To connect the unconnected, a feature also seen in which brain-disease, often associated with the erroneous associations (paranoia, over-association of noise as voices and faces). Show me your wunderkind and i show you the shizophrenia in the family.
I wonder if you could even retrain active run-away shizophrenic people to produce meaningfull creative outcomes.
So lets go to the tenderloin and connect random physics and science wikipedia articles to a megaphone.
Schools out, but the learning is just getting started.
Are you calling all creatives schizophrenic? Because, uh, citation needed, and that goes against my experiences of hanging out with nothing but creatives 90% of the time.
Us all being schizophrenic would be pretty revelatory if it was true.
In some really basic way sure, but schizophrenia also causes definite excesses and deficiencies. They tend to be messy and bad at self care, they can see and hear things that aren't there, are subject to delusions, and can lack a normal affect
I don’t believe schizophrenic thinking is random either. Unproductive maybe, but schizophrenic creative minds are not uncommon either, so cannot really define one against the other. In the process of being offended sometimes we indicate our biases.
My mother was schizophrenic and very smart, I'm very smart and very creative, sometimes a little crazy, but not psychotic... yet, lol.
So this checks out. Your second paragraph is a little word salady.
My mind is always set to 100mph, until it's so tired that I fall into a mild depression. Then recover. Kinda bipolary. I think schizophrenia is what happens to creative brains with high connectivity and too much activation. The continuous activation causes excessive oxidative stress which eventual causes organic damage.
I agree with the first paragraph, but think the second paragraph conflates genetically linked mental illness with drug-induced paranoia, delusions, and general brain rot (which is rarely particularly creative).
One of the key indicator of creativity is how they modify their behavior after mass novelty is achieved. It's distinctively a schizoid behavior, where you shun something that becomes widely known or appreciated by "too many ppl".
It's knowing esoteric facts/connections that allow neural pathways to discover unbeaten path, however its often not without risks. Many artists/actors/engineers/any line of work really remain undiscovered and then there is a sudden wide recognition of their work, much to their disliking.
You know what they say about genius artists, they straight up jack somebody else's work and claim it as their own.
This is fascinating. I relate to everything you just talked about. Both in the way that I've treated artists, by liking/appreciating them way before they were popular and dropping them once they've achieved fame, and the way that I've treated my own interests. There was a time when I achieved sudden and moderate popularity in a field, which I then blew up by deeply retreating from the spotlight. The life in the public eye can put you in a creative prison, as people expect you stick to a "brand".
After that experience, I deeply understood why Dave Chappelle left the spotlight in his prime, giving up $50m to live in Africa.
Is there anything that I could read to learn more about this?
I am one of these highly creative types, and I would say I do not understand my biology. After my PhD@MIT I joined the materials industry and filed over 120 patents in nine years.
I definitely did not expect this to happen, and I have no idea where the ideas come from. I’ll just be doing my routine lab work and get showered with ideas occasionally.
Edit: Someone below mentioned schizophrenia and its association, and it’s true in our family history that there is a lot of schizophrenia. An ability of mine that seems interesting is an ease of very clear mental visualizations and object manipulations.
Main problem now is trying to filter out what to do now and what to wait for in terms of viability. Have had ideas that are definitely 10 years too soon…
> "Exceptionally creative visual artists and scientists – called “Big C” creative types"
I wonder...
How is creativity graduated from, say "ordinary creativity" through "highly creative", to "Exceptionally creative"? What is the measurement unit, and how is the measurement done - what is the tool? The test group and control group - which controls/tests are they subjected to in order to place them in separate groups? Is the measurement unit reliable - if any such unit exists at all? Valid? How is this (validity and reliability / uncertainty), in turn, measured?
The article was interesting, but it does not seem to answer these questions. As the topic is creativity, failing to even define this most central keyword (much less provide any metric or method for identifying it) ... ehrm... (well, honestly, words fail me here, I don't know how to express this in a polite manner...) it's just not good
Musicians often talk about songs appearing to them to the point they feel like they can't take credit for 'writing' them. They just appear out of nowhere and are finished in an hour or so.
