How To Be Creative
C
reativity can em like magic. We look at people like Steve Jobs and Bob Dylan, and we conclude that they must posss supernatural powers denied to mere mortals like us, gifts that allow them to imagine what has never existed before. They're 'creative types.' We're not.
But creativity is not magic, and there's no such thing as a creative type. Creativity is not a trait that we inherit in our genes or a blessing bestowed by the angels. It's a skill. Anyone can learn to be creative and to get better at it. New rearch is shedding light on what allows people to develop world-changing products and to solve the toughest problems. A surprisingly concrete t of lessons has emerged about what creativity is and how to spark it in ourlves and our work.
The science of creativity is relatively new. Until the Enlightenment, acts of imagination were always equated with higher powers. Being creative meant channeling the mus, giving voice to the gods. ('Inspiration' literally means 'breathed upon.') Even in modern times, scientists have paid little attention to the sources of creativity.
But over the past decade, that has begun to change. Imagination was once thought to be a single thing, parate from other kinds of cognition. The latest rearch suggests that this assumption is fal. It turns out that we u 'creativity' as a catchall term for a variety of cognitive tools, each of which applies to particular sorts of problems and is coaxed to action in a particular way.
Does the challenge that we're facing require a moment of insight, a sudden leap in consciousness? Or can it be solved gradually, one piece at a time? The answer often determines whether we should drink a beer to relax or hop ourlves up on Red Bull, whether we take a long shower or stay late at the office.
家长留言精选世界最高的楼The new rearch also suggests how best to approach the thorniest problems. We tend to assume that experts are the creative genius in their own fields. But big breakthroughs often depend on the naive daring of outsiders. For prompting creativity, few things are as important as time devoted to cross-pollination with fields outside our areas of experti. Let's start with the hardest problems, tho challenges that at first blush em impossible. Such problems are typically solved (if they are solved at all) in a moment of insight.
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Consider the ca of Arthur Fry, an engineer at 3M in the paper products division. In the winter of 1974, Mr. Fry attended a prentation by Sheldon Silver, an engineer working on adhesives. Mr. Silver had developed an extremely weak glue, a paste so feeble it could barely hold two pieces of paper together. Like everyone el in the room, Mr. Fry patiently listened to the prentation and then failed to come up with any practical applications for the compound. What good, after all, is a glue that doesn't stick?
On a frigid Sunday morning, however, the paste would re-enter Mr. Fry's thoughts, albeit in a rather unlikely context. He sang in the church choir and liked to put little pieces of paper in the hymnal to mark the songs he was suppod to sing. Unfortunately, the little pieces of paper often fell out, forcing Mr. Fry to spend the rvice frantically thumbing through the book, looking for the right page. It emed like an unfixable problem, one of tho ordinary hassles that we're forced to live with.
But then, during a particularly tedious rmon, Mr. Fry had an epiphany. He suddenly realized how he might make u of that weak glue: It could be applied to paper to create a reusable bookmark! Becau the adhesive was barely sticky, it would adhere to the page but wouldn't tear it when removed. That revelation in the church would eventually result in one of the most widely ud office products in the world: the Post-it Note.
Mr. Fry's invention was a classic moment of insight. Though such events em to spring from nowhere, as if the cortex is surprising us with a breakthrough, scientists have begun studying how they occur. They do this by giving people 'insight' puzzles, like the one that follows, and watching what happens in the brain:
A man has married 20 women in a small town. All of the women are still alive, and none of them is divorced. The man has broken no laws. Who is the man?
If you solved the question, the solution probably came to you in an incandescent flash: The man is a priest. Rearch led by Mark Beeman and John Kounios has identified where that flash probably came from. In the conds before the insight appears, a brain area called the superior anterior temporal gyrus (aSTG) exhibits a sharp spike in activity. This region, located on the surface of the right hemisphere, excels at drawing together distantly related information, which is precily what's needed when working on a hard creative problem.
Interestingly, Mr. Beeman and his colleagues have found that certain factors make people much more likely to have an insight, better able to detect the answers generated by the aSTG. For instance, exposing subjects to a short, humorous video─the scientists u a clip of Robin Williams doing stand-up─boosts the average success rate by about 20%.
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Alcohol also works. Earlier this year, rearchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago compared performance on insight puzzles between sober and intoxicated students. The scientists gave the subjects a battery of word problems known as remote associates, in which people have to find one additional word that goes with a triad of words. Here's a sample problem:
Pine Crab Sauce
In this ca, the answer is 'apple.' (The compound words are pineapple, crab apple and apple sauce.) Drunk students solved nearly 30% more of the word problems than their sober peers.
What explains the creative benefits of relaxation and booze? The answer involves the surprising advantage of not paying attention. Although we live in an age that worships focus ─we are always forcing ourlves to concentrate, chugging caffeine─this approach can inhibit the imagination. We might be focud, but we're probably focud on the wrong answer.
And this is why relaxation helps: It isn't until we're soothed in the shower or distracted by the stand-up comic that we're able to turn the spotlight of attention inward, eavesdropping on all tho random
associations unfolding in the far reaches of the brain's right hemisphere. When we need an insight, tho associations are often the source of the answer.
清产核资报告This rearch also explains why so many major breakthroughs happen in the unlikeliest of places, whether it's Archimedes in the bathtub or the physicist Richard Feynman scribbling equations in a strip club, as he was known to do. It reveals the wisdom of Google putting ping-pong tables in the lobby and confirms the practical benefits of daydreaming. As Einstein once declared, 'Creativity is the residue of time wasted.'
