Creative Thinking

Creativity, what exactly is it? A common dictionary definition tells us;

Creativity is marked by the ability or power to create, to bring into existence, to invest with a new form, to produce through imaginative skill, to make or bring into existence something new.

But this cannot be held as definitive, because 'creativity' itself is a very personal experience, one that is unique to each person. It fails to explain exactly where this creativity comes from and why. It's a definition many have struggled with, one even psychologists and professors have speculated over.

In my quest for this fabled definitive answer I came across many ideas on what qualifies as creativity, or being creative, and one word that cropped up again and again was 'originality'. So if this creativity, by definition, must involve the creation of something never before in existence how exactly do these creative ideas come to be in the first place?

Darwin wrote in his theories on evolution that nature creates many possibilities through blind "trial and error" and then lets the process of natural selection decide which species survive. In nature, 95% of new species fail and die within a short period of time. Genius is analogous to biological evolution in that it requires the unpredictable generation of a large quantity of alternatives and conjectures. From this quantity of alternatives and conjectures,the genius retains the best ideas for further development and communication.

Scholars have attempted to apply this idea to our understanding of creativity and genius. Fundamentally, to prove that creativity is hard-wired into the brain as a result of necessity and natural selection. And that real creative ideas come into fruition through, to use Darwin's terms - alternatives and conjectures, or more simply trial and error. To discover a good idea you must generate many ideas.

A good example of this would be Thomas Edison who reportedly had conducted 50,000 experiments before inventing the alkaline storage cell battery and 9,000 in order to perfect the light bulb. His creative genius was achieved through gathered knowledge and experience. This is a more rational approach to the idea of creativity, and one I would prefer to subscribe to.

The example above considers only creativity in a functional sense, but the same can be true of artistic creativity working in conjunction with its scientific counterpart. The artist and sculpture James Turrell has achieved something worthy of creative merit through much the same process. He has endeavoured to create these astonishing spaces within Roden Crater, an extinct volcano near San Francisco. These spaces include one in which he seeks to gather light older than our solar system, and another in which a viewers shadow can be cast by the light of Venus alone. Turrell approaches light in very much a physical sense and seeks to have people question their perceptions through this highly creative means. More information on James Turrell and his projects can be found at http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/turrell/

There is an alternative view though, that creativity is God-given, and great creative ideas are simply gifted to us. It can be said that some are 'gifted' with greater creative abilities than others, but the rational person in me fails to believe that this is a product of any kind of divine intervention. It could also be argued that by being gifted the means to be creative, by that which created all that has and will ever exist, we cannot be truly creative at all, not in the true sense of the word. But in saying that we must be aware that words are nothing more than the tools with which we try to better understand things!


On a more light-hearted note, here is an interesting if unusual take on creativity I found on youtube.