Imagine: How Creativity Works

by Jonah Lehrer

  Joe Forgas, a social psychologist at the University of New South Wales, in Australia, has spent the last decade investigating the link between negative moods and creativity. Although people tend to disparage sadness and similar moods, Forgas has repeatedly demonstrated that a little melancholy sharpens the spotlight of attention, allowing us to become more observant and persistent. (Of course, feeling sad also makes us less likely to have moments of insight.) His most compelling study took place in a stationery store in the suburbs of Sydney. The experiment itself was simple: Forgas placed a variety of trinkets, such as toy soldiers, plastic animals, and miniature cars, near the checkout counter. As shoppers exited, Forgas tested their memory, asking them to list as many of the items as possible. To control the mood of the subjects, when Forgas conducted the survey on gray, rainy days, he accentuated the weather by playing Verdi’s Requiem; on sunny days, he used a chipper soundtrack of Gilbert and Sullivan. The results were clear: shoppers in the “low mood” condition remembered nearly four times as many of the trinkets. The wet weather made them sad, and their sadness made them more attentive.

  These are the same cognitive skills that underlie the unconcealing process: the negative mood acts like a mild dose of amphetamine. When someone is immersed in melancholy, it’s easier for him to linger on a poetic line or keep thinking about a beer logo. This helps explain why Forgas has found that states of sadness — he induces the downcast mood with a film about death and cancer — also correlate with better writing samples; subjects compose sentences that are clearer and more compelling. Because they were more attentive to what they were writing, they produced more refined prose, the words polished by their misery.

  Modupe Akinola, a professor at Columbia Business School, has expanded on these provocative results. In one of her most recent experiments, she asked each subject to give a short speech about his or her dream job. The students were randomly assigned to either a positive- or negative-feedback condition; in the positive-feedback condition, speeches were greeted with smiles and vertical nods, and in the negative, speeches met frowns and horizontal shakes. After the speech was over, the subject was given glue, paper, and colored felt and told to make a collage using the materials. Professional artists then evaluated each collage according to various metrics of creativity.

  Not surprisingly, the feedback affected the mood of the subjects: those who received smiles during their speeches reported feeling better than before, while frowns had the opposite effect. What’s interesting is what happened next. Subjects in the negative-feedback condition created much prettier collages. Their angst led to better art. As Akinola notes, this is largely because the sadness improved their focus and made them more likely to persist with the creative challenge. As a result, they kept on rearranging the felt, playing with the colorful designs.

  The enhancement of these mental skills during states of sadness might also explain the striking correlation between creativity and depressive disorders. In the early 1980s, Nancy Andreasen, a neuroscientist at the University of Iowa, interviewed several dozen writers from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop about their mental history. While Andreasen expected the artists to suffer from schizophrenia at a higher rate than normal — “There is that lingering cliché about madness and genius going together,” she says — that hypothesis turned out to be completely wrong. Instead, Andreasen found that 80 percent of the writers met the formal diagnostic criteria for some type of depression. These successful artists weren’t crazy — they were just exceedingly sad. A similar theme emerged from biographical studies of British novelists and poets done by Kay Redfield Jamison, a professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins. According to her data, famous writers were eight times as likely as people in the general population to suffer from major depressive illness.

  Why is severe sadness so closely associated with creativity? Andreasen argues that depression is intertwined with a “cognitive style” that makes people more likely to produce successful works of art. Her explanation is straightforward: It’s not easy to write a good novel or compose a piece of music. The process often requires years of careful attention as the artist fixes mistakes and corrects errors. As a result, the ability to stick with the process — to endure the unconcealing — is extremely important. “Successful writers are like prizefighters who keep on getting hit but won’t go down,” Andreasen says. “They’ll stick with it until it’s right. And that seems to be what the mood disorders help with.” While Andreasen acknowledges the terrible burden of mental illness — she quotes Robert Lowell on depression not being a “gift of the Muse” and describes his reliance on lithium to escape the pain — she argues that, at least in its milder forms, the disorder benefits many artists due to the perseverance it makes possible. (Severe depression, however, is clearly useless — the pain is so intense that nothing can be done.) “Unfortunately, this type of thinking is often inseparable from the suffering,” Andreasen says. “If you’re at the cutting edge, then you’re going to bleed.”

  While the unconcealing process allows us to refine our creations, not every problem benefits from melancholy, amphetamines, and the prefrontal cortex. Milton Glaser has learned that his hardest assignments often require a flash of insight before he can begin lavishing the project with attention. “You want to make sure you’re focused on the right question,” Glaser says. “Sometimes that means you’ve got to begin the process by trusting an intuition that you can’t explain.”

