Disgusted with my failure, I went to spend a few days at the seaside, and thought of something else. One morning, walking on the bluff, the idea came to me, with… brevity, suddenness, and immediate certainty, that the arithmetic transformations of indeterminate ternary quadratic forms were identical with those of non-Euclidean geometry.20
The apparently idle period before such insights arrive has a name: incubation. If hard and seemingly futile work on a difficult problem is followed up with a less demanding activity that does not require complete focus—walking, showering, cooking—a mind is free to wander. And when that mind incubates the problem, it can stumble upon a solution.
Incubation is as unconscious as it is real, and it enhances creativity. In one experiment making that point, 135 college students took a psychological test for creativity that required them to find unusual uses for everyday objects, like bricks or pencils. A few minutes into the test, the psychologists running the experiment interrupted some students and gave them an unrelated task. The new task did not take much effort—the students were shown a series of digits and had to tell which of them were even or odd—but it distracted the students from the test. After that interruption, the students continued with the creativity test, and they found more-creative answers than a second group of students who had not been given the distracting task.
Students in a third group got a break like the first, but they were given a harder task that required more focus. And, lo and behold, their answers were less creative than those of the first group. The conclusion: undemanding tasks—easy enough to require little attention, but hard enough to prevent conscious work on a problem—can free a mind to wander and solve a problem creatively.21
If mind-wandering impacts creativity, then its opposite, the control of attention practiced in mindfulness meditation, should have the opposite effects, both good and bad. And indeed it does. A 2012 study showed, for example, that mindfulness meditation, by reducing mind-wandering, can improve scores on standardized academic tests.22 In contrast, less mindful individuals perform better on creativity tests like that just mentioned.23
The message is clear: just as biological evolution can require a balance between natural selection, which pushes uphill, and genetic drift, which does not, so too does creativity require a balance between the selection of useful ideas—where a focused mind comes in handy—and the suspension of that selection to play, dream, or allow the mind to wander.24
The importance of reaching a state of mind—sometimes—where selection is suspended is best illustrated by the many ways in which humans try to attain this state.
Some means to this end are as simple as creating a playful environment.25 When companies that value their “creatives” provide the wacky workspaces made famous by Google—complete with slides, firemen’s poles, hammocks, and foosball tables—they aim to create the kinds of environments we remember from the playgrounds of our childhoods.
A great idea, to be sure, but, sadly, toys alone will not transform office drones into brainstormers. One problem is that we are highly attuned to the judgment of others. This judgment, like the judgment we impose on our own thoughts, is a form of selection that punishes failure. Fear of it creeps into our psyche at some point on our path to adulthood, and Stanford researcher Robert McKim showed how pervasive it can be. In a simple experiment, he had students in a classroom draw a neighbor’s portrait in thirty seconds and show the portrait to the neighbor. Most of the students felt embarrassed about their drawings and apologized to their “victims.”26 No longer as guileless as children, who will proudly exhibit their latest opus to anybody, they had come to expect their neighbors’ criticism.
Resurrecting the inner child in an adult’s mind can require special measures. Among them are the ground rules of brainstorming sessions, including “don’t criticize others” and “don’t compare ideas.” To push against the habit of judging, some companies even award prizes for the most outlandish ideas in their brainstorming sessions.27
But these vehicles to cross the valleys of inferior ideas have speed limits. To go faster and farther, some creators use more forceful means—like drugs. The vivid pipe dreams of opium smokers have triggered major creative works, including Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s celebrated poem “Kubla Khan.” Nobel Prize–winning biochemist Kary Mullis credited LSD for his invention of a technique to copy DNA molecules. Steve Jobs called his LSD experience “one of the two or three most important things I have done in my life” and was fond of asking aspiring creative professionals whether they had ever dropped acid. And his generation was not the first to appreciate the power of psychedelic drugs. Works of art created thousands of years before the Macintosh computer have been linked to the use of psychedelic drugs in the prehistoric cultures of Europe, Africa, and South America.28
Psychologists began to study the effects of psychedelic drugs on thinking in the 1960s. One study focused on twenty-seven workers in creative professions like engineering, design, physics, architecture, and art. Each took a creativity test before and another one after a dose of mescaline and, while drugged, worked on a problem from his or her area of expertise, such as designing a commercial building, an improved magnetic tape recorder, or a piece of furniture. The participants not only fared better on the creativity test while under the influence, but they also felt that mescaline improved their creative problem solving, both during the experiment and for two weeks thereafter. One subject described exactly the kind of relaxed condition that enables creativity: “no fear, no worry, no sense of reputation and competition, no envy.” Another said, “I began to draw.… My senses could not keep up with my images.… My hand was not fast enough.… I worked at a pace I would not have thought I was capable of.” And yet another testified that his mind “seemed much freer to roam around the problems, and it was these periods of roaming around which produced solutions.”29
Unfortunately, this and other such studies do not meet the more rigorous standards of today’s psychology. For example, they do not compare the drug-takers’ creativity with a group of control subjects that did not take the drug. So, the jury is still out.
