Psychology of Creativity: Art, Science and Technology

Until the middle of the 20th century, creativity was generally considered as a psychological attribute of an artist and, sometimes, of a scientist. Then in the late 1950s, J.P. Gulliford applied the idea of creative thinking to technological inventions.

Nowadays, engineers and scientists are expected to be creative. A recent paper shows how creativity in science/tech and art relate to personality traits, the so-called Big Five:

The Big Five personality dimension Openness/Intellect is the trait most closely associated with creativity and creative achievement.

We confirmed the hypothesis that whereas Openness predicts creative achievement in the arts, Intellect predicts creative achievement in the sciences. Inclusion of performance measures of general cognitive ability and divergent thinking indicated that the relation of Intellect to scientific creativity may be due at least in part to these abilities. Lastly, we found that Extraversion additionally predicted creative achievement in the arts, independently of Openness. Results are discussed in the context of dual-process theory.

A related paper outlined the overall relationship between the Big Five, by grouping them into two complementary categories - Stability and Plasticity.

Remarkably, the brain uses a broad range of cognitive strategies to pursue goals within a social context. Given a chance, we can exercise our creative options through technological innovation.

As a side remark, from an innovation theory perspective, the brain and society solve the stability-plasticity dilemma by using both traits, e.g. through the separation in space and time.

Pragmatic creativity among Chimps, Orangutans, and Bonobos

Unlike us humans, who are still confused about what "healthy" food is, many primates know that "healthy" means developing a habit that separates nutritious food from harmful food. For example, chimpanzees, orangutans, and bonobos, know how to turn dirty apples into clean ones, while gorilla's don't.

Chimps, Orangutans, and Bonobos are pragmatically creative because they've developed a consistent process for dramatically improving health outcomes of a recurring situation.

Source: Matthias Allritz, Claudio Tennie, Josep Call. Food washing and placer mining in captive great apes, 2012. DOI 10.1007/s10329-013-0355-5.

Lunch Talk: (Authors at Google) How New Ideas Emerge

Matt Ridley’s brilliant and ambitious new book in which he explores his considered belief that evolution—in biology, business, technology, and nearly every area of human culture—trumps deliberate and intelligent design.

tags: lunchtalk, creativity, innovation, evolution, scale

Lunch Talk: (Authors at Google) Learning how to learn math and sciece

In A Mind for Numbers, Dr. Oakley lets us in on the secrets to effectively learning math and science—secrets that even dedicated and successful students wish they’d known earlier. Contrary to popular belief, math requires creative, as well as analytical, thinking. Most people think that there’s only one way to do a problem, when in actuality, there are often a number of different solutions—you just need the creativity to see them. For example, there are more than three hundred different known proofs of the Pythagorean Theorem. In short, studying a problem in a laser-focused way until you reach a solution is not an effective way to learn math. Rather, it involves taking the time to step away from a problem and allow the more relaxed and creative part of the brain to take over.

The creative aspect of learning math and science is somewhat similar to elements of creativity necessary for developing user scenarios in hard-core technology solutions.

3D Printing - the new Clay Age

Consider a recent MIT Review article about the latest 3D printing lab experiments. What is their importance to inventors and what can we use to predict evolution of this technology?

When we study history, especially, history of innovation, people conventionally mention the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, the Iron Age, etc. At the core of such descriptions lies a wonder material — stone, bronze, iron, steel, silicon — something that enables a huge range of applications, which power technology developments for decades or even hundreds and thousands of years.

Paradoxically, there's no Clay Age (see fig below).

This is really unfortunate because the clay turned out to be the ultimate material that served us, humans, for thousands of years and enabled us to produce an amazing range of objects and technologies: from bricks to construction and architecture, from jars to storage and shipping, from ceramics to chemistry and modern waterworks, from concrete to skyscrapers and highway transportation systems. From an inventor's perspective, I see clay-based technologies as the first example of what we call today additive manufacturing.

Let's go back few thousands of years and compare stone (Before) and clay (After) as manufacturing materials. If you live in a cave and use stone to make your tools you have to chip away, blow-by-blow, certain parts of the original piece of rock that don't fit your design.

