Creativity, Expertise, Grit
The Royal Pavilion, at Brighton in the south of England, was influenced at the end of the eighteenth century by Romanticism in which the East was seen as exotic; the building is a “stately pleasure dome,” of the kind that Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote about in “Kubla Khan.”
Creativity was once thought to occur as inspiration to people who became famous artists and scientists. It is now clear that it is important for us all. Expertise, as studied by Anders Ericsson, is the ability to do something so well that others find it hard to understand how. Ericsson and colleagues say it requires about 10,000 hours of practice, which needs to include setting oneself problems one can’t yet solve. We may be able increase our abilities, including our creative ones, and fulfill our aspirations, by what Angela Duckworth calls grit, making choices and following them with determination and persistence.
Here are the first five lines of “Kubla Khan,” one of the most famous poems in the English language.
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
You can see an example of a stately pleasure dome of the kind referred to in the poem, at the opening of this chapter. When Samuel Taylor Coleridge published this poem in 1816, he accompanied it with an account of how he wrote it.
In the summer of the year 1797, the Author then in ill health, had retired to a lonely farmhouse between Porlock and Linton … The Author continued for about three hours in a profound sleep, at least of the external senses, during which time he has the most vivid confidence, that he could not have composed less than two to three hundred lines; if that indeed can be called composition in which all the images rose up before him as things, with a parallel production of the corresponding expressions, without any sensation or consciousness of effort. On awakening he appeared to himself to have a distinct recollection of the whole, and taking his pen, ink, and paper, instantly and eagerly wrote down the lines that are here preserved.
The poem is about art, the sacred river that runs through society, that fertilizes it, but that also provokes conflict. Here are its last lines, which are about the artist or, perhaps one should say, The Artist.
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.
For Coleridge, The Artist is a special person, a genius, set apart from society, in touch with the gods. His account, in the early part of the Romantic era, has been influential; it’s partly due to him that we think of artists as inspired.
In psychology, a change has taken place to upset the idea of creativity as unusual, a characteristic of only a precious few. We are all creative. Donald Winnicott suggests that an important principle is that it’s creativity
more than anything else that makes the individual feel that life is worth living … In a tantalizing way many individuals have experienced just enough of creative living to recognize that for most of their time they are living uncreatively, as if caught up in the creativity of someone else, or of a machine.1
Creativity takes place in what Winnicott called the space-in-between (discussed in chapter 15), which originates as the space between the baby and a mother or other caregiver. Taking up Coleridge’s emphasis on art, it’s in this space that the mind can expand without persuasion or coercion. It’s in this space, with written art, that the reader can take up and turn over the words as she or he imagines the world the writer suggests, and in this way the imagined world becomes the reader’s own. This kind of experience is a creative continuation of childhood play.
An influential researcher on creativity is Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who discovered a sense of flow in people as they engage themselves creatively in what they are doing. One of the people Csikszentmihalyi interviewed was Rico Medellin, who had been working for five years on an assembly line in a factory that made movie projectors. His task was to perform a certain operation on the projector as it arrived at his station, and to do it nearly 600 times a day. The operation was supposed to take 43 seconds. Rico had carefully thought about what he needed to do, and how to use his tools most efficiently. His best average over a day was 28 seconds per operation. Many people would find this job intolerable, but Rico had trained himself like an Olympic athlete and said, “It is better than anything else … It’s a whole lot better than watching TV.”2 He told Csikszentmihalyi that he was taking evening courses in electronics, and when he received his diploma he would get a more complex job. One can imagine that he would approach it with the same enthusiasm.
Among Csikszentmihalyi’s other interviewees was Pam Davis, a lawyer in a small partnership. She would spend hours in the library finding references, and outlining possible courses of action for her senior partners. Often she would be so involved that she would forget lunch and not even notice when it got dark. Even when she was frustrated, she would recognize what caused the frustration and think of it as an obstacle that she would discover how to overcome. Then there was a dancer: she said that when a performance went well, “Your concentration is very complete. Your mind isn’t wandering, you are not thinking of something else.”3 A rock climber said: “You are so involved in what you are doing [that] you aren’t thinking of yourself as separate from the immediate activity.” A mother spoke of how she spent time with her daughter. “She reads to me and I read to her, and that’s a time when I sort of lose touch with the rest of the world.”
