Creativity is no longer a luxury, it’s about survival.
Gerard Puccio, International Centre for Studies in Creativity.
My six-year old friend told me, incredulously, that there was an easy way to solve the chicken and egg question. “You just change how you understand the question. You could say it depends totally on the steepness of the slope”; whether the egg would roll faster than a chicken could run. How many adults could have come up with that? Was he a genius? Probably not. But creative? Most definitely. And as being creative is one of the key skills required for career success, its likely he will do very well indeed.
In 2018, Hannah Herbst was studying in Florida Atlantic University’s bio-mechanic’s lab. At the time, her father was suffering from a post-operative infection. She was worried about his prognosis, and discovered that sadly his experience was shared by over 200 million cases worldwide. From her lab work, she knew that shark skin was highly resistant to ‘fouling’ – the colonisation of a surface by microbes. Because of the way the scales on shark skin are shaped, and their surface material, microbes rarely build up on them. Linking two seemingly unconnected ideas, Hannah designed a bandage made from shark skin, to cover her father’s wound. It worked. And the best bit? It’s reusable. Her hope is that her bandage can eventually be used as an alternative to help people all over the world.
Oh, and she was 19 when she achieved this.
When she was still in middle school, Hannah’s 9-year-old pen pal from Ethiopia explained how difficult it was to live without a reliable source of power and electricity. Accordingly, she created an energy collection device that converts the kinetic movement of seawater into electricity. Hannah called the project Bringing Electricity Access to Countries through Ocean Energy, known as the acronym BEACON. She was named America’s Top Young Scientist in 2015 as a result.
She is clearly intelligent, yes, but this is because she has ability to bring together quite distinct concepts: because she is also creative.
But what is creativity, actually? Is it purely a human trait that cannot be automated? In which case, to enhance our future careers, shouldn’t we get better at being creative? Can you get better?
Yes. It’s entirely possible to learn to become more creative. I’m going to talk about some of the simple methods we can use to boost creativity – and most of them also help to protect your brain from aging.
Creativity is…
A defining feature of being human. Creativity was – is – a fundamental force in the development of humankind. Finding a way to use a rock to shape another rock to make a tool sharp and strong enough to extract bone marrow from the carcasses left behind by all the other animals meant that in a time before weapons, early hominids could access an energy and nutrient rich food supply. Back in the day, our ancestors were at the bottom of the savannah pecking order – they had to wait until there was no more competition, literally the bare bones, in order to get the part no other animal had the means to get to.
Then of course there was fire. And art. Inside the Maltravieso cave in Spain is the oldest known painting – red hand stencils dated to more than 64,000 years and made by a Neanderthal. Ok, so some animals do create works of beauty – like the male bowerbird who woos females by building stick towers on mats of moss, decorated with snail shells, flower heads and acorns. And a chimpanzee called Congo sold three of his paintings for £14,400 in an auction in which a Warhol picture and Renoir sculpture were unsold. However, art as pursuit purely of the aesthetic is only found as a part of human creativity.
The triggers for creativity are mostly situational – where we are and what we’re doing. Being in ‘creative mode’ involves venturing into the unknown, to forge a new path into the unexpected, vague or unknown. In her book, The Neuroscience of Creativity, Anna Abraham, Professor of Creativity at the University of Georgia says this is the opposite to the uncreative mode, where we walk the ‘path of least resistance’ in a black and white logical world of the familiar, expected, obvious and efficient. We know far more about the science of the uncreative mode (like how we can drive a car subconsciously, out of habit), than the creative mode.
What we do know is intriguing: that several of the large-scale brain networks used in the uncreative mode are also engaged during the creative mode. Scientists now regard creativity as a multifaceted construct, where the roles of specific brain regions are used in specific aspects, such as insight and imagery and overcoming knowledge constraints. Most strikingly, Professor Abraham says that despite disorder and degeneration at a neural level, we are still able to engage in creative pursuits. Developing dementia for many sufferers also marks the unleashing of their creative and artistic side.
Being able to ‘think outside the box’ means you are able to come up with an unconventional or different perspective than others. The phrase comes from a puzzle, a favourite of management consultants in the 1970s and 80s, where you have to connect nine dots (laid out in a three-by-three grid) using only straight lines, and not retracing your steps. The fewer the lines, the better.
When running our non-for-profit workshops in schools, my colleague and I regularly find that on this task, children outperform their teachers. And once they’ve found a solution, they go on to find several (of which there are).
The best answer was from a child who asked if he had to stay within a theoretical boundary; if not, he could connect them with a single straight line – just start at the top of the first dot, move across through the first row on a very slight down-diagonal, go round the world and reconnect at the second row, round the world again and re-join at the final row. I have yet to meet an adult who has come up with such a creative solution (we often ask adults, just to make them squirm in their un-creativity).
Of course, there’s also the paper-into-a-cone solution, which is similar except avoids the trans-global travel. Or the traditional ‘arrow’ answer that most driven corporate-wannabes memorised for their interviews back when we were power dressing and listening to ABBA: down the first column, beyond the boundary of the ‘box’; diagonally up and right to a corner that also lies outside the ‘box’, back through the top row, and diagonally down to the right. It is only by moving outside the imaginary box that our you’re able to complete the puzzle.
We all possess creativity in some capacity, rather like intelligence. It’s more than being able to write a poem or draw a picture. It’s also what meal to make from your fridge leftovers (just put it all on little dishes on the table and voila: ‘Fridge Tapas!’ I love this meal, even if my children see straight through it). Or how to make three costumes for World Book Day at 10pm the night before. And obviously, you can’t design a science experiment or write a good speech without creativity.
Why are some people more creative than others?
Scientists can now predict how creative people will be. Evidence suggests that creativity is the result of a complex interplay between spontaneous and controlled thinking, and how well our brains can both spontaneously brainstorm ideas and consciously evaluate them on how likely they are to work.
So why are some people more creative than others? In a study carried out by Professor Roger Beaty, they examined 163 people to see if they could accurately predict how creative they would bei. The participants completed a classic ‘divergent thinking’ test, coming up with new uses for everyday objects. During the task, their brains were fMRI scanned, so that the researchers could see which parts of the brain had the greatest changes of blood flow and were therefore being used, in real time.
The people with the highest connections between the parts of the brain known to be involved in generating new ideas did indeed out-perform those with weaker connections. Here’s what it looked like: those with higher connectivity between functional regions of the brain came up with answers like using a sock as a water filtration system. Those with lower connectivity suggested a sock could be used to, er, ‘warm your feet’. Right.
Those with a ‘highly-creative’ network use three brain systems: the default system (that’s daydreaming, imagining and mind-wandering); the executive system (the part used to focus or control thoughts); and the salient system (the set of regions that acts as a switching mechanism between the other two systems). Usually, the executive and default systems work separately, but the more creative people were, the better they were at simultaneously activating these systems.
As Steve Jobs said, “creativity is just connecting things”. Poet Maya Angelou said “you can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have”. The question is, can we learn to be creative? Yes. The following article tells you how.
i Beaty, R.E., Kenett, Y.N., Christensen, A.P., Rosenberg, M.D., Benedek, M., Chen, Q., Fink, A., Qiu, J., Kwapil, T.R., Kane, M.J. and Silvia, P.J., 2018. Robust prediction of individual creative ability from brain functional connectivity. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 115(5), pp.1087-1092.