Wouter Boon

Defining
Creativity

The Art and Science
of Great Ideas

Boon Publishing

Colophon

Boon Publishing

mail@definingcreativity.com

Text: Wouter Boon

Design: Rick de Zwart and Hans van der Baan

ePub: CO2 Premedia

Copyright © 2014 Wouter Boon

This ebook is based on the 2nd print; July 2016

ISBN 978 90 825652 1 8

www.definingcreativity.com

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owners. Every reasonable attempt has been made to identify owners of copyright. Any errors or omissions brought to the publishers attention will be corrected in subsequent editions.

For mom and dad, who created me.

Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1 – Building Life

First of all, creativity is defined by novelty. Only things that have never been made before are called creative. The Big Bang – forming our universe, planet earth, and eventually us, Homo sapiens – was the very first act of creation. What today’s man-made creations have in common with nature’s creations is that everything is built with existing building blocks.

Chapter 2 – The Value of Originality

Many of the things we create are new, but not everything we create is necessarily valued as creative by the world around us. The difference between being personally and historically creative is that the latter form is appreciated by a larger audience than just ourselves or our peers. So, even though nowadays everyone has the tools to create new things, not everyone is objectively creative.

Chapter 3 – Cultural Change

The experts of a creative domain are the gatekeepers that decide whether or not new ideas are valuable and allowed to enter. This makes creativity a cultural phenomenon, which also means that once a new idea enters the domain it changes that domain. However, convincing the experts of the value of an idea is not always easy.

Chapter 4 – Motivated by Personality

In order to be creative one needs both intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. Intrinsic motivation comes from one’s personal drive, while extrinsic motivation is fed by external rewards. Creative minds need more or less opposite personality traits to feed these different motivations, which is why, statistically, they are more likely to have mood disorders.

Chapter 5 – Mastering the Rules

Knowledge is the basis of all creativity, because if you want to change a domain, you need to understand the rules that define it. There are technical and cultural rules that tell you how to create within a domain. Mastering these rules is not just about being knowledgeable, but also about skill, which requires both talent and practice to obtain.

Chapter 6 – Unfamiliar Combinations

The essence of creativity is making unfamiliar combinations of familiar ideas, thus merging two or more ideas into something new. That’s why a flexible mind is just as important as a wide knowledge database. In some domains making unfamiliar combinations is more difficult than in others, because there are fewer rules or they are more rigidly defined.

Chapter 7 – Problem Solved

Measuring creative talent is not easy, because creativity requires different talents and skills. However, the thing all creativity has in common is that it is used for solving problems. Solving problems requires divergent thinking – coming up with as many potential solutions as possible – as well as convergent thinking – coming up with the best solution.

Chapter 8 – Preparing for Insights

Finding a creative solution is often like solving a puzzle with an essential piece missing. When the piece is found we experience an insight – or ‘aha’ moment. An insight places what is familiar in a different conceptual context. That’s why in order to find an insight we must thoroughly research the conceptual domain and find inspiration outside of it.

Chapter 9 – Unconscious Sensibility

Preparation and evaluation are the indispensable conscious stages of the creative process. Our unconscious brain, however, is better at filtering and processing data and intuitive decision-making. It is therefore the unconscious brain that generates the crucial insights during the unconscious stage of incubation.

Chapter 10 – Evolution Explores

The largest portion of the creative process consists of exploring a proverbial map that is still partly undiscovered. Because we often don’t know where we are heading, serendipity is important for finding our destination. In fact, the less detailed the map, the more important Darwinian trial and error becomes.

Chapter 11 – Connected Visions

We can expand the capacity of our brain by means of a notebook because it allows us to consciously play with ideas outside our brain. Trough the internet we can also easily expand our knowledge and interact with others. Interaction between individuals catalyses the creative process. Great ideas, however, are always built with a single-minded vision.

Creativity Defined

Thanks

Sources

Introduction

Omnipresent

Creativity has become a buzz word over the past decades. Most of us want to be called creative – even companies and governments. The reason is that creativity represents a special ability and thus gives us a certain status. But it’s not just that. Creativity is extremely handy. It is an invisible tool for making stuff, solving problems, and innovation. And it’s not just practical; it is also a form of self-expression and experienced as enjoyable. For all these different reasons artists, inventors, and scientists fruitfully use it to create works of art, products, and theories. Creativity, however, is not just reserved for a creative elite, but also constantly used in everyday life by people who are generally not regarded as creative. It is thus used by everyone and omnipresent in the world around us.

Illusive

Nevertheless, most people regard the concept of creativity as difficult to grasp. Even scientists have a hard time formulating the ‘laws of creativity.’ One of the reasons for this is that not all output of creativity is necessarily regarded as ‘creative.’ And that’s because there is a difference between being personally creative, which means that you simply create something that you’ve never created before, and creating something historical, because it changes the way people view the world. In the latter meaning, something is only regarded creative when the experts in a domain judge it a valuable addition to the domain, which turns creativity into a label attached to certain ideas, and thus a subjective, cultural and dynamic construct.

Another reason why creativity is not really an exact science is that it’s not ruled by one single mental process or personality trait; we use different parts of our brain and different personalities to be creative. For example, creative minds are known for being autonomous – even egocentric – while at the same time it is important that they interact socially in order to learn from others or convince them of the greatness of an idea. What makes creativity even more complicated is that different creative domains require different cognitive skills. Inventing a rocket is obviously not the same as painting on a canvas. And making a film is not the same as composing music.

