According to Gordon Kane, director of the Michigan Center for Theoretical Physics at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, teeny-tiny quantum particles do indeed pop into and out of existence. They spring into being from nothing, “temporarily violating the conservation of energy,” Kane writes in an article for Scientific American. It seems like that’s what a creative idea does too: it springs into existence from nothing. But that’s not the case at all. Instead of a lightbulb popping into being above your head, creativity builds this lightbulb from spare parts it finds lying around your brain: the glass from here, the filament from there, the threaded metal cap from another place.
Instead of generating something new, a huge field of research shows that creativity comes from making new connections among information and ideas that already exist in your brain. In other words, it depends on something called domain-specific knowledge. In order to be a creative electrical engineer, you need to know stuff about electrical engineering; in order to be a creative artist, you need to know things about art. Think of each “thing” you know as a little dot on a grid. The more dots, the more ways you can connect them. As YouTube videos show, a cat walking on the piano keyboard can break the rules of Western music theory, but it takes knowing these rules in a deeply intimate way to break them in a way that is truly creative.
Now, the real challenge of creativity is gathering these dots of information without becoming bound by how they are usually connected. For example, as you learn about painting, you will learn that a painter uses a brush in a certain way to spread paint on a canvas. Bound by this connection, you would never become Jackson Pollock. (Interestingly, once Pollock’s creativity severed this connection between painting and using a brush, there was an explosion of painters printing, spitting, spraying, or otherwise introducing paint to canvas without the traditional application of a brush.)
One way to gather knowledge without being bound by it is to gather it from many fields. Take the famous example of Pete Gogolak, which you undoubtedly already know. Gogolak grew up in Hungary playing soccer. Then he ended up playing American football as a student at Cornell University. He could kick, and so he became the kicker. Only he didn’t kick like a football player; he brought knowledge from another field—the soccer field—and instead of approaching the football from straight behind, Gogolak started approaching the ball from two steps back and three steps to the side so that he could kick it like a soccer ball. Gogolak went on to play for the New York Giants in the 1960s and 1970s, and by the end of his career almost everybody was kicking field goals soccer style. He had the domain-specific knowledge of kicking but connected it to American football in a new way.
This infusion of creativity from other fields is why students at MIT might do well to take classes in the humanities. To be a creative electrical engineer, you need the domain-specific knowledge of electrical engineering, but then it helps to have other knowledge from outside the field to infuse into it. Limiting the breadth of your knowledge limits the depth of your creativity.
You also need to be able to hear your creativity. The thing about making new connections in your brain is that they’re rarely as loud as the shouts from the established connections. The way things have been done in the past tends to drown out the way things could be done in the future. You have to listen closely to hear creativity over the din of your experience. Experiments show that the more experience, the louder the din. We’ve already seen one way to do this: hit your snooze alarm. A brain on the cusp of sleep or in an unfocused, relaxed state is largely cleared of preconceived thoughts and ready for the burst of creative insight. Likewise, a classic article in the Journal of Creative Behavior followed Cornell undergraduates (no mention of Gogolak, though) for years after they learned the technique of transcendental meditation and showed that students who kept up the technique were able to use it to generate creative thoughts.
Let’s be honest: “turning the attention inwards toward the subtler levels of a thought until the mind transcends the experience of the subtlest state of thought and arrives at the source of thought,” as recommended by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, probably sounds a little weird. And if it sounds a little too weird to try, chances are you’ll never be quite as creative as you could be. That’s because a final ingredient of creativity is the piece of your personality that determines how bound you are by cultural norms. Would you be terribly mortified if your coworkers or classmates saw you sitting barefoot and cross-legged, deep in meditation? Would you ever model nude for a life drawing class? Could you imagine thumbing your nose at the tradition of art that stretches back to fourteenth-century Florence and flicking paint at a canvas?
If you have been diligent in your acquisition of domain-specific knowledge, have looked beyond your field for influences, are willing to listen to whisperings from the back of your mind, and are predisposed (or can find the courage) to shake things up, you’re primed to take the next great leap in creativity, be it in electrical engineering, art, or football kicking.
Is Creativity Thinking Inside the Box?
A 2004 review in the Creativity Research Journal looked at the lessons of seventy studies to show that creativity can, in fact, be trained. There are things you can do that will make you more creative. The review also shows what works: namely, cognitive training is better than training that tries to hit creativity from social, personality, or motivational angles. This means that boosting creativity requires changing the way you think, not necessarily adjusting your mood or motivation. To make your thoughts more creative, focus on identifying problems, generating ideas, and combining concepts in new ways—the review shows that training in these areas offers the biggest boost. Interestingly, it wasn’t the “divergent thinking” skill of brainstorming that led to the biggest creativity boosts. Instead, it was skills involved in analyzing problems, such as convergent thinking (defining answers), critical thinking, and constraint identification. If you want to create creative solutions, first define what you know and what you can (and can’t) do, then practice working within these parameters to make new things from old information.