…Contd.
The Creative Mind is embodied by Einstein in the Sciences and by Virginia Woolf in the Arts. People who are creative are those who come up with new things which eventually get accepted. If an idea or product is too easily accepted, it is not creative; if it is never accepted, it is just a false example. And acceptance can happen quickly or it can take a long time.
I believe that you cannot be creative unless you have mastered at least one discipline, art or craft. And cognitive science teaches us that on the average, it takes about ten years to master a craft. So, Mozart was writing great music when he was fifteen and sixteen, but that is because he started when he was four or five. Same story, with the prodigious Picasso. Creativity is always called “thinking outside the box.” But I order my quintet of minds in the way that I do because you can’t think outside of the box unless you have a box.
As a psychologist, I thought that creativity was mostly an issue of how good your mental computers were. But my own studies and those of others have convinced me of two other things. First, personality and temperament are at least as important as cognitive powers. People who are judged creative take chances, take risks, are not afraid to fall down, and pick themselves up, they say “what can I learn from this?” and they go on.
The other day I was giving a talk and the first question asked was “How do we make people creative”? And I answered that “It’s much easier to prevent it than to make it”. You prevent it by saying that there is only one right answer and by punishing the student if she offers the wrong answer. That never fosters creativity.
Second: People think of creativity as a property of the individual and therefore they say “I am creative”, but that doesn’t work. The only way that creativity can be judged is, if over the long run, the creators works change how other people think and behave. That is the only criterion for creativity. Therefore, the bad news is that you could die without knowing that you are creative, but the good news is that you will never know for sure that you are not creative. Because maybe after you die, people will make a big fuss about you and then, post-mortem, you will be creative. That’s what happened to Emily Dickinson and Vincent van Gogh. We call that the judgment of the field.
There are many examples of false, or no cigar creativity. In the eighteenth century people thought materials burned because of a substance called phlogiston, but it turns out that there is no phlogiston. In the nineteenth century people thought that we all existed in something called the Ether but there is no Ether. In the twentieth century, people thought you could produce virtually infinite amounts of energy by passing some electric current through water, but cold fusion didn’t work. And if you go through most best-selling books and most art shows, in ten or twenty years they will be forgotten. Consequently, there are alas a lot more examples of failed/no cigarcreativity than there are of what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls “Big C” creativity.
If I had given this talk ten years go, I would have stopped here, because my work as a cognitive psychologist has been about thinking, problem solving, and intelligence. Also, there is a natural progression from having a discipline, to being able to synthesize, to creating something new. But for the last dozen years, I have been working chiefly in the human sphere, relations of people in groups and to one another, and thus the last two kinds of minds deal with this human sphere. They are called the Respectful Mind and the Ethical Mind.
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