The Experience of Creativity

“We don't have ideas, they have us.”

-                 Astrophysicist Gregory Benford

To most of us the spark of creativity feels somewhat mysterious, and some of the best creative ideas come when we aren’t really looking for them. Artists and accomplished scientists alike will often claim they just don’t know how they arrive at their new ideas.

Joseph Haydn, on hearing the first public performance of his oratorio The Creation, is reputed to have burst into tears, crying “I have not written this!”  

Human creativity may be difficult to define precisely, but whether it’s a particularly beautiful piece of music, or a striking work of art or literature, or a brilliantly insightful scientific idea, or just a new way to see some intractable business problem, we all recognize creativity when we see it.  And while creativity seems to be a natural human trait found in virtually all of us, it is more pronounced in some than in others. By most accounts, highly creative people tend to be intelligent and curious, open to new information, mentally restless, anti-authoritarian, and often a bit rebellious.

But how exactly does the actual creative process itself happen? What occurs in the human mind when someone comes up with a creative idea or insight?

Many creative insights seem to come from crossing boundaries or making connections between different concepts. In Walter Isaacson’s richly documented biography of Albert Einstein, for instance, he catalogs a number of factors behind that scientist’s own extraordinary creativity, including that he was well read not just in physics but in philosophy, psychology, and other disciplines (he borrowed the term “relativity” from the field of psychology). He constantly drew analogies between physics concepts previously thought to be unrelated (acceleration and gravity, for instance). And to top it off, Einstein was a pre-war German Jew, claimed by his home country as a celebrity, but shunned by it at the same time.

Creative ideas frequently also come to us in our sleep, to the extent that many people (myself included) will intentionally dwell on a problem before going to sleep, and then wake up in the morning with an answer, or at least a new and different perspective. In his book Where Good Ideas Come From, author and TED Talker Steven Johnson says “In a sense, dreams are the mind’s primordial soup: the medium that facilitates the serendipitous collisions of creative insight. And hunches are like those early carbon atoms, seeking out new kinds of connections to help them build new chains and rings of innovation.”

Hungarian psychologist Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced “ME-high Chicks-sent-me-high”) studied creativity and found that, statistically, androgynous people—meaning effeminate men and masculine women—tend to be relatively more creative than others. Explaining this anomaly, Csikszentmihalyi argues that while “androgyny is sometimes understood in purely sexual terms” and can be confused with homosexuality, in reality “psychological androgyny is a much wider concept, referring to a person’s ability to be at the same time aggressive and nurturant, sensitive and rigid, dominant and submissive, regardless of gender.” In other words, spending your life exposed to both a male and a female gender perspective probably stimulates creative insights and ideas.

Bots, algorithms, machine learning programs and other computerized tools can stimulate our minds and facilitate new thinking, but creativity itself remains one of the most thrilling and mysterious of all uniquely human capabilities.

Remember that and celebrate it, the next time you have a truly original idea.

Or rather, when that idea has you.