Creativity: a scientific viewpoint

Last night I was lucky enough to be able to attend a wonderful two hour lecture and chat session with Margaret Boden OBE, Research Professor of Cognitive Science at the University of Sussex in my old home town of Brighton. She is here visiting the University of Canterbury as a Distinguished Erskine Fellow, and gave an evening lecture last night in the city as part of the University’s general programme of reaching out to the community. Her topic: creativity, and what science has to say about its origins, how to avoid discouraging it, and how to nurture it.

Boden is one of those brilliant speakers who brings to the stage an engaging personality, a powerful intellect, and an effortless access to a weight of experience. It is very hard to summarise the breadth and depth of her opinions, and the ingenuity of her illustrative examples, so I will confine myself to giving you the bare bones, and encourage you to track down her books (listed on her webpage linked to above).

She began by assuring us that creativity is not magic or divine, neither is it a special faculty possessed by an elite, but rather an aspect of general intelligence. Most importantly, an understanding of creativity is not beyond the reach of the scientific process. What, then, is creativity? Her answer: coming up with ideas which are new, surprising, and valuable. An “idea” here can be as broad as you please, and certainly includes physical objects.

Those key words – new, surprising, and valuable – are, she said, weasel words, because they have so many meanings. Much of the confusion people have when discussing creativity is due to subtle switches between the meanings. She unpacked them as follows.

1. New was said to have two meanings.
   1. New to the individual, what she termed psychological creativity.
   2. New in the history of human thought.

   Since an idea new in history is certainly new to the individual, we only need concern ourselves with the first meaning.

2. Surprising was said to have three meanings.
   1. Statistical surprise – essentially just an unlikely event, like an outsider horse winning a race.
   2. The sort of surprise one feels when an idea, once seen, seems almost like it was waiting to be discovered all along. The idea is “not an unfamiliar sort of thing”.
   3. Impossibilistic surprise – an idea which seems completely impossible, and yet it exists!
3. Valuable has so many meanings that we couldn’t really exhaustively list them. The list would include things like utility, beauty, simplicity, rich complexity, and so on. The criteria of value were said to be (a) diverse, (b) changeable, and (c) (mostly) socio-cultural. This notion of value can thus be seen to be subjective, which rather removes it from the realm of science. No complete scientific theory of creativity seems possible. But we can still ask how creative ideas emerge, that is, how an idea new, suprising, and judged valuable has arisen.

I liked the way Boden unpacked these ideas, especially the notion of surprise. But what I found most illuminating came next, when she expanded the idea of creativity into three types. They are as follows.

1. Combinatorial creativity, consisting of an unfamiliar combination of familiar ideas. A canonical example being poetic imagery. This, apparently, is the most common definition used when people discuss creativity, and is also the most studied in the scientific literature. This type of creativity depends on the richness of associations in the human mind, on appeal to shared meanings and experiences.
2. Exploratory creativity, and
3. Transformational creativity, involving the exploration and (sometimes) transformation of a structured conceptual space. One example Boden used to illustrate exploratory creativity was a collection of perfume bottles of all sorts of shapes. She pointed out that a perfume bottle is a hollow container capable of holding a liquid, with a stopper to prevent the liquid evaporating. But the bottle artisans had explored the whole range of variations within that conceptual space – tall bottles, short bottles, round ones, square ones, small stoppers, tall stoppers, and so on. Her example of transformational creativity was Kekulé’s discovery that benzene is a ring of carbon and hydrogen atoms. Before Kerkulé, all molecules were strings, but the topological change from strings to rings transformed the conceptual space of organic chemistry.

   

Combinatorial creativity goes along with statistical surprise; exploratory creativity with the not-unfamiliar kind of surprise; and transformational creativity induces an impossibilistic surprise. The three types are not mutually exclusive, nor is there a hierarchy here.

Well, I must admit I was blown away by this categorisation. Suddenly, the aspects of the examples I carry around of inspiring creativity in the mathematical sciences neatly fitted into this list. It raises interesting questions: which kind of creativity do you notice in yourself more? Which do you find most impressive or inspiring in others? What times of day, or moods, or environments, or activities encourage which kinds of creativity in you? (Bob has asked a similar question over on Heroes Not Zombies.)

