Imagine: How Creativity Works (12 page)

The larger lesson is that different kinds of creative problems benefit from different kinds of creative thinking. (T. S. Eliot understood this: “The bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be conscious, and conscious where he ought to be unconscious.”) The question, of course, is how to adjust the thought process to the task at hand. How does anyone know when to listen to the prefrontal cortex instead of unleashing the right hemisphere? When is it time to daydream and take warm showers, and when is it better to drink another cup of coffee?

The good news is that the human mind has a natural ability to diagnose its own problems, to assess the kind of creativity that’s needed. These assessments have an eloquent name: they’re called “feelings of knowing,” and they occur when we suspect that we can find the answer if only we keep on thinking about the question. Consider tip-of-the-tongue moments. It’s estimated that people experience these, on average, about once a week. (
This is universal, and the vast majority of languages, from Afrikaans to Hindi to Arabic, even rely on tongue metaphors to describe the tip-of-the-tongue moment.)
 Perhaps it occurs when you run into an old acquaintance whose name you can’t remember although you know what letter it begins with. Or perhaps you fail to recall the title of a recent movie, even though you can describe the plot in perfect detail. What’s interesting about this cognitive hiccup is that, although you can’t remember the information, you’re still convinced that you know it, which is why you devote so much mental energy to trying to recover the missing word.

But here’s the mystery: If you’ve forgotten a person’s name, then why are you so sure that you can remember it? What does it mean to know something without being able to access it? This is where feelings of knowing prove essential. Numerous studies have demonstrated that when it comes to problems that don’t require insights, the mind is remarkably accurate at assessing the likelihood that a problem can be solved. You can glance at a question and know that the answer is within reach if only you put in the work. As a result, you’re motivated to stay focused on the challenge.

What makes these feelings of knowing even more useful is that they come attached to a sense of progress. This was first demonstrated by Janet Metcalfe, a psychologist at Columbia University. She asked people working on various creative puzzles whether or not they felt like they were getting closer (“warmer”) to the solution. When the subjects were working on problems that were typically solved with insights, they reported no increase in warmth until the insights popped into their heads — they went straight from cold to burning hot. There was no feeling of knowing. In contrast, Metcalfe found, problems that didn’t require insight were answered only after people reported a gradual increase in warmth, which reflected their sense of progress. What’s impressive about such estimates is that people were able to assess their closeness to the solution without knowing what the solution was.

This ability to calculate progress is an important part of the creative process. When you don’t feel that you’re getting closer to the answer — you’ve hit the wall, so to speak — you probably need an insight. In these instances, you should rely on the right hemisphere, which excels at revealing those remote associations. Continuing to focus on the problem will be a waste of mental resources, a squandering of the prefrontal cortex. You will stare at your computer screen and repeat your failures. Instead, find a way to relax and increase the alpha waves. The most productive thing to do is forget about work.

However, when those feelings of knowing tell you that you’re getting closer — when you feel the poetic meter slowly improve, or sense that the graphic design is being unconcealed — then you need to keep on struggling. Continue to pay attention until it hurts; fill your working memory with problems. Before long, that feeling of knowing will become actual knowledge.

There is nothing romantic about this kind of creativity, which consists mostly of sweat, sadness, and failure. It’s the red pen on the page and the discarded sketch, the trashed prototype and the failed first draft. It’s ruminating in the backs of taxis and popping pills until the poem is finished. Nevertheless, such a merciless process is sometimes the only way forward. And so we keep on thinking, because the next thought might be the answer.

Ch. 4
 
THE LETTING GO

The struggle of maturity is to recover the seriousness of a child at play.
— Friedrich Nietzsche

The theater is empty; the house lights are low. Yo-Yo Ma is lugging his cello across the stage toward a lonely metal chair at its center. The instrument looks heavy, and Ma takes delicate steps, the long horsehair bow jutting out into space. He sits, steadies himself in the chair, and stares for a long moment at the sheet music. Then he raises his right arm, positions his fingers on the wooden neck, and drags the bow across the strings. The first note sounds like a beautiful moan.

I’m sitting next to Bruce Adolphe, the composer of the piece Ma is rehearsing, and he seems a little nervous. Because Ma is such a celebrity — in the previous two months, he’s played twenty-three concerts in eighteen cities — this is the first time Adolphe has heard him play the music. “There’s always that anxiety that comes during the run-throughs,” Adolphe says. “I’ve been living with these notes for so long, but it always sounds different when it’s up on stage.” Ma is sight-reading the piece, so he begins playing slowly, like someone trying to decipher the first pages of a novel written in a barely familiar language. Sometimes he stops in the middle of a phrase and then repeats the notes with a slightly different interpretation.