We can cultivate flow, says Csikszentmihalyi, by choosing to do what we are doing. It’s a striking idea. It’s not a matter of waiting for the world to present us with things. We can create for ourselves meaningful activity; even sometimes when in the course of our life we don’t have much influence, we can nevertheless choose to do what we are doing.
If we have a chosen pursuit, as Coleridge did in poetry, we can set ourselves problems in it, take on goals that are sufficiently specific that we know whether they are being achieved, know how to work out the best ways of achieving them, and observe effects of our actions.
There’s now a good deal of research to show that it’s in this way that we can be creative. If we were to immerse ourselves in poetry, become engaged in it, write and develop many poems, it’s possible we might even have a dream from which we would awake with a poem in mind. That wouldn’t happen without deep interest in the subject, without working on the writing and improving of poems over many years, without full engagement. Without these activities, it wouldn’t have happened to Coleridge.
Expertise
“Expertise” is a term for the state in which, in a particular activity—poetry, working on the manufacture of movie projectors, dancing—a person has become noticeably different, and far more proficient than novices. Over a long period, the expert has amassed a store of theoretical and practical knowledge in a particular domain. Expertise becomes a way of acting in the domain about which novices say, “I don’t know how anyone could do that.”
An early piece of research on expertise was by Adriaan de Groot, who played chess for the Netherlands in the 1930s, and was also a psychologist. His PhD thesis was translated into English as Thought and Choice in Chess. After a one-page preamble on the literature of chess, de Groot turns to discussing work by Alfred Binet (who, as we have discussed in chapter 4, with Théodore Simon, was the first to measure intelligence in children). Binet and Henneguy considered how some expert chess players are able to play and win games while blindfolded. They announce their moves, and the moves of their opponent are told to them. These people can remember chess positions, and the course of a game.
Figure 25. Chess board position reconstructed from Adriaan de Groot’s experiment, from a game that had been published but was not well known, which chess players at different levels were asked to remember. Source: Position reconstructed by Keith Oatley, from de Groot, A. (1978). Thought and choice in chess. The Hague: Mouton, p. 326.
De Groot performed a startling experiment. He asked people who were at different levels in chess, including a grand master, a master, a person who was fairly good, and a person who was a novice, to look for five seconds at a board position that you can see in figure 25 (from a game that had been played, and published in an obscure place). Then the people were asked to reconstruct the position they had seen. Each person was given a score out of 22 (the number of pieces in the original position), with one point for each piece correctly placed. The grand master scored 22. He placed all the pieces correctly. The master scored 21 (an extra white pawn had been inserted). The good player scored 16, and the novice scored, guess what? Nine—George Miller’s magical number: 7 + 2.4
One hypothesis might be that whereas most of us are stuck in our short-term memory with the magic number of seven plus or minus two slots, some unusual people, who have the ability to become chess masters and grand masters, have a short-term memory that is three times as capacious.
The real answer is different. Expert chess players have thought so much about chess, played so many games, read so many chess books, and analyzed so many positions that when they look at a board position from a game that has been played, and are asked to remember it, instead of filling each slot in short-term memory with a single piece on a single square, they can see how a game has gone, see how it’s developing, and operate with whole patterns of pieces: meaningful groupings of a kind that might occur in a game. William Chase and Herbert Simon replicated de Groot’s findings, and call these groupings “chunks.” In figure 25, the pieces in the board’s top-left hand corner are a chunk, recognizable as “white-castled-on-the-Queen’s-side.” When master chess players are asked to memorize random positions, not derived from games that have been played, they are no better than novices.