Even when we consider "raw" rocks being cheap and disregard the waste of material itself, our ability to shape the rock or change its internal physical structure is severely limited by what we can find in nature. By contrast, clay is extremely malleable: you can shape it, add filaments, make it hollow, make it solid, make it hard, glaze it, and much more. If you are a hunter-gatherer, by combining clay and fire you can create all kinds of sharp weapons that your stone age competition can't even imagine. If you are a gatherer, you can create jars and jugs, using one of the cornerstone inventions of human civilization: the Potter's Wheel.

If you are a house builder, even a primitive one, you can use mud bricks and reinforce them with straw. As you master fire and masonry, you learn how to create bricks and construct buildings that last decades and centuries, instead of years. You can even print money tokens with appropriate clay technologies! Furthermore, with advanced firing techniques, you discover how to melt and shape metals and discover important alloys, such as Bronze. Ultimately, you develop communities of innovation and economies of scale unheard of in the Stone Age.

Why thinking about the Clay Age is important today, when we are well beyond using mud for building cities? The main goal is to gain an insight into what additive manufacturing can do for us for years to come. Just like clay, 3D printing represents a technology approach with a promising long-term potential. That is, when working with both, clay and 3D printing, instead of removing and wasting extra, we add materials and shape surfaces to achieve desired designs. Luckily, for 3D printing we can leverage the learnings from clay.

Over the thousands of years, humans learned to work with clay by combining 6 key modifying methods:
1. Shape - change the outer geometry (e.g. brick).
2. Thin or thicken - change the inner geometry (e.g. thin jar).
3. Fill - change the inner structure (e.g. reinforced concrete)
4. Fire - modify inner and/or outer hardness or other material properties (e.g. hardened stove brick)
5. Slip - modify or create an outer layer with specific properties (e.g. ceramic glazes)
6. Decorate - paint or other exterior designs to make things aesthetically appealing.

With 3D printing we are still working on items 1 and 2, barely touching 3. Some of the research labs approach item 4 on our list - firing, or its equivalents.  For example, the MIT article that I've mentioned in the beginning of the post uses the ancient sequence of a clay-based technology: shape your piece from a soft material with special additives, then fire in the kiln, to achieve desired hardness and durability. Remarkably, modern 3D printing combines the ancient material — ceramics — with modern design techniques — computer modeling and manufacturing.

In the short term, 3D printing went through a lot of hype that fizzled a bit by now. In the long term,  the age of 3D printing, just like the Clay Age, is going to create a strong foundation for a broad range of human technologies. Basically, we are in the hunter-gatherer stage of our 3D evolution curve.

tags: technology, innovation, history, invention, creativity

A creativity technique from science fiction

I'm reading Rainbows End, by Vernon Vinge. The novel takes place in a future where security spooks play mind games with social, neurobiological and genetic threats. As usual, I pay attention to nuggets of creative wisdom. Here's one of them:

For Robert Gu, real creativity most often came after a good night's sleep, just as he roused himself to wakefulness. That moment was such a reliable source of inspiration that when he was having problems with writing he would often go the pedestrian route in the evening, stock up his mind with the intransigencies of the moment ... and then the next morning, drowsing, review what he knew. There in the labile freshness of new consciousness, answers would drift into view.

I use a similar technique to get an insight into most difficult problems. During the evening, or several evenings in a row, I do a lot of background work on analyzing the problem, exploring its system aspects, trade-offs, dilemmas, etc. often, when I wake up in the morning, I go over my analysis again and discover a new idea that was not there before.

This experience is consistent with the earlier Lunch Talk video in my blog where neuroscience professor Vincent Walsh recommends to become obsessed with a problem in order to come up with a creative solution. I would add that system analysis techniques really help with getting obsessed in a right way, especially when you have to do it for an inter-disciplinary group of creative people.

Lunch Talk: TEDx, Neuroscience and Creativity

Professor Vincent Walsh is a cognitive neuroscientist who has worked extensively with artists and public engagement projects and has taken a special interest in music since 2001 when he organised a McDonnell Pew Music and Brain Symposium in Oxford.

