by Andrew Lynn
When it is being itself, it is exactly what it needs to be.
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This chapter is all about energy. It’s about how great creative works are born of the uninhibited generation of multiple ideas, the fittest of which survive to become the finished work. It’s also about the inner reservoir of energy upon which we draw to get things done – and the ways in which we can run up against its limits. Finally, it’s about how that energy is best marshaled as a source of human generativity and what we can do to make it work for us.
Darwinian Creativity and Picasso’s Guernica
Clues as to this aspect of the mystery of generativity can be found embedded in what is arguably the greatest work of art of the twentieth century – Picasso’s Guernica.1
The story behind the mural is well known. It’s 1937 and Spain is ravaged by brutal civil war between fascists and republicans. Then – on 26 April 1937 – the German Luftwaffe swoops down upon the small Basque hamlet of Guernica in northern Spain. For three hours the town is pounded by high-explosive and incendiary bombs. The village burns for three days and sixteen hundred civilians are killed or wounded.
The Luftwaffe had, it is said, chosen the town for bombing practice.
Picasso is in Paris at the time, preparing to paint a centerpiece for the Spanish Pavilion of the 1937 World Fair. When the news hits, over a million protesters flood onto the streets in the largest May Day demonstration the capital has ever seen. The news and the images fill the papers. Picasso rushes through the crowds back to his studio and begins sketching. Three months later the giant mural – it’s more than eleven feet tall and twenty-five feet wide – is delivered to the Spanish Pavilion.2
Often we don’t really know how creative acts come about; generally we only have the finished product and perhaps some words of the creator. Guernica is exceptional. Picasso began the work with a series of sketches aimed at depicting the true horror of the bombing. What makes the sketches a truly invaluable resource is that they were consecutively numbered and sometimes individually dated. Rather than just looking at the work as a whole, you can look at the ‘bull’, say, or the ‘horse’ or the ‘mother with dead child’ – all identifiable elements of the completed work – and see how they evolved in the period preceding the completion of the work. It’s not quite the same thing as seeing into Picasso’s mind, but it’s as close as we can realistically get.
The question that Dean Keith Simonton – who carried out the research on Guernica – wanted answered was this: did each new sketch represent further progress towards the final work – or did the process show ‘blind variation’ in the sense that the artist would sometimes pursue ideas that took him nowhere and only after taking some wrong turns decide upon the final composition? Simonton knew he could find out by looking at the relationship between the sketch order and the progress made. If Picasso’s progress matched the sketch order, then his creative process would be ‘monotonic’, meaning that each sketch builds upon the previous sketch and represents a steady advance towards the final composition. If, on the other hand, his progress does not increase steadily with the sketch order – if sometimes Picasso makes progress but sometimes he heads down a blind alley – then the process could be said to have been ‘non-monotonic’.
Here’s what Simonton saw when he plotted progress score3 against sketch order:4
This is precisely what would be expected if Picasso’s creative process was non-monotonic. You can see that Picasso is making erratic progress for the first few sketches. Then from sketches five through ten he makes tremendous progress, to the extent that the tenth sketch is as close to his final masterpiece as it will ever be. The remaining thirty-five sketches show steps forward and steps back as Picasso explores various possibilities and assesses whether or not they will contribute to his final composition.
Simonton then decided to repeat the analysis for those sketches that contained only a single figure. Let’s take the ‘horse’ and the ‘mother with dead child’ as examples. Here are Simonton’s graphs:5
What you see for the horse is broadly similar to what you see for the sketches as a whole: Picasso makes the most significant progress between sketches five and ten; after sketch ten there are steps forward and steps back as he explores various possibilities. Now look at the graph for the ‘mother with dead child’. In this case Picasso also makes most of his progress in the earlier sketches. What’s more obvious than with the horse is that it’s a very early sketch that shows most progress towards the final version – none of the later sketches even come close. Picasso gets it more or less right early on in the process. Then he experiments with other possibilities to see how they will turn out – and finally settles for his early version after all.
What all this shows, according to Simonton, is that the creative process is ‘Darwinian’. What he means by this is that the creator doesn’t set out with a specific destination and then take sure and steady steps towards it. Nor is there a single eureka moment when it all falls into place. Instead, the creator engages in a trial-and-error process that produces more ideas than will ever be used and then selects the best from among them. It’s akin to Darwinian theory in that the creative process throws up a whole bunch of variants and the stronger variants ‘survive’, so to speak, in the final work.