Another result based on memory was found by Virpi Kalakoski and Pertti Saariluoma for taxi drivers in Helsinki. The taxi drivers’ memories for street names on real routes was far better than that of novices, but on randomly organized lists of street names they were no better than novices. Eleanor Maguire and colleagues found that taxi drivers in London had the hippocampus area of their brains (a part involved with the making of mental maps) enlarged as compared with non–taxi drivers, and this size was associated with the number of years spent taxi driving.
When we learn a new skill, we are conscious of much of what we do. We think through moves deliberately. We might remember doing this when we learned to drive a car, or play a musical instrument, or use our mobile phone. When we reach an expert level of performance in that skill, we no longer have to think through moves, one by one. We have formed schemas that assimilate necessary features of the particular world, and orchestrate necessary skills. We have achieved intuitions about what to notice, and what to do. We simply seem to know.
Anders Ericsson has argued that in many domains—chess, professions such as science, the arts, athletics—people typically work for ten years before they achieve expertise.5 In more recent research it has been found that to reach excellence in most domains, one needs to put in 10,000 hours of practice. That comes out to three hours a day for ten years, comparable to the amount of time spent doing academic work in grade school, or ten hours a day for three years, about the amount needed to achieve a PhD. It isn’t just a matter of putting in the time. It is a matter of setting oneself problems that one doesn’t know how to solve, learning from mistakes, receiving tutoring and training, and committing oneself to understand and improve everything one can in the domain.
Here is what Ericsson, Raif Krampe, and Clemens Tesch-Römer say:
High levels of deliberate practice are necessary to attain expert level performance. Our theoretical framework can also provide a sufficient account of the major facts about the nature and scarcity of expert performance. Our account does not depend on scarcity of innate ability (talent) … individual differences in ultimate performance can largely be accounted for by differential amounts of past and current levels of practice.6
“Expert level performance” echoes the rhetoric of advertising. It’s far more important to understand how to be ordinary than to think the extraordinary is all that matters. Nonetheless, expertise is a matter of psychological interest. One reason is that if we want to become better in the skills essential to a project or activity that is close to our heart, the principle of deliberate practice seems to be common across domains. Another reason is that when we read a book, or listen to a piece of music, or watch a football game, we may just want to relax, but often we want to improve our minds. To do this, we are likely to get the most improvement by taking in the best.
Ericsson’s theory has been influential, but it has become controversial. There are now many studies in which the relation of practice to expertise has been measured. There is evidence that practice changes the structure of the brain.7 At the same time the associations between amounts of deliberate practice and expertise in a domain are not large. Brooke Macnamara and her colleagues have shown in a large meta-analysis of 111 independent samples, that involved 11,135 participants, that for professions the amount of variance explained by deliberate practice was 1 percent, for education 4 percent, for sports 18 percent, for music 21 percent, and for games 26 percent.
Why are these associations relatively small? It isn’t that deliberate practice is unimportant. One could not become a master chess player, a brain surgeon, a concert violinist, or an Olympic athlete without a great deal of practice. One reason the associations are smaller than one might expect is that those who aren’t at the top but who aspire to it, all put in about the same amounts of deliberate practice.
Fredric Ullén and his colleagues present evidence that to attain expertise, not just practice is involved. Other factors include our genetic talents, the physiology of our brains and bodies, people we meet, motivation, encouragements from families, facilities for training. These researchers propose a multi-factor theory: a gene-times-environment interaction theory, which provides a more complete explanation for understanding expertise, and for conducting research on the topic. Ericsson has of course replied to criticisms of his theory and his critics have replied to him.8
The conclusion is that if you want to become really good at something, you do need to practice a lot, but there are also physical and mental prerequisites. You are unlikely to make it as an Olympic high jumper if as an adult you are five feet tall. To become a poet, you need some verbal fluency, and you need to be very interested in poetry.