Of cour, not every creative challenge requires an epiphany; a relaxing shower won't solve every problem. Sometimes, we just need to keep on working, resisting the temptation of a beer-fueled nap.超声雾化器
氓课件There is nothing fun about this kind of creativity, which consists mostly of sweat and failure. It's the red pen on the page and the discarded sketch, the trashed prototype and the failed first draft. Nietzsche referred to this as the 'rejecting process,' noting that while creators like to brag about their big epiphanies, their everyday reality was much less romantic. 'All great artists and thinkers are great workers,' he wrote.
This relentless form of creativity is nicely exemplified by the legendary graphic designer Milton Gla
r, who engraved the slogan 'Art is Work' above his office door. Mr. Glar's 3 / 7
most famous design is a tribute to this work ethic. In 1975, he accepted an intimidating assignment: to create a new ad campaign that would rehabilitate the image of New York City, which at the time was falling apart.
Mr. Glar began by experimenting with fonts, laying out the tourist slogan in a variety of friendly typefaces. After a few weeks of work, he ttled on a charming design, with 'I Love New York' in cursive, t against a plain white background. His proposal was quickly approved. 'Everybody liked it,' Mr. Glar says. 'And if I were a normal person, I'd stop thinking about the project. But I can't. Something about it just doesn't feel right.'
So Mr. Glar continued to ruminate on the design, devoting hours to a project that was suppodly finished. And then, after another few days of work, he was sitting in a taxi, stuck in midtown traffic. 'I often carry spare pieces of paper in my pocket, and so I get the paper out and I start to draw,' he remembers. 'And I'm thinking and drawing and then I get it. I e the whole design in my head. I e the typeface and the big round red heart smack dab in the middle. I know that this is how it should go.'
The logo that Mr. Glar imagined in traffic has since become one of the most widely imitated works of graphic art in the world. And he only discovered the design becau he refud to stop thinking about it.
But this rais an obvious question: If different kinds of creative problems benefit from different kinds of creative thinking, how can we ensure that we're thinking in the right way at the right time? When should we daydream and go for a relaxing stroll, and when should we keep on sketching and toying with possibilities?
阽危The good news is that the human mind has a surprising natural ability to asss the kind of creativity we need. Rearchers call the intuitions 'feelings of knowing,' and they occur when we suspect that we can find the answer, if only we keep on thinking. Numerous studies have demonstrated that, when it comes to problems that don't require insights, the mind is remarkably adept at asssing the likelihood that a problem can be solved─knowing whether we're getting 'warmer' or not, without knowing the solution.
This ability to calculate progress is an important part of the creative process. When we don't feel that we're getting clor to the answer─we've hit the wall, so to speak─we probably need an insight. If th
案例英文ere is no feeling of knowing, the most productive thing we can do is forget about work for a while. But when tho feelings of knowing are telling us that we're getting clo, we need to keep on struggling.
Of cour, both moment-of-insight problems and no-to-the-grindstone problems assume that we have the answers to the creative problems we're trying to solve somewhere in our 4 / 7
heads. They're both just a matter of getting tho answers out. Another kind of creative problem, though, is when you don't have the right kind of raw material kicking around in your head. If you're trying to be more creative, one of the most important things you can do is increa the volume and diversity of the information to which you are expod.
Steve Jobs famously declared that 'creativity is just connecting things.' Although we think of inventors as dreaming up breakthroughs out of thin air, Mr. Jobs was pointing out that even the most far-fetched concepts are usually just new combinations of stuff that already exists. Under Mr. Jobs's leadership, for instance, Apple didn't invent MP3 players or tablet computers─the company just made them better, adding design features that were new to the product category.
And it isn't just Apple. The history of innovation bears out Mr. Jobs's theory. The Wright Brothers tran
sferred their background as bicycle manufacturers to the invention of the airplane; their first flying craft was, in many respects, just a bicycle with wings. Johannes Gutenberg transformed his knowledge of wine press into a printing machine capable of mass-producing words. Or look at Google: Larry Page and Sergey Brin came up with their famous arch algorithm by applying the ranking method ud for academic articles (more citations equals more influence) to the sprawl of the Internet.
How can people get better at making the kinds of connections? Mr. Jobs argued that the best inventors ek out 'diver experiences,' collecting lots of dots that they later link together. Instead of developing a narrow specialization, they study, say, calligraphy (as Mr. Jobs famously did) or hang out with friends in different fields. Becau they don't know where the answer will come from, they are willing to look for the answer everywhere.
Recent rearch confirms Mr. Jobs's wisdom. The sociologist Martin Ruef, for instance, analyzed the social and business relationships of 766 graduates of the Stanf ord Business School, all of whom had gone on to start their own companies. He found that tho entrepreneurs with the most diver friendships scored three times higher on a metric of innovation. Instead of getting stuck in the rut of conformity, they were able to translate their expansive social circle into profitable new concepts.
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Many of the most innovative companies encourage their employees to develop the sorts of diver networks, interacting with colleagues in totally unrelated fields. Google hosts an internal conference called Crazy Search Ideas─a sort of grown-up science fair with hundreds of posters from every conceivable field. At 3M, engineers are typically rotated to a new division every few years. Sometimes, the rotations bring big payoffs, such as when 3M realized that the problem of laptop battery life was really a problem of energy ud up too quickly for illuminating the screen. 3M rearchers applied their knowledge of 5 / 7
