Life Finds a Way

by Andreas Wagner

  Unfortunately, creativity requires more than the education afforded by inner journeys like that of Prigogine or by outer journeys like that of Gauguin. Countless people travel the world, explore different professions, or study diverse disciplines, but we do not hear from most of them. They lack a talent that is crucial for creativity.

  Here is a clue about the essence of this talent:

  A man and his wife, who normally quarrel a lot, spend an unusually harmonious evening at a restaurant. While they enjoy their dinner, a waitress suddenly drops a tray stacked with dishes, which shatter with an earsplitting racket. “Listen, honey!” the husband says. “They are playing our song.”

  Explaining a joke is a surefire way to destroy it, but it also helps connect humor to a grander theme that we first encountered in biology. Humor links concepts in a mental landscape that are as remote as the harmony of a love song and the frightful noise of shattering dishes, a bit like what evolution does when it recombines very different genes. And when these concepts combine in a good joke, a brief flash of surprise and delight is created. This is another insight of Koestler, who compared the creativity of humor, art, and science in the Act of Creation. He identified the energy source common to both the spark of a joke and the supernova of a major creation when he concluded that all human creativity is powered by such combinations.48

  A creative mind must not just absorb wide-ranging concepts, ideas, or images. It must recombine them, however remote they may seem. Such recombination can use different vehicles. An especially powerful one is the analogy. When physicist Max Planck combined the unrelated concepts of atoms and vibrating strings into one of the most fertile analogies ever, he became able to explain that atoms emit energy in discrete, quantized packets. Louis de Broglie, another father of quantum theory, imagined that elementary particles like electrons not only vibrate but also produce harmonics like real strings. His insights paved the way to modern medical technologies like magnetic resonance imaging. (It may have helped that Planck was a brilliant pianist and de Broglie an accomplished violinist.)

  As in science, so too in engineering. Johannes Gutenberg combined woodblock printing with the idea of a coin punch to create movable type, and then combined that new idea with the squeezing action of a wine press. The end result was a revolution in how we preserve and spread knowledge.49 Surgical staples originated with indigenous peoples on several continents who closed gaping wounds by letting large ants bite the opposite edges of these wounds and draw the edges together with their powerful jaws. Velcro was inspired by the clinging of burs to fur and clothing.50 In the words of economist Brian Arthur, entire technologies “come into being as fresh combinations of what already exists.”51

  By linking seemingly unrelated concepts and phenomena, analogies have helped us discover the most profound laws of nature and create technological revolutions. Their power is similar to that of another element of language, one as central to literature and poetry as analogies are to science. I am thinking of the metaphor. A poetic metaphor like atoms are ringing bells expresses the similarity between atoms and ringing bells more succinctly than any science text could.

  The word metaphor literally means to carry something from one place to another.52 Metaphors have been essential to creative writing and speaking since the time of Aristotle, who first expounded their power in his Rhetoric.53 Robert Frost declared that he strived to “make metaphor the whole of thinking,” and others argue that it already is almost the whole of our thinking.54 In the words of psychologist Steven Pinker, “Metaphor is so widespread in language that it’s hard to find expressions for abstract thoughts that are not metaphorical.”55 We say that a bus stops at the station, but also that we meet at 6 o’clock, using space as a metaphor for time. We say that a man goes to the store, but also that a screen goes blank, using movement as a metaphor for change. We do not even recognize such pervasive metaphors for what they are.

  Metaphors unearth commonalities between two remote concepts, but the metaphor the “stench of failure” works not just because it connects the unpleasant natures of filth and failure. Metaphors are more powerful than that, as psychologists Roger Tourangeau and Lance Rips showed in experiments that analyzed the responses of eighty different people to multiple metaphors. Some of the metaphors the scientists had invented themselves, such as “the eagle is a lion among birds.” Others they lifted from published poems, such as Robert Frost’s An Old Man’s Winter Night, which contains the line “a light he was to no one but himself.” Each study participant was asked to list properties of the different concepts, such as eagle and lion, that occurred in the same metaphor. After that, she had to report which images the whole metaphor conjured in her mind. Tourangeau and Rips found that metaphors do not just lay bare the commonalities between concepts—eagles and lions stalk, they prey on their quarry, and so on. That’s because people do not take phrases like “the eagle is a lion among birds” or “a light he was to no one but himself” literally. To do so would be absurd—an eagle is not a lion, nor does an old man shine like a lamp. Instead, the scientists found that metaphors conjure meanings that are new and different from those contained in their parts. For example, Frost’s “a light he was to no one but himself” evokes the man’s isolation and solitude.56

  British poet Ruth Padel is referring to this power of mental recombination when she calls metaphors the most extreme movement powering a poem’s journey. Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca does the same thing when he calls a metaphor an equestrian leap that unites two worlds.57 Metaphors are the most compact form of recombinant thought.

  We can investigate the role of mental leaps in creativity not just by listening to poets or studying metaphors, but also by having people—from high school students to professional artists, scientists, writers, and engineers—take creativity tests. A bewildering variety of such tests exist, but remarkably, all of them measure the same ability in various guises: how far and how fast a mind can travel.

