I’ve been thinking a lot about creativity lately, in particular about how it works and what it feels like to create something. A couple of recent news articles, while not directly about creativity, do seem to shed some light.
An article from the Boston Globe discusses some of the capabilities of the infant mind and how they differ from those of the adult mind. The skills our brains are born with are useful in gaining mastery over the world; as we grow and use this initial tool kit, the result is a greater capacity for focused consciousness and time-saving familiarity with the world we live in. As in so many things, though, it’s not all gain. Some of those early-life attributes, such as greater flexibility and the capacity for noticing many more details of a situation or scene, would be kind of handy to regain from time to time. The article gives some interesting tidbits about how the brain develops from its early state into something more sophisticated but in some ways narrower and less rich.
Creativity comes into the story, it seems to me, because part of what it means to be creative is to be able to see things freshly, not only appreciating the familiar as if it were new but being able to present stories, colors, shapes, or sounds in new ways, as if seeing them from a new angle. I wonder if creativity is enhanced in any way by spending time with very young people and borrowing their sense of wonder and their capacity for absorbing situations (not knowing what they should pay attention to, the idea is that they try to pay attention to it all). One thing I’ve run across several times in advice about how to keep your brain fit and healthy as you age is to try new things: learn a new language or a new physical skill, read up on some subject or place that’s foreign to you. Maybe what’s going on there is that by immersing yourself in a world that you don’t know, you have to re-acquire some of that ability to notice everything and put it all together. It certainly seems like that might also be a boon to those who want to create; I’ve always had the feeling that doing new things, even if they weren’t related to the writing I wanted to do, was helpful somehow.
An article from The Economist, on the other hand, covers some new research into subconscious thought. A new study has used EEGs to examine brain activity while people were solving a particular type of problem; it turns out that brain activity can be used to predict, by up to 8 seconds, whether someone is going to get the answer to a puzzle. In other words, subconscious brain activity (specifically, an increase in high-frequency gamma waves in the right frontal cortex) reliably signals a forthcoming conscious moment of insight.
It’s always been fascinating to read about the many ways our subconscious minds seem to go on about their business without letting our conscious minds in on what’s going on until necessary. It’s like there’s some committee in the back room discussing the options unbeknownst to me (although “me” is a slippery pronoun in this context) until suddenly my conscious mind is announcing some decision to myself and to the world, just as confidently as if it had thought of it by itself. I’m sure this behind-the-scenes activity makes my cognitive processing much more efficient, but sometimes I’d really like to know what’s going on in there. The whole thing is even more peculiar when you’re coming up with ideas for some creative project or another, and you suddenly see a way to put together the pieces you’ve been mentally pushing around but you’re not sure where the insight came from, or you think you know what road you’re going to take in your writing that day but wind up finding yourself far from home with not much of an idea how you got there. Funny old things, brains.
The first part of your message reminded me of Geoffrey Miller’s musings on the relationship between playfulness and creativity, youth indicators, and sexual selection.
“Most mammals start out cute, playful, and innovative, and gradually become grim, pragmatic, and habit-ridden. Ashley Montagu and many others have observed that humans retain some aspects of juvenile playfulness longer into adulthood. This has been considered one of the prime symptoms of human ‘neoteny,’ the slowing-down of behavioral maturation relative to physical maturation. The traditional explanation for human neoteny is that slower cognitive development might permit a longer period of useful learning. Certainly there may have been good reasons for specific kinds of social learning to persist longer into adulthood over hominid evolution. But I see no reason why this would generalize into the sort of playfulness that we see in adult humans but not in adult chimpanzees.
“Playfulness has large time and energy costs. Indeed, biologists struggled for a long time to identify what possible benefits could offset the costs of play behavior, even for young animals. Play-fighting, play-chasing, and play-fleeing are ways of practicing some of the most important skills that adult animals need for competing, eating, and avoiding being eaten. But once these basic skills are mastered, what possible selection pressure could favor the retention of playfulness into adulthood?
“One clue is that adult human playfulness is not uniform across all situations. When human hunter-gatherers are foraging, they do not walk playfully like John Cleese in the Monty Python ‘Ministry of Silly Walks’ sketch. They walk along with the silent, steady efficiency of any other adult mammal making its living. But when they are socializing in a group–especially in a mixed-sex group–they may very well hop, skip, jump, and do the Chicken Walk.
“Playful, creative behaviors could function as indicators of youthfulness. Their persistence into human adulthood may be not a side-effect of neoteny, but a result of direct sexual selection for youth indicators…if playfulness usually decreases from juveniles to older adulthood for all mammals, then playfulness may be a reliable cue of youthfulness, health, and fertility.”
Geoffrey F Miller, The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature, 1st ed. (New York: Doubleday, 2000), pg. 407-408.
Summarizing: if creativity is a baby-like plasticity of mind, we adults seem to find that attractive in fellow adults as youth indicators, thus through sexual selection perpetuate its presence later in life.
Cool, thank you!
I don’t think I buy Miller’s suggestion that playfulness could be fostered by sexual selection. Behaviors typical of sexually immaturity seem like a rather unlikely target for sexual selection. OK, I know there’s an odd segment of the population that certainly does find adults behaving like babies or young children sexually attractive, but, well, it’s not exactly the norm.
A more obvious explanation, to me, is that humans life simply doesn’t involve a static set of basic skills that can be mastered when young & then persist unmodified throughout life. We keep attributes associated with learning because we don’t stop needing to learn. Speculation, but perhaps more plausible speculation…
Personally, I don’t see how anyone could ask these fundamental questions about adaptive reality perception without becoming overwhelmingly curious about two things: psychedelics and schizophrenia.
But that’s just me.
Playfulness makes people (and animals) feel relaxed, excited, and joyful. A good sense of play, i.e. the ability to be interesting and unexpected, and to provoke similar stimuli from me, is absolutely a part of *my* process of sexual selection 🙂 Play is vitally necessary for making life more than just its component mechanical processes, and it preserves the joy inherent in living. Without it, the brutal parts of life would gradually demoralize us and grind us down, and everybody knows demoralized people are not robust reproducers. For this reason, it’s central to the psychological and spiritual survival of the species.