Creativity is also illusive, because we still don’t know exactly what happens in our brain when we are being creative. Which is why it is hard to measure someone’s creativity. There are psychological tests on creative potential, but their predictive capacity is only limited. And even if we know that we are creative – because everyone tells us so – we can’t simply evoke it whenever we want. Sometimes, when we are looking hard for it we cannot find it. Then, when we lay the creative project aside, the creativity suddenly comes to us in the form of an ‘aha’ moment. But although creativity is subjective, complex, and illusive it is definitely not indefinable.

Comprehensive

Defining Creativity explains the meaning of creativity in a comprehensive manner. It covers the most important aspects of creativity – sourced from a wide variety of established books – and approaches the theme from completely different perspectives, such as from a philosophical, historical, cultural, psychological, biological, and even evolutionary viewpoint. To prevent the book from becoming too theoretical, it explains the different angles by describing the ideas, behaviour, and works of some of the most historic artistic, inventive, and scientific minds. In a way this book is therefore also a tribute to the most well-known creative minds, such as Charles Darwin, Vincent van Gogh, and Steve Jobs. Their works, and that of many other geniuses, are still enjoyed and admired today. Not just the ones that tickle our senses, such as films, books, songs, and paintings, but also those that have innovated our world and help us to adapt to changing environments. It is on these great ideas that we’ve built our entire world and will keep building our world in the future ahead.

1.

Building Life

If I had to define life in a word,
it would be life is creation

Claude Bernard

Bringing into existence

The standard definition of creativity that you will find in a dictionary is something along the lines of “The ability to bring something into existence.” If we go by this definition, acts of creativity are not exclusively reserved for human beings, but can also be attributed to nature’s creations. The very first natural act of creation – as far as modern science knows – is the Big Bang. This huge explosion created our universe some 13.8 billion years ago. Subsequently it created planet earth, about 4.5 billion years ago, and eventually us, the modern Homo sapiens, roughly two hundred thousand years ago. The Christian equivalent of the Big Bang, God, had a similar act of creation. The Christian Bible’s first sentence even literally describes it: “In the beginning God created the Heaven and the Earth.” What both acts of creation have in common with human creativity is that they created something new. This is the first important attribute that makes something creative; bringing something into existence that is entirely new.

Building blocks

There is one important difference between the scientific and the Christian conception of our world; the Big Bang used existing building blocks to create the universe, while God created something out of nothing. You might be inclined to think that the Big Bang also created the universe out of nothing, since we don’t know exactly what was there before the Big Bang. However, scientists generally agree that our universe was made out of something. It was extremely tiny – about 1 billionth of the size of an atom – but it was something. Greek scholars 2,000 years ago already philosophised about creation ex nihilo – out of nothing. They reasoned that this couldn’t be possible, and that whatever created the universe should share nature’s properties. In other words, creating out of nothing is as possible as conjuring a rabbit from an empty hat. Everything created in our universe, human creations included, is built with existing building blocks. There is even a continuum between natural and man-made creations; from the very first brainless prebiotic reactions on this planet to human beings being able to intelligently create physical objects.

Let’s start with prebiotic chemistry creating the very first building blocks. When earth was still an extremely unfriendly environment for human beings to live on, a handful of basic molecules, such as ammonia, methane, water, and carbon dioxide, combined into new forms by simply reacting with each other – sometimes aided by a bolt of lightning. Methane and oxygen, for example, could react to form formaldehyde and water. Four billion years ago only a very limited amount of reactions were possible. Then, after many combinations, the first step to building an actual living organism was the creation of a cell. Proteins could form the membranes that served as the boundary of a cell. Once sugar molecules combined into nucleic acids, DNA could be composed, the building block essential for creating human beings.

Intelligent life

When DNA-based life made its entrance, it was constantly steered into new directions. This was possible because DNA is susceptible to error, which leads to mutations in the code and creates differences within a species. As the naturalist Charles Darwin described in his famous evolution theory, these differences can be an advantage in the struggle for survival in an environment that constantly changes due to climate changes, exploding volcanoes, and meteor impacts. According to Darwin’s theory those that survive pass on their advantageous traits to their offspring, thus slowly changing their species. This is also how, relatively recently, fish started to walk on land, which turned them into mammals; mammals started to climb into trees, which turned them into apes; and apes climbed out of the trees again, which turned them into human beings – in the shortest summary possible. The latter step was a radical one, since almost suddenly life turned much more intelligent.

The first intelligent acts of creation came from the apes that left the trees and started to walk upright some 3.3 million years ago. Due to their increasing intelligence they were able to turn stones into tools by sharpening them and use them as hand axes. 1.8 million years later, our direct ancestor Homo erectus (‘upright man’) improved these rudimentary tools into smoother teardrop-shaped axes and thus created the first ‘human’ piece of technology. Once Homo erectus became skilful at shaping these stones, they were made in their thousands, not just as tools, but also because our ancestor enjoyed making them for aesthetic reasons – and maybe even to show off skill. These stones can therefore also be seen as the first pieces of art. Once Homo erectus knew how to make tools and weapons, it was able to kill bigger animals, form bigger social groups, and learn how to set up camps and fires, allowing its brain to grow steadily. In no time – in the light of the existence of planet earth, of course – hominoids became extremely ingenious and productive. If you look at the complete continuum between natural and human creations, we’ve become quite advanced. While four billion years ago a carbon atom could only form a few hundred configurations, today we can use that same carbon atom to build anything we can imagine, from a virus to a skyscraper.

The thing that makes human creation special compared to natural creation is that we create consciously and are not solely directed by external, physical and chemical forces. And we’re not indifferent about it; we actually enjoy being creative. Which is why today we continuously bring a wide variety of things into existence; art, stories, theories, performances, computer programs, tools, buildings, and so on. And, as mentioned earlier, we always use existing building blocks.