As a scientist he has worked broadly on perception and awareness and has published 225 scientific papers on vision, awareness, time perception, music, synaesthesia and technical aspects of brain stimulation.

Lunch Talk: Daniel Kahneman on The Machinery of the Mind

Daniel Kahneman, author of Thinking, Fast and Slow, on The Machinery of the Mind. Kahneman is Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Public Affairs at Princeton University and the winner of the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics.




tags: psychology, creativity, system, lunchtalk, science

Lunch Talk: Growing a Creative Company (@stanford)

Visionary architect and MacArthur Fellow Jeanne Gang discusses how the process of co-creation with clients and diverse teams leads to uniquely designed works that achieve aesthetic beauty and, at the same time, make bold statements. Founder and principal of Studio Gang Architects, Gang describes growing her firm without diluting creativity or camaraderie.



tags:lunchtalk, creativity

Lunch Talk: Tools for Entrepreneurs - Making Something People Love

Renowned entrepreneur and Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian, will inspire you to think of unique ways to connect with your customers, and to build a community of users who want your business to succeed. In this class you'll learn some key branding, marketing, and user experience principles, plus specific tactics and strategies that you can use to create a company people love.



Note emotional vs cognitive appeal of a new product/service in a new market.

tags: lunchtalk, innovation, entrepreneurship, internet, web, creativity, emotion

How to help a group of teenagers to achieve a creative peak

Russian writer and teacher Dmitry Bykov shares his method of helping teenagers maximize their creative potential:

(Russian version) Есть два способа добиться от детей абсолютного творческого максимума: во-первых, умеренная невротизация (все зависит от вас, доверяем только вам, больше никто не справится и т.д.). Во-вторых — сопутствующее ей, идущее в ногу с ней повышение самооценки: вы лучшие, вы сможете, вас собрали не просто так.

(a shortened English version)

To get a peak creative performance from a group of teenagers, tell them:

- everything depends on you (the children); nobody else can do it.
- you are the best; it's no accident that we included you in this elite group.

Bykov's recommendation aims at producing among the group members a moderate level of neuroticism and raise their self esteem at the same time. We know from a recent study that elevated neuroticism helps increase creativity, by stimulating divergent thinking. Most likely, adding high self-esteem to the psychological mix  extends idea generation into the realm of "impossible", further increasing the divergence and extra effort.

Should work for adults too.

tags: psychology, creativity, brainstorming, divergent

Worry is the mother of invention

A recent psychological study from Singapore Management University has found that being worried can help one's creativity:

By systematically manipulating the experience of emotional states, those who actually experienced worrisome emotions produced creative designs that were rated as being more creative by their peers (Study 2) and were more cognitively flexible in generating unusual uses of a common object under high cognitive load (Study 3).

Note that the study uses divergent thinking as the proxy for creativity. Taking this into account, we can say that being worried makes one to consider a greater range of options. This may also explain why in times of uncertainty and trouble people generate many conspiracy theories. It's not clear what emotional state helps separate good ideas from the bad ones.

tags: creativity, psychology, thinking, cognition, research

Left Brain, Right Brain - no difference!

In 2013, a group of scientist from the University of Utah decided to test the popular hypothesis that the left hemisphere of the brain is responsible for different cognitive functions than the right hemisphere. "Left-brain" people were supposed to be more logical, while "right-brain" ones more spontaneous.

The scientists ran a number of experiments by analysing their subjects' — 1011 individuals between the ages of 7 and 29 — on various tasks, while observing their brain activity using Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI). No significant difference was found.

Source: DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0071275

The study is "old news", so why do I write about it now? Mainly, because I just found the study, but also because I deal with human creativity issues on an everyday basis. To me, there are two important points to that relate to the study:

First, a person's creativity is not confined to a specific portion of the brain. Therefore, conclusions like "I'm a left-brain person and I can't be creative" are wrong. Creativity is about having created something new and useful to other people, rather than pigeonholing yourself into a "creative vs non-creative" categories. In many ways, creativity is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Second, the study highlights the difference between science and entrepreneurship. Science moves slowly, by creating insights, postulating hypothesis, then testing and re-testing them. Initial scientific results can be invalidated much later, which only adds to the value of science. The brain study from the University of Utah is good science.

