Chase, Chance, and Creativity

by James H Austin

  34

  Prescription for Creativity

  The master word... is directly responsible for all advances in medicine during the past twenty-five centuries... the master word is Work.

  Sir William Osler

  Your own creative abilities were inborn and made, innate and learned. You can't disentangle one from the other. You started by inheriting onehalf of your creative instincts from each parent and one-quarter from each grandparent. Thereafter, the attitudes prevailing in your family and those acquired in school went on to set much of the tone. But you can add still more, whatever your field of creative endeavor. It is not too late. The question is: what to add; where, when, and how to add it?

  Let us begin by reviewing some of the formal steps in the creative sequence, for we first need to insert some arbitrary structure into what seems, even at best, a very disorganized process. We recall that the sequences usually quoted are, in order: interest, preparation, incubation, illumination, verification, exploitation. Let us examine them one by one because, just as timing is important in any prescription, what is prescribed will vary, depending on when it is inserted in the sequence.

  Interest. Only if you are really interested in a topic will you persist in it, see it through to completion. This holds whether the topic is colors, dogs, mathematics, law, or whatever. Therefore, you should seek out those areas that serve a deep, long-standing personal need. You won't know, in the abstract, which are your areas of special interest; you will first have to try many of them on for size. Those that fit naturally will "turn you on," and only then will you really know. The interest that strongly motivates you will be the one that enlists all your energies, and brings forth skills you would never be aware of otherwise. Your best work will be a projection of self. Trust yourself to know when you're on the right track.

  Soon, you will find that you're engaged in something of a quest. At all times, seek out lively vital people-good teachers, in particularfor they will both kindle your interests and be inspiring role models in many critical ways. Get involved with them. Ask them questions. Select guides, not drivers, bright persons you can respect, mentors wise enough to help you find your own way, secure enough to keep your own best interests in mind, mature enough to let go at the right time.

  If need be, adopt some active hobbies that provide contrast. If you are a verbal, precise, systematic type, get into something loosesomething visual or musical that you can actively participate in, whether that means finger painting, pottery, or the guitar. Engage all the nerve cells in your whole right hemisphere in active pursuits, not just in passive listening and looking. You will "see into" art and "hear into" music much more when you have done some related work (play, really) with your own hands. The active approach will ultimately enhance your depth of appreciation and make it easier for you to be inspired by the great creative artists in any field. If the arts and crafts you are interested in involve taking an adult education course, and you haven't got the time to explore such new ground, rxake the time.

  The most important interest to develop is the creative attitude itself. New ideas are worthwhile in any field. Most things in life can be improved. Problem solving is challenging, and challenges are fun. You must believe in these principles, be willing to act on them, and be capable of making sacrifices for them. Seek out other persons who believe these same principles, and put up with their liabilities, as they will have to put up with yours.

  Preparation. You must study to become well grounded in your field, mastering its basic techniques until they are second nature. Then, practice your craft by solving problems of increasing complexity. Before long, you will find yourself out at some frontier of the field. Here, the new problems will be as yet unsolved. One or more of these will catch your interest. You will then have to judge which one lies just outside your abilities. It should be no trivial problem, but one important in its implications, one that captures your imagination so that you are enthusiastic about it. If you are then bold enough to tackle it, and you have judged correctly, you will grow to meet it, but you won't know that at the time. For this reason, you will seek advice from those who should know more than you do. Again, you must be a sound judge of character and information, because their replies will be both encouraging and discouraging. You must discard each when the facts warrant it. Your preparation for this critical task of discrimination has been to know so many different people in so many different situations (yourself included) that you have developed an uncommon degree of common sense. If you're going to be a maverick, you'll need horse sense about other people.

  Incubation. Preparation is followed by more work. When you work on a good new problem, you will become committed to it to the point of an obsession, wrestling with it months or years before you solve it completely. Like a jigsaw puzzle, each big problem consists of a whole series of smaller problems that need to be pieced together. And jigsaw puzzles or crossword puzzles are themselves good practice in exercising the skills in visualization you need to solve other problems. Earlier, you needed time to browse; now, you must create solid undistracted blocks of time to work. These blocks of time tend to be more fruitful in the morning or in the evening.

  Sooner or later you will run out of ideas. If you then persist with the intensity you should, you will become frustrated by your lack of progress. Relax at this point. Let go. Free the problem to "go underground." Set it aside to be worked over at all levels of consciousness. Here, again, other diverse interests will provide a refreshing change of pace, give you a breather while you incubate the first problem, afford other problems you can still make progress on in the interim.

  Know something about the structure of luck so that at least you don't do anything to discourage it. Chance I is anyone's luck; Chance II is anyone-in-motion's luck. Chance III is luck that comes from one person's discernment; Chance IV is luck that flows from one unique person's actions.

