From The Huffington Post:

Creativity works in mysterious and often paradoxical ways. Creative thinking is a stable, defining characteristic in some personalities, but it may also change based on situation and context. Inspiration and ideas often arise seemingly out of nowhere and then fail to show up when we most need them, and creative thinking requires complex cognition yet is completely distinct from the thinking process.

Neuroscience paints a complicated picture of creativity. As scientists now understand it, creativity is far more complex than the right-left brain distinction would have us think (the theory being that left brain = rational and analytical, right brain = creative and emotional). In fact, creativity is thought to involve a number of cognitive processes, neural pathways and emotions, and we still don’t have the full picture of how the imaginative mind works.

And psychologically speaking, creative personality types are difficult to pin down, largely because they’re complex, paradoxical and tend to avoid habit or routine. And it’s not just a stereotype of the “tortured artist” — artists really may be more complicated people. Research has suggested that creativity involves the coming together of a multitude of traits, behaviors and social influences in a single person.

“It’s actually hard for creative people to know themselves because the creative self is more complex than the non-creative self,” Scott Barry Kaufman, a psychologist at New York University who has spent years researching creativity, told The Huffington Post. “The things that stand out the most are the paradoxes of the creative self … Imaginative people have messier minds.”

. . . .

They observe everything.

The world is a creative person’s oyster — they see possibilities everywhere and are constantly taking in information that becomes fodder for creative expression. As Henry James is widely quoted, a writer is someone on whom “nothing is lost.”

The writer Joan Didion kept a notebook with her at all times, and said that she wrote down observations about people and events as, ultimately, a way to better understand the complexities and contradictions of her own mind:

“However dutifully we record what we see around us, the common denominator of all we see is always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable ‘I,’” Didion wrote in her essay On Keeping A Notebook. “We are talking about something private, about bits of the mind’s string too short to use, an indiscriminate and erratic assemblage with meaning only for its marker.”

They work the hours that work for them.

Many great artists have said that they do their best work either very early in the morning or late at night. Vladimir Nabokov started writing immediately after he woke up at 6 or 7 a.m., and Frank Lloyd Wright made a practice of waking up at 3 or 4 a.m. and working for several hours before heading back to bed. No matter when it is, individuals with high creative output will often figure out what time it is that their minds start firing up, and structure their days accordingly.

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They “fail up.”

Resilience is practically a prerequisite for creative success, says Kaufman. Doing creative work is often described as a process of failing repeatedly until you find something that sticks, and creatives — at least the successful ones — learn not to take failure so personally.

“Creatives fail and the really good ones fail often,” Forbes contributor Steven Kotler wrote in a piece on Einstein’s creative genius.

Link to the rest at The Huffington Post and thanks to Tim for the tip.

From The Columbia Chronicle:

Society may frown upon dishonest behaviors, but two related Harvard studies have found that lying may increase creativity.

The studies conducted in 2012 and 2013 measured the relationship between dishonesty and creativity in people after they completed a series of activities that promoted dishonest behaviors and innovative ideas. Results showed an increase in creativity when the participants lied or cheated during the activities.

. . . .

Creative types are better at justifying their unethical actions with unconventional ideas, according to Ariely.

. . . .

“If you break a rule, if you start behaving dishonestly, that’s going to really free up your mind … therefore, you’re going to be more creative,” Wiltermuth said.

. . . .

“They think it’s a game,” Yap said. “For some reason they’re not able to [get what they want] through honest means.”

Link to the rest at The Columbia Chronicle

From Professor David Galenson via The Huffington Post:

Sebastian Campanario, who writes for La Nacion in Buenos Aires, recently sent me three questions for an article he was writing on myths about creativity. I thought I would reproduce those questions and my answers here.

SC: You have said that scholars tend to focus on one type of creativity. What do they ignore?

DG: This is by far the greatest error in the scholarly (and popular) understanding of creativity. The scholars who study this believe there is only one kind of creativity, in which young artists and scholars make sudden and dramatic discoveries through highly deductive leaps. I call this conceptual creativity, because it depends heavily on formulating new abstract ideas. Great modern conceptual innovators include Einstein, Picasso, Rimbaud, Godard and Dylan. But what this analysis completely misses is that there is an entirely different kind of creativity that depends on long and painstaking accumulation of evidence, and extended development of techniques that convert this knowledge into new innovations. I call this form of creativity experimental, because it is the result of patient trial-and-error processes. It generally arrives gradually, and much later in the innovator’s life, than conceptual innovations. Great modern experimental innovators include Darwin, Cezanne, Proust, Le Corbusier and Solzhenitsyn. It is not merely by chance that their great innovations came later in their lives than the conceptual innovators listed above: their entire way of thinking, and learning, is different.

