Chase, Chance, and Creativity

by James H Austin

  What about the scientist being middle-aged? (a period that seems to expand in both directions). Prize-winning scientific work is performed later in life than one might think. For example, American Nobel laureates performed the work that earned them the prize in medicine and physiology at an average age of forty-one. Physicists, on the other hand, were younger, averaging only thirty-six years.` Still, a disproportionately large percent of all laureates did their work even later-when they were forty to forty-four years old, bearing in mind the age of their cohorts in the general run of all American scientists at the same time. In terms of patentable work, the peak output comes between the ages of thirty and forty, and by forty-five most inventors tend to be "over the hump" on the downhill side." We remember the exceptions.

  Beyond their great emotional and motivational diversity, research scientists tend to be complex, independent types who can control and focus a wide variety of emotional responses in areas related to their work. They are sensitive both to self, to others, to sensory stimuli from the outside world, and clearly fascinated with scientific and intellectual pursuits.

  To me, among the decisive traits, one stands foremost. That trait istz~ curiosity. I doubly emphasize it because the research lines I have pursued almost always emerged from a simple, naive wondering about something. If we allow that necessity is the mother of invention, then curiosity is surely the father.

  I would agree with Taylor and Barron''' that several other traits delineate the productive scientist:

  a high degree of autonomy, self-sufficiency, and self-direction;

  t a preference for mental manipulations involving things rather than people; a somewhat distant or detached attitude in interpersonal relations; and a preference for intellectually challenging situations rather than socially challenging ones; high ego strength and emotional stability;

  * a liking for method, precision, exactness;

  a preference for repression and isolation as defense mechanisms in dealing with affective and instinctual energies;

  a high degree of personal dominance, but a dislike of personally toned controversy;

  a high degree of control of impulse, amounting almost to over-control: relatively little talkativeness, gregariousness, impulsiveness;

  a liking for abstract thinking, with considerable tolerance of cognitive ambiguity;

  marked independence of judgment, rejection of group pressures toward conformity in thinking; superior general intelligence;

  an early, very broad interest in intellectual activities;

  a drive toward comprehensiveness and elegance in explanation;

  a special interest in the kind of "wagering" which involves pitting oneself against uncertain circumstances in which one's own effort can be the deciding factor;

  an unusual appreciation of the intuitive and nonrational elements in human nature;

  A profound commitment to the search for aesthetic and philosophic meaning in all experience.

  I have been especially interested in the psychological findings" that investigators in the biological sciences rely heavily on their visual imagery, insist on rational controls and share with artists many of the same styles of thinking. I usually think, at times exclusively, in visual terms. Sometimes the image is clear, sometimes murky; either may seem loosely attached to words as I talk, or to a tumble of vague thoughts. When the internal images-the thought-visions-are especially clear, they preempt my conscious awareness of objects in the external world. External vision no longer registers, seems almost to be disconnected, and fades from my memory of the moment.

  To me, research has many analogies with painting. First you imagine in your mind's eye what it is you might do. This inner seeing is all nonverbal activity. Then, you sketch in the bare outlines of the scene. Next come the broad, bold brush strokes, later, the fine details. In between the two last techniques you may swing back and forth many times from one color to the other. Or, putting it another visual way: at the bedside or in the laboratory, you operate very much like a "zoom" lens, set on low power magnification for scanning much of the time, shifting freely to ultrahigh magnification when minute details are important, then back to medium power for items of intermediate size.

  The visual element of creativity is not a single skill, but one separable even in children into at least three components: a preference for complexity, a skill at handling complexity, and an ability to complete what is unfinished.'Z Beyond these gifts the adult researcher needs a special permissive attitude, one that enables him to "see" deeply into a problem, then to find relationships between many seemingly unrelated items, and finally to forge links that connect them. He is not only adept at recognizing a cluster of facts, but he is utterly transfixed when he notes an exception to the rule. Incongruity in a situation snaps him instantly to attention. Charles Darwin's son described this quality in his father as follows: "There was one quality of mind which seemed to be of special and extreme advantage in leading him to make discoveries. It was the power of never letting exceptions pass unnoticed. Everybody notices a fact as an exception when it is striking or frequent, but he had a special instinct for arresting an exception.""

