How to Fly a Horse

by Kevin Ashton

  The human race’s creative power is distributed in all of us, not concentrated in some of us. Our creations are too great and too numerous to come from a few steps by a few people. They must come from many steps by many people. Invention is incremental—a series of slight and constant changes. Some changes open doors to new worlds of opportunity and we call them breakthroughs. Others are marginal. But when we look carefully, we will always find one small change leading to another, sometimes within one mind, often among several, sometimes across continents or between generations, sometimes taking hours or days and occasionally centuries, the baton of innovation passing in an endless relay of renewal. Creating accretes and compounds, and as a consequence, every day, each human life is made possible by the sum of all previous human creations. Every object in our life, however old or new, however apparently humble or simple, holds the stories, thoughts, and courage of thousands of people, some living, most dead—the accumulated new of fifty thousand years. Our tools and art are our humanity, our inheritance, and the everlasting legacy of our ancestors. The things we make are the speech of our species: stories of triumph, courage, and creation, of optimism, adaptation, and hope; tales not of one person here and there but of one people everywhere; written in a common language, not African, American, Asian, or European but human.

  There are many beautiful things about creating being human and innate. One is that we all create in more or less the same way. Our individual strengths and tendencies of course cause differences, but they are small and few relative to the similarities, which are great and many. We are more like Leonardo, Mozart, and Einstein than not.

  4 | AN END TO GENIUS

  The Renaissance belief that creating is reserved for genius survived through the Enlightenment of the seventeenth century, the Romanticism of the eighteenth century, and the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century. It was not until the middle of the twentieth century that the alternative position—that everyone is capable of creation—first emerged from early studies of the brain.

  In the 1940s, the brain was an enigma. The body’s secrets had been revealed by several centuries of medicine, but the brain, producing consciousness without moving parts, remained a puzzle. Here is one reason theories of creation resorted to magic: the brain, throne of creation, was three pounds of gray and impenetrable mystery.

  As the West recovered from World War II, new technologies appeared. One was the computer. This mechanical mind made understanding the brain seem possible for the first time. In 1952, Ross Ashby synthesized the excitement in a book called Design for a Brain. He summarized the new thinking elegantly:

  The most fundamental facts are that the earth is over 2,000,000,000 years old and that natural selection has been winnowing the living organisms incessantly. As a result they are today highly specialized in the arts of survival, and among these arts has been the development of a brain, an organ that has been developed in evolution as a specialized means to survival. The nervous system, and living matter in general, will be assumed to be essentially similar to all other matter. No deus ex machina will be invoked.

  Put simply: brains don’t need magic.

  A San Franciscan named Allen Newell came of academic age during this period. Drawn by the energy of the era, he abandoned his plan to become a forest ranger (in part because his first job was feeding gangrenous calves’ livers to fingerling trout), became a scientist instead, and then, one Friday afternoon in November 1954, experienced what he would later call a “conversion experience” during a seminar on mechanical pattern recognition. He decided to devote his life to a single scientific question: “How can the human mind occur in the physical universe?”

  “We now know that the world is governed by physics,” he explained, “and we now understand the way biology nestles comfortably within that. The issue is how does the mind do that as well? The answer must have the details. I’ve got to know how the gears clank, how the pistons go and all of that.”

  As he embarked on this work, Newell became one of the first people to realize that creating did not require genius. In a 1959 paper called “The Processes of Creative Thinking,” he reviewed what little psychological data there was about creative work, then set out his radical idea: “Creative thinking is simply a special kind of problem-solving behavior.” He made the point in the understated language academics use when they know they are onto something:

  The data currently available about the processes involved in creative and non-creative thinking show no particular differences between the two. It is impossible to distinguish, by looking at the statistics describing the processes, the highly skilled practitioner from the rank amateur. Creative activity appears simply to be a special class of problem-solving activity characterized by novelty, unconventionality, persistence, and difficulty in problem formulation.

  It was the beginning of the end for genius and creation. Making intelligent machines forced new rigor on the study of thought. The capacity to create was starting to look more and more like an innate function of the human brain—possible with standard equipment, no genius necessary.

  Newell did not claim that everyone was equally creative. Creating, like any human ability, comes in a spectrum of competence. But everybody can do it. There is no electric fence between those who can create and those who cannot, with genius on one side and the general population on the other.

  Newell’s work, along with the work of others in the artificial intelligence community, undermined the myth of creativity. As a result, some of the next generation of scientists started to think about creation differently. One of the most important of these was Robert Weisberg, a cognitive psychologist at Philadelphia’s Temple University.

  Weisberg was an undergraduate during the first years of the artificial intelligence revolution, spending the early 1960s in New York before getting his PhD from Princeton and joining the faculty at Temple in 1967. He spent his career proving that creating is innate, ordinary, and for everybody.

  Weisberg’s view is simple. He builds on Newell’s contention that creative thinking is the same as problem solving, then extends it to say that creative thinking is the same as thinking in general but with a creative result. In Weisberg’s words, “when one says of someone that he or she is ‘thinking creatively,’ one is commenting on the outcome of the process, not on the process itself. Although the impact of creative ideas and products can sometimes be profound, the mechanisms through which an innovation comes about can be very ordinary.”

