Behavior is generative; like the surface of a fast-flowing river, it's inherently and continuously novel. We never repeat the same action or have the same thought twice, at least not if you look closely enough. We brush our teeth a slightly different way each morning; we dream new dreams each night. If you say "dog" twice, a spectrograph will easily distinguish two patterns. Behavior flows, and it never stops changing.
The language of creativity is imprecise. "Creative" is an everyday term, not a scientific one. Novel behavior is generated continuously, but it is labeled creative only when it has some special value to the community. Alas, communities are extremely inconsistent in their use of the language of creativity. Jackson Pollock would not have been dubbed "creative" in fourteenth-century Europe; he would have been burned at the stake.
From a scientific perspective, it's not the label "creativity" itself that's of interest--it's the flow of novel behavior that sometimes inspires the label. How can we account for and understand that flow? Where does novel behavior come from? How does the "creative process" work?
My research suggests that many forces act simultaneously on the neural determinants of many different behaviors and that novel behavior is the result of this complex and dynamic process. Generativity is the basic process that drives all of the behavior we come to label "creative."
In recent years, I've had subjects solving problems directly on a computer touch screen, which allows us to simulate the performances in real time. Using this technology, we're getting better at predicting unique, novel performances in individual subjects moment to moment in time, further suggesting that the creative process is orderly--not mysterious at all.
FOUR TECHNIQUES TO BOOST CREATIVITY
Generativity research suggests four distinct strategies for increasing creative output. Each can be implemented in different situations in different ways, sometimes in multiple ways.
CAPTURING
New ideas are like rabbits streaking through consciousness; they're fleeting. If you don't grab them quickly, they're usually gone forever. Just a few minutes ago, while taking care of nature's business (more about that later), a catchy title for an article about our need for mild stressors--something like "What Would My Dog Do Without Her Fleas?"--popped into my head. Alas, by the time I got back to my desk, the tide was gone, and I'm unable to get it back.
The main thing that distinguishes "creative" people from the rest of us is that the creative ones have learned ways to pay attention to and then to preserve some of the new ideas that occur to them. They have capturing skills.
The scientist Otto Loewi had struggled for years with a problem in cell biology. One night, a new approach to the problem occurred to him in his sleep. In the dark, he grabbed a pen and pad, recorded his new ideas, and went back to sleep. Come morning, he couldn't read his writing! Had he imagined this great solution, or was it real? The next night he was blessed by the same flash of insight. This time, he took no chances; he pulled on his clothes and went straight to his lab. He won the Nobel Prize for the work he began that night.
People who are serious about exploring their creative side develop and practice various methods of capturing new ideas. Artists carry sketchpads. Writers and advertisers carry notepads or pocket computers. Inventors make notes on napkins and candy-bar wrappers--especially inventors of new foods!
Salvador Dali, the great surrealist,used to grab ideas for paintings from the very fertile semi-sleep state we call the hypnagogic state. He'd lie on a sofa and hold a spoon in one hand, balancing it on the edge of a glass placed on the floor. Just as he'd drift off to sleep, he'd release the spoon, and the sound of the spoon hitting the glass would awaken him. Immediately, he'd sketch the bizarre hypnagogic images he was seeing.
Anyone can do this. We all have bizarre perceptual experiences in those moments before we fall fully asleep. Dali simply developed a way to seize some of them.
Capturing skills can be taught to young children, to high school kids, to adults, to top executives. Teachers, parents, and managers can boost the creative output of a group manyfold simply by providing some simple training and the right materials.
Capturing is easier in certain settings and at certain times, so we improve our catch by identifying the settings and times that work best for us. For some people, the Three Bs of Creativity--the Bed, the Bath, and the Bus--are particularly fertile, especially if you keep writing materials handy in those locations (obviously, today I failed to do so). Others need to sit by a pool or on a cruise ship or in a lonely cabin in the woods. Years ago I gave a talk on creativity at the Rowland Institute, a private research center built by Edwin Land, the millionaire inventor of the Polaroid "Land" camera. Land designed the entire institute to be a giant idea-capturing machine. Inside, a serene Japanese garden runs the length of the building, with skylights overhead. He wanted himself and fellow researchers to be able to "hear themselves think" as they walked, slowly and peacefully, through the magnificent indoor garden--literally, a garden of new ideas.
CHALLENGING
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