  Walter Cannon's" many years of pioneering laboratory experience led him to include the following abilities among those necessary for the creative investigator:

  Resourcefulness; a forward look; a philosophical approach;

  a faith in the importance of his present and future scientific efforts;

  willingness to take risks-including the regrettable risk of losing time and reputation;

  curiosity;

  ,i ability to design an experiment;

  imaginative insight-the projection of an idea---the ability to ask the proper questions;

  a critical attitude to keep imagination in check;

  a variety of experience-which gives insight into diverse methods;

  ingenuous honesty-readiness to surrender to adverse facts; technical skill and knowledge of equipment;

  good groundwork in the basic sciences, including a knowledge of statistical methods;

  keen powers of observation; retentive and facile memory; patience;

  willingness to take infinite pains and to record carefully; an attitude of humility.

  We may wonder why humility is so rarely cited. It is there. Certainly, it can't dominate the scene in anyone who has strong inner needs to master his environment,'' but it is still there. Humility seems to have both primary and secondary origins. Primary humility stems from the researcher's original sense of awe as he looks at the natural world around him. In me, this feeling deepens and results in an inferiority complex of cosmic proportions whenever I weigh the dust of my puny advances and place it in the vast perspective of the whole universe. The numbers alone are mind-bending: as a first-order approximation, there may be a hundred thousand million sunlike stars in our galaxy, the Milky Way. And in the rest of the universe, there are at least a thousand million other galaxies!!

  Secondary humility evolves from outright failures; from being wrong; from measuring one's own small successes against what should have been possible, and also from measuring them against what others have accomplished. This feeling also grows rapidly and is quickly reinforced by other experiences. The introspective investigator soon realizes how precarious his positions are. For example, it was a humbling experience indeed to find that my dog, Tom, would provide the most crucial instruction to a distinguished colleague like Susumu Yokoi, who came all the way from japan to learn in my laboratory. Smugness doesn't last long in research.

  Koestler' identifies five characteristics of the outstanding scientist:

  * an oceanic sense of wonder;

  a curious mixture of skepticism and credulity precocity;

  dual abilities, both to generalize and to concentrate on the particulars;

  multiple potentials-enough to succeed in any one of several careers.

  In research, aptitude can only go so far, for as we have seen, true creativity and intelligence
are not synonymous." Indeed, creative persons seem distinguished far more by their interests, attitudes, and drives than by their intellectual abilities, as conventionally measured. Given a basic IQ of about 120, a further increase in measured intelligence is not necessarily associated with a significant increase in creativity." Beyond that point, what seems to determine creativity is a person's motivational and stylistic variables. For example, those whose profession is creative writing tend to show a "moral attitude" and to be committed to larger meanings of an aesthetic and philosophical sort. They are individuals constantly involved in creating their own private universes of meaning: "cosmologists all.""' Indeed, we can almost view some creative persons as missionaries on both an external and internal quest. Their well-rationalized quest may appear to be for an elegant answer, one that will throw a new light of understanding into a dark corner of the impersonal cosmos. But their internal quest is for a highly personalized, idealized interpretation-one that brings order and meaning to their own universe. Such a private interpretation must satisfy their own symbolic needs and aesthetic concepts.

  The creative personality certainly tends to be aesthetically sensitive. Perhaps this is best appreciated in the visual sphere. Some would regard the brief measurement of aesthetic preference termed the BarronWelsh art scale as a test of great value in predicting creative potential.2, High scores on this scale, reflecting an intrinsic visual preference for complex form and design, are believed by some to correlate with creative potential not only in the arts and literature but in the physical sciences and engineering as well.

  If I were to limit myself to the five most important traits, I would quickly select: curiosity, imagination, enthusiasm, discrimination, and persistence. But this would be like trying to define the complex operations of a whole human being in terms of his five most vital organs: nervous system, heart, lungs, adrenals, liver. They are essential, but they, too, are only part of the total picture.

  23

  The Creative Personality: Pro and Con

  If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears; however measured or far away.

  Henry Thoreau

  Given all the foregoing requirements, you might conclude that a creative investigator should be a kind of innovative super Eagle Scout who delights in problem solving and helps little old ladies to cross the street in his spare time. Actually, more unconventional and eccentric qualities are required; the investigator must be, in every sense of the term, an opportunist at heart, wrapped in layer after layer of paradoxes. Let's now look at the other side of the picture.

  It has been repeatedly stressed how nonconformist the more creative are.' Other socially downgraded traits that go along with the disposition toward originality include rebelliousness, disorderliness, and vanity, if not exhibitionism.2 Hans Selye has classified the scientific personalities he knows into sixteen types whose features one should either avoid or emulate.' The litany is too long to reproduce here, but as Selye, too, confesses, most of us will admit to at least traces of every one of the sins it enumerates. Mea culpa.

