"O! for a muse of fire, that would ascend the brightest heaven of invention."--Shakespeare
I once witnessed something truly remarkable at the gym. From my vantage point on the treadmill I could see a row of my fellow men attempting to bench press, most of them with great effort. As a girl walked past, I could hardly believe my eyes; what I saw looked like an audience wave at a Baseball game. Every guy the girl passed suddenly sucked in his gut, ferociously pumped faster, and increased his repetitions at a very fast rate. When the girl (who I suspect noticed this phenomenon) was completely out of sight, all the men went back to their earlier behaviors, once again grunting and contorting their facial expressions. Just yesterday, I observed the same phenomenon in the gym. Some guy was jumping around on the mat like a Mexican jumping bean when a girl was on the mat next to him. I don't even think she noticed.
Conscious or unconscious, it seems as though once the mating motive is activated, there is an automatic tendency for people to display their biological fitness. Fitness need not be limited to the physical realm. Mental traits can just as well reveal biological fitness. And in my view, creativity is mental fitness par excellence. Indeed, the evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller argues that creativity, like the Peacock's tail, evolved (at least in part) to display mental fitness because of the potential reproductive successes that can accrue from having a creative mind.
So does creativity operate like my weight lifting example? It would certainly seem so from a cursory look at history. It has long been known that the mating motive can be a remarkably potent creative force. Many wildly creative individuals report being inspired by a Muse. Pablo Picasso was so struck by the 17-year-old Sylvette David at first sight (Sylvette is an artist in her own rite) at his painter's studio in Provence that she became the model for many of his paintings. (Picasso would have many other Muses during the course of his artistic career).
The list continues. Hester Thrale inspired Samuel Johnson, Yoko Ono inspired John Lennon, and Woody Allen has had a number of Muses over the span of his career including Mia Farrow, Diane Keaton, and Scarlett Johansson (although both Woody and Johansson deny that she is his Muse; see here for a full list of Woody's Muses). Some Muses have even inspired multiple men: Lou Andreas-Salomé inspired Friedrich Nietzsche, Rainer Maria Rilke and Sigmund Freud! This is only a small sampling of examples. I suggest reading historian Francine Prose's fascinating book The Lives of the Muses: Nine Women & the Artists they Inspired for more examples and insight.
These case studies certainly are revealing. But these examples are clearly of individuals superior in creative thinking. What about the rest of us? In a series of really clever experiments, Vladas Griskevicius and his colleagues sought out to empirically investigate the effect of the mating motive on creativity using a sample of college students.
To establish a baseline level of creativity, participants wrote a short story about what they think was going on with ambiguous cartoon and abstract images. Then they were asked to chose the most desirable romantic partner from a series of photos taken from Match.com. With their selected picture on the computer screen in view, the researchers primed the mating motive by asking the participant to imagine going on a first date with the person in the photo and to write a story about their idea of the perfect date with that person. The researchers then had the stories rated by a panel of judges. There also was a control condition that didn't activate the mating motive--participants looked at photos of a street with several buildings and imagined being on that street (a mental image that does not activate the mating motive in most humans) and wrote stories about what they thought were the most pleasant weather conditions to walk around and look at the buildings.
They found that the men's stories tended to be more creative in the mating motive condition than the control condition. Women, on the other hand, did not show the same effect--the creativity of their stories was just as creative in both the control and mating primed conditions. In fact, the mating motive had strong effects on men in all of their studies--even when they used a more objective (there was only one correct answer) measure of creativity assessing the ability to form remote associations. These effects weren't related to increased effort on the creativity tasks or to changes in mood or arousal. The mating motive was also a more powerful incentive for increased creativity than a condition in which there was just monetary incentive!
This research suggests that the romantic motive really can enhance creativity. And the mating motive can exert its effects even when the person knows they aren't going to actually have a date with the person. All that seems necessary is that the mating motivation is activated.
Creative but stupid?
In my last post (Interacting with women makes men stupid), I reported a recent study that found that interactions with women can impair the cognitive functioning of men. How can we reconcile the findings of these two studies? How is it possible that the mating motive simultaneously impairs cognitive functioning and increases creativity?
Griskevicius and his colleagues offer a hint to this answer. In trying to explain why creativity isn't always turned on in men once the mating motive is active (since it appears to confer significant reproductive benefits), they offer the possibility that "there are costs associated with allocating one's energies to permanent creative displays, such as decreased capacity to attend to other matters or decreased functioning of short-term memory."
Against this backdrop, I propose a hypothesis. We know in the study described in my last post that interacting with women can (at least temporarily) decrease the ability to update working memory and switch between tasks. But note that that study also found a decrease in the ability to inhibit stimuli. I would argue that a temporary decrease in the ability to inhibit stimuli is precisely what is needed for increased creativity.
