Chase, Chance, and Creativity

by James H Austin

  Possibly some Unitarians were comforted with much earlier data (dating from 1927) showing that they were eighty-one times more likely to be listed in the ranks of the scientifically eminent." Now, starting a new millennium, the data base on Unitarians and other faiths has undergone obvious changes, and no group appears to have room for complacency.

  In terms of their own undergraduate training, the greatest number of laureates went to college at Columbia (seven) or Harvard (five), whereas Yale, Berkeley, and MIT ranked next with four each."

  Scientific meetings are also part of the total scientific milieu. Rarely does the researcher find everything he needs to know in a book or journal. Personal contact with colleagues is constantly stimulating. These encounters develop most fruitfully at scientific meetings that draw together investigators from distant laboratories representing a wide spectrum of disciplines. The cross-fertilizations which occur at a good meeting prompt many hybrid ideas, because new discoveries tend to occur at the interface between disciplines.

  Meetings in other cities serve other needs. They afford a perfect opportunity to restore one's sense of aesthetic appreciation. I know my own limits at meetings now; after two solid days, my scientific synapses are packed full, and it's time for a break. So I go out in response to some inner need to clear the air-browsing around art museums, seeking out new exhibits, varying the menu all the way from man's ancient archaeological treasures to his groping contemporary efforts, feeling a kinship with each artist, emerging refreshed and inspired.

  Big problems must first be defined in the mind, however vaguely, before they can be effectively approached in the laboratory. But, increasingly during this century the investigator has come to depend on a more intricate technology than his counterparts did even a generation ago. Our own studies would not have been successful without the international advances in infrared spectrophotometry, chromatographic techniques, and later on, radioisotope equipment. When a human has to depend on a machine, it is an uneasy alliance. I always feel more at home with results I can see quite literally with my own eyes than with those that come from a piece of equipment. But the fact is that, unless one incorporates the new technological approaches, few creative contributions will be made on today's rapidly advancing scientific frontiers. Technological advances do have an increasingly important impact on creativity, and we are all bound, now, to machines of some kind, with all the good and ill that this portends.

  To appreciate this fact in yet another dimension, it is helpful to consider an analogy with Impressionist painting. It was from Monet's work in 1874 entitled Impression: Sunrise that the term "Impressionists" was coined. But Monet's approach and that of his colleagues was greatly facilitated by the development of an array of bright new colors earlier in that century. In 1826, an extraordinarily intense blue pigment, French Ultramarine, became available. Reds and oranges of great brilliance soon followed. Another critical development occurred when the American painter, John Rand, developed the simple collapsible paint tube.21 It was this, essentially, that freed the artist from the bulky paint pots and the north light of his garret studio, and liberated him into the countryside, en plein air, there to capture the ambient sunlight in all the subtleties of its spectrum. Thus, a century ago, even the spontaneity of the Impressionists rested on the firm base of the technological advances of the time.

  This is not to slight the fact that research ultimately depends on people. In the laboratory, much research nowadays is really a collaborative effort. It is true teamwork; everyone contributes. A solo effort might have sufficed for some projects a few years ago when all one might have needed were some test tubes, a smoked drum, and some equipment held together with baling wire. But research today had grown exponentially more complicated, and the creative setting involves a team of specialists. One example shows this clearly: of ninety-seven original articles published in the New England Journal of Medicine late in 1975, not one had a single author. The average number of authors was 4.55.24 (At the present rate of increase in authorship it has been calculated that in 2076, each paper might have at least twenty-four authors! )21

  Whether it met in Portland or Denver, our laboratory team of 4.55 individuals would have certain requirements whenever it worked out a plan of action. As we got to know one another better, we worked together more effectively. An important ingredient is the quality of liveliness and "sparkle" in one or more members of the team. Margo had it, and it always perked up our conferences with a sense of electricity. We also needed consecutive time to explore the problem in order to come up with better ideas."' This meant we must firmly set aside a one- to two-hour block of time and meet in a room free from a telephone or other interruptions. When we met an impasse, it helped to generate a lot of ideas, even if many of them were "wild ideas." At some vaguely perceived time, however, our "free-wheeling" had to stop, and at this point we needed to impose a deadline in order to emerge with any worthwhile plan of action .2

  Any research plan must soon develop a practical strategy. In 1994, Zuckerman and Cole reported the results of their case-control study of 103 scientists, both eminent and rank-and-file.2' Their findings emphasize three important aspects of research strategy: (1) it is essential to select significant problems (often "interesting" because they seem novel and anomalous) that will both attract funding and be solved within a reasonable period of time; (2) it is important to select the most appropriate model system and technical methods for studying each problem; and (3) it is helpful to work on an array of somewhat related problems, the findings from which are likely ultimately to be publishable.