Fortunately, other drugs might boost creativity, even if LSD doesn’t. The Romans knew this when they said, “There is no poetry among water drinkers.”30 Science is still catching up with such folk wisdom, although one study made a similar point when it found that twenty mildly intoxicated social drinkers did better on a creativity test than did twenty sober participants.31
But whether any one drug is best at enhancing creativity matters less than this: there is more than one state of mind—and more than one way to find it—where judgment and the selection of ideas are suspended. That is a good thing, because the ability to descend into the depths of half-baked sketches, inferior drafts, or imperfect harmonies is essential to reach the heights of a great work. Play, dreams, and the still mysterious ways of incubation join the genetic drift of adaptive landscapes and the thermal vibrations of energy landscapes as means of overcoming obstacles in these landscapes.
And they hint at another talent of creative people, whose biological counterpart has helped biological evolution succeed: not only are their minds well traveled, but they can also move rapidly—yes, even teleport instantly—through a mental landscape.
Much of creation is a journey through an abstract, high-dimensional realm, but creative works can also build on journeys in a more familiar world. This is especially true for the journeys of outstanding individuals, the trailblazers of humankind. I mean people like the French artist Paul Gauguin.
Born in Paris, Gauguin spent most of his early childhood in Peru, where his mother’s interest in pre-Columbian pottery became his earliest artistic influence. But his life would take a long detour before returning to art. His family moved to France in 1855, when Gauguin was seven years old, and he entered a naval preparatory school a few years later. He entered the merchant marine, traveled the oceans for three years, and later served for two years in the French navy. Upon
returning to Paris at age twenty-three, he worked as a stockbroker for eleven years, until that career was derailed by an 1882 stock market crash. He then moved to Denmark with his Danish wife and tried himself as a tarpaulin salesman. Unfortunately, the Danish did not take a liking to French tarpaulins, so his wife had to support the family by giving French lessons.32 During his time as a stockbroker, Gauguin had started to paint, and with his commercial career in shambles, he decided to paint full-time. To make a go of it, he left his family in Denmark and moved back to Paris. The going was rough. His work achieved neither widespread critical acclaim nor financial success, and Gauguin had to take on menial jobs. Disappointed with the French art scene, he eventually left France, first for Panama and Martinique, and then for Tahiti and the Marquesas Islands in the South Pacific. Living in a bamboo hut for a while, he produced his best-known work on these islands. These are highly valued—and highly priced—paintings like When Will You Marry or Ave Maria, which depict Polynesian natives in bold colors and surrounded by lush tropical sceneries.
The life journey of Renaissance painter Raphael did not range as widely, but his travels—from the studio of his father, where he first learned to paint, to the studio of Pietro Perugino, whose style and method of glazing he assimilated, to Florence, where he absorbed aspects of da Vinci’s sfumato and pyramidal constructions—helped him create a new style he called unione, which is embodied in his masterworks, like The Transfiguration of Christ.
The creative journeys of many other creators are lost in time, even though they helped create entirely new artistic styles. Among them is a style of painting popular in Renaissance Venice, which amalgamates Byzantine Art—stone mosaics, flat-panel paintings—with Western elements like the three-dimensional renderings of linear perspective.33 In Latin America, the facades of famous Baroque churches like that of San Lorenzo in Bolivia’s Potosí merge Christian symbols like angels with those of the Incan religion, like sun and moon, in a style that art historians call Andean Hybrid Baroque.34 And in Western architecture, the pointed arch helped transform squat Romanesque churches into light-flooded Gothic cathedrals that stretch into the sky.35 This arch had been used for centuries in the Islamic architecture of the Near East, so chances are that it arrived with some itinerant engineers or masons.
