CREATIVITY
University of California–San Bernardino researcher James Kaufman knows the recipe for creativity. It’s equal parts intrinsic motivation, experience, and something he calls low personal inhibition.
Intrinsic motivation is pretty self-explanatory, but beware the danger of “replacing intrinsic motivation and a natural curiosity with external rewards,” says Kaufman. If a parent wants a child to become a creative pianist, the parent should encourage interest in the piano but not incentivize this interest with ice cream. Creativity blooms in fields you’re drawn to, not in fields into which you’re pushed.
Experience might sound like an odd ingredient to creativity—we like to believe that creativity springs from nothingness like Venus emerging on the half shell. But in fact, it comes from extensive practice. Kaufman’s research has shown that creative people are hard workers with background knowledge and expertise in their creative domains. “It’s the ‘learn the rules so you can break them’ approach,” he says.
Finally, to intrinsic motivation and experience, truly creative people add low personal inhibition, which Kaufman explains with the following example: “Usually when you walk into a hotel lobby, you don’t start shouting profanity. This isn’t because you never have the fleeting urge to shout profanity, but because you inhibit this urge,” he says. Which is not to say that all creative people shout profanity in hotel lobbies—but they tend to feel less personally constrained by societal norms.
Each ingredient sounds straightforward, but when you look at the mix, you can see why so few people successfully cook up creativity. It requires motivation independent of external reward, years of painstaking preparation in the field, and the rare pairing of conscientiousness with abandon. Also, while these three factors open the possibility of creativity, expressing it also takes perseverance. For example, Dean Keith Simonton of UC Davis found that the nineteenth-century scientists who wrote the most-cited papers also wrote the least-cited papers. In other words, even with motivation, experience, and low personal inhibition, not everything a creative person creates will be creative (even an industrious and talented woodchuck will not always succeed in chucking wood). Instead, contribution is the hit-or-miss product of somewhat random chance—the more scientific papers or sonatas or sonnets a person writes, the greater chance that one or more will be especially creative.
So the basic ingredients of lifelong creativity are a tricky brew.
Luckily, there are some mind-sets and strategies that can boost the short-term expression of creativity. Learning these can help you next time you’re presented with a problem requiring “out-of-the-box” thinking. Following are some of science’s best tricks for boosting creativity.
INSPIRED, DIVERGENT THINKING
Consider the Mad Hatter’s classic riddle, as infuriatingly written by Lewis Carroll: “Why is a raven like a writing desk?” Alice gives up, but you should not. Instead you can train your brain to come up with creative solutions to questions that, like this one, require divergent thinking.
Whereas convergent thinking describes narrowing down possibilities until converging on the one correct answer, divergent thinking is its opposite—you start with given conditions and create many possibilities, such as how a raven could possibly be like a writing desk, or the possible uses of a drinking straw. And while ravens and writing desks might be a bit silly, there are plenty of real-world conundrums that are rewarded by this ability to brainstorm many possible solutions and draw unexpected conclusions.
First consider what Andreas Fink of the Austrian Institute of Psychology saw when he watched subjects’ brains with fMRI when he asked them to come up with creative, alternative uses for everyday objects such as bricks or paper clips. First Fink had participants do it cold. Then after an appropriate interval he had them reflect on their ideas and try it again. Finally, he presented participants with others’ ideas and had them complete the task a third and final time.
Here’s the punch line: unlike the first two conditions, being confronted with others’ creative ideas sparked creativity in his participants—they came up with more, creative uses for umbrellas and tennis balls and the like. Fink and colleagues saw this jump in creativity as increased activity in areas of the brain responsible for memory, attention, and language processing—exactly paralleling the three ingredients of creativity: experience, intrinsic motivation, and low personal inhibition. Perhaps this “idea sharing,” as Fink calls it, could be the key to historical pockets of creativity, like Florence of the Medicis or the Harlem Renaissance or China’s Tang dynasty. In any case, the point here is that experiencing creative ideas will make you more creative.
So before diving into the Carroll-esque divergent-thinking riddles below, prime your own creativity by considering some creative answers to Carroll’s first, famous riddle—a raven is like a writing desk because: (A) The notes for which they are noted are not noted for being musical notes (Sam Loyd, 1914); (B) Poe wrote on both (Loyd); (C) There is a b in “both” and an n in “neither” (Aldous Huxley, 1928); (D) They both come with inky quills (anonymous); (E) Neither is made of cheese (no applause, please).
