Creativity as an eternal puzzle

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Psychologists have studied creativity since the very beginning of their discipline, but it still remains quite elusive. There are many theories about creativity, but this is a sign not only of the author's creativity, but also of a lack of true understanding. Almost everyone was studied - school children, chess players, musicians, mathematicians, winners of major artistic awards, famous historical figures... We gave them assignments, read diaries, analyzed drawings, dissected biographies... Creativity was associated with intelligence, unhappy childhood, personality types, opinions , temperament, defense mechanisms, mental disorders... It's still not completely clear to us, and maybe it never will be.

It sometimes happens to many people that they solve a new problem, let's say mathematical, in a way they haven't seen before. It is the first time in their life that they try to repair a computer and along the way they come across a novelty that others consider useful, adopt and start to apply regularly. This capacity is desirable and can make you a popular member of the team, a colleague that others like to work with or, if humor is involved, a favorite entertainer that everyone invites as guests. It is also clear what this is for. In the processes of adaptation and development, it is important for each group to have a member who can offer new ideas or approaches. But how does this work?

I hope you know at least one extremely funny person. Someone to whom jokes "arrive" in a fraction of a second, which to others would not even last all night. For psychology, the problem is that such people do not have to be special in anything else, intellectually, emotionally or ethically, so it is not clear what to connect it with.

Everything gets even more complicated when you focus on people who managed to do something for the first time in the history of human work or in a unique way. There are many such examples and some of them are very well researched and documented. Leonardo and Tesla were far ahead of their time; Shakespeare invented 170 new words just for Hamlet; the theory of relativity was initially considered a philosophy, but - when, thanks to the development of technology, empirical tests became possible - it turned out that Einstein was right in everything, down to the smallest details; during rehearsal breaks Don Giovanni, in Prague, Mozart wrote several symphonies...

The first complication is that you don't want these people on your team of collaborators. As children, they are either too far ahead of their peers and the usual activities are boring to them, or they are completely unrecognized, closed and wayward. They work in their own way, it's hard to get involved, they don't follow procedures. The fruits of their genius are often reaped by other people, decades or even centuries later.

The theoretical complication is that it is almost impossible to explain where this kind of genius comes from. Of the aforementioned, there are more intelligent and educated and healthier and happier, very often more skilled in the very disciplines that made them famous: Shakespeare never studied, Leonardo suffered because he did not know Latin, Einstein was laughed at for his mathematics, Tchaikovsky had absolutely no hearing which every tuner has... Many great creators were boring conversationalists, fascists, manipulators, self-obsessed, addicted to people or substances.

DESPITE THE WORLD

Despite his pride, Freud admitted that "psychoanalysis must lay down its arms before talent." Here is just one of many such examples of limitless talent. In a small town in California, almost in the desert, a teenager comes across a record with the music of Edgar Varese, postmodern compositions without melody, regular rhythm, anything that children like. His parents know nothing about music, so he has to teach himself everything. Already in high school, he begins to compose and record orchestral music, but he realizes that he will not be able to record it because it is too expensive to hire so many people and the studio. He decides to make money by starting a rock band. In the next 25 years, he will release dozens of albums, hold countless concerts, and write songs in all possible genres of popular music. Moreover, his collaborators testify that he only stopped composing for concerts and jams, the recordings clearly show him conducting rock concerts (again, in a very unconventional way), he wrote pseudo-baroque music for the harpsichord, and orchestral music was conducted by, among others, Nagano and Boulez. How to explain all this when genetics, upbringing, mentors, music education, support play no role?

Only one lesson we can draw from this example is that creativity must take place despite, that it involves a lot of internal and social risk, and is often fueled by one not having enough or even no support. A great work must be based on overcoming its own limitations, era, mainstream, conformity... Otherwise, it remains mere entertainment.

QUESTION OF BEGINNING

The question of creativity also relates to the fundamental questions of theology and cosmogony - how did the gods, or more recently physical forces, create the worlds, from what material, with what forces, why did they want to do it in the first place. Various religious systems, philosophical approaches and modern astrophysics have offered numerous answers to this question. Probably the greatest historical influence was the Judeo-Christian concept according to which God creates from nothing (nothingness, "darkness over the abyss"), by the power of his will and deliberation, and some mystics say that he creates out of love and even loneliness. This, among other things, led to the belief that man can only rearrange the arrangement of already created elements, so, for example, Diner is probably the first to systematically sign his paintings. Modern scientific conceptions are based on Newton's (and partly Spinoza's) vision of the universe governed by impersonal natural laws, as well as on avoiding the question of why and how it all began.

THE UNPREDICTABILITY OF INSPIRATION

Understanding creative people and creative products is even less of a mystery than understanding the creative process. When someone "finds" an original technical solution or a beautiful melody, what does he do with it and can it be practiced and taught? The inexplicability of all this is underlined by the very expression "it comes to my mind". It was as if something that was outside our mind had suddenly entered it, that the process was completely out of our control.

Latin word inspiration means that we inhaled something, and the Greek root of the word enthusiasm that someone has or carries his god within himself. Plato considers poetry to be a kind of madness, believing that it arises under the influence of the Muses. The same word is used today for persons, usually women (but also Shakespeare's mysterious "master-mistress" and Michelangelo's poetry addressed to Tommaso Cavalieri, thirty years younger), who inspire the artist to create. For some romantics, we know that they systematically used alcohol and opium to induce a similar effect, and in recent decades, this phenomenon has unfortunately become very widespread.

A big problem for the scientific examination of the creative process is its unpredictability. Only a few create regularly and in a proper process. Many suffer from "creative block" or solutions appear in their dreams, during walks or trips, and some claim that, occasionally or almost all the time, they "receive dictates". Also, some extremely gifted children do not live up to expectations, many genius artists died young, and someone becomes truly original when he himself has lost hope that it will ever happen.

OURS IS JUST WHAT WE CREATED

However, this is just the beginning. Since fooling oneself is the easiest thing in the world, a potentially great scientific idea must be tested in many ways that the researcher had to learn, practice, choose and apply. An artistic idea must be carved in marble, written down so that others can read it, or arranged in a system of signs that someone will be able to convert into very specific tones. It takes a lot of learning, effort and editing to give new content an adequately good shape.

No matter how the creative process looks from the inside and no matter how difficult it can be at times, almost everyone perceives it as precious. No one gives it up easily, many sacrifice everything else to preserve their creative power, without it their lives seem meaningless, and they themselves are empty. The popular thread about the connection between creativity and mental disorder can also be, at least in part, explained by this: for some people, drawing or astrophysics are more interesting than anything else, they refuse to conform, we reject them for it (and don't forget the envy of creative ones), and in the end, they truly become significantly "different", partly because it is not important to them, and partly because of chronic loneliness.

It is this experience of the preciousness of the creative experience that can be sufficient evidence for its necessity. If we shift the focus from the product (that is, the ambition) to the enjoyment of trying to express in a perceptible way how the outer world resonates with our inner one, it can give a new dimension to knowing ourselves and enjoying life. Who will see it and what they will think about it is an irrelevant question. Because it can truly be that ours is only what we have created - a drawing, a poem, a letter, an interior, a dinner... All the same, as long as I work in my own way and express myself in a new way.

The author is a psychologist