  The relationships between scientific creativity on the one hand, and gender or the sexual climate on the other, are so complex as to fall well beyond the scope of this work. It suffices to note two points. First, women face a very long uphill climb if they try to enter a scientific field. Even as children they confront a cultural setting titled away from scientific investigation. They create in other areas. Take as one example, the Nobel Prize in medicine and physiology. If you conclude that it reflects the ultimate global test for scientific creativity in these two fields, then the award remains strictly a male preserve. Between the years 1901 and 1974, when a total of 112 Prizes were awarded, only one went to a woman, Gerti Cori, who shared it both with her husband, Carl, and with Bernardo Houssay. As the cultural milieu changes, and as more women are freer to pursue academic careers, we may see them represented more often in this and other indices of scientific creativity.

  The second point to make is no more than a private hunch. I think that the creative drive and the sex drive may overlap to the degree that they share some common neuroanatomical sites in the brain. However, I do not sense that the creative drive is necessarily derived from the sex drive. Nor do I believe that they exist either in a one-to-one, cause-andeffect relationship, nor indeed always in some reciprocal relationship. In my own case, I was most creative musically in a setting in which I was young, in love, engaged, and sexually frustrated. But, subsequently, I have no controlled data to offer on the subject of sex and scientific or artistic creativity except to note that neither sexual satisfaction nor physical lassitude necessarily inhibits the flow of creative ideas when thoughts are really pressing for expression. Clearly, the subject is still wide open for study.

  The creative setting in academic life is no insulated ivory tower. It is under constant assault from all sides. What is especially harmful is to lose your free time for browsing. The gradual death of creativity in a researcher who becomes enmeshed in too many committees is well portrayed by Carl Dragstedt. His essay is appropriately titled, "Who Killed Cock Robin.""' And biomedical investigators of all ages would also do well to ponder Dwight Ingle's true statement:

  The early years in the laboratory are the golden years for many scientists. After he becomes known, the volume of mail, telephone calls, number of visitors, organizational activities, including committees by the dozens, and demands for lectures, reviews and community activities grow insidio
usly and will destroy the creativity of the scientist if unopposed.30

  Not only does my own brain operate more slowly and less flexibly as I get older, not only do the newer problems out on the newer frontiers require increasingly sophisticated technologies and colleagues versed in more highly specialized fields, but I too have become increasingly subject to all the distractions of contemporary living, swept up in a "future shock"" of my own and others' making. As a result, I have learned I must establish and protect my own setting, my own tropical islands of uninterrupted time-mornings in general, Saturday mornings in particular, lunch time, and travel time. Vacations are a last resort.

  Yet all good work settings erode. Sooner or later their novelty wears off and the whole routine tends to become stale. Once productive grooves turn into ruts. The experimentalist worries about going "flat" just as much as the artist or composer. All feel the anxiety that "the well will go dry someday."

  At this point, fresh stimuli are needed. The only way some persons can break out of this root-bound situation is to transplant themselves to a new job. True, a move will be fruitful if it involves a real pruning of useless activities and a repotting of roots into fertile new soil. For others, new projects, new friends, and new meetings will be inspiration enough if they can be supplemented by an occasional year away on sabbatical leave, preferably abroad (as the story of the Three Princes illustrates). Still, it is surprising how many times I have had to rediscover the elementary principle that re-creation is essential to creativity.

  30

  The Creative Prelude

  By the creative process we mean the capacity to find new and unexpected connections, to voyage freely over the seas, to happen on America as we seek new routes to India, to find new relationships in time and space, and thus new meanings.

  Lawrence Kubie

  Ideas often come suddenly to individuals, but they usually have a long history.

  Lancelot Whyte

  We start with a problem at the bedside or in the laboratory. There follows a rush of thoughts. In a few seconds, a complicated experimental design unfolds, aimed at solving the problem. Seemingly, everything happened quickly and spontaneously. Not so. The stories in Part I illustrate that my ideas evolved through long and complex pathways. Indeed, the longitudinal history of an idea extends much farther back and is much more circuitous than I realized at the time (see figures 5, 7, 9, 10).

  For example, when I finally start a painting, or decorate a clay pot before firing with a modified Anasazi design, my sketchbooks show that I have usually had it "in the back of my mind" for years. My musical notebooks are filled with "stray chords" and chord sequences long before these are synthesized into a complete song. Similarly, the faint traces of most themes in our research had been incubating, in one form or another, for one or two decades. Ideas, like persons, have long pedigrees. Introspective autobiographers may identify pedigrees that otherwise may escape a biographer's notice.

  One cannot rely on the processes of conscious or subconscious memory to pull out the right facts at just the right time. (At least, my brain doesn't function that way.) Instead, I supplement what is inside my head with a fairly elaborate filing system. The individual topics are listed in large, bold print, color-coded so they can be seen-a file folder full of enzyme reprints here, a folder on a certain disease there, a file of methods farther on. With luck, connections will emerge between one file and the others. Sometimes they do, but rarely.