  As you work, the varieties of chance will operate, stirring up new options, new facts, novel perceptions prompted by actions uniquely yours. Remaining alert to exceptions, keeping an open, receptive mind, you will intuitively grasp the more worthwhile observation, whatever happens to turn it up.

  Define passive activities, such as listening to music, that help you relax, unfocus your thinking, and loosen up your free associations. Seek out good comedy. Never stay so busy that you don't have time to daydream.

  Maybe you'll encounter something, by accident, that you weren't looking for, that hints at a whole new problem. Make note of it. This may turn out to be the important problem you'll be working on years hence.

  Illumination. Solutions do leap forth by themselves, but a clear, relaxed, well-slept mind generates more innovative ideas. Get enough sleep. Stay alert for the intuitions that flicker in from the margins of consciousness, especially during the phase of reverie after awakening. Major insights can be unforgettable, but they are rare. Most other flashes of insight are of lesser intensity, and they can vanish quickly unless you immediately write them down. Don't worry if you daydream up a new approach that appears farfetched; jot the essence of it down. It may lead on to still another idea that will turn out to be much better.

  Verification. If a solution has arisen, it is still only one possible solution. If a hypothesis springs forth, it remains to be tested. Again, hard mental and physical work enters in. You will save much time at this point by shifting into hypercritical gear, deferring all leads save those most pregnant with new possibilities. Ask the "so what" question.

  Design the next experiments not only to verify your hunch, but also to shake it, to prove yourself wrong. Insert enough controls into the experiment so that you won't fool yourself in your enthusiasm for the alluring new idea. No matter what you think you have verified, some others will not agree. Listen to them. Swallow your pride, put the resulting energies to work to prove your thesis correct one hundred percent. Even if your insight is valid, plan to spend at least three times as long as may seem necessary in order to prove it s
o. But routinize the routine as soon as possible, so that you save free time for innovation.

  Exploitation. Keep the emphasis on ideas, theories, and hypotheses that can lead to action. If your creative efforts are ever going to cause change, you can't stop now. You must follow through on the project, investing more of yourself to make sure that change does, in fact, occur. Reactionaries, resisting change, should again only help you redouble your own constructive followthrough. Translating your ideas into effective action means you must preserve the same infectious enthusiasm at this late date that you had in the beginning, and must publish your results so that others can improve on them.

  This is the kind of prescription I would write for myself. Maybe yours is similar, but it is probably not identical. Every prescription for creativity must be a highly individualized one. Learn to recognize what works for you.

  35

  Summary

  True creativity is characterized by a succession of acts, each dependent on the one before and suggesting the one after.

  Edwin Land

  We have now observed something of what medical research is, and what it is not. It is no clear, blue, inorganic crystal which grows symmetrically and predictably in solution. Instead, it is a live, organic growth, a wild vine winding in and around an intellectual trellis. It ventures a tendril here, thrusts out a leaf there, proliferates in odd directions, rarely bursts into bloom. It draws sustenance both from tangible earthly sources and, seemingly, from thin air.

  Discovery is pluralistic. It springs from a dynamic interplay between one's own life style and that of other persons, between intuition and reason, between the conventional scientific method and chance in all its forms. The more diversity there is among these elements the more unique is the resulting creative product. Conceptually, there is an almost infinite distance between a dog, a bell, a starch granule, and a Lafora body. These four random elements, seemingly incongruous, could be drawn together and fused only when the personal life style of one individual interacted with chance. Some kinds of chance happen, others are stirred up, discerned, or instigated inadvertently. A new word, altamirage, has the essence of the personalized generation of good fortune, and the form of chance it exemplifies may be called Chance IV.

  A moment of creative inspiration is rare. It has both a long incubation period and, if it is to prove fruitful, a lengthy subsequent development. We find that the creative experience in science begins with an unconventional person, of abilities both diverse and contrasting, who is well grounded and receptive in his professional field. He not only prefers but needs novelty, for he is bored if not disenchanted by a physiological status quo. He has grown up to be a questioning, "adverbial man" whose curiosity is piqued to solve problems for more reasons than he is aware of. His search incorporates some elements of the primitive chase, brings all his senses to a peak, and sweeps him up in a tangle of stimulating ideas. He employs logic as far as it alone can go. Soon, however, his progress is blocked, and he may appear to have abandoned a fruitless struggle. But preconsciously, his mind probes and scans for clues throughout all his sources of information and experience, rapidly discerning those that will fit, neatly discarding the others. He keeps on going.

