Imagine: How Creativity Works (10 page)

The Apollonian artist, by comparison, relies on convergent thinking. This mode of thought is all about analysis and attention. It’s the ideal approach when trying to refine a poem, or solve an algebra equation, or perfect a symphony. In these instances, we don’t want lots of stray associations — such thoughts are errant distractions. Instead, we want to focus on the necessary information, filling our minds with relevant thoughts. And so we slowly converge on the ideal answer, chiseling away at our errors. This process is a struggle, a long labor of attention, but that’s the point. It takes time to find the perfect line.

1.

Earl Miller has devoted his career to understanding the prefrontal cortex, that warehouse of working memory. He has a shiny shaved head and a silver goatee. His corner office in the gleaming Picower Institute at MIT is cantilevered over an old freight-train track, so every afternoon the quiet hum of the lab is interrupted by the rattle of a locomotive. Miller’s favorite word is exactly — it’s the adverb that modifies everything, so a hypothesis was “exactly right” or an experiment was “exactly done” — and that emphasis on precision has defined his career. His first major scientific advance was a byproduct of necessity. It was 1995 and Miller had just started his lab, which meant that he had no money. His research involved recording the activity of neurons in the monkey brain, monitoring the flux of voltage within an individual cell as the animal performed various tasks. “There were machines that allowed you to record from eight or nine [neurons] at the same time, but they were very expensive,” Miller says. “I still had no grants, and there was no way I could afford one.” So Miller began inventing his own apparatus in his spare time. After a few months of tinkering, he constructed a messy tangle of wires, glass pipettes, and electrodes that could record simultaneously from numerous cells distributed across the monkey cortex. “It worked even better than the expensive machine,” Miller says. “And then we just made the units smaller and smaller, which meant we could record from more and more neurons.”

This methodological advance — it’s known as multiple-electrode recording — allowed Miller to watch information zip around the brain as the electrical cells interacted with one another. Miller was most interested in studying the prefrontal cortex, though, since this brain area is such an aggregator of information. “It’s where everything projects to,” Miller says. “It’s literally where the world comes together.”

Because Miller can eavesdrop on neurons, he’s been able to describe this flood of ideas at the most fundamental level. He can listen as cells in the prefrontal cortex struggle to make sense of the information in working memory and search for relevant patterns and new connections. In one of Miller’s current experiments, he shows monkeys a picture of randomly scattered dots, which look like stars in the night sky. This picture is the prototype. Then Miller flashes the monkeys a set of distorted pictures, in which the dots have been haphazardly shifted around the screen. The monkeys are required to indicate, using a joystick, whether or not these different pictures are similar in any way to the initial picture. At first, the monkeys guess randomly, and they learn from trial and error. They struggle to figure out the essence of the prototype and how to characterize it. Is the picture defined by the square of dots in the center? Or the cluster of dots off to the left?

Interestingly, it turns out that even when the original picture is taken away — the monkeys can no longer see the prototype — the prefrontal cells devoted to that picture continue to fire. They’re still holding on to that particular arrangement of dots, which is why working memory is a type of memory. (Scientists refer to this as RAM-like activity, since these brain cells are acting just like random-access memory in a computer.) This echo of activity lasts for only a little while, but it’s long enough to mix together thoughts, as seemingly unrelated ideas intersect. And so, after a few minutes of staring at different pictures of dots, the monkeys are able to sort the pictures into categories and determine which ones most resemble the prototype. “At a certain point, the monkeys just get it,” Miller says. “They suddenly realize that there are patterns here.” This new idea — it’s essentially an abstract rule for connecting the dots — is represented as a new circuit of neural activity in the prefrontal cortex. The brain cells have been literally altered by the breakthrough, changed by the creative connection.

