so it is a better backdrop for solving analytic problems.
2. Get Groggy
According to a
study published last month, people at their least alert time of
day—think of a night person early in the morning—performed far better on
various creative puzzles, sometimes improving their success rate by
50%. Grogginess has creative perks.
Serge Bloch
#3 Don't Be Afraid to Daydream
3. Daydream Away
Research
led by Jonathan Schooler at the University of California, Santa
Barbara, has found that people who daydream more score higher on various
tests of creativity.
4. Think Like A Child
When
subjects are told to imagine themselves as 7-year-olds, they score
significantly higher on tests of divergent thinking, such as trying to
invent alternative uses for an old car tire.
5. Laugh It Up
Serge Bloch
When people are exposed to a short video of stand-up comedy, they solve about 20% more insight puzzles.
When people are exposed to a short video of stand-up comedy, they solve about 20% more insight puzzles.
6. Imagine That You Are Far Away
Research
conducted at Indiana University found that people were much better at
solving insight puzzles when they were told that the puzzles came from
Greece or California, and not from a local lab.
7. Keep It Generic
One way to
increase problem-solving ability is to change the verbs used to describe
the problem. When the verbs are extremely specific, people think in
narrow terms. In contrast, the use of more generic verbs—say, "moving"
instead of "driving"—can lead to dramatic increases in the number of
problems solved.
Serge Bloch
According to a new study,
volunteers performed significantly better on a standard test of
creativity when they were seated outside a 5-footsquare workspace,
perhaps because they internalized the metaphor of thinking outside the
box. The lesson? Your cubicle is holding you back.
8. Work Outside the Box
According
to new study, volunteers performed significantly better on a standard
test of creativity when they were seated outside a 5-foot-square
workspace, perhaps because they internalized the metaphor of thinking
outside the box. The lesson? Your cubicle is holding you back.
9. See the World
According to
research led by Adam Galinsky, students who have lived abroad were much
more likely to solve a classic insight puzzle. Their experience of
another culture endowed them with a valuable open-mindedness. This
effect also applies to professionals: Fashion-house directors who have
lived in many countries produce clothing that their peers rate as far
more creative.
10. Move to a Metropolis
Physicists
at the Santa Fe Institute have found that moving from a small city to
one that is twice as large leads inventors to produce, on average, about
15% more patents.
—Jonah Lehrer
A version of this article appeared Mar. 10,
2012, on page C1 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with
the headline: How to Be CreativeHow To Be Creative.
Here
is another one of my "sick of spending so much money on soap?", "tired
of loading the dishwasher after dinner and finding you are out of
dishwasher soap, again?". Save money and grocery store trips and make
your own. It's really easy and last's forever!
It even has a pouring spout to make things easy.
Use
1 tablespoon per wash cycle. It has no fillers so you do not have to
use nearly as much to get the job done! This recipe is for hard water
users, if you have soft water you may want to browse the internet for a
better recipe for soft water.
1 4 lb 12 oz box Borax (2.15 kg or 76 oz) found in the detergent isle
Start out by grating your Fels-Naptha soap just like cheese. You can
use a food processor or just use your hand held grater, what ever you
have.
Toss all ingredients in a 5 gallon bucket lined with a garbage bag.
This part makes your whole house smell great. Once everything is mixed
store soap however you like. 
