Benjamin Franklin was another exceptional intellect. His scientific contributions were remarkable by any measure, but all the more so because he had almost no academic training. The diversity of his scientific contributions was also incredible. For example, when his brother John was seriously ill and had trouble urinating, Franklin invented the first urinary catheter used in America. Through his observation and improvised experiments he was able to name and chart the Gulf Stream, and navigators were able to use this new information to decrease the amount of time it took to travel on the Atlantic Ocean.
Thomas Edison is also a fascinating example of intellect. Although his entire education consisted of only three months of grammar school followed by homeschooling by his mother after his teacher implied that perhaps he was slow, his precocious intelligence soon became evident. He began reading very early at his own initiative, and as noted earlier, he became a voracious reader who insatiably pored through science books at the library. By the age of twelve he was asking questions about physics that stymied his parents and others.
There are numerous possible relationships between intelligence and innovativeness. Exceptional intelligence helps an individual to more quickly and easily acquire a broad range of knowledge, providing more fodder for generating creative ideas if one has the propensity to do so. Intelligence can also help creative people to implement their ideas and get them adopted. As I will show, integrating research on creativity, working memory, executive control, and neurotransmitters yields yet another possibility: some of the same biological mechanisms that give rise to exceptional intelligence can also give rise to creativity, if one has other traits or experiences that promote the generation and pursuit of unusual ideas.
Biological Processes in Creativity
THE EARLIEST WORK IN psychology and creativity emphasized the importance of unstructured, visual mental activity called “primary process thinking.”47 Because of its unstructured nature, primary process thinking can result in combining ideas that are not typically related, leading to what has been termed “remote associations” or “divergent thinking.” Sigmund Freud noted that primary process thinking was most likely to occur just before sleep or while dozing or daydreaming; others have observed that it might also be common when distracted by physical exercise, music, or other activities. For example, when Elon Musk was asked how he comes up with his new ideas, he responded “It’s somewhat cliché, but it happens a lot in the shower. I don’t know what it is about showers.…”48 Einstein played the violin to help himself think, noting that “Mozart’s music is so pure and beautiful that I see it as a reflection of the inner beauty of the universe itself.… Of course, like all great beauty, his music was pure simplicity.”49 As his son Hans Albert observed, “He would take refuge in music and that would solve all his difficulties.”50 A friend added, “He would often play his violin in his kitchen late at night, improvising melodies while he pondered complicated problems. Then suddenly, in the middle of playing, he would announce excitedly, ‘I’ve got it!’ As if by inspiration, the answer to the problem would have come to him in the midst of music.”51
Other psychologists built on these ideas about the role of primary process thinking by positing that some people are more prone to using it or have more control over the primary thinking process. For example, the noted creativity researcher Dean Simonton argues that some creative people may make their minds more open to random associations. They then mentally sort through these associations, selecting the best for further consideration. Other lines of research have also found evidence that highly creative people make more or better use of primary process thinking.52 They fantasize more, remember their dreams more clearly, and are more vulnerable to hypnosis.53 However, while much of this work implies that creativity is a process of random association, subsequent studies (including my own work on cognitive insight) pointed to another explanation more directly connected with intelligence: long paths of association. In my work modeling cognitive insight as a network process, I showed that individuals who are more likely or more able to search longer paths through the network of associations in their mind can arrive at a connection between two ideas or facts that seems unexpected or strange to others.54 What appears to be random may not be random at all—it is just difficult for other people to see the association because they are not following as long a chain of associations. Consistent with this, studies by professors Mathias Benedek and Aljoscha Neubauer found that highly creative people usually follow the same association paths as less creative people, but they do so with such greater speed that they exhaust the common associations sooner, permitting them to get to less common associations earlier than others would.55 Benedek and Neubauer’s research argues that highly creative people’s speed of association is a product of exceptional working memory and executive control. In other words, the ability to hold many things in one’s mind simultaneously and maneuver them with great facility enables a person to rapidly explore many possible associations.56
Tesla and Musk are excellent examples. Both men had such extraordinary cognitive power that they were able to process a long path of calculations almost instantly in their heads. Their conclusions appear to arrive almost by magic! There is a path to the conclusions they make, but they fly down that path so fast that others don’t see the route they have taken. Something that seems obvious to them may seem far-fetched to people who have not already followed all of the steps and have not done all the math. When Musk first announced that he wanted to build reusable rockets and colonize Mars, for example, many people dismissed him as just another millionaire space cowboy who would waste a lot of money on a fantasy fueled by little more than ego. However, Musk had already worked out that human extinction was likely if we did not become a multi-planetary species. He had also worked out that the biggest obstacle to space travel was cost and that the biggest obstacle to reducing that cost was single-use rockets. He had deduced—correctly, it turns out—that rockets could be made reusable and vastly reduce their cost, thereby making space travel far more practical. It was obvious to him, even before he picked up a rocket science textbook, and he subsequently proved it. There are many similar examples from Tesla’s story. One of the clearest was his immediate intuition that the production of electricity could be made vastly more efficient by eliminating the commutator. Although he did not know the specifics of how to do it when he first had the insight and although the existing textbooks of the time said that it was impossible, he deduced—correctly, it turns out—that it could be done. Within a few years he had proven it.