On the other hand, entrepreneurship requires us to move fast, act on incomplete or even wrong information,  take huge risks, and make outrageous claims in order to gain advantage in the marketplace. For example, Christopher Columbus was not a good scientist because his calculations assumed that the Earth was 3 times smaller than it turned out in reality. Scientists of his time already knew that and were highly skeptical of his idea!

Nevertheless, he was a great entrepreneur because he not only convinced the king of Spain to give hime ships for discovering a new way to Asia, but did succeed in discovering a new continent, although by mistake. Eventually, scientists proved him wrong, but it didn't diminish the value of his accomplishment.

One of the most striking aspects of Silicon Valley's success is its reliance on an entrepreneur's desire to discover a new business "continent", rather than do perfect science. Most remarkable examples would be the Moore's Law, Computer Games, the Web, Social Networking, and the iPhone.

tags: creativity, innovation, science, entrepreneurship,

Invention of the Day: Thinking Inside the Box

When we participate in invention workshops and other creative activities, as I often do, we hear the moderator urge us to think "outside the box." Most often, though, nobody knows where the box is. As a result, we often get from one box into another, which is even worse than the first one.

Despite common "creative" wisdom, thinking inside the box can be extremely productive. One of the great inventions in economics of the 19th century was the Edgeworth Box, named after Francis Ysidro Edgeworth (1845 – 1926). While trying to figure out an efficient allocation of limited resources between two people, Edgeworth decided to represent their positions graphically inside a two-dimensional box.

For example, in a simplified model the patent war between Apple and Google can be described as a fight for a position inside the box (Figure 1). At the given moment, the number of patents is fixed, the amount of money at stake is also fixed. Outcome 1 (p1, m1) shows the initial position where Apple has more patents, but less money. Since the number of patents and money is fixed, Google is positioned in exactly the same spot, at the Outcome 1 dot. From Apple's perspective, the purpose of the war is to move the situation from O1 to Outcome 2 (p1, m1), where some of Google's money goes to Apple in exchange for patents. As a result, Apple will have more money, and fewer patents.

The Edgeworth box is extremely useful for analyzing allocations of fixed resources. It is essential to modern finance and economics when it comes to understanding and explaining equilibrium states. (See for example, Financial Theory course from Yale. Econ 251).

For an inventor, it is critical to know where the box is before starting to think "outside the box." Our goal would to discover a dimension where the trade-off inside Edgeworth Box becomes irrelevant.

tags: creativity, trade-off, tradeoff, economics, invention, innovation

(Not so secret) Secrets of Creativity

Below are a few quotes from an Atlantic article about creativity studies. [ To BUS 74 students: I recommend reading the entire thing.]

- creative people are better at recognizing relationships, making associations and connections, and seeing things in an original way—seeing things that others cannot see.

- having a high IQ is not equivalent to being highly creative. ...above a certain level, intelligence doesn’t have much effect on creativity: most creative people are pretty smart, but they don’t have to be that smart, at least as measured by conventional intelligence tests. An IQ of 120, indicating that someone is very smart but not exceptionally so, is generally considered sufficient for creative genius.

- Although we have a definition of creativity that many people accept—the ability to produce something that is novel or original and useful or adaptive—achieving that “something” is part of a complex process, one often depicted as an “aha” or “eureka” experience. This narrative is appealing—for example, “Newton developed the concept of gravity around 1666, when an apple fell on his head while he was meditating under an apple tree.” The truth is that by 1666, Newton had already spent many years teaching himself the mathematics of his time (Euclidean geometry, algebra, Cartesian coordinates) and inventing calculus so that he could measure planetary orbits and the area under a curve. He continued to work on his theory of gravity over the subsequent years, completing the effort only in 1687, when he published Philosophiœ Naturalis Principia Mathematica. In other words, Newton’s formulation of the concept of gravity took more than 20 years and included multiple components: preparation, incubation, inspiration—a version of the eureka experience—and production. Many forms of creativity, from writing a novel to discovering the structure of DNA, require this kind of ongoing, iterative process.

