As a graduating senior, it seems like creativity is a buzzword many employers
are looking for. And as a student who studied both film and theater, I'm
constantly thinking about creative ideas and projects. But sometimes I wonder what
does creativity actually mean?
Having an answer that's unique to you.
I can't really look around and see very much that's not creative. It's just the
human impulse. It's what we're what we're doing all the time.
Making connections
between things that maybe don't seem related on the surface, but sort of if
you dig a little deeper, are very connected.
Freedom. Freedom to live my
life the way I want.
It's a really different way of thinking that really
adds to what you know instead of demonstrates that you know.
I talked to several professors about the topic of creativity, and it was a very
informative exploration. First, I talked to Colleen Seifert, a psychology
professor who specifically studies creativity, in order to get a more
scientific understanding of this topic.
In your brain there's a network called
the executive control network, and it's kind of every part of your brain that
lights up when you're trying to do something. So if you're thinking of an
answer or solving a problem, a lot of the areas of the brain are connected in a
particular pattern. And when you're not trying to do something, that's called the
default. So, you're just daydreaming or relaxing--you're not trying to do
anything for a moment--then you get a different pattern of activation, and
that's been termed the default. Well it turns out the default is the kind of
processing you need to be creative. Where you're not trying to solve a particular
path (the next step), you're just letting it all influence each other. You're
letting the association of ideas happen. And you're not directing the association.
You're not thinking I have to figure out the answer. You're thinking, "What about
this?"
I was fascinated by the idea that a default state can lead to creative
breakthroughs, but how am I supposed to get into a default state when I'm making
a creative work? So, I talked to Laura Kasischke--a novelist, poet, and professor
from the University of Michigan--in order to understand how I can access a default
state while still making creative work.
I never let myself think to myself that
I'm starting a new project, because if I sit down at the computer and I tell
myself, "Oh I'm gonna write a poem now," I'd go completely blank.
I get very anxious, and I go to the laundry or anything else that I can do.
So I just mean part of what I do in writing everyday is I have notebooks--I
have tons of things that are already half started or begun, or, you know, I
could pick up on or I could go back to-- so that I never feel like I'm starting
a new project. When you're a writer, I mean everything you're doing,
everything, you know, you just, you know, tell yourself to look at the world like
a writer. Tell yourself to think about what you--how you--would describe that, and
even if you don't go straight home and do it and write some prize-winning poem
from it, it's all gonna, it's gonna be there. It's gonna be in your mind.
It's gonna be in your head. You're gonna be able to retrieve it at some point.
Another person that I talked to about the creative process was Mark
Tucker--a professor who leads Festifools, a major public art installation that
happens every year in Ann Arbor. He has a lot of students that don't come from
artistic majors, and so I wanted to ask about what it means for different
students to be creative.
If you were to hear someone say: "You know, I'm not a creative person," what would you
tell them?
I would say, "Did you get up this morning?
You know, did you have a
vision for your day?"
How we go about our day
and then how we go about envisioning
a future that we don't even know we're
gonna have, but we have faith that we're
gonna have it, I mean that's a vision. Right? So it's not just about "Oh, can I
mix you know blue and yellow make green." It's like what kind of a life do I want
to have, and once you've even thought of that, I
think you're creative.
About ten years ago, I started working with a student in
design, and seeing how designers think was shocking. For these designers, even
though there is a right answer that's known, they want a different answer. So
the way they think is all about "What difference can I create here?" If I think
of a solution, can I think of a different solution from that? It happens across
domain--it's not just designers--to say what is a question we haven't asked yet.
Like, that's a really creative step, and every field needs to do that, and great
mathematicians are doing that--we're just not thinking of what they're doing as
creative.
After talking to Professor Seifert about creativity existing in all
fields, I wanted to explore creativity outside of the arts. So I talked to
scientist and professor, Luis Zaman.
I think creativity is really important in
science, especially sort of early science. So we think of science as being sort of
this list of facts and things we have to memorize and rules about the way the
world works, but all of those things that we now kind of
take for granted or assume are true or sort of memorize in high school were
things that someone at some point had to prove. I heard someone describe
their science as being undisciplined, and I just really like that phrase, that
turn of phrase, for talking about interdisciplinary science. The idea is
that you're asking questions that kind of don't fit traditionally within one
sort of box that we've drawn around the way we kind of study the world. Thinking
about which questions are sort of the best ones to ask--the scientific process
right doesn't tell you how to do those things. That's kind of the creative
process.
It's clear to me that creativity plays so many functions in our personal
lives, and in the world, but how do we practice creativity in our everyday
lives? How do we stay creative?
Making sure to kind of step back and look at
the world through different lenses than your own. A lot of times, really creative
ideas come from kind of what we would call a beginner's mind.
It sounds very uncreative, but usually I enforce some sort of goal on myself,
and it's only when I'm actually in the process of writing that I know what I'm
gonna write about or how I can do it. It's just doing it.
You're gonna have to
create your own tools, and you're gonna have to create your own language, if
you're not doing that, you're simply imitating what people have done before
you. But taking that risk is, you know, an absolute must. You have to do that at
some point.
It really is okay to propose a solution
that turns out to be not the best one. You can't know ahead of time how it's
gonna turn out, but we do know that if you don't produce that unusual solution,
we'll just keep doing the same thing over and over. I'm stunned that we're
throwing away really interesting ideas because they don't fit what we expect,
and instead we should be paying more attention to ideas we don't expect
because we're learning so much more about the world than whether someone can
give us the right answer again.