IME music written this way feels more organic and natural vs 'trying' to write a song over a long time period
This raises a good point. I've adopted a rule, that something is not an "idea" unless it's shown to work. This avoids the scenario where someone like a manager takes credit for blurting out a suggestion at a meeting, and then taking credit after someone else has actually made it work. It's especially tricky when a team is working on something, and someone has to figure out who's name goes on the patent submittal.
Some people think outside the box, other times it's difficult to determine where the box was to begin with or how it got there.
>I’ll just be doing my routine lab work and get showered with ideas occasionally.
That's what you're supposed to do in the lab.
If you stick with it and get good, eventually you'll be showered with ideas continuously in the right lab.
>Main problem now is trying to filter out what to do now and what to wait for in terms of viability. Have had ideas that are definitely 10 years too soon…
You think that's a problem now?
You will have plenty of time to refine the most futuristic concepts which through time may also naturally come more within reach.
In 10 years the world will often catch up with ideas that were once a decade ahead, this is also to be expected.
This doesn't say which comes first, though. Does the training of "creative" disciplines make the brain work differently from the "non-creative" disciplines, or is it a birth trait? The brain is an elastic organ.
Speaking as someone with family experience with a very closely related thing... oh man, it's totally 100% visible from birth or nearly so. Some brains are just different.
And, unfortunately, the schizophrenia thing discussed above is real too. Not that it's necessarily genuine schizophrenia or even some watered-down version, just that these things live in the same metaphorical neighborhood and you cannot pretend otherwise.
I only bring it up because I graduated from art school and now I code all day for my job (I'm older with a family to support) and the difference in my thinking styles is noticeable. Not only to me, but to my friends by the way I speak and in my personality.
This leads me to the "chicken and the egg" question. So often people look at coding as an acquisitionable ability, where as they view creative ability as something you have to be born with, discounting the years if effort that goes into those abilities. Be they cooking, painting, writing, what have you.
Even their test subjects had graduate degrees in creative disciplines. Generally that doesn't bide well for schizoeffective disorders... the comparison to graduate degrees in the arts with graduate degrees in mathematics with schizoeffective disorders is probably near equal, as many papers have linked schizophrenia to a pre-viral load:
> the difference in my thinking styles is noticeable. Not only to me, but to my friends by the way I speak and in my personality
I agree that's a real effect. (I think a big part of it is the people around you, too.) I'm pointing out that there are some people in this world whose thinking is not like the rest, and there's no amount of environmental difference that can explain or erase it.
> This leads me to the "chicken and the egg" question. So often people look at coding as an acquisitionable ability, where as they view creative ability as something you have to be born with, discounting the years if effort that goes into those abilities. Be they cooking, painting, writing, what have you.
I also completely agree with this. I think that even if not everyone can be the "Michael Jordan of creativity" (okay, there's a better example... just, my own creativity, you know...), it still does every one of us massive good to exercise our brains.
This is why I disagree fundamentally with TDD - it kills the creative spark. Whatever happened to hiring dedicated testers in order to give the creatives freedom to do what they do best? Forcing a creative dev to constrain him/herself right out of the gate is an exercise in futility made even worse when you add the requirement to be a Docker+Kubernetes+AWS gun-slinger. Whatever happened to specialisation?
Very true. Though less “prestigious”, the most fun I ever had was actually working as an SDET in the beginning of my career at Microsoft in Azure. I would spend hours dreaming up corner cases on how to break dev code in a distributed systems setting and came up with (for that time) quite a few unique frameworks that helped catch bugs that would’ve otherwise slipped through the usual unit, functional and smoke test archetypes. Unfortunately, I believe this job function has been removed entirely within MS
> Unfortunately, I believe this job function has been removed entirely within MS
Azure customers like me all suspected this, it's funny to see it confirmed.
The lack of testing is glaringly obvious. I can "break" Azure by deploying trivial, toy architectures. I can't imagine what customers go through if they actually try to scale up to something bigger or more complex.
