Creativity is neither IQ nor skill

What is your “heaven” on earth? You know – the thing that you constantly aim for but only get a glimpse of once in a while? Mine would be a slice of spacetime that would be inhabited by the most creative people I know and know of, with each of them doing what they love and do best, while I soak in inspiration and learn.  

It would be impossible to have that kind of heaven in its complete sense since some of my most favorite “creating” humans have long gone.  But last week, I got a little bit of that. I was with Dr. Nancy Andreasen and Joe Rohde with whom I had golden conversations and who also gave talks about this thing called creativity.

Nancy is a prominent neuroscientist and psychiatrist who also has a PhD in English literature.  She is among the pioneers in neuroimaging (getting snapshots of the brain particularly when asked to do certain tasks) and a leading researcher on creativity. She has, for many decades now, studied the work habits, family histories and brains of the most widely recognized creative people – Nobel laureates, Fields medalists (highest honor given in Math), Pulitzer Prize winners- among others. She spends a few days with each of them doing extensive and in-depth interviews and creativity tests. Then she would have them go through a MRI machine to see what brain regions are activated during creative thinking. (WATCH: RapplerTalk: Creativity and the Human Mind)

Nancy’s work so far shows us that creativity is not the same as high IQ.  While the ones she has studied so far are very smart people, they do not all have exceedingly high IQs. Having a high IQ is not an accomplishment. Creative accomplishment requires that you do something useful with what you know; and that calls for other things other than merely having a very high IQ (or forming groups solely on that basis). You also cannot train to be creative – it is not a skill.

One thing she found out about these highly creative people is that they are interested in many things and engage in them deeply. They are not one-trick ponies and not narrow in their passions. That is part of the “preparation” part that Nancy identified among these special bunch of humans. 

Another thing about creative people that she found out is that they require an “incubation” period. This refers to that time for that slow brew, letting the mind play and make its own connections with all the bits and chunks of knowledge that are in there like pieces inside a kaleidoscope. This may mean sitting on a tub, staring into space or even cleaning the closet.

Over one of our dinners, Nancy told me about one of the creative geniuses she studied and how that person would make long drives to get into his personal “brew” zone. This creative genius also prefers to be called a writer than any other title including what most know him to be – a filmmaker. He is George Lucas.

Creative people also speak of the moment when they sense a pattern inspiringly emerging from the kaleidoscope pieces in their minds. This pattern is original. i.e., it has neither been seen nor has it been considered to be relevant before.

Production is the final step that creative beings speak of. This is when the pattern becomes crystal clear to the creator that it nudges her or him to get to work on animating it and unleashing it into the world. Creative people do not just brew and whip up patterns– they create!  

However, this gift of creativity seems to come with a price for its bearers. Nancy’s work shows that it is linked to mental illness- largely to mood disorders and to a lesser extent, to schizophrenia and bipolar disorders.  Why this is so is still largely a mystery. However, some clues point to the fact that mental illness manifests in behavior as the lack of definite boundaries in thinking and behaving, This “porous” kind of thinking is also behind creative thinking. The difference though is that the relationships that a creative person with mental illness sees become really clear even to others when the work of creation is done, while for those who are only mentally ill, the relationships they see exist only in their own minds.

While Nancy chases after what goes on inside the creative brain, Joe Rohde designs and makes compellingly creative spaces. He is the other side of the same coin of creativity. He makes it real by having all of us experience his creative works. Joe is the Creative Head of the Imagineering Division of Walt Disney.

It was his first time in the Philippines and was completely blown away by the sight of jeepneys. He told me that because they are all “hand made”, no two are really ever alike. I never thought of jeepneys like DNA  – individually unique but come to think of it – with their personal, painted and welded symbols – they are! (WATCH: RapplerTalk: Science and the power of imagination)

In his talk, he distilled the singular element so critical in creating: the narrative. He homed in on the role of a powerful narrative – whether it is for a book, a theme park, a museum or any configuration of a space. That narrative is that original pattern the creative sees. Once you get your story down, strong and clear, the rest would hang from it and work to enliven the space –in your head (for written work) or in the world. A story, he says, is a direction, a map, and when people come upon a space they are not familiar with, they will gravitate to a “map.”

I think this space could be any space regardless of whether it is a micro space seen through lenses or so vast that they require drones for bird’s eye views.   A story- whether it is for a consumer product, a service, a museum or a living space – is what people will connect with. This story has to be able to draw powerful emotions from the one experiencing it so that they will give it a chance and discover how emotionally rewarding it is to approach it and be held by it.

Joe also showed how a narrative, not the hierarchy in the organization, should dictate what needs to be produced in a project and by whom. Doing it this way also naturally hands over the reigns of pieces of the story to those who can tell it best. And it is not necessarily always top management.

When I met Nancy late last year, I immediately introduced him to Joe whom I met early last year. They both immediately recognized that they are two sides of the same coin. Joe is now part of the list of exquisitely creative human beings being studied by Nancy. And as I told Nancy, I would have given anything to have been a fly on the wall when their conversations took place. That wall would have been heaven for me.

Our lives are so much richer because these creative beings are among us. They see magnificent patterns that revise our world or the way we view it.

If you do not consider yourself a creative being, all is not lost. It is so easy to succumb to despair, knowing and living with all kinds of hellish suffering on earth. But perhaps writer Italo Calvino’s wisdom could save us. He said that there are  only two ways to deal with hell on earth. One is we accept it and become suffering ourselves. The other is much harder and calls that we be always on guard. It summons us to seek and learn to recognize those who are heaven on earth, to give them space and more importantly, to make them endure. – Rappler.com

(“Creativity concept” image from Shutterstock)