While the prefrontal cortex is the source of these creative ideas, it doesn’t generate these new connections by itself. Miller has discovered that instead, the prefrontal cortex works in close collaboration with other brain areas, such as the basal ganglia and dopamine reward pathway. The process goes like this: rewarding information — and the reward can be anything from a sweet treat to a poetic metaphor — gets processed by the dopamine neurons and then sent onward to the prefrontal cortex. The thought has now entered working memory. If this new information leads to any useful conclusions — if it allows the monkey to decipher the dots, or helps a poet improve a poem — then the idea survives, a persistent link between cells. A new connection that helps solve a problem has been created.

But the process isn’t finished. That new thought is then transmitted back to its source — those pleasure-hungry dopamine cells in the midbrain — so the neurons learn from the new idea. “We call that a recursive loop,” Miller says. “It allows the system to feed on itself, so that one idea leads naturally to the next. We can then build on these connections, so that they lead to other, richer connections.”
(
 One of the interesting implications of Miller’s work is the importance of the primitive midbrain in the creative process. While this brain area is often disparaged — it’s seen as the primal source of rewards, not the center of epiphanies — Miller’s research demonstrates that the midbrain also plays a crucial role in helping to locate the relevant information that will help solve a problem. “The basal ganglia and these other areas are the engine behind so many higher cognitive functions,” Miller says. “They may be more primitive, but they are what grasp the pieces of the puzzle. Only then can the pieces be sent along to the prefrontal cortex, which puts the puzzle together.”) This loop of creativity illuminates the power of attention.

When each of us focuses on something, the idea enters working memory. As a result, we’re able to slowly chisel away at our creative tasks. Perhaps it’s finally finding the perfect choreography for a dance, or figuring out how to solve the architectural problem. These unprecedented thoughts are then transmitted back down the line, so that the brain modifies its own sense of what’s important. We suddenly look at reality through a slightly different lens, as the new idea is seamlessly incorporated into our perceptions. Instead of just seeing a scattering of dots, we notice the pattern; things are starting to make sense. We have stared at the world, and the world itself has changed.

2.

When Milton Glaser was sixteen, he decided to draw a portrait of his mother. “I was just sitting in front of her one night and I thought it would be fun to sketch her face,” he says. “So I got out a piece of paper and a charcoal pencil. And you know what I realized? I realized I hadn’t the faintest idea what she looked like. Her image had become fixed in my mind at the age of one or two, and it really hadn’t changed since. I was drawing a picture of a woman who no longer existed.”

But as Glaser stared at her face and then compared what he saw to the black marks on the paper, her appearance slowly came into view. He was able to draw her as she was, and not as he expected her to be. “That sketch taught me something interesting about the mind,” he says. “We’re always looking, but we never really see.” Although Glaser had looked at his mother every single day of his life, he didn’t see her until he tried to draw her. “When you draw an object, the mind becomes deeply, intensely attentive,” Glaser says. “And it’s that act of attention that allows you to really grasp something, to become fully conscious of it. That’s what I learned from my mother’s face, that drawing is really a kind of thinking.”

Milton Glaser looks like a patriarch from a Philip Roth novel. His bare head is ringed with gray hair; oversize glasses rest on the long slope of his nose. Glaser is eighty years old, but he still works in a small studio on East Thirty-Second Street in Manhattan. It’s a cluttered space, the white walls hidden by old art posters, colorful prints for 1980s rock concerts, and art books stacked ten high. Above the front door, chiseled into the glass, is the slogan of the studio:
art is work
.

For Glaser, the quote summarizes his creative philosophy. “There’s no such thing as a creative type,” he says. “As if creative people can just show up and make stuff up. As if it were that easy. I think people need to be reminded that creativity is a verb, a very time-consuming verb. It’s about taking an idea in your head, and transforming that idea into something real. And that’s always going to be a long and difficult process. If you’re doing it right, it’s going to feel like work.”

Glaser is a living legend in the world of graphic design, having created a number of the most iconic illustrations of the twentieth century, from the I ♥ NY ad campaign to the 1967 Bob Dylan silhouette poster. He came up with the DC Comics logo, cofounded New York magazine, and invented numerous typefaces; he’s designed the interiors of famous restaurants and is responsible for a staggering number of product labels on the supermarket shelves. In recent years, his images have entered the permanent collections of MOMA, the Smithsonian, and the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum.