Wow. I have the exact opposite experience with TDD. I use TDD to set a specific goal, and to have the computer tell me almost instantly when I've reached it. Then I can unleash creativity in trying implementations, and know instantly if they've worked. Occassionally I'll get a lucky guess in that works. Such a great feeling knowing immediately that my intuition was right.
There are many other problems with TDD (caveat: it's a good idea for _some_ projects) besides "it's no fun". Watch the Jonathan Blow video on the subject for the details.
The classic example is sudoku, where all the TDD advocates failed to get there because they spent their time testing incorrect ideas instead of actually thinking their way to a solution. You can't build a moon rocket a step at a time, as they say.
Catastrophic interference is proposed as one cause of maybe pathological forgetting in the brain. This forgetting in the brain may be strongly linked with creativity. Are there links to hippocampal neurogenesis?
> Input vectors are said to be orthogonal to each other if the pairwise product of their elements across the two vectors sum to zero. For example, the patterns [0,0,1,0] and [0,1,0,0] are said to be orthogonal because (0×0 + 0×1 + 1×0 + 0×0) = 0. One of the techniques which can create orthogonal representations at the hidden layers involves bipolar feature coding (i.e., coding using -1 and 1 rather than 0 and 1). [10] Orthogonal patterns tend to produce less interference with each other. However, not all learning problems can be represented using these types of vectors and some studies report that the degree of interference is still problematic with orthogonal vectors. [2]
I find it interesting how brain works when we try to solve a problem. It is like we have to tell the brain "Here is the problem ... now come up with a solution". And then it does somehow come up with proposed solutions. But we are unaware of how it does that. It is the sub-conscious.
How do we come up with thoughts? They just seem to appear out of nowhere. We don't decide what we will think next. Something guides what thoughts come to mind next, but we have no idea of the internal reasoning that must be going on under the surface.
Daniel Dennett has an interesting theory. Consciousness is a “pandemonium architecture” where clusters of neural connections (daemons) “shout” when activated. The more activations, the louder it shouts, and the higher it climbs in the unconscious, until it gains enough energy to irrupt through the threshold of consciousness.
Something like that surely. And what about dreams? When I'm about to fall asleep it is as if some kind of story starts to be told by my brain, it invents it. I just hear it and am in a different world. If I don't fall asleep because of some interruption I can remember how the dream-world was starting to take over.
> How does one define creativity? How do you measure it?
Different studies might define it slight differently and test it via different tests. But to suggest that we as humans don’t have a fundamental understanding of what creativity even is quite hyperbolic.
I disagree. Our lack of fundamental concept definition in this area is abysmal.
Intelligence, consciousness, agency/free will… it’s all a huge epistemological void that we are trying to recreate artificially without even knowing what it is.
This is why I disagree fundamentally with TDD - it kills the creative spark. Whatever happened to hiring dedicated testers in order to give the creatives freedom to do what they do best?
I believe that everybody has the capacity to be creative, and those who think they don't are impeded not by a lack of creative spark, but rather by their own inhibitions and belief that they aren't creative. Part of this is cultural; engineers are told by society that an engineer/artist schism exists and incorporate that meme into their self-image, writing off their own ability to be creative. This becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy because creativity is like a muscle that needs to be exercised.
"I believe that everybody has the capacity to be creative"
Maybe, but I am almost certain that this capacity is highly unequal. Some people are like walking geysers of inspiration and you cannot suppress them culturally anymore than you can prevent the July sun from baking the sand. Others are decidedly low-voltage even when it comes to private creativity (such as decorating your own home).
It is the same with muscles. We all have some muscles, but only some people do really have the potential to be good athletes.
Like with any other skill, I'd imagine most people could probably become "good at" being creative with practice. The very best creatives would be those who practiced and who had natural talent, but surely the ceiling is rather high even for those without much natural creativity.
Ideating is a muscle. When you intentionally spend time everyday writing down ideas, playing with old ideas, and looking at how others drew inspiration for their ideas, you become stronger at the skill. "Creative" people were not hindered by the fact that their early ideas were stupid, pointless and derivative. They kept at it.