  The necessary interplay of these different creative modes —the elation of the insight, and the melancholy of the unconcealing — begins to explain why bipolar disorder, an illness in which people oscillate between intense sadness and extreme euphoria, is so closely associated with creativity. Andreasen found that nearly 40 percent of the successful creative people she investigated had the disorder, a rate that’s approximately twenty times higher than the general population. (More recently, the psychiatrist Hagop Akiskal found that nearly two-thirds of a sample of influential European artists were bipolar. ) The reason for this correlation, Andreasen suggests, is that the manic states lead people to erupt with new ideas as their brains combust with remote associations. “When people are manic, they are driven by this intense, over-whelming need to express themselves,” Andreasen says. “It can be an extremely unpleasant condition, often because they can’t stop creating.” Furthermore, these imaginative outpourings are de-fined by their radical, sometimes incomprehensible, nature. “People become much more open to unexpected ideas when manic,” Andreasen notes. “That’s when they typically come up with their most original concepts.”

  And then the mania ebbs. The extravagant high descends into a profound low. While this volatility is horribly painful, it can also enable creativity, since the exuberant ideas of the manic period are refined during the depression. In other words, the emotional extremes of the illness reflect the extremes of the creative process: there is the ecstatic generation phase, full of divergent thoughts, and the attentive editing phase, in which all those ideas are made to converge. (This has led several psychiatrists, such as Andy Thomson at the University of Virginia, to speculate that the enhanced creativity of people with bipolar disorder might explain why the illness has been preserved throughout human evolution.) This doesn’t take away, of course, from the agony of the mental illness, and it doesn’t mean that people can create only when they’re horribly sad or manic. But it does begin to explain the significant correlations that have been repeatedly observed between depressive syndromes and artistic achievement.

  The larger lesson is that different kinds of creative problems benefit from different kinds of creative thinking. (T. S. Eliot understood this: “The bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be conscious, and conscious where he ought to be unconscious.”) The question, of course, is how to adjust the thought process to the task at hand. How does anyone know when to listen to the prefrontal cortex instead of unleashing the right hemisphere? When is it time to daydream and take warm showers, and when is it bett
er to drink another cup of coffee?

  The good news is that the human mind has a natural ability to diagnose its own problems, to assess the kind of creativity that’s needed. These assessments have an eloquent name: they’re called “feelings of knowing,” and they occur when we suspect that we can find the answer if only we keep on thinking about the question. Consider tip-of-the-tongue moments. It’s estimated that people experience these, on average, about once a week. (This is universal, and the vast majority of languages, from Afrikaans to Hindi to Arabic, even rely on tongue metaphors to describe the tip-of-the-tongue moment.) Perhaps it occurs when you run into an old acquaintance whose name you can’t remember although you know what letter it begins with. Or perhaps you fail to recall the title of a recent movie, even though you can describe the plot in perfect detail. What’s interesting about this cognitive hiccup is that, although you can’t remember the information, you’re still convinced that you know it, which is why you devote so much mental energy to trying to recover the missing word.

  But here’s the mystery: If you’ve forgotten a person’s name, then why are you so sure that you can remember it? What does it mean to know something without being able to access it? This is where feelings of knowing prove essential. Numerous studies have demonstrated that when it comes to problems that don’t require insights, the mind is remarkably accurate at assessing the likelihood that a problem can be solved. You can glance at a question and know that the answer is within reach if only you put in the work. As a result, you’re motivated to stay focused on the challenge.

  What makes these feelings of knowing even more useful is that they come attached to a sense of progress. This was first demonstrated by Janet Metcalfe, a psychologist at Columbia University. She asked people working on various creative puzzles whether or not they felt like they were getting closer (“warmer”) to the solution. When the subjects were working on problems that were typically solved with insights, they reported no increase in warmth until the insights popped into their heads — they went straight from cold to burning hot. There was no feeling of knowing. In contrast, Metcalfe found, problems that didn’t require insight were answered only after people reported a gradual increase in warmth, which reflected their sense of progress. What’s impressive about such estimates is that people were able to assess their closeness to the solution without knowing what the solution was.

  This ability to calculate progress is an important part of the creative process. When you don’t feel that you’re getting closer to the answer — you’ve hit the wall, so to speak — you probably need an insight. In these instances, you should rely on the right hemisphere, which excels at revealing those remote associations. Continuing to focus on the problem will be a waste of mental resources, a squandering of the prefrontal cortex. You will stare at your computer screen and repeat your failures. Instead, find a way to relax and increase the alpha waves. The most productive thing to do is forget about work.

  However, when those feelings of knowing tell you that you’re getting closer — when you feel the poetic meter slowly improve, or sense that the graphic design is being unconcealed — then you need to keep on struggling. Continue to pay attention until it hurts; fill your working memory with problems. Before long, that feeling of knowing will become actual knowledge.

  There is nothing romantic about this kind of creativity, which consists mostly of sweat, sadness, and failure. It’s the red pen on the page and the discarded sketch, the trashed prototype and the failed first draft. It’s ruminating in the backs of taxis and popping pills until the poem is finished. Nevertheless, such a merciless process is sometimes the only way forward. And so we keep on thinking, because the next thought might be the answer.

  Ch. 4 THE LETTING GO

  The struggle of maturity is to recover the seriousness of a child at play.

