The physicist Max Planck put it best: “Science advances one funeral at a time.”
.. The researchers found that new ideas—those that remixed information in surprising ways—got worse scores from everyone, but they were particularly punished by experts. “Everyone dislikes novelty,” Lakhami explained to me, but “experts tend to be over-critical of proposals in their own domain.” Knowledge doesn’t just turn us into critical thinkers. It maybe turns us into over-critical thinkers. (In the real world, everybody has encountered a variety of this: A real or self-proclaimed expert who’s impatient with new ideas, because they challenge his ego, piercing the armor of his expertise.)
.. A 1999 study found that teachers who claim to enjoy creative children don’t actually enjoy any of the characteristics associated with creativity, such as non-conformity. A famous 2010 study from the University of Pennsylvania showed that ordinary people often dismiss new ideas, because their uncertainty makes us think, and thinking too hard makes us feel uncomfortable... How should creative people fight this widespread prejudice against creativity? Perhaps by disguising their new ideas as old ideas. If people are attracted to the familiar, it’s crucial for creative people to frame their ideas in ways that seem recognizable, predictable, and safe.
Ed Catmull: “Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming The Unseen Forces That Stand In The Way Of True Inspiration”
Ed Catmull: worked on digital films in 1974. He thought it would take 10 years. It ended up taking 20.
Managing is problem-solving, which is a creative activity. By being open, we attracted the best people.
Toyota turned solving the manufacturing problems into a creative activity. The first versions of all of our films suck. The original toy story was predictable.
The second version introduced the choice of living forever without love, introducing tension. We never look at outside scripts.
We look to create a team that will tell a story. You can try to create creativity, or you can remove creative blocks that you know about. If you don’t fail, you’re screwing up in a different way. The team members have no power to make the final decision. The director does. So the team does better because the power is out of the equation. The object should not be to avoid failure, but to make it safe to fail. You can applaud the failures for trying.
A healthy environment is not one in which one department (marking, finance, ect) wins.
Secrets of the Creative Brain
A leading neuroscientist who has spent decades studying creativity shares her research on where genius comes from, whether it is dependent on high IQ—and why it is so often accompanied by mental illness.
Subsequent studies by other researchers have reinforced Terman’s conclusions, leading to what’s known as the threshold theory, which holds that above a certain level, intelligence doesn’t have much effect on creativity: most creative people are pretty smart, but they don’t have to be that smart, at least as measured by conventional intelligence tests. An IQ of 120, indicating that someone is very smart but not exceptionally so, is generally considered sufficient for creative genius.
.. The basic concept that has been used in the development of these tests is skill in “divergent thinking,” or the ability to come up with many responses to carefully selected questions or probes, as contrasted with “convergent thinking,” or the ability to come up with the correct answer to problems that have only one answer.
.. By matching based on education, I hoped to match for IQ, which worked out well; both the test and the control groups had an average IQ of about 120. These results confirmed Terman’s findings that creative genius is not the same as high IQ. If having a very high IQ was not what made these writers creative, then what was?
.. In my own version of a eureka moment, the answer finally came to me: creative people are better at recognizing relationships, making associations and connections, and seeing things in an original way—seeing things that others cannot see.
.. “There is no greater joy that I have in my life than having an idea that’s a good idea. At that moment it pops into my head, it is so deeply satisfying and rewarding … My nucleus accumbens is probably going nuts when it happens.” (The nucleus accumbens, at the core of the brain’s reward system, is activated by pleasure, whether it comes from eating good food or receiving money or taking euphoria-inducing drugs.)
.. “Everybody has crazy things they want to try,” that same subject told me. “Part of creativity is picking the little bubbles that come up to your conscious mind, and picking which one to let grow and which one to give access to more of your mind, and then have that translate into action.”
How sleep makes your mind more creative
It is 6.06am and I’m typing this in my pyjamas. I awoke at 6.04am, walked from the bedroom to the study, switched on my computer and got to work immediately. This is unusual behaviour for me. However, it’s a tried and tested technique for enhancing creativity, long used by writers, poets and others, including the inventor Benjamin Franklin. And psychology research appears to back this up, providing an explanation for why we might be at our most creative when our minds are still emerging from the realm of sleep.
.. No wonder some people value the immediate, post-sleep, dreamlike mental state – known as sleep inertia or the hypnopompic state – so highly. It allows them to infuse their waking, directed thoughts with a dusting of dreamworld magic.