Imagine: How Creativity Works (2 page)

In 1997, nearly three years after West and his designers began making their videotapes, Procter and Gamble officially submitted an application for a U.S. patent. In the early spring of 1999, the new cleaning tool was introduced in supermarkets across the country. The product was an instant success: by the end of the year, it had generated more than $500 million in sales. Numerous imitators and spinoffs have since been introduced, but the original device continues to dominate the post-mop market, taking up an ever greater share of the supermarket aisle. Its name is the Swiffer.

The invention of the Swiffer is a tale of creativity. It’s the story of a few engineers coming up with an entirely new cleaning tool while watching someone sweep up some coffee grounds. In that flash of thought, Harry West and his team managed to think differently about something we all do every day. They were able to see the world as it was — a frustrating place filled with tedious chores — and then envision the world as it might be if only there were a better mop. That insight changed floor cleaning forever.

This book is about how such moments happen. It is about our most important mental talent: the ability to imagine what has never existed. We take this talent for granted, but our lives are defined by it. There is the pop song on the radio and the gadget in your pocket, the art on the wall and the air conditioner in the window. There is the medicine in the bathroom and the chair you are sitting in and this book in your hand.

And yet, although we are always surrounded by our creations, there is something profoundly mysterious about the creative process. For instance, why did Harry West come up with the Swiffer concept after watching that woman wipe the floor with the paper towel? After all, he’d done it himself on numerous occasions.

“I can’t begin to explain why the idea arrived then,” he says. “I was too grateful to ask too many questions.” The sheer secrecy of creativity — the difficulty in understanding how it happens, even when it happens to us — means that we often associate breakthroughs with an external force. In fact, until the Enlightenment, the imagination was entirely synonymous with higher powers: being creative meant channeling the muses, giving voice to the ingenious gods. (Inspiration, after all, literally means “breathed upon.”) Because people couldn’t understand creativity, they assumed that their best ideas came from somewhere else. The imagination was outsourced.

The deep mysteriousness of creativity also intimidated scientists. It’s one thing to study nerve-reaction times or the mechanics of sight. But how does one measure the imagination? The daunting nature of the subject led researchers to mostly neglect it; a recent survey of psychology papers published between 1950 and 2000 revealed that less than 1 percent of them investigated aspects of the creative process. Even the evolution of this human talent was confounding. Most cognitive skills have elaborate biological histories, so their evolution can be traced over time. But not creativity — the human imagination has no clear precursors.

There is no ingenuity module that got enlarged in the human cortex, or even a proto-creative impulse evident in other primates.

Monkeys don’t paint; chimps don’t write poems; and it’s the rare animal (like the New Caledonian crow) that exhibits rudimentary signs of problem solving. The birth of creativity, in other words, arrived like any insight: out of nowhere.

This doesn’t mean, however, that the imagination can’t be rigorously studied. Until we understand the set of mental events that give rise to new thoughts, we will never understand what makes us so special. That’s why this book begins by returning us to the material source of the imagination: the three pounds of flesh inside the skull. William James described the creative process as a “seething cauldron of ideas, where everything is fizzling and bob-bing about in a state of bewildering activity.” For the first time, we can see the cauldron itself, that massive network of electrical cells that allow individuals to form new connections between old ideas. We can take snapshots of thoughts in brain scanners and measure the excitement of neurons as they get closer to a solution. The imagination can seem like a magic trick of matter — new ideas emerging from thin air — but we are beginning to understand how the trick works.

The first thing this new perspective makes clear is that the standard definition of creativity is completely wrong. Ever since the ancient Greeks, people have assumed that the imagination is separate from other kinds of cognition. But the latest science suggests that this assumption is false. Instead, creativity is a catchall term for a variety of distinct thought processes. (The brain is the ultimate category buster.) Just consider the profusion of creative methods that led to the invention of the Swiffer. First, there was the anthropologist phase, those nine months of careful observation and tedious videotaping. Although this phase didn’t generate any new ideas — the point was to clear the mind of old ones — it played an essential role in the creative process, allowing the team to better understand the problem. And then, when West watched the woman sweep up the coffee grounds, there was the classic moment of insight, a breakthrough appearing in a fraction of a second. But that epiphany wasn’t the end of the process. The engineers and designers still had to spend years fine-tuning the design, perfecting the spray nozzle and the electrostatic wipes. “The concept is only the start of the process,” West says. “The hardest work always comes after, when you’re trying to make the idea real.”