1. How is a butterfly like a sunbonnet?
2. How is a platypus like a pencil sharpener?
3. How is a pumpkin like a propeller?
4. How is an emu like a kazoo?
5. How is a rabbit like a coffee cup?
6. How is a bicycle like an electric mixer?
7. How is a birdhouse like a bowling ball?
8. How is an old dog like a paper mill?
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THE BOOK OF NONSENSE
Stanford’s Margaret Boden says that “unpredictability is often said to be the essence of creativity. But unpredictability is not enough. At the heart of creativity lie constraints. Random processes alone can produce only first-time curiosities and not radical surprises.” This is why my answer to the raven-and-writing-desk riddle in the previous exercise is so much less interesting than the first four: the fact that neither is made of cheese is unpredictable but sidesteps the problem’s constraints. Instead, a truly creative solution is more than mere novelty or unpredictability. “Constraints and unpredictability, familiarity and surprise, are somehow combined in original thinking,” Boden writes.
As an example of constraints that allow creativity, Boden mentions limericks. “Limericks cannot be written in blank verse, but some ‘space’ for choice exists,” she writes. So let’s train our creativity within constraints by completing some famous limericks, drawn from the classic 1846 Book of Nonsense by English poet and artist Edward Lear. In each of the below, the final three lines of the limerick are missing. Complete them according to the rules of rhyme, as well as your own taste and moral compass. Once you’re done, you can search online for Lear’s completions. The first is from Lear and demonstrates the limerick rhyme scheme.
There was an Old Man with a beard,
Who said, “It is just as I feared!”
Two Owls and a Hen,
four Larks and a Wren,
Have all built their nests in my beard.
There was a Young Lady whose eyes,
Were unique as to color and size;
There was an Old Man who supposed,
That the street door was partially closed;
There was an Old Person of Buda,
Whose conduct grew ruder and ruder;
There was an Old Man with a gong,
Who bumped at it all day long;
There was a Young Lady of Norway,
Who casually sat on a doorway;
There was a Young Person of Crete,
Whose toilette was far from complete;
There was a Young Lady whose bonnet,
Came untied when the birds sat upon it;
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FIGURE COMPLETION
A frequent task in creativity tests is figure completion. The subject is given a few lines and is asked to incorporate them into a creative drawing. Drawings are then scored for originality and things like expressiveness, movement, humor, and richness. As with many exercises in this book, this task doesn’t just test the skill in question but can help to train it as well. For example, when North West University professor Esmé van Rensburg found unusually low creativity scores among South African children, she designed a training intervention to combat these low scores and included practice with figure completion of the kind seen on the test. Here, practice and thus train your creativity within constraints by incorporating the given lines into creative drawings of your own.
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EMBODIED COGNITION
How you act influences how you think—this is what’s known in psychology as embodied cognition and has been quite in vogue since about 2008. For example, researchers found that holding a pencil in the teeth to force a frown hinders subjects’ comprehension of pleasant sentences, that holding a warm drink predisposes subjects to like people, and that subjects like the look of Chinese writing better when they pull characters toward themselves than when they push the same characters away. Similarly, researchers Eli Finkel and Paul Eastwick showed that in speed-dating sessions in which one gender sits while the other rotates, daters who sit and are approached are more liked than daters who rotate and must do the approaching.
Here’s what this has to do with creativity: researchers at Cornell, New York University, University of Michigan, and Singapore University noticed that many cultures use the same metaphors to describe creativity. Namely, they found that English, Hebrew, Korean, and Chinese cultures use the expressions “put two and two together,” “think on one hand and then the other,” and “think outside the box.” Could this intercultural similarity be more than coincidence? Could these metaphors, in fact, be serendipitously expressing the cognitive roots of creativity?
To test this idea, researchers had subjects act out these metaphors. One experiment had people sit inside or outside of a 5×5 box while brainstorming what to name ambiguous objects. Another had subjects gesture with one hand and then the other (or with the same hand again) while imagining uses for a university building. In these trials and a couple more, subjects who embodied metaphors for creativity were more creative than subjects who did not (really!).
So to train your creativity, you’ll do the same. Of course, in order to notice the creativity boost of acting out a metaphor, you’ll need a task on which to test yourself. Here we’ll use a version of the venerable Cartoons Test, developed by researcher Yvonne Treadwell in 1970. Much like you would for the New Yorker magazine caption contest, unleash your creative brain to caption the following cartoons, which Treadwell showed to be a clean test of creativity.
First perform one of the following embodied-cognition tasks and then caption a cartoon (which are drawn from the works of nineteenth-century poet and cartoonist Edward Lear). Continue alternating tasks and cartoons. Does it get easier? Admittedly, this seems silly. But creativity can certainly be silly, and creative action—no matter if it’s silly—stimulates creative thought.
