Imagine: How Creativity Works (11 page)

Morandi’s obsessive dedication to getting the image exactly right changed forever the way Glaser thought about creativity. His old artistic model had been Pablo Picasso — “A raging lunatic genius who wanted to devour the world,” as Glaser puts it — but his new hero was the modest Italian painter. “It was Morandi who taught me about dedication,” Glaser says. “He showed me the necessity of persistence, and that nothing good is ever easy. And that’s because we see nothing at first glance. It’s only by really thinking about something that we’re able to move ourselves into perceptions that we never knew we had the capacity for.”

The German philosopher Martin Heidegger referred to this as the unconcealing process. He argued, like Glaser, that the reality of things is naturally obscured by the clutter of the world, by all those ideas and sensations that distract the mind. The only way to see through this clutter is to rely on the knife of conscious attention, which can cut away the excess and reveal “the things themselves.”

This mental process — the act of unconcealing — has been an essential tool for Glaser. He relies on the solvent of working memory to turn difficult assignments into resonant images that precisely convey the necessary set of associations. This helps explain why Glaser has no defining style. He isn’t a minimalist or a maxi-malist, a realist or a cartoonist. (“I distrust styles,” he says. “To have a style is to be trapped.”) Instead, Glaser treats each assignment as a unique problem with its own requirements and constraints. He doesn’t know what the answer will look like or what kind of image it will require. That’s why he needs to think about it.

Consider the Brooklyn Brewery project. In 1987, Milton Glaser was approached by Steve Hindy and Tom Potter, two businessmen and beer aficionados interested in reviving the great tradition of Brooklyn brewing. They asked Glaser to design a logo for their new company that would somehow capture the spirit of the bor-ough. “Their first idea was to use the Brooklyn Bridge or to call the beer the Brooklyn Eagle,” Glaser remembers. “And that could have worked; that’s clever enough. But I told them, ‘Why settle for only a small piece of Brooklyn when you can own the whole place?’ ”

And so Glaser meditated for days on Brooklyn and craft beer. The first part of the solution arrived when Glaser misremembered the baseball cap of the Brooklyn Dodgers. He drew a wide, arcing B that he thought was the team’s logo. (The Dodgers actually used a staid, blocky font; Glaser had embellished the letter in his memory.) “It didn’t matter that the logo wasn’t accurate,” he says. “It felt like it was from baseball. It really made you think of the Dodgers.”

But Glaser knew that something was missing; the logo was incomplete. “And so I’m racking my brain, because I’ve got to give the design a European feel,” he says. “It’s got to feel like an import beer with a distinguished history, not another Budweiser.” After weeks of market research, analyzing all the beer bottles he could find, Glaser settled on a simple frame of white dots on a green background with the big B in the center. “I can’t tell you why that logo works,” he says. “I can’t explain how it came to me. But I just kept on playing with the design until I found what I needed.” 
(When Glaser 
fi
rst showed the founders of the Brooklyn Brewery his proposed logo, they were mostly disappointed. “The greatly anticipated logo was a shock,” remembers Steve Hindy. “There was no Brooklyn Bridge. There was no soaring eagle. It was just a B.” Glaser told the businessmen to give the image a chance, to “put it on the counter of the kitchen and live with it for a while.” After a few days, says Hindy, the brilliance of the design began to sink in. “The B evoked the nostalgia of the Dodgers while being a fresh symbol of Brooklyn . . . It looked like the logo of a company that had been in business for decades.”)

This is Glaser’s fundamental method: he thinks until he can think no more, until his attention gives out or his solution is unconcealed. Of course, such a process is only possible because those cells in the prefrontal cortex can cling to ideas, allowing one to focus on abstractions like beer logos and the meaning of Brooklyn. The logo itself is a visual hybrid, a literal overlapping of ideas.

There is the cursive B that makes us think of baseball, but there is also the cosmopolitan background echoing the labels of old European beers. Once these distinct visuals collided in his working memory, Glaser knew that his problem was solved: he’d found a pretty image that conjured up the ideas he needed to convey. And it fit on a beer bottle.

3.