Speaking of which, Boden finished the main part of her talk with some tips for how to avoid discouraging creativity, and how to encourage it. These tips, she said, work equally well for children and adults. First, the best way to discourage creativity of all three kinds is “to slap people down when they try to do something new”. Even worse than saying “that’s wrong” is to say “that’s silly” or (even worse!) “you’re silly”. This destroys people’s ability to freely think in a creative, daring way. She pointed out that she’s not saying that there are no wrong answers, but a wrong answer comes from somewhere, from a process of thought, and if you can modify that process in an encouraging and positive way then the right answer will come, the person will learn, and will nurture their confidence and creativity.

How then to encourage creativity? Each type needs a different kind of encouragement, as follows.

1. To encourage combinatorial creativity, ensure that the person has access to a wide range of ideas, where again an “idea” can be anything from the works of Plato to a game of football. Perhaps, for a child, ask them to combine ideas in silly ways. Maybe give them two crazy ideas, and ask them to write a sentence, or a story, or paint a picture which links those ideas.
2. Exploratory creativity can only be encouraged in one way: practice! One must learn the conceptual styles, the rules and conventions of the structured conceptual space in which one works. Boden cited an interesting study in which pieces of music from various stages of the careers of famous composers were selected and played to a panel of expert judges. The composers included some who were child prodigies, composing perhaps, like Mozart, at the age of 4. The panel was not told the composer, only the year of composition, and was asked to rate the piece on how adventurous it was – in Boden’s terminology, on whether it exhibited exploratory creativity or transformational. In every single case, even for the child prodigies, it was found that their early work was exploratory, and transformational work only came after a period of around 12 years of deep and devoted immersion in musical culture and history. Practice, practice.
3. So on to transformational creativity, which obviously builds on exploratory creativity, so we at least need that first. Beyond that, encouragement to change the rules, to drop some of them, will free the individual to be transformational. They may never be, of course, but rules should be seen as breakable.

I found this discussion encouraging for mathematicians, and I hope it encourages you in your field too. It is often said of mathematicians that they produce their best work before the age of 30. I don’t know a single mathematician who thinks it is true of themselves, and yet one encounters the idea regularly. I imagine, though, that a small group of transformationally-creative mathematicians, who get the most attention, have immersed themselves in maths since they were young children, have stuck diligently with it, working hard, and so around 12 years have elapsed when they find themselves in their twenties, with few commitments and lots of energy. No wonder they work well. Some of us come to fall in love with maths much later, and perhaps never put in the sweat and tears required to reach transformational creativity, and so explore and combine throughout our whole careers. Who knows? (The host of the talk, Denis Dutton, said that he recently read a paper by the psychologist Colin Martindale in which it was said that of course creativity can be taught. Simply find something you want to study 18 hours a day every day for fun, then do it for 20 years and you will be creative.)

Finally, in the question session which followed, I asked (waaaay too many questions, one of which was) about the role of the subconscious in creative thought, especially in the sciences. I pointed out that, anecdotally at least, mathematicians seem to have their best ideas when not doing maths, such as taking a shower or walking the dog. There seems, I said, to be a period of intense cogitation, followed by incubation, followed by sudden realisation. (This has been called by Guy Claxton the “undermind” at work – see a post of mine here.)

Boden doesn’t think so. She argues, citing some wonderful studies, that what counts is rest, time away from the issue at hand. The problem is that in the period of intense thinking we get trapped in ways of looking at the issue, trapped in cycles of thinking. Time away resets our thought processes, so when we come back to the problem, our fresh eyes (and presumably the deeper understanding of the problem provided by the intense thinking) see the solution immediately.

How does that resonate with you? It makes a lot of sense to me, especially when I think back to those flashes of inspiration in the shower. They often did not come straight out of the blue during a not-thinking phase, but followed a little voice which said “let’s get back to the problem” – and then the solution appeared, usually by a feeling of stupidity for not seeing it earlier!