  This is only a token gesture in the direction of being organized. Actually, many ruminative and complex meanderings go into the creative prelude. My mind has no well thought out scenario. Indeed, if I'm really on a new frontier, I don't know where or how I'm going because, by definition, I've never been there before. A jumble of potentially useful facts lies scattered over the landscape of my own experience and that of others. Most of this is not in the filing cabinet. Some bits of information are years old; others only seconds old. The nascent stirrings of this prelude have been well described by Ghiselin:

  A common delusion among those ignorant of the creative process is that it begins in clarity and order, systematic understanding, and proceeds in logical advances and under pressure of will to the development of a foreseen, or at least partially foreseen, structure or system. Actually, it begins in obscurity and in some degree of confusion.'

  The state of mind accommodating all the elements soon to fuse in a flash of creative inspiration can only be likened to organizable chaos. In order to generate and then unite all these disparate elements, it is essential to have a flexible approach. Kubie uses the term "preconscious" to describe the rapid, fluid mental processes operating during this period.' Descriptively, they operate like a cross between a friendly genie and a first-rate executive secretary. However defined, these scanning and sorting activities are an essential instrument in all creative activity. The goal is to liberate them. True, as Kubie points out, the unconscious does spur creativity, but it also acts as a straitjacket. It makes responses rigid and stereotyped and distorts them. On the other hand, the conscious processes that perform the important service of evaluation or correction also have their own pedestrian limitations.

  During the creative prelude, my mind increasingly gnaws away at the problem like a dog at a bone, working for a solution at all levels of consciousness. It is frequently a time of intellectual turbulence and emotional frustration. When the data are all in, and one's problem is to interpret them, the frustration resembles in a sense that of trying to crack the insoluble paradox of a Zen koan. One difference is that in research, the facts themselves are usually not all at hand, and the solution is hung up on several levels at once. The answer just won't come. And, it can't be forced.

  Will this be a dead end? I won't know at the time, but whenever I meet with an impasse, I find it helpful to relax into something less demanding or recreational, quite literally, to "let go" and set off in another direction. So I set aside the first problem and pick up the thread of a second one in the hope that a solution may soon arise out of the very fact of approaching the first problem afresh from another direction, from an angle at which it is more vulnerable. When I lapse into a change of pace (music, sight-seeing, manual tasks, daydreaming, sleeping) it does more than provide a refreshing interlude. It also helps "reshuffle the synapses," and gives my subconscious mental activities the freedom to work unrestrained. Intuitions of various sizes sometimes dart in to interrupt meditations in the early morning.

  Diversion, to the French painter Ingres, meant turning to the violin as a respite from his long hours at the easel. The French not only developed a phrase, "the violin of Ingres," in recognition of the fact, but placed the violin itself on display in the museum at Montauban.' The phrase directs our attention to an important point-the need for a diverting hobby. In the final analysis, it didn't much matter whether Ingres' fingers played his violin well or not.' What was important was that he could shift for a while from a mental set that was primarily visual to one that was mainly musical. There is in everyone a need for a refreshing change of pace, for a "violin of Ingres."

  If another person were to observe you during your creative prelude, s/he might conclude that it ended in one of two ways. Either you would appear actively to set off in a different direction, or you would seem to have lapsed into a quiet pause. Both would be deceptive. Appearances aside, this is not a time of complete change, nor is it one of quiet, because neuronal circuits keep working over the problem beneath the conscious surface of your brain, and neither you nor your observer need be aware of their activities. As blood flows in the heart during the phase of cardiac "relaxation," so deep in the brain unconscious thoughts keep flowing during a kind of mental diastole that precedes the next systole.

  Sometimes the interruption of a good night's sleep provides the pause that helps you arrive at a solution; other times, even a poor night's sleep is no hindrance if problems are still churning over rapidly in your mind. I have never had a useful solution leap forth from a dream
in the middle of a deep sleep. Kekule once claimed to have done so, but some have questioned his story. (Confronted with the chemical problem of how six carbon atoms could be arranged, he claimed to have dozed off in the evening, dreamed that a snake held its tail in its mouth, and to have awakened with a beautiful new concept of the benzene ring.) In my own experience, the most productive free association occurs in the early morning reverie just before arising. In this fluid state, halfway between dreaming and waking, reasoned analysis is suspended. Problems, long unsolved, float up toward consciousness, and then seem easily to attach themselves to solutions, or to ideas for solutions. A few such ideas written down hurriedly and evaluated critically during the light of the next day will turn out to be very useful.

  Even when we are fully awake, we still evaluate our environment through subconscious processes which we now call intuition. Although our hints and our hunches seem instantaneous, they may well mean that we have successfully forged links between scattered memories and partial solutions buried in the past and observations drawn from the present. Intuitive thinking and creative associations in general involve "thinking in loops." Major abrupt changes of consciousness from one state to another hinge on big shifts within the reciprocal interactive links between the thalamus with the cortex. These pivotal shifts can also draw heavily on widespread parallel processing systems. These systems connect the brain's multiple distributed modules into vast functional networks, linked high and low, right and left. So, we no longer speak of our ordinary logical thinking in terms suggesting that it is a "serial" process that unfolds in a predictably "straight line." For example, as you stand back and watch your own thoughts, you see them go out in one direction, gather in a series of other loose associations, and then, like a boomerang, loop back sometime later from another direction.