It's Time to Change How We Think About Creativity
You don’t have to speak to many people about creativity before you hear the words “I don’t have a creative bone in my body!” or “I’m just not the creative type!”. These kinds of attitudes and beliefs don’t generally appear out of nowhere. They are usually embedded in people from a young age, having grown up in a society that tells them, whether implicitly or explicitly, that not everyone is creative, and that creativity is some special mystical talent that is gifted to right brained children.
We know now that this is not the case (more on this later), so why are people growing up believing that they are incapable of creativity? Let’s take a historical dive and see how we got here.
A (very brief) history of creativity as a concept
Going back many many many years, to the Ancient Greek civilizations, there was no ‘creativity’ so to say – at least there was no word for it. Ancient Greek poets, and only poets might I add, could ‘make’ poetry (“poiein” = “to make”). Artists, according to Plato, merely imitated. In fact, when it came to art, the Ancient Greeks considered art as being about technique (“techne”) and involved subjection to rules, rather than any type of freedom to create.
In both Greek and Roman early societies, the concept of an external creative ‘daemon’ (Greek) or ‘genius’ (Latin) that was linked to the sacred developed, as explained by researchers Albert and Runco. This solidified creativity as being a divine inspiration, external from the human.
The idea of creativity being separate from humans was carried into the rise of Christianity in medieval times, where the Latin term “creatio” was used in reference to God’s act of creation. The term “creatio ex nihilo” meant “creation from nothing”, and therefore ceased to be applicable to any human activities. Even poetry was eventually revoked of its special status and was no longer considered to be creativity, rather being grouped in with art as a craft.
Throughout the 18th century, the idea of creativity began to be linked with imagination and started appearing in art theory. Come the 19th century, art was now considered creative, but in fact art was the only thing that was allowed to be called creative. Creativity belonged to the arts, and so you were only considered creative if you made art. This conception of creativity remained relatively unchanged for some time and might provide us with a clue as to why we often think not everyone can be creative.
The scientific study of creativity is born
This brings us to 1950, when American Psychologist J. P. Guilford gave a presidential address to the American Psychological Association, stating that psychologists had neglected the study of creativity with their focus on intelligence. And just like that – the scientific study of creativity was born. Since this time, researchers on creativity have suggested there has been a 100% relative increase in the scientific study of creativity (Figure 1) and the good ol’ Google Books Ngram Viewer shows a steep increase in the number of books mentioning creativity after 1950 (Figure 2).
Figure 1 : Studies of creativity in the psychological sciences, adapted from the Cambridge Handbook of the Neuroscience of Creativity.
Figure 2: Number of books mentioning creativity.
Then comes the 90’s, where researchers Jamison and Rothenberg independently found links between people with mental health problems and creativity, and a wealth of research on creativity and mental ill health followed. A strong association between mood disorders and creativity was suggested, and even prolific writer and psychology researcher H.J. Eysenck weighed in on the matter, claiming that there was a link between creativity and psychoticism. Contrasting results have since been found, and creativity researchers are still divided on the link between mental illness and creativity today.
The pervasive ‘creative type’
Combining the above findings with anecdotal evidence that had been building over the past 100 years suggesting that artists often battled with mental ill-health (think Vincent Van Gogh and Edvard Munch), and pre-existing attitudes about the ‘creative genius’, it seems the pervasive label of the ‘creative type’ was injected into societal perceptions of creativity.
“No great genius has ever existed without a strain of madness” – Aristotle
Edvard Munch’s ‘Scream’.
Over the next 20 or so years, researchers found links between creativity and many other things as well – personality, attention, intelligence, executive control, dopamine and even the right side of your brain. Not all of these findings held true – take the finding that the right side of the brain is responsible for creativity, for example. Multiple neuroimaging studies have since discovered that creativity involves many brain networks that encompass the whole brain, not just one side.
However, it appears that certain perceptions about creativity, such as the tortured creative genius or the role of the ‘right brain’ are with us to stay. These perceptions were too deeply ingrained in the societal understanding of what creativity is to simply disappear. And so many of us continue to believe that you either have creativity, or you don’t.
Now, we know that our understanding of the world is not always explicitly correct – as our lab member Annaliese explains, we are riddled with cognitive biases that affect how we understand and perceive everything around us. We know that to be creative is not simply to be the crazy scientist or mad artist who cuts their own ear off, yet these pesky perceptions of creativity continue to creep into our lives. The effect of this is that something that should be for everyone, becomes limited to an elite few. Let me explain…
The accepted definition of a creative idea according to the world’s leading creativity researchers is something that is original and useful, or appropriate.
In other words, creativity is everywhere. And just about everyone has it. Figured out a new way to get your morning coffee? Original? Yes. Useful? Very.
Yet a recent survey of 5000 adults globally found that only 39% of respondents consider themselves creative. Over half of people surveyed don’t consider themselves to be creative, when according to the above definition, it is arguable that almost everyone has had a creative idea at least once in their life, and they probably have them all the time. Our past conceptions of creativity tell us that unless you are the ‘creative type’, you aren’t creative, but this just isn’t true.
While these small creative ideas that we all have may not seem like a big deal, it’s these little ideas that grow into big, revolutionary innovations that move us forward as a society. That new way to get your morning coffee could just change the way we drink coffee forever.
Melitta Bentz created filter coffee after using blotting paper from her sons notebook.
So, while in medieval times creativity may have been reserved for divine acts of creation, the current conception of creativity is for everyone. Everyone has the ability to be creative in the future, and just about everyone has been creative, in one way or another, in the past.
Understanding why we hold the beliefs and attitudes we do can help us to shift them, or at least recognize our own biases towards (or against) creativity. So next time you or someone else you know claims they don’t have a creative bone in their body, know that they (probably) have around 206, to be exact.
Why does it matter if I don’t think I’m creative, you ask? Well, the reason we care about changing our perceptions of creativity is this: creativity is fundamentally human – we may not completely understand it yet, but it’s a part of who we are, it’s part of our culture, and it’s how we move forward as a society. Furthermore, as we enter the fourth industrial revolution and try to innovate to change some of the world’s biggest problems, it’s going to become a whole lot more important.
Some smart and dedicated people in our lab care about this so much (and want everyone to take full advantage of their creativity), that they created Creative Chrome – a chrome extension designed to exercise your creative muscles and get your brain thinking about all the little ways you can practice creativity in your day to day life. Each time you open a new Chrome tab, a random creative game will pop up that you can play through in a minute or less.
You can grab it from the Chrome store here: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/creative-chrome
Try it when you get bored of all the non-creative things you spend your time doing, or when you have really fun creative things to be doing but you are just completely stuck for ideas!
If you don't use Chrome, you can try it out here: http://www.creativechromelab.com/