These and other new styles of art emerged when creators both known and unknown traveled the world. But an itinerant life as such isn’t the point. The point is that such a life can enable an inner journey through different realms of knowledge. A great example of such an inner journey is the convoluted path of Ilya Prigogine, who won the 1977 Nobel Prize in chemistry but did not start out with scientific aspirations. His first love was the humanities, most notably philosophy. Perhaps there are parents who rejoice when their son wants to become a philosopher, but Prigogine’s were not among them. They insisted that he pursue a more reputable line of work. So he studied law. Unfortunately, law was not his true calling, but during his studies he became fascinated by the criminal mind and its psychology. To grasp the mind’s hidden springs of action, Prigogine decided he needed to understand brain chemistry. That endeavor turned out to be too ambitious for the times he lived in, so he turned to simpler chemical systems that display self-organization—the process by which systems as different as cyclones and viruses spontaneously self-assemble. And that’s where he made his mark in science, discovering laws of nature that make self-organization not only possible but inevitable. Eventually, his scientific work led him all the way back to philosophy and to the question of whether the world is deterministic and whether choice, responsibility, and freedom are illusory concepts. He came out against determinism. His arguments were based on his research in chemistry, where he had shown that the future of some chemical systems cannot be predicted with certainty. Prigogine’s life’s work, an example of outstanding creativity at the intersection between the humanities and science, was only made possible by his meandering path through different fields of knowledge.36
Another well-documented inner journey is that of physicist Rosalyn Yalow, who won the Nobel in the same year as Prigogine. Her life was pulled by two crosscurrents of intellectual influence.37 Growing up in the 1930s, when the world celebrated the spectacular successes of quantum mechanics, Yalow was drawn to physics, and in particular to the radioactivity that another famous female scientist, Marie Curie, had helped the world understand decades earlier. Yalow got her first big break when she was admitted to graduate school in physics at the University of Illinois, where openings were abundant because many young men had gone off to fight in World War II. She was the only woman in a department of more than four hundred. In 1945, right after she received her doctorate, she crossed over into a new field when she was hired by the radiotherapy department of the Bronx Veterans Administration Hospital. She was blissfully ignorant of both medicine and biology, but proved a quick study who realized how radiation physics could help medicine. Together with her colleague Solomon A. Berson, she created the first department of “nuclear medicine”—an entirely new field of science. Her biggest, Nobel Prize–winning achievement was to invent the radioimmunoassay, a highly sensitive measurement technology that uses radioactive isotopes to quantify minute amounts of molecules, such as insulin, in a patient’s blood. Had she stayed on the straight and narrow of her traditional physics education, she would never have made this outsized contribution.
Other examples include the Austrian physician Karl Landsteiner, whose knowledge of chemistry helped him discover the main blood groups, which made modern blood transfusions possible. They also include Hermann von Helmholtz, whose father obliged him to marry medicine instead of his first love, physics. It led von Helmholtz to invent the ophthalmoscope, a device that can illuminate the eye’s interior and remains to this day one of the most widespread medical instruments.38 And August Kekulé of benzene fame abandoned architecture for chemistry, but his fascination with geometry led him to investigate the spatial organization of molecules. His inner journey helped him earn the title “architect of organic chemistry.”39
Lives such as these help a mind accumulate unusual combinations of experience and expertise. And they permit what philosopher Arthur Koestler’s book The Art of Creation called cross-fertilization, an amalgamation of knowledge that resembles the kind of recombination we found in biological evolution.40
Some of this cross-fertilization takes eminent creators far outside their area of expertise, where their intelligent naïveté can lead to important discoveries. Louis Pasteur had never worked with silkworms before his research rescued the French silk industry from a deadly parasite that decimated its silkworm populations. Henry Bessemer, the inventor of a cheap process to manufacture steel, credited his success to his ignorance of well-established truths. And Luis Alvarez, a nuclear physicist, discovered that a gargantuan asteroid had helped eradicate the dinosaurs—a discovery that was as crucial to paleontology as it was unwelcome to turf-conscious paleontologists.41
Koestler’s cross-fertilization can be especially powerful when it extends beyond different branches of science to the arts. A well-known example is that of Steve Jobs, whose companies Apple and Pixar melded digital technology and design into an indivisible whole. Jobs amalgamated digital electronics with influences as different as the simple elegance of Bauhaus architecture, the minimalism of Zen Buddhism, and the art of calligraphy to help design revolutionary products like the Macintosh computer. The Mac’s elegant proportional fonts, for example, abandoned the clunky fixed-width fonts that computers had used until then and paved the way for the revolution of desktop publishing that everybody takes for granted now—in no small part thanks to Jobs’s love of calligraphy.42 Albert Einstein is also well known for his artistic sensibility. He loved to play the violin and thought that important scientific theories fused the true with the beautiful. He credited music for his discovery of relativity theory when he said that the theory “occurred to me by intuition, and music is the driving force behind this intuition.… My new di
scovery is the result of musical perception.”43 An artistic theme also resounds in the particle accelerators that the physicist and accomplished sculptor Robert R. Wilson conceived: “In designing an accelerator I proceed very much as I do in making a sculpture.… The lines should be graceful, the volumes balanced.”44
Broad surveys of scientists support the notion of a deep connection between great science and artistic sensibilities. In 2008, Robert Root-Bernstein and colleagues compared the artistic side interests of thousands of scientists and the general public.45 The most eminent group they studied were the Nobel laureates, followed by scientists just one rung below. These included the Fellows of the Royal Society of the United Kingdom, an organization of more than one thousand British scientists elected for lifetime membership based on their outstanding accomplishments, and members of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States, another body of elite scientists. Root-Bernstein’s 2008 study found that twice as many National Academy and Royal Society members exercise an art or a craft as less eminent scientists or the general public. But even they are beaten hands down by the Nobel laureates, where an additional 50 percent have artistic side interests that range from music, sculpture, and painting to fiction writing.
More generally, systematic studies show that many eminent creators have had wide-ranging interests since childhood, which helped them acquire the broad knowledge they needed to cross-fertilize different areas of science or the arts. In contrast, they were often indifferent to the schooling intended to launch the average pupil into the job market.46 Mark Twain expressed this contrast best when he quipped, “I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.”47
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