Link to the rest at The Huffington Post

From The Huffington Post:

In 1905, a year before his death, 66-year-old Paul Cézanne wrote to the younger painter Emile Bernard that “I believe I have in fact made some more progress, rather slow, in the last studies which you have seen at my house.” Although he confessed that it was “very painful to have to state that the improvement produced in the comprehension of nature from the point of view of the picture and the development of the means of expression is accompanied by old age and a weakening of the body,” Cézanne nonetheless affirmed his belief in his incremental progress toward his artistic goal: “Time and reflection, moreover, modify little by little our vision, and at last comprehension comes to us.”

. . . .

Scholars and critics have long agreed with Cézanne’s characterization of his gradual artistic growth. So for example Roger Fry described the last three decades of Cézanne’s life as “a long research for an ultimate synthesis which unveils itself little by little,” and Meyer Schapiro considered Cézanne’s art “a model of steadfast searching and growth,” with his last two decades “a period of magnificent growth.” Clive Bell considered all of Cézanne’s later life “a climbing towards an ideal,” in which every picture was “a means, a step, a stick, a hold, a stepping-stone – something he was ready to discard as soon as it had served his purpose.”

. . . .

In 1923, 42-year-old Pablo Picasso firmly rejected the notion that his art had evolved over time, declaring that “The several manners I have used in my art must not be considered as an evolution.” He insisted that change was not the same as evolution – “Variation does not mean evolution” – and explained that he changed his art whenever he had new ideas: “If an artist varies his mode of expression this only means that he has changed his manner of thinking.” Change did not imply improvement: “in changing, it might be for the better or it might be for the worse.”

. . . .

Cézanne, Kandinsky, and Mondrian all understood that they were artistic seekers, who innovated cautiously and continuously; Picasso and Malevich equally understood that they were finders who made sudden and discrete artistic leaps.

Link to the rest at The Huffington Post

From Matthew Schuler:

Mihaly [Csikszentmihalyi] is a seminal professor of Psychology and Management, and is the Founding Co-Director of the Quality of Life Research Center at Claremont. He writes:

“I have devoted 30 years of research to how creative people live and work, to make more understandable the mysterious process by which they come up with new ideas and new things. If I had to express in one word what makes their personalities different from others, it’s complexity. They show tendencies of thought and action that in most people are segregated. They contain contradictory extremes; instead of being an individual, each of them is a multitude.”

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02

Most creative people tend to be smart and naive at the same time. “It involves fluency, or the ability to generate a great quantity of ideas; flexibility, or the ability to switch from one perspective to another; and originality in picking unusual associations of ideas. These are the dimensions of thinking that most creativity tests measure, and that most creativity workshops try to enhance.”

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05

Most creative people tend to be both introverted and extroverted. Many people tend toward one extreme or the other, but highly creative people are a balance of both simultaneously.

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07

Most creative people are both rebellious and conservative. “It is impossible to be creative without having first internalized an area of culture. So it’s difficult to see how a person can be creative without being both traditional and conservative and at the same time rebellious and iconoclastic.”

Link to the rest at Matthew Schuler

From Pacific Standard:

The question of when highly accomplished people reach their peak level of creativity has long fascinated researchers. Some make huge breakthroughs relatively early in life: think of Igor Stravinsky, who composed the groundbreaking ballet The Rite of Spring at age 31.

Others go through an extensive period of trial and error before finding their unique voice. A 2011 study found modern-day physicists make their most innovative discoveries at age 48.

Economist P.H. Franses of the Erasmus School of Economics in the Netherlands examined the question from a different perspective, and came up with a fascinating result. In a newly published paper, he reports that painters create their most masterful works (at least as determined by the marketplace) “at the 0.618 fraction of their lives.”

. . . .

Franses examined data on 221 famous painters of the 19th and 20th centuries, 189 of whom have died. He compared their total lifespans with the year they created what is today their most expensive work. “Of course, many other measurements (of peak creativity) are possible, but this seems the most objective one,” he writes in the Creativity Research Journal.

On average, the painters produced their most highly valued work when they were 41.92 years old; they had lived just under 62 percent of their total lives.

Link to the rest at Pacific Standard and thanks to Tina for the tip.

From Slate:

In the United States we are raised to appreciate the accomplishments of inventors and thinkers—creative people whose ideas have transformed our world. We celebrate the famously imaginative, the greatest artists and innovators from Van Gogh to Steve Jobs. Viewing the world creatively is supposed to be an asset, even a virtue. Online job boards burst with ads recruiting “idea people” and “out of the box” thinkers. We are taught that our own creativity will be celebrated as well, and that if we have good ideas, we will succeed.