As someone who is in the 'geyser' category, I'll split the difference. Much of what determines how creatively one feels about oneself depends on how they themselves define it. Often the lens is some musical/artistic pursuit where the measurement is somewhat arbitrarily tied to someone(s) famous, which can produce a bad relative sense of self.
I have friends who artistically really have fairly mundane tendencies, but as chefs/cooks, mechanical tinkerers, etc they have all manner of (insert proper cliche here, a la "out of box") creative thinking.
But often they don't see those skills as "creative" so the domain parameters and how they are expressly defined matters a lot.
I think you're speaking of interest and motivation, without which you won't try to be creative or hit the gym. But I believe the capability still exists within you, even if you choose to ignore it. Nobody is unable to be an artist because of the way they were born.
I am creative. If you are not, it is because you lack the willpower.
Funnily enough, it is the reverse expectation that is often placed. "If you can't concentrate, it's because you lack the willpower" etc.
I lived under this burden that something was wrong with me my whole life; that I had some character flaw that made me unsuccessful at things that other people find easy.
And then I was diagnosed with ADD. And then I was prescribed drugs. And then I discovered what it was like to be a normal human being. It turns out that it took just 35 milligrams of a single substance to allow me to focus just like other human beings can, and get through a normal work day like other human beings can.
The point of my story is this: people are wired differently. It is not a character flaw that someone doesn't have an attribute that you should think they have. It is not a lack of willpower or focus.
I have a highly creative brain. It is clear that there is something that causes my brain to make connections faster than most others. And, that thing also helps me make new and random connections in a way that most others will never experience.
This thing, this creative spark, is also my ADD. My brain is constantly taking me on weird and wonderful journeys. I don't choose it, it just happens. And the same thing in reverse. I don't choose to lose focus. It just happens. My brain is constantly making noise and interrupting me. It just happens.
May I ask how you know your new, medicated behavior is representative of how normal human beings think?
I don't consider myself to have ADD, but I have taken Adderall. It increased my ability to focus, focusing on tasks is rewarded in society, and I felt like the positive effects of it made me a better version of myself. I stopped because I didn't appreciate some of the negative side-effects.
It seems common for people who take stimulants to feel like they're a better version of themselves while experiencing the positive side-effects of the medication irrespective of an ADD diagnosis. If you agree, I wonder how you came to the conclusion you were at a competitive disadvantage compared to the norm rather than simply having a leg-up against the norm once medicated.
And sorry if probing is disrespectful. No ill intent here. Just idle curiosity.
'I wonder how you came to the conclusion you were at a competitive disadvantage compared to the norm'
Happy to answer. I've been fired four times, and have only narrowly avoided being fired a few other times. The only reason they didn't fire me in those circumstances was I had managers who didn't have the heart to let me go.
I nearly lost my marriage partly due to my undiagnosed ADD.
There is a look in people's eyes when they have utterly given up on you; when they just cannot comprehend how someone can be so incompetent at basic tasks and unable to function, yet so good at high level tasks. I've seen that look too many times.
Initially, they would love me for the creativity and strategic thinking. But then after causing fire after fire after fire through the most trivial errors from lack of concentration, you slowly, slowly see them lose faith in you.
I could go on, but you get me.
Obviously I can't know how a 'normie' sees and feels, but when I take my drug, all of a sudden I can sit down and work all day like my wife and (most of my) colleagues can, rather than being in a constant state of distraction-resistance.
With drugs, my ratio of good days to bad days has completely changed. I'm 37 years old and this is the first time I've ever gotten 18 months into a job and been in a situation where everyone still thinks I'm doing great. Normally by this time I'm getting the wooden stares.
Stimulants make you better than baseline on some tasks, but definitely not all of them, and not all creative ones. (Especially if you lose out on sleep or your teeth start falling out from abusing them.)
It's usually pretty obvious if you have ADD, and it's not "you're bad at your job", it's more like "everything outside your job is falling apart". Your job provides enough stress to concentrate on it most of the time.
Adderall also doesn't make you "more stimulated" like caffeine does - a regular psychiatric dose should make you a little calmer, since your life isn't falling apart anymore.