The point is that the Swiffer creative process involved multiple forms of creativity. This is where the tools of modern science prove essential, since they allow us to see how these various forms depend on different kinds of brain activity. The imagination is transformed from something metaphysical — a property of the gods — into a particular twitch of cortex. Furthermore, this new knowledge is useful: because we finally understand what creativity is, we can begin to construct a taxonomy of it, outlining the conditions under which each particular mental strategy is ideal.

Some acts of imagination are best done in a crowded café sipping espresso, and some are helped by a cold beer on the couch. Sometimes we need to let go and improvise on our own, and sometimes we need the wisdom of others. Once we know how creativity works, we can make it work for us.

But just because we’ve begun to decipher the anatomy of the imagination doesn’t mean we’ve unlocked its secret. In fact, this is what makes the subject of creativity so interesting: it requires a description from multiple perspectives. The individual brain, after all, is always situated in a context and a culture, so we need to blend psychology and sociology, merging together the outside world and the inside of the mind. This is why, although Imagine begins with the fluttering of neurons, it will also explore the influence of the surrounding environment on creativity. Why are some cities such centers of innovation? What kind of classroom techniques increase the creativity of children? Is the Internet making us more or less imaginative? We’ll look at evidence showing that seemingly irrelevant factors — such as the color of paint on the wall, or the location of a restroom — can have a dramatic impact on creative production.

Furthermore, because the act of invention is often a collaborative process — we are inspired by other people — it’s essential that we learn to collaborate in the right way. The first half of this book focuses on individual creativity, while the second half shows what happens when people come together. Thanks to some fascinating new research, such as an analysis of the partnerships behind thousands of Broadway musicals and an investigation into the effectiveness of brainstorming, we can begin to understand why some teams and companies are so much more creative than others. Their success is not an accident.

For most of human history, people have believed that the imagination is inherently inscrutable, an impenetrable biological gift. As a result, we cling to a series of false myths about what creativity is and where it comes from. These myths don’t just mislead — they also interfere with the imagination. In addition to looking at elegant experiments and scientific studies, we’ll examine creativity as it is experienced in the real world. We’ll learn about Bob Dylan’s writing method and the drug habits of poets.

We’ll spend time with a bartender who thinks like a chemist, and an autistic surfer who invented a new surfing move. We’ll look at a website that helps solve seemingly impossible problems, and we’ll go behind the scenes at Pixar. We’ll watch Yo-Yo Ma improvise, and we’ll uncover the secrets of consistently innovative companies.

The point is to collapse the layers of description separating the nerve cell from the finished symphony, the cortical circuit from the successful product. Creativity shouldn’t be seen as something otherworldly. It shouldn’t be thought of as a process reserved for artists and inventors and other “creative types.” The human mind, after all, has the creative impulse built into its operating system, hard-wired into its most essential programming code. At any given moment, the brain is automatically forming new associations, continually connecting an everyday
x
to an unexpected
y
. This book is about how that happens. It is the story of how we imagine.

ALONE

Ch. 1
 
BOB DYLAN’S BRAIN

Always carry a light bulb.
— Bob Dylan

Bob dylan looks bored. It’s May of 1965 and he’s slumped in a quilted armchair at the Savoy, a fancy London hotel. His Ray-Bans are pulled down low; his eyes stuck in a distant stare. The camera turns away — Dylan’s weariness feels like an accusa-tion — and starts to pan around the room, capturing the ragged entourage of folkies and groupies following the singer on the final week of his European tour.