And then, after a few tentative minutes, Ma begins to disappear into the music. I see it first in his body, which begins to subtly sway. The movement then spreads to his right arm, so that the bow starts to trace wider and wider arcs in the air. Before long, Ma’s shoulders are relaxed and expressive, drawing together whenever the tempo increases. And then, when he repeats the theme of the piece, his eyes briefly close, as if he were entranced by the same beauty he’s pouring into space. I look over at Adolphe: his tension has turned into a faint smile.

Bruce Adolphe first met Ma at Juilliard in New York City. Although Ma was only fifteen years old at the time, he was already an established performer, having played for JFK at the White House and with Leonard Bernstein on national television. Adolphe, meanwhile, was a promising young composer who had just written his first cello piece. “Unfortunately, I had no idea what I was doing,” Adolphe remembers. “I’d never written for the instrument before.” He’d shown a draft of his composition to a Juilliard instructor, who told him that the piece featured a chord that was impossible to play. Before Adolphe could correct the music, however, Ma decided to rehearse the composition in his dorm room. “Yo-Yo played through my piece, sight-reading the whole thing,” Adolphe says. “And when that impossible chord came, he somehow found a way to play it. His bow was straight across all four strings. Afterward, I asked him how he did it, because I had been told by the teacher that it couldn’t be done. And Yo-Yo said, ‘You’re right. I don’t think it can be done.’ And so we started over again, and this time when the chord came I yelled, ‘Stop!’ We both looked at his left hand, and it was completely contorted on the fingerboard. The hand position he had somehow found was uncomfortable for him to hold; his fingers were twisted in a most unnatural way. ‘See,’ Yo-Yo said, ‘you’re right, you really can’t play that.’ But he did!”

For Adolphe, the story is a reminder of Ma’s astonishing talent, his ability to play those unplayable chords. It’s a virtuosity that has turned Ma into one of the most famous classical performers in the world, an artist celebrated for a wide variety of recordings, from the cello suites of Bach to the swing of American bluegrass.

He’s improvised with Bobby McFerrin, recorded scores for Hollywood blockbusters, and popularized the melodies of Central Asia. “Sometimes, I’ll watch him play and I’ll feel that same awe I felt as a student at Juilliard,” Adolphe says. “He can take your notes and he can find the thing that makes them come alive. Ma is a technical master, of course, but what makes him such a special performer is that he also knows when to release technique for something deeper, for that depth of emotion that no one else can find.”

But Ma wasn’t always such an expressive performer. In fact, his pursuit of musical emotion began only after a memorable failure. “I was nineteen and I had worked my butt off,” Ma told David Blum of the New Yorker in 1989. “I knew the music inside and out. While sitting there at the concert, playing all the notes correctly, I started to wonder, ‘Why am I here? What’s at stake? 
Nothing
. Not only is the audience bored but I myself am bored.’ Perfection is not very communicative.” For Ma, the tedium of the flawless performance taught him that there is often a tradeoff between perfection and expression. “If you are only worried about not making a mistake then you will communicate nothing,” he says. “You will have missed the point of making music, which is to make people feel something.”

This search for emotion shapes the way Ma approaches every concert. He doesn’t begin by analyzing the details of his cello part or by glancing at what the violins are supposed to play. Instead, he reviews the complete score, searching for the larger story. “I always look at a piece of music like a detective novel,” Ma says. “Maybe the novel is about a murder. Well, who committed the murder? Why did he do it? My job is to retrace the story so that the audience feels the suspense. So that when the climax comes, they’re right there with me, listening to my beautiful detective story. It’s all about making people care about what happens next.” Ma’s unusual musical approach is apparent during these rehearsals, as he carefully refines his interpretations of Adolphe’s score. Over the course of the afternoon, his performance steadily accumulates its feeling; his body grows more loose-limbed and expressive. Ma’s slight shifts of interpretation — hushing a pi-anissimo even more, speeding up a melodic riff, exaggerating a crescendo — turn a work of intricate tonal patterns into a passionate narrative. These shifts are not in the score, and yet they reveal what the score is trying to say. Most of the time, Ma can’t explain what inspired these changes, but that doesn’t matter: he has learned to trust himself, to follow his storytelling instincts.