Although there is much we do not yet understand about intelligence, we do know that a significant component of intelligence is memory. Memory is usually divided into (at least) two interdependent types: working memory and long-term memory. Working memory is what keeps information temporarily available for immediate access and use; it includes executive functions that control what information is attended to, how it is manipulated, and how it is acted upon. For example, working memory is what enables you to retain partial results of an arithmetic problem while you solve it. It is limited in capacity, and the number of “chunks” of information a person can hold in her working memory depends on both the person and the nature of the “chunks.” Typically, fewer words than digits can be held in short-term memory, fewer longer words than shorter words, and so on. However, individuals can learn to combine chunks into higher-level chunks that enable them to retain impressive series of information. This is where long-term memory comes in. A subset of information that enters working memory is encoded into long-term memory, where information can be stored indefinitely. The brain decides what is important to save, and a person can influence that process by rehearsing an association. For example, you can memorize the quadratic formula by practicing it over and over. Although an individual can have a vast amount of information stored in long-term memory, the amount of it that can be activated (thought about) at one time is limited by working memory. Furthermore, long-term memory can
influence the capacity of working memory by creating “chunking” rules. For example, it is very hard to remember a random sequence of numbers such as 1–8–5–6–1–9–4–3, but it may be very easy to remember these numbers if you have studied Nikola Tesla and combine these digits into two chunks, 1856 and 1943, the years of Tesla’s birth and death. Exceptional long-term memory can thus enhance the capacity and efficiency of working memory, and exceptional working memory enables more of long-term memory to be rapidly accessed. Measures of working memory, rather than long-term memory, tend to better predict many measures of intelligence,57 but both types of memory are complementary pieces of the intelligence puzzle.
Many of the breakthrough innovators were specifically noted for having exceptional memories. Edison would often stun people when he remembered their names and personal details despite having met them only briefly decades prior. Curie could recite substantial poems or passages after hearing them only a couple of times. There is considerable evidence that Tesla, as noted earlier, possessed an eidetic memory—the ability to recall images and sounds with great precision after only a few exposures. Intriguingly, it seems highly likely that Musk also has an eidetic memory. His photographic memory as a child would amaze his family and classmates when he recited huge quantities of information from the encyclopedia. Later he realized he could visualize and manipulate objects in his mind with remarkable clarity. Musk speculates, “It seems as though the part of the brain that’s usually reserved for visual processing—the part that is used to process images coming in from my eyes—gets taken over by internal thought processes.” Musk adds, “I can’t do this as much now because there are so many things demanding my attention but, as a kid, it happened a lot. That large part of your brain that is used to handle incoming images gets used for internal thinking.” He also notes, “For images and numbers, I can process their interrelationships and algorithmic relationships.… Acceleration, momentum, kinetic energy—how those sorts of things will be affected by objects comes through very vividly.”58 As noted by biographer Ashley Vance, Musk’s combination of extraordinary intelligence and memory gives him an ability “to absorb incredible quantities of information with near-flawless recall.”59
Working memory provides an interesting connection between creativity and intelligence. Superior working memory and executive control are extremely valuable in general cognitive functioning. Measures of working memory are strongly correlated to comprehension, problem solving, and general measures of intelligence.60 If working memory aids remote association and is also associated with general intelligence, this may explain at least in part the frequent finding of an association between intellect and creativity.61 This does not mean that all extremely intelligent people will be innovative, but it does suggest that exceptional creativity might be more common in the presence of high intelligence.
The Personality Factor: “Openness to Experience”
IN THE EXTENSIVE RESEARCH on personality, there is a dominant classification system called the “Big Five Personality Traits” of neuroticism, agreeableness, extraversion, conscientiousness, and openness to experience. These “traits” are actually broad dimensions of personality that comprise many other more-specific traits. Personality characteristics that are in the same “big five” dimension tend to be highly correlated and consistently reported within individuals, while the dimensions themselves are basically independent and nonoverlapping. Of the big five, openness to experience is the one most commonly associated with creativity.
Openness to experience reflects an individual’s use of active imagination, aesthetic sensitivity (the appreciation for art and literature, for example), attentiveness to emotion, a preference for variety, and intellectual curiosity. It is assessed by asking individuals to rate their degree of agreement or disagreement with statements such as “I have a vivid imagination,” “I enjoy hearing new ideas,” “I have a rich vocabulary,” “I rarely look for deeper meaning in things” (negative), “I enjoy going to art museums,” “I avoid philosophical discussions” (negative), and “I enjoy wild flights of fantasy.” Individuals who score high on the openness to experience dimension tend to have great intellectual curiosity, are interested in unusual ideas, and are willing to try new things. They are also typically more tolerant of complexity and ambiguity than the average person. People with low scores on this dimension hold more-conventional beliefs and may be uncomfortable with novelty, complexity, and ambiguity.