- Many creative people are autodidacts. They like to teach themselves, rather than be spoon-fed information or knowledge in standard educational settings. Famously, three Silicon Valley creative geniuses have been college dropouts: Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg.

- Many creative people are polymaths, as historic geniuses including Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci were.
The arts and the sciences are seen as separate tracks, and students are encouraged to specialize in one or the other. If we wish to nurture creative students, this may be a serious error.

- Creative people tend to be very persistent, even when confronted with skepticism or rejection.

- Do creative people simply have more ideas, and therefore differ from average people only in a quantitative way, or are they also qualitatively different? One subject, a neuroscientist and an inventor, addressed this question in an interesting way, conceptualizing the matter in terms of kites and strings:

In the R&D business, we kind of lump people into two categories: inventors and engineers. The inventor is the kite kind of person. They have a zillion ideas and they come up with great first prototypes. But generally an inventor … is not a tidy person. He sees the big picture and … [is] constantly lashing something together that doesn’t really work. And then the engineers are the strings, the craftsmen [who pick out a good idea] and make it really practical. So, one is about a good idea, the other is about … making it practical.

Invention skills are very similar to wisdom

Today I learned that:

In recent years wisdom has received much scientific attention in psychology. It can be defined as expertise in coping with difficult or unsolvable life problems.

Wisdom is a multidimensional psychological construct, including dimensions like
(1) change of perspective,
(2) empathy,
(3) perception and acceptance of emotions,
(4) emotional serenity,
(5) factual knowledge,
(6) procedural knowledge,
(7) contextualism,
(8) value relativism,
(9) uncertainty acceptance,
(10) long-term perspective,
(11) distance from oneself and
(12) reduction in level of aspiration.

Wisdom can be learned and taught (source: DOI: 10.1159/000321580)

Practically, all items on the list apply, except #12. Inventors must have aspirations to change the world.

Solving the Life vs Glory dilemma - 2

Recap: In my earlier posts I described and analyzed in detail a typical dilemma situation: a person faces mutually exclusive choices. For example, the ancient Greek hero Achilles has to choose between dying young with eternal glory or living a long, uneventful life. The modern hero Neo from the Matrix has to chose between the Red pill and the Blue pill.

In art, heroes choose dilemmas. In real life, we try to get away from them by picking a reasonable trade-off - "the middle way." A fundamental characteristic of a dilemma or trade-off situation is the existence of "The Box." The Box represents a set of constraints, either visible or invisible. The first step to think outside the box is to discover what the box is.

In the Achilles example, we've established that he is locked in the box of personal mortal combat with an opposing fighter - Patroclus. Even if Achilles wins today, sooner or later a new fighter will be born to kill him. That is, once you've entered the dilemma box, the choices are unavoidable: Achilles wins some great battles, but he is eventually killed by Paris, who, in turn, dies in combat later.

At the first glance, the Achilles' Life vs Glory dilemma seems to have no happy outcome. On the other hand, we've established that another Greek Hero - Odysseus - had found a breakthrough solution: he reached eternal glory AND lived a long, fulfilling life. How did he do that?

First, let me say that the Achilles' box is version of a theoretical construct created by economist Francis Ysidro Edgeworth in the 19th century. It serves as a foundational principle for the modern economics of free markets, where people make rational choices about allocation of limited resources. That is why the first principle of economics is often stated as "Everything is a trade-off."

In Sclalable Innovation (Prologue), we show that great innovations often happen when people break trade-offs and dilemmas, instead of strengthening them. Odysseus is no exception. As a creative individual, he sees outside the Achilles' box. In his thinking, a 3-rd dimension exists - gods and other people (fig below).