  The history of these tests begins in World War II. That’s when the US Air Force studied how pilots react during an emergency like a failing plane and found that its smartest pilots did not always react in the best possible way to save their planes and their lives.58 Instead, the most creative pilots did, and the smartest pilots were often not the most creative.59 To identify those most creative pilots, the Air Force hired psychologist Joy Paul Guilford to help develop experimental tests for creativity. In the course of this work, Guilford had a simple yet enduring insight. There are two fundamentally different kinds of thinking: divergent thinking and convergent thinking.60 Divergent thinking is the heart of creativity, providing multiple candidate solutions for a problem, like that of saving a plane, whereas convergent thinking winnows these variants down to a single, hopefully best solution. Indeed, Guilford’s work provided further support for the Darwinian nature of mental creativity, where divergent thinking is analogous to processes like mutation and recombination, and convergent thinking is analogous to natural selection. Guilford also realized something else—people’s minds differ in how they create new thoughts. Some move in small steps akin to point mutations. Others—the more creative ones—take bigger leaps.

  Guilford’s ideas helped him develop a variety of tests for divergent thinking, which spawned a whole industry of creativity testing. Among the earliest tests were word association tests, where a person is given a word like hand and asked for a list of related words. Where an unimaginative person would respond only with the obvious—arm, foot, and finger—a creative person would come up with more original responses, like soft, friendship, and instrument. A person’s responses to each word in such a test would be compared to responses from hundreds or thousands of people. From their responses, we know that fruit is close to apple, edible, and tree, but more distant from medicine, garden, and wine. And butterfly is close to insect, caterpillar, and bird, but more distant from blossom, sunshine, and temporary.61

  Such tests also distinguish fluency—the ability to fin
d many related words—from originality—the ability to find unusual words. Not all fluent minds are also original. Some find many associations, but all of them are near each other. Original minds, however, find more distant or remote associations. They are like globetrotters compared to homebodies, who only putter around their backyard.62

  The notion of distant travel is baked into the very name of another, more sophisticated word-association test. It is the remote-associates test, which starts from a triplet of words like cottage, swiss, and cake. The task is to find a single word that links all three.63 Most people easily find the solution to this triplet—cheese—but more remote triplets are harder to solve. They include river, note, and account (linked by bank), as well as fur, rack, and tail (linked by coat). The test-taker needs to solve as many triplets as possible within a given amount of time.64

  Because not all creativity is about words, psychologists also developed tests to quantify nonverbal creativity. One such test is the alternative-uses test, where people are given an object like a brick, a hairpin, or a cardboard box and are asked to come up with as many different uses as they can—a brick could be used as a bookend, a paperweight, a doorstop, a hammer, and so on. In another test, subjects are shown a simple shape, such as a circle, and are asked to draw as many objects with this shape as they can—a sun, a face, a flower, a football, and so on. In yet another test, subjects are asked to imagine the consequences of unusual events, such as if everybody went blind, or if clouds in the sky suddenly had ropes dangling from them, reaching to the ground.65 The most widely used of these test batteries is the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking, named after its designer, psychologist E. Paul Torrance.66 (Torrance knew about the importance of suspending judgment, which we heard about earlier, because he emphasized that his tests should be taken in a relaxed atmosphere so that subjects can have fun with the test questions.67)

  These tests are simple, but they work.68 For example, architecture students at the University of California whose professional work was ranked by their professors as being especially creative also scored highly on a remote-association test.69 Such expert ratings of creativity may seem a tad subjective for a scientific experiment. However, not only do different raters often agree to a surprising extent, ultimately all creative works are evaluated by other humans.70 Even better than such snapshots of people’s creativity are longitudinal studies that follow a person’s creative output over many years. Two such studies tracked elementary and high school students for up to twenty-two years after they had taken the Torrance test battery.

  One of these students is Ted Schwarzrock, who took the Torrance test as an eight-year-old and astonished psychologists with the twenty-five creative improvements he found for the fire truck they handed him. Five decades later, he was a wealthy entrepreneur who had invented medical technologies like respirators and anti-inflammatories.71 And he was no exception. Students who had done well on the test frequently became more prolific creators, based on criteria such as award-winning artworks, plays, and musical compositions that were publicly performed, as well as patents and inventions.72

  But creativity tests are not perfect. We know this because many good test-takers do not become prolific creators. And that should also come as no surprise. For one thing, most creativity tests focus on originality but not appropriateness—the wilder an idea, the better. Also, they quantify the talent for divergent thinking to generate ideas, but not that for convergent thinking to isolate solutions. Most of us know the kind of person who has too much of one but too little of the other. Just like biological evolution, human creativity needs a balance between opposing forces.

  In addition, typical creativity tests are completed in mere minutes or hours, and without special equipment or skills. That’s a good thing—a test asking for a sculpture to be created from a slab of marble would find few takers. But it also creates another weakness because such tests neglect the fact that outstanding creators undergo years of training, and that they may have to endure even longer periods of obscurity. Creativity tests are silent on the grit it takes to stagger through a desert in search of an oasis.73

  But, warts and all, creativity tests have taught us a lot about creative minds. Their ability to quantify “remoteness” and “closeness”—for example, through frequent word associations—shows that distance can be more than a metaphor for mapping our minds.74 And they all show that creative minds can traverse great distances. Instantly.