Put the theory to one side and begin to imagine what it would have actually felt like to be Picasso working on Guernica. It’s one thing to struggle onwards, even making only small steps forward from a modest starting point, if each step improves upon the last. But Simonton’s graphs show that at many points in the process Picasso’s efforts did not take him forward. They took him backwards. That’s another thing altogether. What must he have thought and felt when he reached sketch thirty-five and saw his work no closer to the final version than he had been at sketch ten? And yet we can’t possibly say that Picasso was doing anything wrong – the final works vindicate him on that front. The better approach is to recognize and accept that progress is made not by seeking perfection, but by permitting the perfect to emerge from a mass of imperfect items.
This all confirms what has been said of Picasso elsewhere. ‘Faced with an empty canvas or a blank sheet of paper he does not think things out: he makes a start and lets his picture lead him on, knowing that he will begin all over again if he is not satisfied. Which explains how he could once say to Vlamnick, in the days when they were friends: “How on earth did I manage to do that?”’6 Picasso is the most prolific artist in history – he produced an astounding 147,800 works of art, or an average of around 1,780 pieces per year over his eighty-three or so years of creativity.
How generalizable is this? If the top producers in art, music, literature, and even entrepreneurship achieve what they do through a trial-and-error process like this, then there’s something important we can learn from it. What generativity requires, in this view, is for the process of creation to be bold and uninhibited. We don’t pre-select our own brilliant products; we let them emerge in their varied forms and in their own way. Many of the early ideas won’t make it through to the final cut; but many of the later ideas won’t make it either, and it may sometimes prove to be the case that what came out first, came out best.
Inner Resource
What Darwinian creativity shows is that in creative work it is the unhindered generation of ideas that is primary – and that the critical processes of self-assessment and selection (‘survival of the fittest’) happen later. Does it really follow, though, that our enterprises are generally – and across multiple fields of human endeavour – best carried out freely and without inhibition?
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An answer to this may be found in the concept of ‘inner resource’.
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Inner resource can be considered the store of energy we draw upon to self-regulate. When we resist temptation, exercise choice and responsibility, or suppress thoughts or emotions, we draw upon this store of energy. It’s a single store that is relied upon to do all these thing
s; and it’s a store that can be depleted from overuse, leaving us less able to self-regulate ourselves later on. This means not just impairment to self-control, but also impairments to performance and persistence.
This is a radically new idea. Historically we have tended to think of self-control rather differently. Probably the most common view is that self-control is a kind of skill. In this view, we gradually develop the skill of self-control over long periods of time. A related approach is to view self-control as a kind of knowledge, such that we know or can learn how to alter our own responses or states. Either way, once developed and sufficiently practiced, we don’t expect any sudden drop-offs. We know how to manage ourselves and maintain our poise and bearing.
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Here’s what the science tells us: that resisting desire, exercising choice, restraining emotion, and suppressing thoughts all lead to impaired performance on other tasks that require self-regulation.
Imagine, for example, being taken into a room in which chocolate chip cookies had just been baked and laid out upon a table. The air is filled with the aroma of the fresh chocolate and baking. You’ve been told to skip a meal and you are famished. Other people are allowed to tuck in merrily to the cookies and chocolates. You, however, are instructed to snack only on a bowl of red and white radishes. After this, you’re asked to carry out a geometric puzzle. (The puzzle is insoluble – but you’re not told that.) You might be surprised to find that you would tend to give up rather easily – in fact, you would be likely to give up, on average, more than twice as quickly as the cookie-eaters, and you would make only around half as many attempts.
Now imagine watching a tear-jerking movie while being required to neither show nor feel any emotion. Afterwards you are asked to unscramble a series of anagrams. The results are no less surprising. You would, on average, solve the problems almost 50 percent more effectively if you had been allowed to let your emotions flow, without any effort to deny or hide them, while watching the film.7
Suppressing thoughts leads to similar performance decrements. In the tests that have been done, people give up much more quickly after repressing thoughts than when either expressing those thoughts or with no thought control at all.8 Suppressing thoughts seems to expend the same energy that we have to use to persist in activities – and has a predictably negative effect on outcomes.
Finally, the same kind of impairment occurs not only after exercising self-restraint but also after making choices, as has been shown by Kathleen Vohs of the University of Minnesota. Vohs conducted a total of seven experiments involving almost four hundred subjects both inside the laboratory and out on the streets and malls of the United States. Some of the participants were asked to make choices about consumer products, university courses, and study materials. Others were not asked to make choices, but simply to consider the options in front of them. They were then asked to carry out various unpleasant or challenging tasks: for example, participants were asked to hold their arms in ice water, or drink diluted vinegar, or solve mathematical problems.