The lesson of W. H. Auden and Milton Glaser is that working memory is an essential tool of the imagination. Sometimes, all we need to do is pay attention, to think until the necessary thoughts intersect. The progress will be slow, but the answer will gradually reveal itself, like a poem emerging from the edits. As Nietzsche observed in his 1878 book Human, All Too Human:

Artists have a vested interest in our believing in the
fl
ash of revelation, the so-called inspiration . . . shining down from heavens as a ray of grace. In reality, the imagination of the good artist or thinker produces continuously good, mediocre, or bad things, but his judgment, trained and sharpened to a
fi
ne point, rejects, selects, connects . . . All great artists and thinkers are great workers, indefatigable not only in inventing, but also in rejecting, sifting, transforming, ordering.

To illustrate his point, Nietzsche described Beethoven’s musical notebooks, which documented the composer’s painstaking process of refining his melodies. It wasn’t uncommon for Beethoven to experiment with seventy different versions of a phrase before settling on the final one. “I make many changes, and reject and try again, until I am satisfied,” the composer remarked to a friend. In other words, even Beethoven — the cliché of artistic genius — needed to constantly refine his ideas, to struggle with his music until the beauty shone through.

Although this mental talent is an essential part of the creative process, there is nothing easy or pleasant about it. It isn’t fun re-fining a musical motif, or cutting a favorite line, or throwing away a sketch. In fact, there is evidence suggesting that the ability to relentlessly focus on a creative problem can actually make us mis-erable. Aristotle was there first, stating in the fourth century b.c. that “all men who have attained excellence in philosophy, in poetry, in art and in politics, even Socrates and Plato, had a melancholic habitus; indeed some suffered even from melancholic disease.” This belief was revived during the Renaissance, leading Milton to exclaim, in his poem “Il Penseroso”: “Hail divinest melancholy / whose saintly visage is too bright / to hit the sense of human sight.” The Romantic poets took the veneration of sadness to its logical extreme and described suffering as a prerequisite for the literary life. As Keats wrote, “Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?”

Joe Forgas, a social psychologist at the University of New South Wales, in Australia, has spent the last decade investigating the link between negative moods and creativity. Although people tend to disparage sadness and similar moods, Forgas has repeatedly demonstrated that a little melancholy sharpens the spotlight of attention, allowing us to become more observant and persistent. (Of course, feeling sad also makes us less likely to have moments of insight.) His most compelling study took place in a stationery store in the suburbs of Sydney. The experiment itself was simple: Forgas placed a variety of trinkets, such as toy soldiers, plastic animals, and miniature cars, near the checkout counter. As shoppers exited, Forgas tested their memory, asking them to list as many of the items as possible. To control the mood of the subjects, when Forgas conducted the survey on gray, rainy days, he accentuated the weather by playing Verdi’s Requiem; on sunny days, he used a chipper soundtrack of Gilbert and Sullivan. The results were clear: shoppers in the “low mood” condition remembered nearly four times as many of the trinkets. The wet weather made them sad, and their sadness made them more attentive.

These are the same cognitive skills that underlie the unconcealing process: the negative mood acts like a mild dose of amphetamine. When someone is immersed in melancholy, it’s easier for him to linger on a poetic line or keep thinking about a beer logo. This helps explain why Forgas has found that states of sadness — he induces the downcast mood with a film about death and cancer — also correlate with better writing samples; subjects compose sentences that are clearer and more compelling. Because they were more attentive to what they were writing, they produced more refined prose, the words polished by their misery.

Modupe Akinola, a professor at Columbia Business School, has expanded on these provocative results. In one of her most recent experiments, she asked each subject to give a short speech about his or her dream job. The students were randomly assigned to either a positive- or negative-feedback condition; in the positive-feedback condition, speeches were greeted with smiles and vertical nods, and in the negative, speeches met frowns and horizontal shakes. After the speech was over, the subject was given glue, paper, and colored felt and told to make a collage using the materials. Professional artists then evaluated each collage according to various metrics of creativity.

Not surprisingly, the feedback affected the mood of the subjects: those who received smiles during their speeches reported feeling better than before, while frowns had the opposite effect. What’s interesting is what happened next. Subjects in the negative-feedback condition created much prettier collages. Their angst led to better art. As Akinola notes, this is largely because the sadness improved their focus and made them more likely to persist with the creative challenge. As a result, they kept on rearranging the felt, playing with the colorful designs.