A considerable amount of research suggests that openness to experience is associated with divergent thinking and creativity. Certainly, having a broader range of interests and experiences to mix in the combinatorial hopper should lead to more unusual associations. Furthermore, a tolerance for complexity and ambiguity could prompt heterodox thinking and enable more sophisticated abstraction. However, the evidence for this trait among the breakthrough innovators studied here is mixed. Einstein definitely exhibited aesthetic sensitivity, noting about himself, “Personally, I experience the greatest degree of pleasure in having contact with works of art. They furnish me with happy feelings of an intensity that I cannot derive from other sources.”62 Tesla was noted for his great love of poetry and literature, and he could recite passages from Goethe, Shakespeare, and Voltaire from memory. It was, as noted earlier, while reciting stances from Goethe’s Faust that he had his great insight about how to achieve alternating-current electricity. Furthermore, most of the breakthrough innovators were avid and omnivorous readers, and some were polymaths with skills in numerous areas (for example, Franklin is generally described as a polymath). However, some of them were also so intensely focused on their objective that their lives were lived rather narrowly. For example, Tesla’s work consumed him so completely that he spared himself little time to explore the world or pursue diverse adventures. Curie was similarly consumed by her work and found it uncomfortable to travel to new places and did so only reluctantly. Jobs’s spiritual pursuits and travel are consistent with the typical descriptions of “openness,” but it is harder to see “openness” in the maniacal work habits of Edison, Kamen, or Musk. It may turn out that openness to different intellectual ideas is a somewhat different trait than the pursuit of variety in real-world experiences. It is also possible that while “openness” helps creativity, maniacal focus is required to bring an exceptional innovation to fruition. The unusual combination of these traits may be a key to understanding exceptional breakthrough innovators.
What was more notable about these people than their range of interests was their drive to find fundamental principles, whether they be in physics, math, virtue, or social progress. For instance, Einstein was driven to find the fundamental principles of the mechanics of the universe, which led him to study gravity and light and to seek generalized solutions for his theories (i.e., theories that are robust to a wide array of contexts and applications, such as his General Theory of Relativity): “In this field, I soon learned how to scent out that which was able to lead to fundamentals and to turn aside… from the multitude of things which clutter up the mind and divert it from the essential.”63 Similarly, Tesla sought to understand and harness the fundamental dynamics of waves and oscillation on a grand scale. From the moment he understood how to transmit communication wirelessly, he was no longer content to transmit it between cities or even between countries. He wanted to wirelessly transmit communication globally and beyond. He spent a considerable period of his career, in fact, attempting to communicate with Mars. Similarly, from the moment he had demonstrated methods of transmitting electricity wirelessly, he began to envision global-scale wireless energy transmission. His tendency to immediately abstract the fundamental principles of a phenomenon and envision how it could be scaled up to vast proportions is a big part of why he often faced skepticism from the public and his investors—they had a hard time following his leaps of cognition, and because the scale of his ideas was intimidating, others were prone to label them as absurd. This drive to seek fundamental principles is also apparent in
Jobs’s search for truth through Zen and his concept of the computer as a “bicycle for the mind,” in Franklin’s relentless pursuit of more-efficient or welfare-enhancing ways of social organizing, and in Curie’s identification of radioactivity as a fundamental property of elements.
Atypical Brain Chemistry
ALTHOUGH INTELLIGENCE, MEMORY, AND “openness” are all characteristics that have long been associated with creative genius, the breakthrough innovators here—particularly Tesla—highlight a more unusual and less understood ingredient of creative genius: atypical brain chemistry. As neuroscientists have gained capabilities to explore the activities of the brain in greater detail, they have started to pay more attention to the relationship between the neurotransmitter system and creativity. Evidence is amassing about the relationship between dopamine and/or glutamate and divergent thinking. Dopamine has been shown to reduce latent inhibition: the automatic preconscious process whereby stimuli thought to be irrelevant are blocked from conscious awareness.64 In a related line of research, psychologists have found that highly creative people typically have lower levels of latent inhibition and thus tend to respond to stimuli that others would ignore.65 Highly creative people are often highly sensitive to physiological stimuli, such as auditory tones, electric shocks, or lights,66 illustrated in the extreme by Tesla, who wrote in his autobiography about his senses during periods of nervous strain:
I could hear the ticking of a watch with three rooms between me and the time-piece. A fly alighting on a table would cause a dull thud in my ear. A carriage passing at a distance of a few miles fairly shook my whole body. The whistle of a locomotive twenty or thirty miles away made the bench or chair on which I sat, vibrate so strongly that the pain was unbearable. The ground under my feet trembled continuously.… The sun’s rays, when periodically intercepted, would cause blows of such force on my brain that they would stun me.67
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