Is Privacy a Key Element of Creativity?
Charles Dickens possessed not only a great mind, but also excellent calves. On any given day, Dickens traveled, on average, more than 12 miles through the lush countryside of Kent or the bustling streets of Victorian London.
This post originally appeared on the Crew blog .
On one particularly bleak night in October 1857, Dickens set out to escape his increasingly disharmonious marriage by walking from his home in central London to his home in Kent – a 30-mile journey that would eventually be repeated (in the opposite direction) by his character Pip. in high expectations . In fact, many of Dickens’s secluded walks later became fodder for his work.
“There are details in Dickens’s descriptions — a window, a railing, or a keyhole in a door — that he gives demonic life. Things seem to be more relevant than they really are, ”explains critic G.K. Chesterton in Charles Dickens: A Critical Study .
“Indeed, this degree of realism does not exist in reality: it is the unbearable realism of a dream. And such realism can only be achieved by dreamily walking around the place; it cannot be obtained by walking observantly. “
Like Dickens’ walks, research and anecdotes describe the creative virtues of spending time alone and in one’s own mind: solitary work , being in nature , daydreaming . But what happens when we let our mind sink deep into our subconscious mind? And how does this help us overcome creative blocks?
Is loneliness the key to creativity?
What makes us “creative”?
To understand how creativity works, we need to first understand how creative people work .
Back in the 1960s, psychologist and pioneering researcher of creativity Frank X. Barron brought together a group of the most famous creators of the era, including the writers Truman Capote, William Carlos Williams and Frank O’Connor, as well as leading architects, scientists, entrepreneurs. and mathematicians to see if he can identify common traits among creative individuals, regardless of their specialty.
Barron found that all of the most creative thinkers had certain things in common: openness to their inner lives; preference for ambiguity and complexity; an unusually high tolerance for disorder and disorder (as well as vodka and orange juice, if we are talking about Capote); and the ability to extract order from chaos.
Describing a group of traits that he observed, Barron argued that the creative genius was “both more primitive and more cultured, more destructive and more constructive, sometimes more insane, but still adamantly more intelligent than the average person.”
Eighty years later, Mihai Csikszentmihalyi, a leading art researcher and father of the flow, summarized the creative personality in the same way:
“If I had to express in one word what sets their personalities apart from others is complexity. They exhibit tendencies in thought and action that are segregated in most people. They contain opposite extremes; instead of being an “individual,” each of them is a “multitude.”
While Barron’s research was one of the first to demonstrate the sheer complexity of creative thinking from a behavioral perspective, it is now almost clear that there is no one key trait that defines creativity.
Inside your creative mind
Years after Barron’s research, technology and research have confirmed his observations.
Unlike the right / left brain myth , most neuroscientists these days agree that activating our “creative mode” involves various interacting cognitive processes (both conscious and unconscious) as well as our emotions.
In fact, while we still don’t know exactly how creativity and the brain work together, we know that every time we are given a creative task, parts of our entire brain are activated.
More specifically, there are three main “networks” of brain functions that we know are used for creative tasks:
- The Executive Attention Network comes into play when we need a laser focusing beam, for example, when we are trying to understand a complex lecture or solving a problem that requires intensive use of our working memory.
- The imagination network (or the default network) is responsible for creating dynamic mental simulations of past experiences, imagining alternative scenarios, and social cognition (i.e. when we try to imagine what someone else is thinking).
- The Salience network constantly monitors both external events and our internal dialogue, passing the baton on any information necessary to solve a given task.
And while we still don’t know how it all works together, we are getting closer.
In a recent article in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, researcher Rex Jung and colleagues concluded that when you want to loosen associations, allow your mind to wander freely, imagine new possibilities and keep silent from your inner critic (in other words, get creative and come up with interesting and new ideas), it is good to reduce the activation of the network of attention of leaders and increase the networks of imagination and significance.
In other words, you want to block the outside world and retreat inward.
Even more recent research on jazz musicians and rappers shows that this is exactly what happens during improvisation. Our creativity thrives in mental isolation.
How Isolation Is Related to Incubating Ideas
From a social, cultural and scientific point of view, creativity seems more free when we can use those parts of our brain that are less connected with reality and are more free in nature.
And I’m sure we can all agree on that. We have all experienced the shock of sudden enlightenment when our brain wanders. But how does this affect the creative process in general?
Back in 1926, Graham Wallace, an English social psychologist and co-founder of the London College of Economics, published The Art of Thought, one of the first attempts to define how the creative process works.
The Wallas process consisted of four stages:
- Preparation: Here the creative problem is “explored in all directions.” It is a conscious and subconscious accumulation of resources that you will ultimately use.
- Incubation: Here we are taking a period of unconscious processing when no direct effort is being made on the problem.
- Lighting: Eureka! Intuition, or whatever you call it, is a moment of “flash” when we find a new creative way to solve a problem.
- Check: Now is the time for real work. The final step in the process is when your unique understanding is validated by others.
Since Wallas, researchers, psychologists, and thinkers of all stripes have come up with their own ideas about what creativity entails. However, in each of them, great attention is paid to the period of “incubation” – the time spent alone, allowing your thoughts to wander and combine random ideas.