The enhancement of these mental skills during states of sadness might also explain the striking correlation between creativity and depressive disorders. In the early 1980s, Nancy Andreasen, a neuroscientist at the University of Iowa, interviewed several dozen writers from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop about their mental history. While Andreasen expected the artists to suffer from schizophrenia at a higher rate than normal — “There is that lingering cliché about madness and genius going together,” she says — that hypothesis turned out to be completely wrong. Instead, Andreasen found that 80 percent of the writers met the formal diagnostic criteria for some type of depression. These successful artists weren’t crazy — they were just exceedingly sad. A similar theme emerged from biographical studies of British novelists and poets done by Kay Redfield Jamison, a professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins. According to her data, famous writers were eight times as likely as people in the general population to suffer from major depressive illness.

Why is severe sadness so closely associated with creativity? Andreasen argues that depression is intertwined with a “cognitive style” that makes people more likely to produce successful works of art. Her explanation is straightforward: It’s not easy to write a good novel or compose a piece of music. The process often requires years of careful attention as the artist fixes mistakes and corrects errors. As a result, the ability to stick with the process — to endure the unconcealing — is extremely important. “Successful writers are like prizefighters who keep on getting hit but won’t go down,” Andreasen says. “They’ll stick with it until it’s right. And that seems to be what the mood disorders help with.” While Andreasen acknowledges the terrible burden of mental illness — she quotes Robert Lowell on depression not being a “gift of the Muse” and describes his reliance on lithium to escape the pain — she argues that, at least in its milder forms, the disorder benefits many artists due to the perseverance it makes possible.
(Severe depression, however, is clearly useless — the pain is so intense that nothing can be done.) 
“Unfortunately, this type of thinking is often inseparable from the suffering,” Andreasen says. “If you’re at the cutting edge, then you’re going to bleed.”

While the unconcealing process allows us to refine our creations, not every problem benefits from melancholy, amphetamines, and the prefrontal cortex. Milton Glaser has learned that his hardest assignments often require a flash of insight before he can begin lavishing the project with attention. “You want to make sure you’re focused on the right question,” Glaser says. “Sometimes that means you’ve got to begin the process by trusting an intuition that you can’t explain.”

The necessary interplay of these different creative modes —the elation of the insight, and the melancholy of the unconcealing — begins to explain why bipolar disorder, an illness in which people oscillate between intense sadness and extreme euphoria, is so closely associated with creativity. Andreasen found that nearly 40 percent of the successful creative people she investigated had the disorder, a rate that’s approximately twenty times higher than the general population. (More recently, the psychiatrist Hagop Akiskal found that nearly two-thirds of a sample of influential European artists were bipolar. ) The reason for this correlation, Andreasen suggests, is that the manic states lead people to erupt with new ideas as their brains combust with remote associations. “When people are manic, they are driven by this intense, over-whelming need to express themselves,” Andreasen says. “It can be an extremely unpleasant condition, often because they can’t stop creating.” Furthermore, these imaginative outpourings are de-fined by their radical, sometimes incomprehensible, nature. “People become much more open to unexpected ideas when manic,” Andreasen notes. “That’s when they typically come up with their most original concepts.”

And then the mania ebbs. The extravagant high descends into a profound low. While this volatility is horribly painful, it can also enable creativity, since the exuberant ideas of the manic period are refined during the depression. In other words, the emotional extremes of the illness reflect the extremes of the creative process: there is the ecstatic generation phase, full of divergent thoughts, and the attentive editing phase, in which all those ideas are made to converge.
(This has led several psychiatrists, such as Andy Thomson at the University of Virginia, to speculate that the enhanced creativity of people with bipolar disorder might explain why the illness has been preserved throughout human evolution.) 
This doesn’t take away, of course, from the agony of the mental illness, and it doesn’t mean that people can create only when they’re horribly sad or manic. But it does begin to explain the significant correlations that have been repeatedly observed between depressive syndromes and artistic achievement.