  Said another way, normal thinking is rich and complex—so rich and complex that it can sometimes yield extraordinary—or “creative”—results. We do not need other processes. Weisberg shows this in two ways: with carefully designed experiments and detailed case studies of creative acts—from the painting of Picasso’s Guernica to the discovery of DNA and the music of Billie Holiday. In each example, by using a combination of experiment and history, Weisberg demonstrates how creating can be explained without resorting to genius and great leaps of the imagination.

  Weisberg has not written about Edmond, but his theory works for Edmond’s story. At first, Edmond’s discovery of how to pollinate vanilla came from nowhere and seemed miraculous. But toward the end of his life, Ferréol Bellier-Beaumont revealed how the young slave solved the mystery of the black flower.

  Ferréol began his story in 1793, when German naturalist Konrad Sprengel discovered that plants reproduced sexually. Sprengel called it “the secret of nature.” The secret was not well received. Sprengel’s peers did not want to hear that flowers had a sex life. His findings spread anyway, especially among botanists and farmers who were more interested in growing good plants than in judging floral morality. And so Ferréol knew how to manually fertilize watermelon, by “marrying the male and female parts together.” He showed this to Edmond, who, as Ferréol described it, later “realized that the vanilla flower also had male and female elements, and worked out for himself how to join them together.” Edmond’s discovery, despite its huge
economic impact, was an incremental step. It is no less creative as a result. All great discoveries, even ones that look like transforming leaps, are short hops.

  Weisberg’s work, with subtitles like Genius and Other Myths and Beyond the Myth of Genius, did not eliminate the magical view of creation nor the idea that people who create are a breed apart. It is easier to sell secrets. Titles available in today’s bookstores include 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative, 39 Keys to Creativity, 52 Ways to Get and Keep Your Creativity Flowing, 62 Exercises to Unlock Your Most Creative Ideas, 100 What-Ifs of Creativity, and 250 Exercises to Wake Up Your Brain. Weisberg’s books are out of print. The myth of creativity does not die easily.

  But it is becoming less fashionable, and Weisberg is not the only expert advocating for an epiphany-free, everybody-can theory of creation. Ken Robinson was awarded a knighthood for his work on creation and education and is known for the moving, funny talks he gives at an annual conference in California called TED (for technology, entertainment, and design). One of his themes is how education suppresses creation. He describes “the really extraordinary capacity that children have, their capacity for innovation,” and says that “all kids have tremendous talents and we squander them, pretty ruthlessly.” Robinson’s conclusion is that “creativity now is as important in education as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status.” Cartoonist Hugh MacLeod makes the same point more colorfully: “Everyone is born creative; everyone is given a box of crayons in kindergarten. Being suddenly hit years later with the ‘creative bug’ is just a wee voice telling you, ‘I’d like my crayons back, please.’ ”

  5 | TERMITES

  If genius is a prerequisite for creating, it should be possible to identify creative ability in advance. The experiment has been tried many times. The best-known version was started in 1921 by Lewis Terman and still continues. Terman, a cognitive psychologist born in the nineteenth century, was a eugenicist who believed the human race could be improved with selective breeding, a classifier of individuals according to their abilities as he perceived them. His most famous classification system was the Stanford-Binet IQ test, which placed children on a scale “ranging from idiocy on the one hand to genius on the other,” with classifications in between including “retarded,” “feebleminded,” “delinquent,” “dull normal,” “average,” “superior,” and “very superior.” Terman was so sure of his test’s accuracy that he thought its results revealed immutable destiny. He also believed, like all eugenicists, that African Americans, Mexicans, and others were genetically inferior to English-speaking white people. He described them as “the world’s hewers of wood and drawers of water” who lacked the ability to be “intelligent voters or capable citizens.” The children, he said, “should be segregated in special classes.” The adults should “not be allowed to reproduce.” Unlike almost all eugenicists, Terman set out to prove his prejudices.

  His experiment was called Genetic Studies of Genius. It was a longitudinal study—meaning it would follow its subjects for a long period of time. It tracked more than 1,500 children who lived in California, all of whom were identified as “gifted” by Terman’s IQ test or some similar scheme. Nearly all the participants were white and from upper- or middle-class families. The majority of them were male. This is unsurprising: of the 168,000 children considered for that pool of 1,500, only one was black, one was Indian, one was Mexican, and four were Japanese. The selectees, who had an average IQ of 151, called themselves “Termites.” Data about the progress of their lives were collected every five years. After Terman died, in 1956, others took up his research, aiming to continue the work until the last participant either withdrew or died.

  Thirty-five years into the experiment, Terman proudly enumerated the success of “his children”:

  Nearly 2,000 scientific and technical papers and articles and some 60 books and monographs in the sciences, literature, arts, and humanities. Patents granted amount to at least 230. Other writings include 33 novels, about 375 short stories, novelettes, and plays; 60 or more essays, critiques, and sketches; and 265 miscellaneous articles. Hundreds of publications by journalists that classify as news stories, editorials, or newspaper columns. Hundreds, if not thousands, of radio, television, or motion picture scripts.