I am not sure if this is distinction without difference. A part of being an artist is, for me at least, the drive to do something.
Myself, I write quite a lot (in Czech), I have published 7 books so far. I am not claiming to be a big artist, merely a mediocre one, but I notice that I don't really have a choice. I have to write something almost every day, much like a full toilet bowl has to overflow.
It is for some people and that's probably a reasonable predictor of how well they'll do. Have you met people who excel at something who don't care about excelling? I can't think of one.
Probably true, but as the article suggests, it may be more than just exercise. Some people seem to be given a creative brain from the get-go, whilst others must work very hard to produce creative outcomes, and indeed...may stop trying altogether because of this.
If I take the least creative people in my circles, one pattern I can spot is that they lack curiosity. Interests are narrow, shallow and for pragmatic reasons only. Not ignorant, just cognitively passive. My pseudo-scientific take on creativity is that it's connecting dots in unforeseen ways. Without curiosity though, there's little to connect.
I’m right there with you. I thought I wasn’t creative. The magic insight was that you just start doing the thing and creativity comes as part of the process.
Don’t know how to start? Just start and the process automatically becomes breaking down the task into thousands of tiny parts that you then just do.
> the process automatically becomes breaking down the task into thousands of tiny parts
One way I categorise artists I have met is engineer-type artists versus discovery-type artists.
* engineer-type artists: definite goal. The artist has a defined goal in mind for a piece of art, they plan towards achieving that goal, and they produce their artwork. Learning and creativity within some of the steps.
* discovery-type artists: no defined goal. There is a huge mount of play and seemingly random experimentation with their medium, almost searching for random discovery. Often playing within a chosen restricted domain. They might say something like “the work discovered itself as I did it”.
I am an engineer at heart, so I have really appreciated learning how discovery-type artists create. Disclaimer: not an artist.
I find this distinction to match my experience with musicians (qualification: I produce records).
I lean more towards this engineer mindset, but know plenty of artists who just dive right in and start molding and hacking away. One of the big takeaways that I've gotten from observing them is the importance of just starting. Even if I don't know where I'm headed. If I persist in generating bad ideas I will eventually fall into a creative groove that is rewarding. It might take an hour or more to arrive there, but it happens.
The composer Carla Bley summed up the importance of her daily work routine succinctly in an essay: "If the muse strikes when you're in the kitchen, the best you're going to get is a sandwich."
I believe I also say this sentiment described a while ago in a long-forgotten HN essay. The writer referred to it as AIC: Ass-in-chair methodology. Just sit down and start working.
A CS centric way of looking at this is that spending (brain) cycles exploring the problem is a necessary but not sufficient condition to solve it.
Most people don’t believe they can and don’t even try. But the brain is very fascinating and imo anyone is capable of problem solving.
One practical reason I am really sold on diversity in Tech is that I believe peoples experiences shape the way they think about problems. Having different kinds of minds looking at the same problem can result in different solutions. And that’s amazing. We can’t predict how it will work in advance, all we can do is create the right conditions which precipitate this result.
This could be my neurological development being slightly askew, but I am not creative in the slightest. I used to think I was somewhat creative (I drew constantly as a child and into my late teens, played a lot of music, worked as a graphic designer, love building things from wood, sort of a “maker” of sorts these days), but then I realized I’m just a regurgitation machine.
I’m not sure I’ve had a remotely original or interesting idea of my own in my life.
I just suck up everything around me, rip it apart, slap it back together, and that’s my version of “creativity”.
I’ve been working at being more creative now that I’ve realized I’m not creative, and I have no idea how. I am a pattern replicating machine.
I’m a little disappointed, but also somewhat content that I can enjoy what I do nonetheless. It’s all a sort of meditation and practice in developing skills. I’m not sure I ever prided myself on being creative in the first place, so it’s not a loss I suppose.
But when you say anyone can be creative, I have no idea what you mean. I can’t figure it out. Everything I think of is something someone has done. I can trace everything back to someone else. There is nothing creative about it.