People who had been required to make choices were, Vohs found, considerably worse at maintaining focus when trying to solve problems or complete an unpleasant task. The strength of the effect is illustrated by what is known as the ‘cold pressor’ challenge, which requires participants to hold their arms in ice water. Those who had not made choices beforehand did reasonably well on the challenge – tolerating an average of sixty-seven seconds of intense cold. Those who had made choices prior to dunking their arms in the freezing water, on the other hand, were unable to hold out, averaging a measly twenty-eight seconds. In the words of Vohs, they suffered from ‘decision fatigue’ or ‘cognitive depletion’.9 In other words, they had less of that inner energy you need to focus and overcome difficulty.
What is especially striking about the last point is that these detrimental effects occur even when we make choices freely and in accordance with our wishes and attitudes. For example, when making a choice between two diametrically opposed courses of action, it didn’t matter which was chosen – it was the mere fact of having to choose at all that caused the detriment.
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All decision-makers – not just creatives – benefit from awareness of what happens when we deplete the inner energy we use to self-regulate. That’s because decision making itself, as we have seen, both relies upon and depletes this self-regulatory resource.
When judges decide whether or not to grant parole, for example, it is decision fatigue that appears to have the greatest impact.10 The effect is dramatic and disconcerting: the percentage of favourable rulings drops from around 65 percent to nearly zero within each decision session and returns abruptly to nearly 65 percent after a break. The graph below11 shows the proportion of rulings in favour of prisoners (y axis) against the order in which the decisions were made (x axis), with circles representing the first decision in three decision sessions and dotted lines representing a food break. Over a thousand rulings of eight judges were recorded over a ten-month period. While decision fatigue can substantially reduce the chance of a favourable decision, it is curious that legally relevant considerations – severity of the crime and prison time served – exerted no effect on the rulings.
A prisoner whose case comes up first thing in the morning, then, has a good chance of convincing the judge that he is worthy of consideration for parole. As the morning wears on, the chance goes down. The prisoner who appears immediately after the morning break, however, also has a good chance of obtaining a favourable ruling, which again drops and continues dropping for prisoners appearing later on. The difference in outcomes is striking. A prisoner whose case comes up before lunch has a near zero probability of release; one whose case comes up immediately after lunch, on the other hand, has around a 65 percent chance of being granted parole.
The researchers attribute the effect to mental depletion. What happens is that the judges find rejecting requests to be the safest and easiest decision: this effectively preserves the status quo and is associated with shorter decision time and shorter written decisions. It is therefore the likelier outcome when judges are mentally depleted as a result of the number of previous decisions they have had to make.
Decision making can be impaired on many fronts. Compromise and integrative thinking are reduced, and simplistic decisions take their place. Decision-makers will be more inclined to choose the ‘standard’ response or the response that preserves the status quo. Decisions are increasingly likely to be based on irrelevant information. They may also be postponed or avoided altogether.12 People’s IQ scores drop as does their performance on other tests of logic.13
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What really is this resource? It’s been said by the researchers that although they can infer the existence of the resource, they don’t have a clear understanding of its nature. But we can draw some conclusions.
It’s important. Choice, responsibility, and self-control are all-pervading features of human life. These matters are so fundamental that it’s hard to imagine an activity or enterprise in which the resource isn’t engaged – and routinely engaged at that.
It’s surprisingly limited. A mere five-minute exercise in resisting the temptation to eat cookies and chocolate resulted in a doubling of the time taken by people to solve puzzles.
And it’s counterintuitive. Of course, it’s not hard to understand and accept how exercising self-control could have detrimental effects: it can be tiring and irritating to have to say ‘no’. But this same resource was also impaired by suppressing thoughts or by merely making choices – even choices that are freely made and in accordance with our underlying attitudes and values. The resource is engaged and depleted by a wide range of acts that draw upon the exercise of will or volition.
It has been said that the resource is, in fact, like a muscle. We have only a limited capacity to control and alter behavior, and this capacity appears to be vulnerable to depletion after serious use. When we have experienced intense demands for self-cont
rol, or when we squander self-control in unproductive activity, we may find ourselves in a situation where self-control breaks down in other, unrelated spheres.14
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How to self-control without self-control, so to speak? Is there a way to square the circle? Possibly, yes. The focus here has been on construal: the way in which people subjectively construe a situation, an object, or a desire. Related to this is the focus on what psychologists call ‘cognitive transformations’. Cognitive transformation is all about sense making – or, here, making sense of experience in a way that has not been done before.
At its simplest, this may just mean thinking about something differently. One of the ways that the transformation can be effected, for example, is to switch from thinking in a consummatory to a non-consummatory manner. If we think in a consummatory way, we’re usually thinking about satisfying our drives: for example, thinking about how a marshmallow would melt sweetly on the tongue. But it is always open to reconceive of the marshmallow: to imagine it from a purely visual or aesthetic standpoint. It’s the same marshmallow we’re thinking about, but in an entirely different light. It has been cognitively transformed.