It's alive!
It’s summer, 1816, and Mary Wollstonecraft is stuck in Switzerland. She’s been traveling with her lover, the poet Percy Shelley. The previous year, their daughter died within days of being born. They can’t marry because he’s married to someone else. The landscape is bleak. The medieval buildings crumbling. It’s raining. They have one book of ghost stories between them.??
They talk with friends. Discuss ideas. Science. Life and death. All infused with the wild storm-drenched vistas beyond the windows of the villa. Mary comes away from that grim summer in the Swiss mountains with the kernel of a story. In the process, she creates the science fiction genre and one of the most memorable characters in all of fiction.
The character, of course, was Victor Frankenstein (and his monster). The eponymous novel (also known as The Modern Prometheus) created many of the tropes we instantly associate with horror: dark castles, mad scientists, mindless zombies. A moment of historic creativity that has led to dozens of film and stage adaptations.?
What was the spark? We know the Enlightenment era in which Mary lived was one where science was beginning to unravel the mysteries of the natural world. This sense of possibility, coupled with being cooped up with her crazy, creative friends, perhaps (in addition to her husband, Mary shared the villa with their friends the poet Lord Byron and the writer John Polidori). Were questions of life and death weighing on her mind following the death of her daughter? Compounded by the weather?
Somehow Mary stitched these mundane elements, piece by piece, into a coherent whole then threw the switch. Surged 40,000 volts through her creation. And it lives still. Lurching clumsily into the nightmares of readers and moviegoers more than 200 years later.
Is there a recipe for that? Science is trying to find out.?
A target you can’t see
If ever there was an example of Big C creativity, it’s Mary Shelley’s Swiss summer. Researchers define Big C creativity as the production of major novel contributions that shape cultures and change societies. Other examples are Darwin’s theory of evolution, Picasso’s Guernica, and the discovery of the double helix by Watson and Crick.?
While we don’t know where these leaps come from, a link exists between those who can produce these towering works and functional brain connectivity. And we can see it in an fMRI scan. Recent research by Anderson et al. suggests those who scored high for Big C creativity showed more random global brain connectivity. That’s to say, their brains used more random pathways when attempting creative tasks, rather than more efficient ones (as was the case for a ‘high intelligence’ control group).?
“While non-creatives tended to take the same routes across the brain,” says lead author Ariana Anderson, “Highly creative people made their own roads.”
More flexible global connectivity has also been observed in the brains of ADHD sufferers. Many scientists have suggested that ADHD symptomology may be often mistaken for giftedness and vice versa, although opinions are mixed. Are people with ADHD more likely to be Big C creatives? There’s (possibly) at least one (possible) famous example.?
“If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind...
Of what, then, is an empty desk a sign?” asked Albert Einstein. This is his desk.
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Incidentally, the next time someone complains about your desk clutter, you can point out that Mark Twain, Steve Jobs, and Thomas Edison also had famously messy workspaces. But Einstein is worth a mention on his own. He made arguably the single greatest creative leap of the 20th century. The theory of general relativity defines physics to this day. And since his death, some have suggested he may have had ADHD. Whether neurodivergence helped him be more creative or not is a matter of conjecture. What is certain is that Einstein, to use Anderson’s phrase, “made his own roads.”?
Are there pointers we can take from this to help us mortals think more creatively? Science says yes.??
Slow down
Wharton professor of psychology Adam Grant has spent years studying procrastination. His findings suggest that procrastinators might be more creative. But this only applies when we procrastinate in the right way. Grant found that it’s not merely goofing off that helps us produce more creative solutions. It’s goofing off after you’ve started to think about the task. Grant postulates that this might allow the subconscious mind to start working through different approaches naturally. In any case, those who thought about a task and then did something else before beginning it were consistently found to be more creative than those who started work immediately. Before starting work on a problem, why not do something else? Let the idea percolate a little. You might find your subconscious brain has been working on it while you weren’t.
Embrace restrictions
The writer Anton Chekhov invented the modern short story. He is famous for his use of subtext, not revealing his characters' inner thoughts directly, instead leaving them ambiguous. Yet this came about because he was initially restricted to exactly 100 lines per story by his publisher. This restriction forced him to be economical with his words and helped create a style of storytelling in which the reader co-creates the narrative along with the writer. That is, things are left ambiguous. And each reader completes the story with a little piece of herself.??
Some of the most enduring (and masterful) American movies were the screwball comedies of the 1930s. Famous for their rapid, witty dialogue, the movies made stars of Clark Gable, Cary Grant, Katherine Hepburn, and Rosalind Russell. Yet these movies were only made because of a newly introduced Motion Picture Production Code. This Code aimed to protect American morals by forbidding any mention of sex (let alone physical contact). This forced screenwriters to be more creative, and lead actors to add nuance to their performances. A subtle wink or a raised eyebrow now had to carry the implication of sex. It turned out that American filmgoers' imaginations were more powerful than anything the filmmakers had previously been showing on screen. Screwball comedies were huge hits in their day and are still considered classics today.
Strip your ideas naked
In the 90s, one of the hottest advertising agencies in the world was Mad Dogs & Englishmen. They were proud of their low production values. The lack of megabudget photography or glossy locations meant that there was nowhere for the ideas to hide. They could focus on being truthful and honest. The results were the darlings of creatives around the world. Says co-founder Nick Cohen: “The more honest we were, the more people seemed to respond to the work.”
Today more than ever, we all have tools at our fingertips that allow us to make slick, beautiful work in minutes. But is there actually an idea hiding back there? Or is all that spangle covering the fact that the idea isn’t very good? To stand out, more than ever, we need our ideas to fly. Let’s make sure they resonate before we beautify them. We might just be producing wallpaper.?
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