What I find funny is that the description of your version of "creativity" is my general definition of creativity. Has anyone ever done anything completely original and unheard of before? I think to be creative at something is to have a large mental library of concepts within a certain space, and to be able to mix and match those concepts. Much like ripping ideas apart and slapping them back together as you say.
I used to think visual character design was the hardest thing ever. To just come up with something out of nowhere. that being creative like that was a very difficult thing. What I didn't usually see or look at is all the designs those people have seen and taken inspiration from before.
I think that's also why some ideas can be "ahead of their time". Someone made a connection between some concepts that many people haven't yet, and will think is too farfetched. Still, over time people can come to see value in that idea that was dismissed earlier.
Just to reiterate my main point, I think it's easy to look at what other people do and think "Wow, how original!", without ever seeing their inspiration for something. Even though they might just feel like they replicated some patterns.
You're too hard on yourself, the reality is that this is the vast majority of people. There are those few percent of people that will come up with something new, but the majority of time its a person thinking about combining A with B, and coming up with something that's just slightly new.
It also quite depends on environment. When you try to think about something, the observer may think that you are just being lazy and doing nothing. I can't count how many times I've been told by parents or other people that used to be close that I should do some work rather than just sit and stare at the wall.
And I would have some really great ideas of how to make something or how to solve something.
Then those people would say - you are just stupid, you can't do this and that. I can imagine many people will try to shun such thoughts and associate it with something unpleasant. As I did for many years.
This may sound brutal, but only when I cut contact with every single person that was negatively affecting my creativity in the past and present I stopped being depressed (not completely, sometimes it's coming back), but also started getting successes at work and eventually I was able to start doing things on my own.
Some people don't realise how toxic they are and there isn't even point talking to them about that, because you are going to get ridiculed and attacked.
For sure. I have a bachelor's in Fine Arts but taught myself to code. I think the pendulum has swung too far, I need to get back to painting/drawing and exercise that muscle again :)
I have an engineering degree and work in tech. I've also been part of more than 30 exhibitions around the world.
Creating a new web app side project and an art project in whatever medium is exactly the same type of creative work.
However, being somebody working inside a large institution, whether tech or art, is not creative because you are limited by the org what you can say do and in practice even think. You cannot be creative there.
So the environment either permits you or restricts you from being creative. You need to breakout and create your own environment to be creative in.
And, once you become an established artist you have certain rules to follow so you can no longer be as creative as when you started out.
> I believe that everybody has the capacity to be creative
I like your optimism but it isn't my experience. Creative people can't help but be creative. They need no prompting, no encouragement, no practice etc. They just do it. I personally need to create things and feel like I am missing something or wasting my life if I am not busy with projects. Most people I know aren't like that at all.
To me it’s a matter of investing time to learn an art medium. Painting, playing music, or writing code, all require some painful hours/days/weeks/months of learning before you can actually use the medium to “create”. Most people don’t get past that learning phase, and thus can never really have fun creating.
Yeah I agree with this, most of the people I know that aren’t creative seem to have some emotional block or belief that it’s not their role. Often if you get past that they are incredibly creative
Creative is a very fuzzy word. For example, why is someone who produces works of art considered “creative”, but someone who creates - for example bridges - an engineer?
Come on... An even slightly charitable reading of parents' comment would realize that they don't mean "belief" in the religious sense.
It's pretty safe to assume they are asking what the previously understood and accepted academic stance on the matter was, and are asking how the findings of this paper differ in a way to make it newsworthy.
If he can't figure that out, i'd regret having asked that question because i dont feel like the other replies will be of better quality. Ignore the thread please, y'all.
I simply wasn't sure what to make of your comment. I probably shouldn't have assumed the worst in the face of ambiguity. The sentiment that science needs to be newsworthy wrt actual beliefs is omnipresent online, indicating (to me) a wrong canvas for your post.
I wonder if you could even retrain active run-away shizophrenic people to produce meaningfull creative outcomes. So lets go to the tenderloin and connect random physics and science wikipedia articles to a megaphone.
Schools out, but the learning is just getting started.