Creativity is an odd phenomenon. It’s prized and desired but often elusive, hard to coax
out, and even more difficult to define. Is creativity just coming up with new stuff?
Well, no, because nobody has ever said this before:
But that's not creative. It's just bollocks. This is entirely new:
but again, not very creative. And really, anything is new if you look hard enough: a perfect
copy of the Mona Lisa is new in the sense that it was made today rather than in 1504,
but that doesn't mean it's creative, in fact it’s the opposite – derivative.
So being creative isn’t just coming up with new or original stuff.
Quite a few philosophers have said that being creative is coming up with new and valuable stuff.
And immediately that raises some interesting questions, because what "value" is,
well that depends on who you are. A modern economist might say that value is price; a Marxist would
say that value is socially necessary labour time; we might say that something is valuable insofar as it's
useful for a given goal…
And this is why the philosopher Teresa Amabile points out that creativity always occurs in a context. She
thinks that something is creative in a given field insofar as people who know that field judge
it to be both new and valuable.
Which of course opens up a whole bunch of new questions about what it means for a work
of art to be good or valuable and who are the relevant experts that we need to consult, and so on – the philosophy of creativity
is very closely linked to aesthetics, the philosophy of art.
But if you’re very clever, you’ll have noticed something: we’ve been talking about
what it is for a work of art or a product to be creative, but what about a
person? When someone is being creative, what exactly are they doing?
Artistic creativity is just one kind: you can have creative scientific or mathematical creativity
you can have creative acting performances, creative jokes, creative
dances. Sometimes creativity takes a lot of planning
and effort, and sometimes it comes so spontaneously and out of nowhere that it surprises the creator
– think about improvisation.
So the philosopher Peter Carruthers thinks we need a theory that explains all of that variation.
He says that whenever you go to perform some action, like open a door or pick up a
book, your brain sends a signal to command the relevant part of your body, but it also generates “action schema”
to anticipate what performing that action will look like, feel like, and so on. Those action
schema are then compared against actual sensory input so that you can correct what you’re doing.
So for instance, if you go to move a sofa, your brain anticipates how heavy it will be, what the fabric will
feel like and so on, so that you know how much force to put behind it and you can correct yourself if
you need to. Sometimes action schema are generated automatically
like when you move a sofa, and sometimes you can generate them yourself when you mentally
rehearse an action: when you go, “Ok I’m going to go on stage, it's gonna look like this,
the lines and the music are gonna sound like this,” – that’s your brain anticipating sensory input
Carruthers thinks that creativity lies in generating new and valuable action schema.
When you’re writing poetry you anticipate what those words will sound like or what that image
would look like; when you’re painting you anticipate how the paint will look on the
canvas; when you dance you anticipate how your body will feel in those positions. When
you improvise, action schema are generated so quickly and automatically that you might even
be surprised by what comes out of you!
There’s also some evidence that when people engage in scientific creativity they construct
mental models of the thing they’re investigating using action schema. Think about the plum pudding model of atomic
structure Vs the central nucleus model; those are both ways of thinking about the structures
of atoms that rely on a visual picture to help you understand it, even though atoms are too small to be seen. Or think about Watson and Crick
using actual physical models to try and figure out what the structure of DNA would look like to a human eyes.
Thinking of creativity as this kind of automatic sensory imagination explains a few things.
It explains why you can be disappointed when you try and be creative: you anticipate that the painting will look a certain way but you can't quite get it to look on the canvas
how it looks in your head. And have you ever heard people say that hallucinogenic
drugs like LSD help them with creativity? Well it would, because it changes the way your
brain processes sensory information.
And it explains why just copying somebody else’s work isn’t
creative: you didn’t generate those action schema yourself, you just got some sensory input
and now you're remembering it in order to copy it.
And you know how people sometimes look to the natural world for creative inspiration:
looking at how a bee flies in order to inspire a piece of music, or an
actor looking at the way an animal moves in order to incorporate those movment patterns into a
new character they're creating? That’s all using sensory information. Action schema!
You see? So many people think that creativity is this mysterious, unknowable pehnomenon There’s
a whole industry of people making books, and sometimes even YouTube videos, just dedicated to wallowing in that mystery and not explaining it. But
that’s because creativity is like a magic trick: it only looks mysterious and supernatural when you don’t
know how it works, but there's actually very ordinary explanation. And you can do it! Because you generate action schema
every single day for every thing you do! In order to be creative you just need to generate new
and valuable ones, and in Part 2 of this series I’ll be teaching you ‘How to be Creative!’
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