Creativity in mathematics and science

The video in my last post, and Christopher Richards’s blog from which I nicked it, have really got me thinking about creativity, inspiration, and analytical thinking. My own creativity is woeful and worsening. Is this a common feeling amongst adults? Why do most of us stop painting as we grow up? Is it because we learn, or adopt social conventions, of what is a “good” or “bad” painting? Why do we stop writing stories (pace Christopher) and poems, playing make-believe with our friends, and having wild daydreams?

I wish I could remember where, but I once read that 90% of mathematicians think in images during the creative stages, and only in symbols and logical manipulations when they are tidying things up for presentation to others. I’m one of the other 10%. Why? Did I unlearn an image-based way of thought as I progressed through school and its exams? Can I (re)learn to be in touch with the wellspring of vivid imaginal inspiration apparently gushing within us all?

One of Christopher’s other blogs mentioned the book Hare Brain Tortoise Mind by Guy Claxton which I promptly borrowed and am reading through (slowly, yay me). The book is a wonder. It gathers together a welter of scientific studies which reveal the bubbling, brilliant, and bizarre unconscious which underpins true creativity as outlined in anecdotes from the arts and sciences. It seems that not only can our unconscious be more “intelligent” than our consciousness, outperforming it under all sorts of circumstances, but that it acts independently of our consicous cognition. In this way, unconscious intelligence outperforms and overrides conscious cognition without our consicous perception of it, and consciously-held facts and beliefs seem not to influence it. A strange world indeed. I haven’t begun to do the book justice, but I strongly recommend you to read it.

I would like to tag Christopher for a post on messiness and creativity. For motivation, here’s a photo of Einstein’s office on the day he died:

(downloaded from http://faculty.rmwc.edu/tmichalik/einstein.htm). Einstein is widely regarded as being an individual of fabulous imagination. His revolutionary breakthroughs in physics came largely from strong pictorial imaginings while staring into space (literally and figuratively). He also is quoted as saying “If a cluttered desk signs a cluttered mind, of what, then, is an empty desk a sign?” I keep my own desk scrupulously tidy, but am in a tiny minority amongst my colleagues in doing so, as well as being in the minority who don’t think in images. Is there a link? What about in other areas of life? What does messiness speak of creativity?