But Glaser almost didn’t make it. In the late 1950s, when he began working on Madison Avenue, photography seemed like the ad form of the future. Although print ads had once relied on trained illustrators — they helped spin the fantasy — the industry was transitioning to staged photo ops. “People like me seemed so antiquated,” Glaser remembers. “Why draw something when you could just take a picture of it, or make a television commercial?” The camera was king; artists were out of work.

As a cofounder of Pushpin Studios, however, Glaser helped rediscover the potential of graphic design. He introduced bright neon colors and a touch of abstraction; he found a way to turn even staid commissions into conceptual works of art. Glaser knew that the most powerful images weren’t the most realistic. Instead of simply trying to represent a thing, Glaser wanted to define it. His perfect visual was more than a picture: it was a summary of associations, a map of thought. It was a picture honed by human attention.

The creative possibilities of graphic art are perfectly captured by Glaser’s most iconic design. In 1975, he accepted an intimidating assignment: create an ad campaign that would rehabilitate the image of New York City. At the time, Manhattan was falling apart. Crime was at an all-time high, and the city was almost bankrupt. “When people thought about the city, they thought about dirt and danger,” Glaser remembers. “And they wanted a little ad campaign that could somehow change all that.” There was one additional constraint: the print ad had to use the phrase I love New York.

Glaser began by experimenting with fonts, laying out the straightforward slogan in a variety of friendly typefaces. After a few weeks of work, he settled on a charming cursive, with I Love NY set against a plain white background. “I send in my proposal and it’s approved,” Glaser says. “Everybody likes it. 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 Glaser continues to fixate on the design, devoting hours to a project that was supposedly finished. “I can’t get the damn problem out of my head,” he says. “And then, about a week after the first concept was approved, I’m sitting in a cab, stuck in traffic. I often carry spare pieces of paper in my pocket, and so I get the paper out and I start to draw. And I’m thinking and drawing and then I get it. I see the whole design in my head. I see the typewriter typeface and the big round red heart smack-dab in the middle. I know that this is how it should go.”

For Glaser, the I ♥ NY ad is a testament to the importance of persistence. Because he refused to stop thinking about the three-word slogan — he kept on redrawing the logo in his mind — his ideas continued to improve. And then, while stuck in the taxi, this steadfast focus led to a new design, a better design. The graphic that he imagined in rush-hour traffic has become the most widely imitated work of graphic art in the world.

This is the power of attention and working memory; it allows us to relentlessly refine our ideas, to continue thinking about our thoughts. “Design is the conscious imposition of meaningful order,” Glaser says. “That sounds grandiose, but it’s just the process of taking an idea that isn’t clear and making it a little more clear. I could tell you a bullshit story about what exactly led to the idea [of I ♥ NY], but the truth is that I don’t know. Maybe I saw a red heart out of the corner of my eye? Maybe I heard the word? But that’s the way it always works. You keep on trying to fix it, to make the design a little bit more interesting, a little bit better. And then, if you’re really stubborn and persistent and lucky, you eventually get there.”

Glaser’s impressive work ethic — his ability to stick with a problem until it surrenders — is itself a skill that took years to develop. In 1951, Glaser was an impressionable twenty-one-year-old with a Fulbright fellowship who was heading to Bologna to study etching with the painter Giorgio Morandi. At the time, Morandi was creating his natura morta paintings, a collection of still lifes that featured empty wine bottles and terra-cotta vases set against a flat gray background. The art was austere, a reflection of Morandi’s disciplined artistic process. He spent months on each canvas, trying to edge closer to the fragile reality he wanted to describe. Sometimes, Morandi would just stare at that random collection of containers and become too intimidated to paint. “I’d watch him get so focused on these incredibly tiny details,” Glaser remembers. “He’d devote weeks of his life to moving a passage of gray a quarter of an inch to the left, or smoothing out the curve of a bottle. It didn’t matter that nobody else would notice. He would notice, and that was more than enough.”