If it’s impractical for you to sit beside a cardboard box when confronting problems of creativity at work or at home, don’t despair: a follow-up study showed you don’t actually have to do these things—you don’t, in fact, have to embody the cognition. For instance, researchers found that watching a Second Life avatar sit outside a box or point with one hand and then the other put subjects in the frame of mind to outperform others on creativity tasks. Do these cues count as disembodied embodied cognition? Are they subconscious reminders to think creatively? Whatever the reason, the point is that even imagined versions of embodied metaphors are proven to work. So once you get in the habit of using these cues, you should be able to draw on their power without making your coworkers think you’ve gone loopy.
1. Sit on the floor next to a cardboard box.
2. Walk in the pattern of a rectangle and then intentionally break this pattern to wander aimlessly.
3. Gesture at an object with one hand. And then do the same with the other hand.
4. Put two and two together: shuffle together two stacks of cards.
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CREATIVITY GRAB BAG
Here, for your pleasure and edification, are five of science’s most entertaining creativity-boosting mini-tips:
1. REM sleep: A 2009 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows that REM sleep and not necessarily quiet rest or non-REM sleep increases creativity. (Note that this is distinct from the slightly groggy state that produces insight.) Researcher Denise Cai and her colleagues found that REM sleep “enhanced the formation of associative networks and the integration of unassociated information.” In other words, REM sleep allowed subjects to consolidate information in networks that allowed creative connections.
2. Think or don’t think about death: Awareness of our own eventual demise makes us seek social connection. Researcher Clay Routledge and his colleagues reminded subjects about their impending death and then had them write proposals to promote a rock concert. How creative were subjects’ proposals? Well, if subjects thought the proceeds of the concert would benefit charity, their proposals were much more creative than proposals from subjects who thought they’d pocket the proceeds themselves. If your creativity would benefit a group, spend a minute to reconnect with the idea of your own mortality.
3. Manipulate trust: A person’s level of trust enhances group creativity but stifles personal creativity. (And conversely, a little distrust can make you more powerfully, individually creative.) This is because the feeling of connectedness can also make you bound by group norms—it ups Kaufman’s factor of personal inhibition. Distrust of others makes creative, mad scientists.
4. Dance: Researchers Elizabeth Hutton and Shyam Sundar of Penn State University used the videogame Dance Dance Revolution to show that pairing either low excitement and a bad mood or high excitement and a good mood enhances creativity.
5. Embrace multiculturalism: A team from France, Singapore, and the United States showed that multicultural experience fosters creativity, writing that, “Creativity is facilitated in contexts that deemphasize the need for firm answers.” A multicultural society shows that one culture’s rules and customs may not be the only way to exist.
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RUBE GOLDBERG MACHINE DESIGN CHALLENGE
Every year the Rube Goldberg Society and Purdue University host a contest in which engineering geeks from around the country compete to accomplish simple tasks in convoluted ways. For example, on March 26, 2011, a team from the University of Wisconsin–Stout won the competition with its machine that successfully watered a plant … in 244 steps. Along the way, the machine told the story of a deserted Louisiana estate whose ghosts come to life with the full moon.
Now you’ll apply similar skills of creativity and inefficiency to solve the problems of past years’ Rube Goldberg Machine Contests. Here’s how:
• Copy and then cut out the Rube Goldberg design elements that follow.
• Arrange these elements into “machines” that in combination solve the given problems in the specified number of steps.
• Assume the following rules: (1) Elements can be arranged however you like and will stand anywhere without additional support; (2) String can be cut; (3) Animals will attempt to approach any presented food; (4) Any force (applied in the correct direction) will activate the subsequent element irrespective of size or presumed mass; (5) You may not use any additional elements of your own design; (6) Use your creativity to weave a “storyline” of movement through these elements, however farfetched.
Copy and cut out these Rube Goldberg machine elements:
| Start by pushing the car down element number 14, and insert 5 steps before dispensing hand sanitizer. |  |
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Start by lighting the fuse of the rocket in element number 13, and insert 8 steps before pushing down the toaster handle. |
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Start by turning on the fan in element number 3, and insert 7 steps before smashing this orange to juice it. |
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Start by pushing the pin-laden paper airplane down the ramp in element number 16, and insert 5 steps before turning the crank to sharpen the pencil. |
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Start by cutting the string that holds the balloon in element number 11, and insert 9 steps before turning off the alarm clock. |
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Start by clapping your hands to startle the bird in element number 5, and insert as many steps as possible before squeezing toothpaste onto the brush. |
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