  — Friedrich Nietzsche

  The theater is empty; the house lights are low. Yo-Yo Ma is lugging his cello across the stage toward a lonely metal chair at its center. The instrument looks heavy, and Ma takes delicate steps, the long horsehair bow jutting out into space. He sits, steadies himself in the chair, and stares for a long moment at the sheet music. Then he raises his right arm, positions his fingers on the wooden neck, and drags the bow across the strings. The first note sounds like a beautiful moan.

  I’m sitting next to Bruce Adolphe, the composer of the piece Ma is rehearsing, and he seems a little nervous. Because Ma is such a celebrity — in the previous two months, he’s played twenty-three concerts in eighteen cities — this is the first time Adolphe has heard him play the music. “There’s always that anxiety that comes during the run-throughs,” Adolphe says. “I’ve been living with these notes for so long, but it always sounds different when it’s up on stage.” Ma is sight-reading the piece, so he begins playing slowly, like someone trying to decipher the first pages of a novel written in a barely familiar language. Sometimes he stops in the middle of a phrase and then repeats the notes with a slightly different interpretation.

  And then, after a few tentative minutes, Ma begins to disappear into the music. I see it first in his body, which begins to subtly sway. The movement then spreads to his right arm, so that the bow starts to trace wider and wider arcs in the air. Before long, Ma’s shoulders are relaxed and expressive, drawing together whenever the tempo increases. And then, when he repeats the theme of the piece, his eyes briefly close, as if he were entranced by the same beauty he’s pouring into space. I look over at Adolphe: his tension has turned into a faint smile.

  Bruce Adolphe first met Ma at Juilliard in New York City. Although Ma was only fifteen years old at the time, he was already an established performer, having played for JFK at the White House and with Leonard Bernstein on national television. Adolphe, meanwhile, was a promising young composer who had just written his first cello piece. “Unfortunately, I had no idea what I was doing,” Adolphe remembers. “I’d never written for the instrument before.” He’d shown a draft of his composition to a Juilliard instructor, who told him that the piece featured a chord that was impossible to play. Before Adolphe could correct the music, however, Ma decided to rehearse the composition in his dorm room. “Yo-Yo played through my piece, sight-reading the whole thing,” Adolphe says. “And when that impossible chord came, he somehow found a way to play it. His bow was straight across all four strings. Afterward, I asked him how he did it, because I had been told by the teacher that it couldn’t be done. And Yo-Yo said, ‘You’re right. I don’t think it can be done.’ And so we started over again, and this time when the chord came I yelled, ‘Stop!’ We both looked at his left hand, and it was completely contorted on the fingerboard. The hand position he had somehow found was uncomfortable for him to hold; his fingers were twisted in a most unnatural way. ‘See,’ Yo-Yo said, ‘you’re right, you really can’t play that.’ But he did!”

  For Adolphe, the story is a reminder of Ma’s astonishing talent, his ability to play those unplayable chords. It’s a virtuosity that has turned Ma into one of the most famous classical performers in the world, an artist celebrated for a wide variety of recordings, from the cello suites of Bach to the swing of American bluegrass.

  He’s improvised with Bobby McFerrin, recorded scores for Hollywood blockbusters, and popularized the melodies of Central Asia. “Sometimes, I’ll watch him play and I’ll feel that same awe I felt as a student at Juilliard,” Adolphe says. “He can take your notes and he can find the thing that makes them come alive. Ma is a technical master, of course, but what makes him such a special performer is that he also knows when to release technique for something deeper, for that depth of emotion that no one else can find.”

  But Ma wasn’t always such an expressive performer. In fact, his pursuit of musical emotion began only after a memorable failure. “I was nineteen and I had worked my butt off,” Ma told David Blum of the New Yorker in 1989. “I knew the music inside and out. While sitting there at the concert, playing all the notes correctly, I started to wonder,
‘Why am I here? What’s at stake? Nothing. Not only is the audience bored but I myself am bored.’ Perfection is not very communicative.” For Ma, the tedium of the flawless performance taught him that there is often a tradeoff between perfection and expression. “If you are only worried about not making a mistake then you will communicate nothing,” he says. “You will have missed the point of making music, which is to make people feel something.”

  This search for emotion shapes the way Ma approaches every concert. He doesn’t begin by analyzing the details of his cello part or by glancing at what the violins are supposed to play. Instead, he reviews the complete score, searching for the larger story. “I always look at a piece of music like a detective novel,” Ma says. “Maybe the novel is about a murder. Well, who committed the murder? Why did he do it? My job is to retrace the story so that the audience feels the suspense. So that when the climax comes, they’re right there with me, listening to my beautiful detective story. It’s all about making people care about what happens next.” Ma’s unusual musical approach is apparent during these rehearsals, as he carefully refines his interpretations of Adolphe’s score. Over the course of the afternoon, his performance steadily accumulates its feeling; his body grows more loose-limbed and expressive. Ma’s slight shifts of interpretation — hushing a pi-anissimo even more, speeding up a melodic riff, exaggerating a crescendo — turn a work of intricate tonal patterns into a passionate narrative. These shifts are not in the score, and yet they reveal what the score is trying to say. Most of the time, Ma can’t explain what inspired these changes, but that doesn’t matter: he has learned to trust himself, to follow his storytelling instincts.