On creativity

I wrote here about how there are thought to be essentially only three ways in which several things can be related or connected: resemblance, contiguity in time or space, and cause or effect.

Creativity is often talked about as making connections between disparate things. For example, Steve Jobs told Wired in 1996 that "Creativity is just connecting things."

But is making connections the only way we can be creative?

A recent article by Dan Jones in Nature, reviewing three books on creativity, suggests not - depending on what you define as a "thing".

In their book The Runaway Species: How Human Creativity Remakes the World, Jones says, David Eagleman and Anthony Brandt "trace the roots of creative thinking to three key mental skills: bending, breaking and blending".

Clearly blending involves connecting two things, but what about bending and breaking? I would say these don't, or at least not if we want to look at things in the most fruitful way.

As an example of creative bending, Jones cites architect Frank Gehry's warping of the lines and planes of buildings into waves and curves (see also Zaha Hadid). Now, you could frame this as connecting unbent buildings with any of a number of things that cause the building to bend, for example: mechanical stresses; the concept that curves are beautiful; or even, to get meta about things, the suggestion that bending is a key skill at the root of creativity.

(The bending doesn't have to be physical, btw: Jones also cites Einstein's bending of how we look at the fabric of the universe with his theories of relativity. )

But this seems silly: to say that something has been connected with the idea that it would be better off bent is an unhelpfully roundabout way of saying it was bent.

Likewise breaking, which Jones exemplifies with cubist painting, also seems better thought of as a standalone process.

So it does seem that creativity is not just connecting things, as Jobs asserted: it can also be purposeful, novel changing of a single existing thing.

Indeed, it seems to me that Eagleman and Brandt have (or perhaps Jones has) overlooked various other kinds of creative changing - for example, of colour, texture, size, proportion, orientation, stiffness and surface contiguity (say, whether or not something is perforated).

So are these two subsets of creativity (connecting and changing) exhaustive - do we now have a complete taxonomy of creativity?

Jones goes on to talk about another book, Mario Livio's Why?: What Makes Us Curious. This, according to Jones, says that curiosity, and subsequently creativity, is piqued by novelty, complexity, uncertainty and conflict. So what mechanisms does creativity piqued by these prompts act through?

It occurs to me that each of these four things can be not only properties inherent to a thing one is presented with, but also properties that one can oneself introduce to a thing. Could this introduction in itself be a creative act?

Clearly bringing something into conflict entails connecting it to something else, so that's already part of our taxonomy. But what about making something more novel, more/less complex or more/less certain? Can any of these things be done without connecting something to something else, or without changing it in a way that isn't better described as simply twisting, bending, snapping it, etc?

Is, say, the solving of a complex mental problem best characterised as a creative mechanism in itself or as an abstract form of straightening / unravelling - i.e. changing?

(Holy shit. I was going to ask whether problem solving might also be better thought of as an abstract form of rearranging multiple tangled strands, and that made me realise that not only can single things be creatively changed but so too - duh - can the connections between connected things. Hence that's a third type of creativity right there, or a combination of the two primary types, if you prefer.)

Likewise, can something be made more/less certain without adding or removing something else to or from it? (Removing might seem to be another creative category, but following my holy shit moment about changing connections in the above paragraph, I'm going to lump the removal of a connection in with other changes to connections, or bracket disconnecting with connecting.)

I'm not sure, and this post is getting a bit long, so let's end by summarising:

Creativity is not just connecting. Creativity includes changing, which is more than just bending, breaking and blending; it includes connecting, which seems to be limited to likening, bringing into proximity, and affecting; it includes changing connections or disconnecting; and it might also include other things.

To be continued...

What do people do all day? #2

 “Rather than make friends, then go off down to the soda fountain or go to where the kids would hang out, I would just go home and write my scripts and cut my films. I was pretty much isolated, but I had a hobby that I was obsessed by. I would come home from school and I would not go to friends’ houses to play. I would go to my bedroom and I would sit with my little editing machine.”