When Odysseus encounters a tough challenge he leverages this dimension to generate a broad variety of coordinated actions. During the siege of Troy, he finally defeats the enemy city by getting one group of Greeks build the Trojan Horse, another group to hide inside it, yet another to rush the city when the Horse is inside, etc. This pattern of problem solving repeats when Odysseus runs into trouble on his way back home to Ithaca. For example, he uses the help of his team to defeat the Cyclops and escape from the cave. (Even the Cyclops' sheep act as "members" his team.) Odysseus accomplishes the impossible feat of listening to the song of the Sirens and surviving it too. (I posted about his solution in detail in 2011). Odysseus returns home to Ithaca and restores himself as the rightful king, by craftily creating a coalition of players and arranging the circumstances to benefit his cause. As the result of his adventures, Odysseus achieves eternal glory AND ensures that he has a long life.

In short, Odysseus is a 3D strategist, while Achilles is a 2D tactician. Achilles thinks inside the box, while Odysseus thinks outside it, by discovering dimensions of the situation that Achilles cannot see. In these dimensions, he finds opportunities for novel actions and their novel combinations. To motivate his allies, he uses certain psychological effects, which I'm going to cover later.

tags: creativity, problem, solution, dilemma, trade-off, separation, breakthrough, luck, control

Lab Notebook: Emotions, Metaphors, and Creativity.

When people talk about their emotions they often use metaphors because it is difficult to express how you feel in words. In everyday life we solve this language problem by using common experiences with objects as metaphors. In the 1980s, UC Berkeley psychologists Lakoff and Kovecses studied the connection between emotions and metaphors. The metaphor of a fluid in a container (hot, cold, boiling, flowing etc.) turned out to be associated with all major emotions: anger, fear, happiness, sadness, love, lust, pride, shame, and others. We are so used to dealing with water and other liquids that when something unknown and unfamiliar is presented as "water" it becomes easily accessible to our minds.

Here's a great example how a difficult concept can be explained to a lay audience: Robert Shockley, the co-inventor of the transistor, shows the work of his new incredible electronic device as water flowing over the dam. In the picture, charged elements (electrons and holes) become "water," while the electro-magnetic field that controls the flow of the current is shown as a dam barrier that can be raised or lowered to control the flow of "water."

Remarkably, the metaphors of UP and DOWN are also frequently used to describe emotions, e.g. "I feel a bit down today," or "Lighten up!".

Max and I should try to use the common metaphors discovered by Lackoff and Koveses to explain how our system model works. In Scalable Innovation (Chapter 3) I use "train" to explain a difficult patent, but water would probably work even better.

tags: creativity, psychology, emotion, system

Creativity quote of the Day: Elon Musk on problem-solving

"Ask them about the problems they worked on and how they solved them. If someone was really the person who solved the problem they would be able to answer on multiple levels... Anyone who struggled hard with a problem never forgets it." (Business Insider, December, 2013).

For once, I agree with Elon Musk. We should not confuse the feeling of an "aha" moment with real-life problem solving.

Lab Notebook: Jobs' "A team" vs creative malcontents (black sheep)

Steve Jobs famously insisted on working only with an "A team" at Apple. Remarkably, an experience from his other company, Pixar, shows that a group of malcontents, i.e. employees who have something to prove, can be as creative. Here's a quote from a Brad Bird's interview about his work on The Incredibles and Ratatouille:

So I said, “Give us the black sheep. I want artists who are frustrated. I want the ones who have another way of doing things that nobody’s listening to. Give us all the guys who are probably headed out the door.” A lot of them were malcontents because they saw different ways of doing things, but there was little opportunity to try them, since the established way was working very, very well.

We gave the black sheep a chance to prove their theories, and we changed the way a number of things are done here. For less money per minute than was spent on the previous film, Finding Nemo, we did a movie that had three times the number of sets and had everything that was hard to do.

I would say that involved people make for better innovation. Passionate involvement can make you happy, sometimes, and miserable other times. You want people to be involved and engaged. Involved people can be quiet, loud, or anything in-between—what they have in common is a restless, probing nature: “I want to get to the problem.

One of the "secrets" of Silicon Valley is that malcontents from one company can form highly successful startups. (Adobe, 3Com, SGI, Netscape, Seagate, Palm, etc.)

tags: innovation, book, example, creativity