For the previous four months, Dylan had been struggling to maintain a grueling performance schedule. He’d traveled across the Northeast of the United States on a bus, playing in small college towns and big-city theaters. (Dylan played five venues in New Jersey alone.) Then he crossed over to the West Coast and crammed in a hectic few weeks of concerts and promotion. He’d been paraded in front of the press and asked an endless series of inane questions, from “What is the truth?” to “Why is there a cat on the cover of your last album?” At times, Dylan lost his temper and became obstinate with reporters. “I’ve got nothing to say about these things I write,” he insisted. “I just write them. There’s no great message. Stop asking me to explain.” When Dylan wasn’t surly, he was often sarcastic, telling journalists that he collected monkey wrenches, that he was born in Acapulco, and that his songs were inspired by “chaos, watermelons, and clocks.” That last line almost made him smile.

By the time Dylan arrived in London, it was clear that the trip was taking a toll. The singer was skinny from insomnia and pills; his nails were yellow from nicotine; and his skin had a ghostly pal-lor. (He looked, someone said, like an “underfed angel.”) Dylan was taking too many drugs and was surrounded by too many people taking drugs. In a classic scene from Don’t Look Back, a documentary about the 1965 tour by D. A. Pennebaker, the singer returns to an empty suite. “Welcome home,” says a member of his entourage. “It’s the first time that this room hasn’t been full of a bunch of insane lunatics, man, that I can remember . . . It’s the first time it’s been cool around here.” A few minutes later, there’s a knock on the door. The lunatics have arrived.

Dylan couldn’t escape from the crowds, so he learned to disappear into himself. He packed a typewriter in with his luggage and could turn anything into a desk; he searched for words while surrounded by the chaos of tour. When he got particularly frustrated, he would tear his work into smaller and smaller pieces, shredding them and throwing them in the wastebasket. (Marianne Faithfull referred to such moments as “tantrums of genius.”) Although Dylan’s creativity remained a constant — he wrote because he didn’t know what else to do — there were increasing signs that he was losing interest in creating music. For the first time, his solo shows felt formulaic, as if he were singing the lines of someone else. He rarely acknowledged the audience or paused between songs; he seemed to be in a hurry to get offstage. In Don’t Look Back, when a fan tells Dylan she doesn’t like his new single — it featured an electric guitar — his reply is withering: “Oh, you’re one of those. I understand now.” And then he turns and walks away.

Before long, it all became too much. While touring in England, Dylan decided that he was leading an impossible life, that this existence couldn’t be sustained. The only talent he cared about — his ceaseless creativity — was being ruined by fame. The breaking point probably came after a brief vacation in Por-tugal, where Dylan got a vicious case of food poisoning. The illness forced him to stay in bed for a week, giving the singer a rare chance to reflect. “I realized I was very drained,” Dylan would later confess. “I was playing a lot of songs I didn’t want to play. I was singing words I didn’t really want to sing . . . It’s very tiring having other people tell you how much they dig you if you yourself don’t dig you.”

In other words, Dylan was sick of his music. He was sick of strumming his acoustic guitar and standing in the spotlight by himself; sick of the politics and the expectations; sick of the burden of being a spokesman. People assumed that his songs always carried a message, that his art was really about current events. But Dylan didn’t want to have an opinion on everything; he had no interest in being defined by the sentimental self-righteousness of “Blowin’ in the Wind.” The problem was that he didn’t know what to do next: he felt trapped by his past but had no plan for the future. The only thing he was sure of was that this life couldn’t last. Whenever Dylan read about himself in the newspaper, he made the same observation: “God, I’m glad I’m not me,” he said. “I’m glad I’m not that.”

The last shows were in London at a sold-out Royal Albert Hall. It was here that Dylan told his manager he was quitting the music business. He was finished with singing and songwriting and was going to move to a tiny cabin in Woodstock, New York. Although Dylan had become a pop icon — the prophetic poet of his generation — he was ready to renounce it all, to surrender the celebrity and status, if it meant he might be left alone.