And this is why Ma sways as he plays: Because he can’t restrain himself. Because he is experiencing the same emotions that he is trying to express. Because he is letting himself go. “The best storytellers always get really into their own stories,” Ma says. “They’re waving their arms, laughing at their own jokes. That’s what I try to be like on stage . . . I know that some of the best music happens when you let yourself get a little carried away.”
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n many respects, Ma’s obsession with spontaneity and expression — and his disinterest in perfection — evokes an earlier mode of performance. The classical music of the eighteenth century, for instance, is full of cadenzas, those brief parentheses in the score where the performer is supposed to play “ freely.” (The practice peaked with Mozart, who wrote cadenzas into most of his compositions.) In these frantic and somewhat un-scripted moments, the performer was able to become a personality and express what he felt.)

To make this kind of performance possible, Ma cultivates an easy, casual air backstage. Thirty minutes before the concert begins, Ma disappears into a quiet room. When he reemerges, I expect him to be somber and serious and maybe a little nervous. Instead, Ma is just as disarming and funny as ever, teasing me about my tie, eating a banana, and making small talk with Adolphe. This ease is not a pose: Ma needs to stay relaxed. If he is too clenched with focus, too edgy with nerves, then the range of his musical expression will vanish. He will not be able to listen to those feelings that guide his playing.

“People always ask me how I stay loose before a performance,” Ma says. “The first thing I tell them is that everybody gets nervous. You can’t help it. But what I do before I walk onstage is I pretend that I’m the host of a big dinner party, and everybody in the audience is in my living room. And one of the worst things you can do as a host is to show you’re worried. Is the fish overcooked? Is the wine too warm? Is the beef too rare? If you show that you’re worried, then everybody feels uncomfortable. This is what I learned from Julia Child. You know, she would drop her roast chicken on the floor, but did she scream? Did she cry or panic? No, she just calmly picked the chicken off the floor and managed to keep her smile. Playing the cello is the same way. I will make a mistake on stage. And you know what? I welcome that first mistake. Because then I can shrug it off and keep smiling. Then I can get on with the performance and turn off that part of the mind that judges everything. I’m not thinking or worrying anymore. And it’s when I’m least conscious of what I’m doing, when I’m just lost in the emotion of the music, that I’m performing at my best.”

1.

There is something scary about letting ourselves go. It means that we will screw up, that we will relinquish the possibility of perfection. It means that we will say things we didn’t mean to say and express feelings that we can’t explain. It means that we will be onstage and not have complete control, that we won’t know what we’re going to play until we begin, until the bow is drawn across the strings.

While this spontaneous method might be frightening, it’s also an extremely valuable source of creativity. In fact, the act of letting go has inspired some of the most famous works of modern culture, from John Coltrane’s saxophone solos to Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings. It’s Miles Davis playing his trumpet in Kind of Blue — most of the album was recorded on the very first take — and Lenny Bruce inventing jokes at Carnegie Hall. Although this kind of creativity has always been defined by its secrecy, we are now beginning to understand how it happens.

The story begins in the brain. Charles Limb, a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins University, has investigated the mental process underlying improvisation. Limb is a self-proclaimed music addict — he has a small recording studio near his office — and has long been obsessed with the fleshy substrate of creative performance. “How did Coltrane do it?” Limb asks. “How did he get up there onstage and improvise his music for an hour or sometimes more? Sure a lot of musicians can throw out a creative little ditty here and there, but to continually produce masterpiece after masterpiece is nothing short of remarkable. I wanted to know how that happened.”
(
The birth of jazz improv is often traced back to Charles “Buddy” Bolden, an early-twentieth-century cornetist and one of the most popular musicians in New Orleans. In 1907, Bolden had a psychotic break, and he spent the rest of his life in a mental institution. (He was buried in an unmarked grave in 1930.) According to Dr. Sean Spence, a psychiatrist at the University of Shef
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eld, Bolden suffered from dementia praecox, an illness that was later classi
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ed as a variant of schizophrenia. Spence speculates that Bolden’s unrelenting “madness” — he was hospitalized after threatening to attack people in the street — was actually a crucial inspiration for his “madcap” musical improv. His disordered thoughts, combined with his inability to read music, allowed him to arrange notes in a new way. Subsequent studies have found a disconcerting correlation between success in jazz and mental illness, from the heroin addiction of Charlie Parker to the er-ratic moods of Thelonious Monk to the debilitating depression and phantom-limb pain of Cole Porter.)