The why of creativity.
I’m very excited about creativity and creation as a mechanism in people. Right now, there’s a special interest in music from my part, but all of creation out of nothing that humans are doing is just so fascinating. One thing in this area that I’ve spent some time thinking about lately is creativity, and that’s what I want to explore in this series. I’ll take you through my point of view of the Why, How and What of creative thinking, in this text we’ll focus on Why creativity is important to talk about.
As I grew up, I thought of myself as incapable of being creative. I remember one day in kindergarten very specifically that’s been a holding my perspective on creativity for a long time, and has been defining myself in terms of creativity to some extent. We were painting self-portraits, all of us. My mom gets a call from one of the teachers who tells her that I was refusing to get on with the task. They were both stunned as I was the happiest, most compliant kid ever. But for this, I sat in a corner refusing to do my task.
I don’t really know why they called mom about it, but she told them to just let me be and that she’d talk to me about it when picking me up. What happened was that when all of the other kids were done painting themselves on A3 papers, I got out of my corner and started looking at the paintings. I studied each and every one of them meticulously. Then I started painting. When picking me up, my mom asked me about it. I told here that I didn’t want to do the task wrong, so I waited to see what all of the other kids were doing.
I had problems doing those kinds of free tasks all of my school life. The amount of freedom stunned me and made me somewhat incapable of doing anything at all, which is a bummer. It’s also really important to be able to do something from vague instructions later on, so it’s a super important thing to learn.
I want to talk about another case that I think is important as to why creativity is important to us all, and it’s one with roots in the neuropsychological research. Scientists have made scans of cab drivers’ brains, just as well as they did with bus drivers’ brains.
The thesis was that some parts of the brain develops as it’s challenged in terms of memory and connecting information. A cab driver in central London has to know an incredible amount of information and access it more rapidly than most other people. On top of merely streets, they need to know what’s on the streets in terms of restaurants and tourist attractions. London is a hard city to navigate with many one way streets, constant roadwork and the giant canal dividing the city. That’s why it’s chosen.
Unlike the cab driver, the bus driver doesn’t need to navigate that mess, as they drive pretty much the same route, and are directed if they need to divert from that route. What was shown from the research is that the hippocampus, which is the center of memory and location, grew in the cab drivers getting them above average in size. And it was shown to grow more the longer one was on the job.
This is important to us in this context because there’s a lot of creativity involved in the decision making process of a cab driver. That’s only one of the millions of occupations in which you need to gather a lot of information and cleverly connect it. In the society we are developing it’s going to be even more important as the volume of information grows and more of us get in to professional roles which are unclear as well as more cognitively demanding.
Creativity has many more implications than just being able to paint and play music. The change rate of technology and society demands us to be able to think in new patterns, which creativity is. It’s the ability to solve new problems, as well as coming up with new ideas. That’s how we should go about the concept, and it’s why I think it important that we make a shift in the way we think of it. In the next part of the series, I’ll explain how this shift can be done.
