Wyoming is not only the birthplace of Jackson Pollock, master of squiggly art. It's also the home of Casper College, host to a remarkable humanities festival that annually draws top scholars and scientists. This year the Casperians took a careful look at that mysterious domain that Pollock had mastered as few others have: creativity. For three days, distinguished poets, artists, writers, composers and scientists from around the country presented their varied perspectives on the creative process, all before a stage set for Shakespeare's The Tempest (the play was being performed each evening in the same auditorium).
The climax of the festival was a panel discussion, where, to the delight of the audience, the two psychologists on the panel began an impromptu and impassioned debate, one arguing that creativity can and should be taught, the other insisting that cultures can tolerate only a handful of creative people in each generation.
Who's right? And, perhaps just as important, who do you hope is right?
A creativity researcher for more than 30 years, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced Me-high Chick-zhent-me-high) is Professor of Human Development and Education in the Department of Psychology at the University of Chicago. He has written 13 books, including the best-seller Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (Harper Collins, 1991). Robert Epstein is University Professor at United States International University in San Diego. His books include Creativity Games for Trainers (McGraw-Hill, 1996) and The New Psychology Today Reader (Kendall/ Hunt, 1999), and he is a contributor to the newly released Encyclopedia of Creativity (Academic Press, 1999). Here are highlights of their debate.
MC: Do all innovations become integrated into a culture? A lot of new ideas are generated in a given culture, but are they all selected and transmitted? That's where I disagree with you, Robert. I think we need to distinguish between novelty and creativity.
You study novelty, and it's true that that's the ground from which creativity flows, but it's not enough. Novelty in human behavior is like variation in evolution. Thousands of mutations are necessary for evolution, but then those mutations come under strong selection pressure, and only a few survive. Three stages are necessary for evolution: variation, selection and transmission.
You emphasize the first of these stages, but I don't think it's enough for creativity.
RE: I've been looking forward to this moment for several days .... [Laughter from audience.] While it's true that biological evolution requires several mechanisms, selection is a trivial one, at least in the sense that it's not mysterious. Variation has long been the mysterious mechanism, since it's the mechanism that generates novel forms, and until recently, we had no idea where such forms came from.
The same is true of creativity. It's the novelty in the behavior of the individual--the flash of insight or solution to a nagging problem--that has always made creativity seem so mysterious to people. That's the phenomenon that feels so bizarre, that seems so divine, and that's where I've been trying to remove the mystery. Once something new is presented to a community--say, a new painting--the selection process is almost arbitrary. A painting that one community hates might be adored by another community. That's why I think selection is trivial.
MC: One of the typical moves in academic dialog is to say that the other person's interest is the trivial part of the problem .... [Laughter from audience.]
To me, selection is the real mystery. Under what conditions are people receptive to and able to recognize novelty? Novelty, on the other hand, is not mysterious. You yourself are trying, through your research, to show that novelty is not mysterious, and I agree. But without selection, you cannot have evolution, and you cannot have art.
RE: I don't think that the way a culture judges a creative product is especially trustworthy. Imagine Albert Einstein emerging from the patent office in 1905, carrying his three brilliant manuscripts, only to find that someone else had already proposed his ideas the year before. Would his accomplishment have been any less amazing, even if the culture chose to ignore him?
And what about the many innovative artists and scientists whose ideas were rejected by the experts of their day --Copernicus, Galileo, and even Darwin himself? The idea that continents shift around the planet on vast plates was considered preposterous for decades, but now we know it's true. It's originality in the individual that we need to under stand and nurture. To hell with the fickle judgment of the culture.
MC: But here's the problem. I've worked with hundreds of people over the years who thought they were as creative as Einstein. It turned out they were delusional, and it took years of, therapy to correct the delusions.
It's impossible to judge what happens in the mind of the individual scientist as being novel or great. In fact, I don't even know if Einstein's ideas were so great. I have to rely on what other physicists say about him, because I don't understand his ideas. Without Such an evaluation, I might conclude that Einstein was just as delusional as those hundreds of others I've worked with. The judgment of others is essential for us to be able to call an idea creative, to distinguish it from delusion.
RE: But when it comes to creativity, isn't delusion relative?
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