  The identity of most of the Termites is confidential. Around thirty have disclosed their participation. Some were notable creators. Jess Oppenheimer worked in television and was a principal developer of a top-ranked, Emmy Award–winning comedy called I Love Lucy. Edward Dmytryk was a film director, making more than fifty Hollywood movies, including The Caine Mutiny, which was nominated for several Oscars, starred Humphrey Bogart, and was the second most watched film of 1954.

  Other participants fared less well. They found more ordinary work as policemen, technicians, truck drivers, and secretaries. One was a potter who was eventually committed to a mental hospital; another cleaned swimming pools; several collected welfare. By 1947, Terman was forced to conclude, “We have seen that intellect and achievement are far from perfectly correlated.” This was despite Terman actively helping his participants by writing letters of recommendation and providing mentorship and references. Movie director Dmytryk benefited from a letter at age fourteen, after he ran away from his violent father. Terman explained to the Los Angeles juvenile authorities that Dmytryk was “gifted” and his case deserved special consideration. He was saved from his abusive childhood and placed into a good foster home. TV producer Oppenheimer was a coat salesman until Terman helped him get into Stanford University. Some Termites landed careers in Terman’s field of educational psychology, and many were admitted to Stanford, where he was an eminent professor. One Termite took over the study after Terman died.

  The study’s flaws and biases are beside the point. What matters is what happened to the children Terman excluded. The genius theory of creating predicts that the only creators among the children will be the ones Terman deemed geniuses. None of those excluded should have done anything creative: after all, they were not geniuses.

  This is where Terman’s study falls flat. Terman did not create a control group of non-geniuses for comparison. We know a lot about the hundreds of children who were selected and only a little about the tens of thousands who were not. But what we do know is sufficient to undermine the genius theory. One child Terman considered and rejected was a boy named William Shockley. Another was a boy named Luis Alvarez. Both grew up to win Nobel Prizes for physics—Shockley for coinventing the transistor, Alvarez for his work in nuclear magnetic resonance. Shockley started Shockley Semiconductor, one of the first electronics companies in Silicon Valley. Employees of Shockley’s went on to found Fairchild Semiconductor, Intel, and Advanced Micro Devices. Working with his son Walter, Alvarez was the first to propose that an asteroid caused the extinction of the dinosaurs—the “Alvarez hypothesis”—which, after decades of controversy, scientists now accept as fact.

  Terman’s failure to identify these innovators does not close the coffin on the genius hypothesis. Perhaps his definition of genius was insufficient or Shockley and Alvarez’s tests were wrongly administered. But the magnitude of their achievements begs us to consider another conclusion: genius does not predict creative ability because it is not a prerequisite.

  Subsequent studies tried to correct this by measuring creative ability specifically. Starting in 1958, psychologist Ellis Paul Torrance administered a set of tests later known as the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking to schoolchildren in Minnesota. Tasks included coming up with unusual ways to use a brick, having ideas for improving a toy, and improvising a drawing based on a given shape, such as a triangle. The researchers assessed the creative ability of each child by looking at how many ideas he or she generated, how different the ideas were from the others, how unusual they were, and how much detail they included. The difference in thinking about thinking that characterized psychology after World War II is evident in Torrance’s work. Torrance suspected that creation was “within
the reach of everyday people in everyday life” and eventually tried to modify his tests to eliminate racial and socioeconomic bias. Unlike Terman, Torrance did not expect his method to be a reliable predictor of future outcomes. “A high degree of these abilities does not guarantee that the possessor will behave in a highly creative manner,” he wrote. “A high level of these abilities, however, increases a person’s chances of behaving creatively.”

  How did these more modest expectations play out for Torrance’s Minnesotan children? The first follow-up research came in 1966, using children who were tested in 1959. They were asked to select the three classmates who had the best ideas and then complete a questionnaire about their own creative work. The answers were compared with the data from seven years earlier. The correlation was not bad. It was certainly better than Terman’s. The results were much the same after a second follow-up test, in 1971. The Torrance Tests seemed to be a reasonable way to predict creative ability.

  The moment of truth came after fifty years, when the participants were ending their careers and had demonstrated whatever creative ability they possessed. The results were simple. Sixty participants responded. None of the high-scoring individuals had created anything that had achieved public recognition. Many had done things Torrance and his followers called “personal achievements” of creation, such as forming an action group, building a house, or pursuing a creative hobby. The Torrance Tests had achieved the modest goal of predicting who might have a somewhat creative life. They had done nothing to foresee who might have a creative career.

  Without meaning to, Torrance had done something else. He had reinforced what Terman’s results showed but Terman stubbornly ignored: that genius has nothing to do with creative ability, even when creative ability is broadly defined and generously measured. Torrance had recorded the IQ of all his participants. His results showed no connection between creative ability and general intelligence. Whatever Terman was measuring had nothing to do with creating, which is why he missed the Nobel laureates Shockley and Alvarez. We may call them creative geniuses now, but if creative genius is apparent only after creation, it is just another way of saying “creative.”