  Often, through an accident that has a distinctive personal flavor, he will finally stumble on a fresh clue. At a conscious level, the clue might appear irrelevant, but it immediately opens up wide avenues of useful information. He suddenly finds himself in a state of enhanced awareness. His thoughts steer themselves at lightning speed to a new conscious insight. The new solution is vivid and intensely satisfying both intellectually and emotionally. His visual recollection of the moment is usually indelible. The "moment" may be a major flash of insight, or it may be an attenuated "spark," or a related series of faint glimmers spread out over months or years.

  In broad perspective, we see in the way the two sides of his brain create one solution an analogy with the love-hate, tug-of-war going on between romanticism and rationalism since the dawn of man. The struggle is only resolved when the two sides join forces in their common cause and go off reunited hand in hand.

  For, with a fresh insight, the investigator's work has just begun. He fashions his inspired ideas into a testable hypothesis, then laboriously creates a series of increasingly rigorous experiments to prove or disprove it. Persisting in these experiments through trial and error, he ultimately meanders into an entirely new set of problems. He leans forward once more, follows the Kettering Principle of staying in motion, and his chase, his search, his quest begins anew. And for the women who read this book and its prescription, every point above applies equally well to you.

  36

  In Closing

  Medical research is an abstraction-the realities are not the laboratories and the hospitals but the men who search and search again for causes.

  Alan Gregg

  A neurologist looking critically at what has been written here (or indeed, elsewhere in the literature) is acutely, painfully conscious of one thing: we still know next to nothing about the basic neurophysiological and neurochemical mechanisms underlying human creativity. We are still groping to reach a valid understanding of movement and perception, let alone of what constitutes man's mind in action. Association areas of the cerebral cortex must be involved in complex interactions with powerful neuronal networks deeper in the brain. But this isn't saying much. Moreover, it is still hypothesis. Not only are more data needed, but their every interpretation must be guided by the old dictum: correlation doesn't mean causation.

  We leave to neurophysiologists and neurochemists in the future the attempt to analyze all the elements involved in the creative process. Imaginative beginnings have been made,' but whenever we start to localize functions, we must remind ourselves that the cortex of man contains perhaps 13 billion nerve cells-each with multiple connections. Though the U.S. Congress did declare the final ten years of the twentieth century to be the "Decade of the Brain," we will surely need more than a few decades of this twenty-first century to realize the full promise of neuroimaging techniques, and to learn how to design multidisciplinary experiments that match the sophistication of the instrumentation already available.

  The biological psychiatrist and psychologist can also make important contributions as part of the team investigating creativity. If they wish to reach a more profound understanding of the scientific researcher, they must literally live with him in each present moment, not interview him years after the fact. They will need to study him in situ, in action, in the total context of all the other elements and interactions described herein, yet remain discreetly in the background, all-seeing but unobtrusive. No easy task. However, it is one that Bruno Latour, a pioneering sociologist, has already undertaken in a busy laboratory (as described in Appendix Q. Social psychologists and teachers are well aware that chance, operating in its subtle ways, shapes who we are, gifted or ordinary, and often determines what we each can become in our life paths outside the laboratory.-

  If you have been both interested enough in creativity and persistent enough to have read this far, I can surely start by wishing you luck (Chance I) in your own meanderings! But more than that, I hope you have seen three other more personal ways you can influence chance yourself, and how these interactions can in turn enhance the creative opportunities all around you. It is well to emphasize this point of view as we begin the third millennium, becoming more anonymous and facing an uncertain future. For our ability as humans to adapt and to survive as a species depends on our creating new solutions with. few attendant problems. At such a crucial time in our evolution it needs to be reaffirmed that man is intrinsically creative. It may help to recall that at Altamira our primitive ancestors held colors in their hands and not just clubs, as far back as 1.5,000 years ago.

  Our future is still malleable, still very much in our own hands. Nothing is predetermined. Chance can be on our side if we but stir it up with our energies, stay receptive to the glint of opportunity on even a single hair a
bove the underbrush, and continually provoke it by individuality in our attitudes and approach to life.

  Suggested Further Reading

  If you are interested in scientific investigation, you can find useful points of view in the writings of Cannon, Beveridge, Selye, Koestler, Noltingk, Ingle, Watson, and Krebs and Shelley.' Bartlett clarifies the characteristics of experimental thinking, and Szent-Gyorgyi adds some warm reminiscences of his own research career.'

  The decades of the 1960s and 1970s saw an enormous expansion of the literature on creativity. A bibliography on scientific creativity is included on pages 391-407 in the book edited by Taylor and Barron.' Roe summarizes the results of psychological approaches to scientific creativity in a chapter with eighty-one references.; Guilford, Stein, and Wallach review the psychological literature and point out areas of needed research.' Coler's publication contains a list of thirty-four references."

  Claude Bernard's early descriptions of chance and of his own experimental approach are also available in English.' Cannon, Taton, and Beveridge also consider the respective roles of reason and chance in various classical scientific discoveries.`