  Creativity tests are not alone in making this point. Experiments that help our minds recombine images do as well. In these experiments, psychologist Albert Rothenberg showed pairs of very distant—really, unrelated—images to each member of a group of visual artists or art students. For example, the first image might show several soldiers with rifles crouched near a tank, whereas the second image might show an ornate French four-poster bed. To another group of students, Rothenberg presented a single composite image, with both the soldiers and the bed superimposed. He then asked the artists to create new drawings inspired by these images and had these drawings evaluated by independent experts, which included a professional artist, an art teacher, and an art critic. The result: the composite image evoked more creative drawings.75

  Rothenberg’s composite image does for visual artists what metaphors do for readers of poetry: it launches a leap of the imagination. And the same principle—Rothenberg calls it homospatial thinking—also enhances other forms of creativity. We know this because Rothenberg spent more than a thousand hours interviewing American and British writers and scientists, who confirmed that imagining different kinds of objects in the same space helps their creative work.76 Rothenberg’s work also sheds light on multiple well-known historical anecdotes, such as the one where Kekulé dreamed of atoms morphing into snake-like chains, and when these snakes bit themselves in the tail, he discovered the celebrated ring of benzene’s molecular structure.77 Albert Einstein famously imagined himself traveling along a beam of light when he developed relativity theory, and physicist Donald Glaser envisioned himself in Earth orbit above a tub of liquid hydrogen when he invented a bubble chamber to detect subatomic particles.78

  Yet other psychological experiments show that creative minds extend their feelers further into the world. And I do not mean that creative people deliberately seek new experiences—that’s almost a truism, because you can only recombine what you have experienced. I mean an altogether more subtle, unconscious sensibility.

  In one such experiment, 204 college students had to solve anagrams—puzzles where letters in a word like senator can be rearranged to yield other words, like treason. Before this task, the participants were shown a list of words, and at the same time, another list of words was read to them aloud. They were asked to memorize the words they read, but to ignore the words they were hearing. What they didn’t know is that both kinds of words included solutions to some of the anagrams they would have to solve.

  When they did solve the anagrams, highly creative students differed from the rest: they did better on those anagrams whose solutions they had heard but were asked to ignore. In other words, their minds were less scrupulous at blending out supposedly irrelevant but actually crucial information.79 This pattern will strike a chord in anybody familiar with the history of scientific discovery, which is full of people who pay attention to information ignored by others. In the words of chemist Albert Szent-Györgyi, who discovered vitamin C: “Discovery consists of looking at the same thing as everyone else and thinking something different.”80

  Sensitive antennae. Homospatial thinking. Remote associations. These are all different manifestations of the same talent—fast and distant travel—that a creative mind displays during the minutes or hours of a psychological test. A creative mind’s flashes of brilliance during such a test are a microcosm of human creativity, but the same talent creates the fireworks of major creations, in which knowledge accumulated during a life’s journey becomes recombined. Such recombination becomes easier when our minds dream, play, or i
ncubate, suspending the judgment—temporarily—that usually weeds out the inferior ideas that can ultimately become stepping-stones to perfection.

  Mental recombination is as important to our creativity as DNA recombination is for biological evolution’s exploration of adaptive landscapes. So too are play and various other means to reaching a state of mind that allows us to leap or drift through mental landscapes. And because landscapes are so central for all kinds of creation, the landscape perspective on human creativity can help us answer questions that matter to many of us: how to raise children, how to run innovative businesses, or how to turn entire nations into creative powerhouses.

  Chapter 9

  From Children to Civilizations

  By the time South Korean students finish suneung, the national college admission exam, many have spent months sleeping fewer than six hours a night and studying up to thirteen hours a day, often in soul-crushing cram schools called hagwons—little wonder that they hurl their textbooks out the window after they are done. Exam day itself derails daily routines across the country: mothers fill the country’s temples to pray, city officials add extra subway trains to avoid delays, air-traffic controllers reroute planes to avoid disturbing the English-listening part of the test, and policemen stand by on motorcycles to speed latecomers to the exam. Protesters even suspend demonstrations, such is the grip of the test on the public imagination.1

  At least as important—and as harrowing to students—is the gaokao, its Chinese counterpart, taken by more than nine million Chinese students every year. Their preparation begins at age five, when Chinese “tiger mothers” begin to drill multiplication tables and proper syntax into them. Success means university and hopefully a better life, while failure can mean a life of manual labor. And where Chinese parents are hopeful that their kids will ascend the social ladder, many well-off US parents are afraid that their children will descend it. The costs for kids in pressure cooker high schools can be just as high. As one Palo Alto high school junior says: “We are not teenagers. We are lifeless bodies in a system that breeds competition.”2 With that kind of pressure, it is little surprise that both the gaokao and the rigors of elite US high schools have been linked to spades of teenage suicides.3