Steven Spielberg as interviewed by Tom Shone for the Guardian

Calibrating life

When things turn to shit, we tell ourselves life could be worse.

I've lost my job, but I've got my health. I've lost my leg, but I've got my life. They lost their life, but they lived it well.

It helps a lot of the time. In If This is a Man, Primo Levi wrote this of his time in Auschwitz:

Strange, how in some way one always has the impression of being fortunate, how some chance happening, perhaps infinitesimal, stops us crossing the threshold of despair and allows us to live. It is raining, but it is not windy [...]

It's a good way of stopping yourself from smothering on the stench.

But what about when life gives you roses? If something good happened and a friend told you it could've been better, you'd slap them.

Unfortunately, life is always telling us it could be better, via advertising, and social media, and media of any kind, and generally having eyes and ears...

Plus, the reason you'd slap the friend is because they'd be right, and they'd have killed your buzz.

That blog post you wrote? It was good! It wasn't a novel...

When are our friends - and, more importantly, our own minds - right to tell us things could be better?

Philip Larkin is best known for his poetry, but he was also a critic. In Further Requirements, he said this about criticism:

It is no use remonstrating with a reviewer for speaking of the latest Poetry Book Club choice in terms that leave no adjectives for, say, Hardy, Tennyson, and Pope. If he tries to keep the same critical standard for the lot he will find himself unable to say, not only anything favourable, but anything at all about the month's poetry, simply because critical perspective means that if the classics are in focus then ephemera are not even visible, and vice versa.

Is the same true of life?

I think it is for things that aren't personal achievements. This morning's sunrise might not be as spectacular as that one in 1998 with Barbara on Machu Pichu, but it still looks pretty damn epic, so shut the fuck up about Peru.

This Friday night in Dalston might not be as thrilling as a first night at Glastonbury, but I've still got chills up my spine...

It's tricky when things get personal, though.

When I write what I think is a good blog post, should I remind myself that it wasn't a novel? It would kill my buzz, but maybe all those small buzzes from all those small blog posts give me just enough satisfaction to stop me from ever writing that novel, and maybe the buzz from the novel would be a whole other world of buzz I'll never experience because I blog?

When I write a good article at work, should I remind myself that I haven't exposed any corruption or impeached any presidents? Would I be more likely to topple presidents if I was that hard on myself? And if I did eventually take one down, would I be able to feel happy about it, or would I have lost the ability to feel anything positive?

Likewise every achievement that provides small satisfactions or burns off small frustrations. If I didn't have Tinder, would I eventually get frustrated enough to approach people I like in bars, and if I did would I take more of them home? If I didn't run and do weights, would I go to Syria to fight Isis, and if I did would I consider my life more worthwhile when it ended 3 months later than if I'd lived 60 more years in suburbia?

There's danger in letting off steam as well as in bottling it up, I suspect.

In general, I think we have to re-calibrate our expectations every once in a while to make sure the ephemera remain visible. I don't think there's any danger in this: I'm pretty sure nobody has ever blown their mind like a set of overloaded speakers through an unexpected pleasure surge. There is no Stendhal syndrome of the streets.

But for maximising your own potential, I don't know. We can't all be Thomas Hardy, but nor would Hardy have been if he hadn't tried.

Hungover thinking - further evidence #1

I've written before about how hangovers can be conducive to thinking. I still don't know how well explored this has been by others elsewhere, but I was pleased to see Tom Hodgkinson ask Louis Theroux about it in the February 2016 issue of The Idler, which Tom edits.

Tom asks: "What about drinking and being hungover? You know how people say, and we probably all feel it, work can be quite fun when you're hungover. You can be more creative. Like some kind of barrier's been released."

Louis doesn't really address the question, instead talking about times when he feels he's been sub-par due to being hungover. I wonder whether Tom has written about it before...?

It's a pretty good interview, anyway. This is the first time I've read The Idler, but probably not the last.

I don't have permission to post my photo of this, but I'm hoping they won't mind since I'm basically giving them a free advert. The cover illustration is by Ellie Foreman-Peck.