Creative Thinking and Evolution
Howard Gardner has written an engaging book of psychological biographies of creative people, who include Albert Einstein, Pablo Picasso, Martha Graham, and Mahatma Gandhi. Another such book on the psychology of creativity is The Mind’s Best Work by David Perkins. In it he talks the reader through many of the ideas that have developed on creativity and the psychological research that has taken place. He discusses Coleridge’s theory of inspiration, Arthur Koestler’s hypothesis that creativity involves seeing an association between two previously unrelated ideas, Edward de Bono’s programs for lateral thinking, and he relates Marie Curie’s discovery of radioactivity.9
Perhaps most central to understanding creativity is Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection. According to this, Nature has generated all the forms of plant and animal life, including our selves, and enabled them to thrive, each one in its ecological niche. In this Nature has been extraordinarily creative: think of a whale and a hummingbird, think of an orchid, think of how the human eye works. To do this, evolution has first produced different possibilities. Darwin called this Variation. Second, it produced more individuals than were needed for replacement. Darwin called this Superabundance. Then it enabled some characteristics to go forward while other characteristics became extinct. Darwin called this Selection.
Donald Campbell proposed that human creative thought is based on essentially the same processes. In creativity, he argues there is production of wide and frequent variation of ideas; then comes selection among the ideas. He stresses that, as in evolution, variation is blind, without direction. Maja Djikic and I reviewed this idea and offered evidence that in creative writing, variation is not blind.10 Creative writers read what they have written, and use this to guide the variations they next generate.
Artists of other kinds—painters, sculptors, musicians—do the same thing. Mihaly Csikszentmilalyi and Jacob Getsels studied students at art school and gave them a set of objects that they were asked to arrange and then paint as a still life picture. They found that the more a student artist manipulated the objects, the more arrangements she or he tried out, and the more they thought that further change would be possible to their painting, the better artists they became seven years later.
Both the artist and the scientist explore and, depending on what they discover, they generate new possibilities in the course of further exploration. Part of the exploration is to determine what to ask. Albert Einstein and Léopold Infeld put it like this:
The formulation of a problem is far more often essential than its solution … To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle requires creative imagination.11
Creativity and Emotion
In what may be the best theory of art that has been produced in recent times, Robin Collingwood proposes that art properly so called does not involve having a finished product in mind, in the way that in cooking one may follow a recipe to produce a known dish: porridge or coq au vin. Rather, the artist takes some state, usually an emotion-based state, that she or he does not understand, and externalizes it in a language—of words, or paint, or dance, or a jazz solo—in order to explore and understand it better. To get a sense of the artist, he says, imagine a man as follows:
At first he is conscious of having an emotion, but not conscious of what this emotion is. All he is conscious of is a perturbation or excitement, which he feels going on within him, but of whose nature he is ignorant. While in this state, all he can say about his emotion is: “I feel … I don’t know how I feel.” From this helpless and oppressed condition he extricates himself by doing something which we call expressing himself. This is an activity which has something to do with the thing we call language: he expresses himself by speaking. It also has something to with consciousness: the emotion expressed is the emotion of whose nature the person who feels it is no longer unconscious.12
In written, visual, and musical art, the artist puts something out there to pass it on to someone who will become engaged with the art. But prior to this, and equally important, is that the work in progress can be passed on to oneself, so that the generation of new possibilities is not blind, but guided. Darwin himself was an example: he undertook the exploratory voyage on the Beagle, which lasted nearly five years, and then spent much of the period after he had returned in 1836 making notes and reading them, exploring possibilities, reading, discussing, thinking things through, in order to conceive and write (in a first private draft of 1842) his evolutionary theory of the origin of species.13
Incubation
In 1908, Henri Poincaré wrote:
The genesis of mathematical creation is a problem which should intensely interest the psychologist. For fifteen days I strove to prove that there could not be any functions like those I have since called Fuchsian functions … every day I seated myself at my work table, stayed an hour or two, tried a great number of combinations and reached no results … Just at this time I left Caen … The changes of travel made me forget my mathematical work … At the moment when I put my foot on the step [of an omnibus] the idea came to me, without anything in my former thoughts seeming to have paved the way for it, that the transformations I had used to define the Fuchsian functions were identical with those of non-Euclidian geometry.14
Based on Poincaré’s account, Graham Wallas published The Art of Thought, in which he proposed that creative thought has four phases. First comes Preparation. You must work on a problem, work on it a lot, think about it deeply. Then you must put it aside, as Poincaré did when he went on his travels. During this period, which Wallas calls Incubation, the unconscious can be at work in ways that the conscious mind doesn’t know about. Then comes Illumination, when the unconscious tells our conscious self of a possible solution. Last comes Verification, when one compares the new insight to the world to see whether it will really work. In an experimental study, Catherine Patrick tested Wallas’s theory in an experiment in which she asked poets and non-poets to look at a picture, and write a poem about it. The non-poets wrote about the picture itself, and what it suggested. The poets wrote in a way that was recognizable as their usual published work, and they put more imagination and meaning into their poem. Patrick found some evidence for incubation in that when a person had an idea, then after exploring other approaches, this person would often come back to it.