  An interesting kind of fluid intellectual instability has been noted by Barron, who finds that the effectively original person is one who can regress very "far out" for the moment, yet still be able quickly to return to a high degree of rationality.' As he does so, he can take back with him the fruits of his earlier regression to fantastic modes of thought. If the person is basically confident of his own ability to discern reality accurately, then he can afford to give free rein to his powers of imagination. Thus, the creative person "may be at once naive and knowledgeable, being at home equally to primitive symbolism and to rigorous logic. He is both more primitive and more cultured, more destructive and more constructive, occasionally crazier and yet adamantly saner, than the average person."'

  I hope that the reader who feels, simultaneously, the tug of these same struggling opposites in himself has fully experienced them in what to me is one of the supreme turning points in the theater. It may come as no surprise that I would refer to the play Harvey. (It just happens that the author's name is Mary Chase.) Up to the end of the second act of the play we have become convinced that Elwood P. Dowd, its lovable eccentric, is probably hallucinating when he converses with his invisible friend, Harvey, whom he describes as a white rabbit, six feet one-and-a-half inches tall. Indeed, the logical part of our mind resists any notion to the contrary. Then, as the play approaches its culminating moment, the action suddenly stops, the actors exit, and the empty stage is deserted and lifeless. Or, is it? For the doorknob now rattles at stage left, the door opens and closes, as if by an unseen hand, and after an appropriate interval, the door at stage right opens and shuts, as if by an unseen ... paw? Then suddenly, we grasp the enchanting certainty that Harvey does exist, even though he's invisible to us. Our fantasy becomes real. With a giant hop, our imagination propels us into a delightful new fantastic reality. It is this delicious, incongruous juxtaposition of reality and fantasy that captivates us not only for the remainder of the play, but also far on into a lifetime. A good new idea in research has something of the same quality-satisfying us by combining in a flash, old, richly personal symbolism with a fresh vision of reality.

  Kuhn makes an important point when he observes that "very often the successful scientist must simultaneously display the characteristics both of the traditionalist and of the iconoclast."" He regards this ageold tension between tradition and innovation as the essential tension in scientific research. This readiness to break with convention is well illustrated in Thomas Edison's saying: "There ain't no rules around here! We're trying to accomplish something!" Equally strong tensions, as described by Gregg, arise on the threshold of discovery: "To me, one of the surest evidences of probable ability in a research man is this-that when he feels near to a new truth he is overwhelmed with excitement and elation and yet almost paralysed by cautious skepticism and self-imposed dubiety."'

  The investigator is forever in quest of the new. He is always curious, unfulfilled, intellectually restless, not satisfied with what is already well known. Indeed, to the extent that the old constricts the new and prevents it from emerging, he finds himself in rebellion against it. To this extent, creativity is the natural enemy of dogma and conformity. Because he knows this instinctively, the creative person feels a piercing shock when he recognizes that "the enemy exists within the gates," that dogma and orthodoxy still linger within himself. In fact, he will discover more than a few rigid rods within the structure of his own personality around which he molds zones of concrete conformity. Not until he consciously readjusts to this fact will he start to be truly open and even-tempered, responding as objectively to the ideas of others as he does to his own.

  The evidence that creative men demonstrate a high degree of "masculine-associated" traits such as assertiveness, confidence, determination, ambition, and drive for power, while at the same time having a greater than average incidence of "feminine" interests, suggests that it is a wedding of the necessary sensitivity and intuition together with purposive action and determination that is conducive to creativeness.' The creative man may be less constrained to deny the side of his nature, viewed as feminine in our football-oriented culture, that reflects an openness to emotions and feelings and considerable self-awareness.

  We see, then, that the creative personality includes some unusual executive abilities-if not to reconcile contradictions then at least to manage to live with them. I have presented a representative field of these opposing traits in figure 12. No single one of the characteristics on the rim of this field is all good or all bad. It is important that there be a balanced spectrum of opposing traits, and an inevitable tugging tension between each polar pair of them. Moreover, each trait serves creative ends-sometimes one way, other times another way. The creative person not only lives with the pull of these contrasting centrifugal forces, but goes on to resolve them in creative endeavor.
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br />   Some may feel they can accurately locate the epicenter of their personality in one well-defined spot. I have not been able to manage this. I have always had a strong inner sense of operating at many points that merge along a whole series of spectral bands; of having a variety of interests and traits that seem more and more compatible as the years go on even though they may be quite opposite. My inner feeling is not of being bivalent, or ambivalent, but of being polyvalent. Pledged to establish facts and biological truths, I still worship no final conclusions, but tend to look beyond toward an infinite complexity of things. Perhaps one reason my favorite movie is the Japanese film Rasliomon is because it exemplifies so well the view that truth itself differs depending on the perceptions of those who look at facts in the light of their own internal needs.