60 years ago, psychoanalysts suggested that one of the hallmarks of creativity is “the ability to regress into the unconscious while maintaining the conscious control of the ego.” Back in the 1970s, Csikszentmihalyi suggested that creative personalities “tend to be strong in some traits, such as introversion and self-confidence, and low in others, such as conformism and moral confidence.”
TS Eliot noted the “almost mystical” quality of the incubation of ideas . Alexander Graham Bell spoke of the power of “unconscious mental activity.” While Lewis Carroll defended the importance of mental “chewing” (chewing thoughts). In almost every creativity “system” invented, the most important part of the process involves letting go of your consciousness to allow deeper parts of your mind to come in and connect.
Without incubation – this space far from direct thoughts – there is no Eureka!
Four ways to take care of and control your unconscious
So, we saw how creative understanding depends on many free-flowing ideas and emotions passing through our subconscious. But is it really a skill we can train?
On our busy day after day, where our attention is constantly pushed and pulled in all directions, as if our minds are being pulled in and quartered, however, there are several methods you can use to block out the world and dive into this deep sense of mentality. winding.
1. Practice mindfulness training.
The current trend towards mindfulness training and spreading meditation is not just about calming our inner minds. One of the greatest advocates of the creative benefits of meditation is filmmaker David Lynch,who has practiced Transcendental Meditation for many years .
The goal, as Lynch describes, is not “to get more creative.” Rather, increased creative thinking is a side effect of calming the inner mind during and after meditation. Instead of controlling his thoughts and emotions (as is often the case in consciousness), after meditation they become raw materials that he can select and manipulate as he pleases.
But Transcendental Meditation is just one of the many forms of meditation that you can practice. If you’re interested in getting started, here’s a great article on creating a daily meditation practice by Leo Babaut of Zen Habit.
2. Schedule disruptions on your day
Breaks are nothing new. Back in the 1920s, Wallas proposed a technique for optimizing the incubation stage of creativity, which is confirmed by our modern psychology of productivity.
His method was to interrupt our workflow with concentrated effort. Some people do this deliberately by scheduling mandatory breaks in their day, while others take a more natural approach – drinking enough water for the call of nature to force them to take “micro breaks.” As Wallas suggests :
“We can often do more in the same way by starting several tasks in a row and voluntarily leaving them unfinished while we turn to others than working on each problem in one sitting.”
This is why designers like Dann Petty and Jeff Sheldon start multiple projects at once . Multitasking can kill your brain, but incubating multiple things at the same time can have real benefits.
3. … and disruption to your lifestyle
There is a reason why a creative person or scientist is often portrayed as lonely, inept in social situations. By studying creative minds and social rejection, researchers have found that feelings of rejection or isolation from their peers can encourage more creative thinking .
Many of the greatest thinkers of our time have been outsiders in some respects. Think about how Einstein moved from Germany to Switzerland, Italy, and then to the United States. Gandhi in South Africa. Stravinsky leaves Russia. Eliot moves to England. Martha Graham moved from the South to California as a child, where she was influenced by Asian art. Freud as a Jew in Catholic Vienna. Or Picasso leaves Spain for France.
As Mihai Csikszentmihalyi sums up : “It seems that a person who is comfortable in the bosom of society has less incentive to change the status quo.”
An outsider – someone who faces a personal feeling of rejection or difference, or is actually in a place of social isolation – is not only able to experience new and new experiences, but also more likely to spend more time in their heads. work through these ideas and see how they can be used.
4. Allow your mind to dream unhindered.
One trait that Barron discovered during his research on creativity was that creative people are more introspective. But not only in the sense that they have an increased level of self-awareness, but also in the fact that they are familiar with darker and more uncomfortable parts of their psyche.
You’ve probably read about the creative benefits of daydreaming , but one of the things that is rarely mentioned in these essays is the importance of unlimited daydreaming – not letting your brain filter the thoughts that enter your head.
In a subsequent study of creative writers, Barron and researcher Donald McKinnon found that the average writer ranked in the top 15% of the population for all dimensions of psychopathology .
But, oddly enough, these writers also scored extremely high on all dimensions of mental health – meaning they were better equipped to deal with these thoughts and feelings. For most of us, these dark thoughts are filtered and hidden. They do not serve us as good, law-abiding and moralistic citizens.
But Barron argued that this complete experience of light and darkness, even if only in our head, fuels the creative mind. And the more we experience these thoughts, the more we can control them.
In fact, the creative mind is able to shape our experience not only through the external world, but also through the deep synthesis of our imagination. This is why so often you hear artists say that inspiration comes from within, not from the outside.
Keats described his solitary life as “wife and child” – something that both attracted his attention and demanded his attention.
Thoreau exclaimed: “I have never met a friend who was as sweet as being alone.”
We are faced with so many distractions, notifications, and constant demands for our attention in our lives that it is difficult for us to find the time to allow our thoughts to creep in.
However, as we search within ourselves, we become more open to the ambiguities of life. And there, in the midst of chaos, is the birthplace of creativity.
Is loneliness the secret to unlocking our creativity? | Crew