It’s all a lie. This is the thing about creativity that is rarely acknowledged: Most people don’t actually like it. Studies confirm what many creative people have suspected all along: People are biased against creative thinking, despite all of their insistence otherwise.

“We think of creative people in a heroic manner, and we celebrate them, but the thing we celebrate is the after-effect,” says Barry Staw, a researcher at the University of California–Berkeley business school who specializes in creativity.

Staw says most people are risk-averse. He refers to them as satisfiers. “As much as we celebrate independence in Western cultures, there is an awful lot of pressure to conform,” he says. Satisfiers avoid stirring things up, even if it means forsaking the truth or rejecting a good idea.

. . . .

“Everybody hates it when something’s really great,” says essayist and art critic Dave Hickey. He is famous for his scathing critiques against the art world, particularly against art education, which he believes institutionalizes mediocrity through its systematic rejection of good ideas. Art is going through what Hickey calls a “stupid phase.”

In fact, everyone I spoke with agreed on one thing—unexceptional ideas are far more likely to be accepted than wonderful ones.

. . . .

All of this negativity isn’t easy to digest, and social rejection can be painful in some of the same ways physical pain hurts. But there is a glimmer of hope in all of this rejection. A Cornell study makes the case that social rejection is not actually bad for the creative process—and can even facilitate it. The study shows that if you have the sneaking suspicion you might not belong, the act of being rejected confirms your interpretation. The effect can liberate creative people from the need to fit in and allow them to pursue their interests.

Perhaps for some people, the pain of rejection is like the pain of training for a marathon—training the mind for endurance. Research shows you’ll need it. Truly creative ideas take a very long time to be accepted. The better the idea, the longer it might take. Even the work of Nobel Prize winners was commonly rejected by their peers for an extended period of time.

Link to the rest at Slate

From Valley News:

Doris Lessing, the freewheeling Nobel Prize-winning writer on racism, colonialism, feminism and communism who died recently at age 94, was prolific for most of her life. But five years ago, she said the writing had dried up.

“Don’t imagine you’ll have it forever,” she said, according to one obituary. “Use it while you’ve got it because it’ll go; it’s sliding away like water down a plug hole.”

Does creativity have an expiration date? The question arises each time an artistic luminary retires: In the past year, authors Philip Roth and Alice Munro announced that they would stop writing after decades of prodigious output; he was 79, she was 81, and their declarations piqued fears in older artists that they, too, might run out of ideas or energy.

We are used to wunderkinds, Mozarts and Zuckerbergs whose innovations in classical music and social media in their 20s transformed the culture. But the origins of creativity are complex, influenced by societal, emotional and neurological factors. And although some creative minds do peak in younger years, the trajectory is often not straightforward.

. . . .

The National Endowment for the Arts is coordinating an interagency task force, which includes the National Institute on Aging, to look into how creativity can be fostered throughout a person’s life.

“Enhanced creativity is associated with greater satisfaction,” NEA research director Sunil Iyengar said.

. . . .

“Large creative breakthroughs are more likely to occur with younger scientists and mathematicians, and with lyric poets, than with individuals who create longer forms,” said Howard Gardner, professor of cognition and education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

In fields like law, psychoanalysis and perhaps history and philosophy, on the other hand, “you need a much longer lead time, and so your best work is likely to occur in the latter years,” Gardner said.

There’s some truth to what Lessing said. “You should start when you are young,” Gardner said. “But there is no reason whatsoever to assume that you will stop being creative just because you have gray hair.”

But repeating the same sort of creative pursuit over the decades without advancing your art can be like doing no exercise other than sit-ups your whole life, said Michael Merzenich, professor emeritus of neuroscience at the University of California at San Francisco and the author of Soft-Wired, a book about optimizing brain health.

One-trick artists “become automatized, they become very habit-borne,” Merzenich said. “They’re not continually challenging themselves to look at life from a new angle.”

. . . .

A bit of brain degeneration can actually work to one’s advantage.

People tend to excel at math and science early on partly because, studies show, the frontal lobe is still building myelinization — the insulating sheath around axons in the brain — through one’s early 40s, said Rex Jung, assistant professor in the department of neurosurgery at the University of New Mexico. Better myelinization means more effective transmission of messages, leading to more precision and focus.

But after the early 40s, demyelinization starts to occur, with potentially interesting results for creativity.