Grit
An idea that became popular two hundred years ago in Europe, in the early stages of what became known as the Romantic Era, was of Nature: somewhere to visit, something for artists to depict, something a person could express of themselves without artificiality. If someone did something really well, this person might be called “a natural.” The Romantic idea is that ability as an artist, as a scientist, as an athlete, comes as a gift. As an idea of how a person who is interested in producing something worthwhile—perhaps a novel, perhaps a best time in a marathon, perhaps a good plan for city transportation, perhaps a beautiful garden—the idea of being a natural is not so helpful. As the literature on expertise shows, the ability to do such things doesn’t just fall out of the air. It requires committing oneself to a project, with effort over a period of years. It requires putting in time and practice. Grit is the motivation, the passion, the determination, to keep at it.
The idea of grit has been developed by Angela Lee Duckworth, who completed her Bachelor of Arts degree in neurobiology at Harvard and earned a Master of Science degree in neuroscience at Oxford. She took a highly paid job as a management consultant, then gave it up to teach seventh-grade mathematics at the Learning Project, an alternative public school in New York, and then at another school in San Francisco. After teaching, she pursued a PhD and now she is a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. Her book, Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance, became a New York Times bestseller.
In 2007, with colleagues, Duckworth published a study in which the researchers found that success in Ivy League universities, and at West Point Military Academy, did not relate to IQ, but was predicted by the Big Five personality trait of Conscientiousness. In addition, a measure called Grit, of perseverance in long-term goals, which has a large component of Conscientiousness, contributed further to predictions of success.
In another study, Duckworth (with colleagues who included Ericsson) conducted research to see what it took for people to do well at the United States National Spelling Bee. The researchers looked to see which of three activities predicted success: deliberate practice (studying words and memorizing them alone), doing practice quizzes given by others, and reading for pleasure. The results were that although deliberate practice was the most effortful and least enjoyable of these methods, it was the best preparation for doing well in spelling bees. Grit is the trait of passionate determination to engage in an activity, and it was the grittiest people who did more deliberate practice and succeeded in spelling bees.
Early in her book, Duckworth cites a principle that William James suggested in a paper of 1907, which he published in Science, then and now the world’s foremost scientific journal. In the article James writes:
Compared with what we ought to be, we are only half awake. Our fires are damped, our drafts are checked. We are making use of only a small part of our possible mental resources … men the world over possess amounts of resource, which only exceptional individuals push to their extremes of use.15
We can make more of these resources, says Duckworth, by grit. We can make our lives meaningful, by discovering something in which we are interested, be it gardening, friendship, or science. Perhaps we find, unexpectedly, that we have a talent, and exercising it is satisfying. We can come to know that, for our selves, it is important to do a certain kind of thing in life, perhaps raise a family, perhaps work in a refugee camp. Then we get more deeply into it, immerse ourselves in it, find ourselves engaged in it, find ourselves being creative, becoming more expert.
In part, what is involved is interest, perhaps genetic, perhaps due to some accident of the environment. How intensely, how satisfyingly, we pursue a project that has become meaningful to us will depend in part on perseverance, grit.