“That’s where artistic expression perhaps benefits from demyelinization,” Jung said, noting that less efficient connectivity can mean a loosening of associations that allows ideas to flow more freely. Older people might benefit from more continuous idea generation rather than “one great idea that’s going to win the day,” he said — essentially the difference between an inventor of the polio vaccine and an improvisational jazz musician.

In fact, the looser frontal lobe organization may heighten creativity in older people. “You have lots of data at your hands, and you have …. fewer brakes on your frontal inhibitors, and you’re able to put things together in more novel and useful ways,” Jung said. “When you see an increase in people’s creative undertakings in retirement, it may not be just because they’re retired and have more time on their hands; it may be because the brain organization is different.”

Link to the rest at Valley News

From Scientific American blogs:

Would we have Poe’sRaven today if the tormented author had taken lithium to suppress his bipolar illness? Not likely, considering the high frequency of psychiatric illnesses among writers and artists, concluded psychiatrist Kay Jamison of Johns Hopkins Medical School speaking last week at the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting in San Diego. Madness electrifies the creative process, Jamison concluded, but this difficult drug-use dilemma raises an even more provocative question:

Would we have Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds had the Beatles not taken LSD?

Lord Tennyson, Virginia Woolf and Vincent Van Gogh are familiar examples of artists and writers who suffered serious mental illnesses, but Jamison explained that psychiatric illness was the cruel engine of their creativity. Tracing their family pedigrees, she showed that many of these artists’ siblings, parents and descendants were institutionalized in mental hospitals, committed suicide, or endured life-long struggles with mania, despair, schizophrenia or other mental disorders.

. . . .

Statistics show that among all categories of creative artists, writers suffer by far the highest incidence of bipolar disorder, outstripping all other artistic professions. Why? Jamison concludes that the manic phase of bipolar disorder infuses the writer with furious energy and limitless stamina. The author foregoes sleep, is driven to take daring risks, expands their imagination and embraces grandiose thinking.

The crash of depression ending the manic phase immerses the writer in the depths of human suffering. This infuses poets and writers with the most monumental and profound dimensions of human experiences, moving them to contemplate the meaning of life, confront the certainty of death, and struggle against the agony of despair to survive adversity.

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Cured of their mental illness, such artists and writers would be gutted of their creativity and stripped of the means to realize it. Society would be deprived the beauty and insight the creative works of Van Gogh and Poe inspire had their tormented minds been healed with drugs. Thus, the seeds of madness survive like weeds in the human gene pool because, while not pretty, they are needed. Despite the cruel agony of such life-threatening disorders as bipolar disease and schizophrenia, the fruits of such creative minds benefit society.

. . . .

Mania, depression and other mental disorders are devastating. Not only disabling for the individuals afflicted with them, mental illness shatters personal relationships, fractures families, and cost society at large. Many courageous people struggle to hold their lives together under the burden of such a random and all-consuming disorder that mental illness uncontrolled by effective therapy can inflict. Other people who choose to induce these conditions pharmacologically will suffer the same burdens and life-risking consequences. But those who exploit drugs to manipulate their mind suffer even greater risks from two additional threats: toxicity and addiction.

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2. Can the creative product—a song, painting, poem, or book—justify the sacrifice and harm that will accompany conducting the creative pursuit under the influence of drugs?

3. Would we have had rock music without drugs?

Link to the rest at Scientific American blogs

From Science 2.0:

New research from the University of Washington Information School and Harvard University, followed 20 years of student creative writing and visual artworks and finds that the dynamics of creativity are changing.

They wanted to find out if creativity was in decline and found instead that some aspects of creativity — such as visual arts — have been rising over the years, while other aspects, such as creative writing, could be declining.

Katie Davis, UW assistant professor, and fellow researchers studied 354 examples of visual art and 50 examples of creative writing by teenagers published between 1990 and 2011. The question they pursued, Davis said, was “How have the style, content and form of adolescents’ art-making and creative writing changed over the last 20 years?”

. . . .

The review of student visual art showed an increase in the sophistication and complexity both in the designs and the subject matter over the years. The pieces, Davis said, seemed “more finished, and fuller, with backgrounds more fully rendered, suggesting greater complexity.” Standard pen-and-ink illustrations grew less common over the period studied, while a broader range of mixed media work was represented.

Conversely, the review of student writing showed the young authors adhering more to “conventional writing practices” and a trend toward less play with genre, more mundane narratives and simpler language over the two decades studied.

. . . .

“It remains an open question as to whether the entire U.S. has seen a decline in literary creativity and a parallel increase in visual creativity among its youth over the last 20 years,” Davis said. “Because society — indeed any society — depends on the creativity of its citizens to flourish, this is a question that warrants serious attention in future creativity research.”

Link to the rest at Science 2.0