Creating Creativity

Some adults just seem more creative than others. It's not wholly a matter of comparing people in the “creative” professions – visual artists and musicians and fiction writers – to those in supposedly less-creative jobs. When we actually consider the latter, we realize that engineers have to be creative to solve problems, physicists have to use divergent thinking to pose previously unasked questions, detectives have to “think outside the box” about where to look for evidence—in other words, that every profession benefits from creativity. And some adults just seem to have more of it. However, we often say that all young children are creative. The famed artist Pablo Picasso said, "Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up." Albert Einstein advised adults to become more like children: “To stimulate creativity, one must develop the childlike inclination for play and the childlike desire for recognition.” Studies of brains and brain function are beginning to tell us a few things about creativity. There are definitely some surprises in the data, but the findings seem to back the intuitive practices of many parents and teachers and education reformers.

Yes, we all have the capacity to be creative.
Tom Stafford describes adults who have had frontal lobe damage; they often tell very inventive and elaborate lies—in other words, very creative lies—but without meaning to be dishonest, indeed, without the ability to see the difference between confabulation and truth. He points out that the fact that these brain-injured patients demonstrate so much creativity tells us that we all have the ability to be inventive, creative storytellers. Those of us lucky enough to have undamaged brains have something in our frontal cortex that helps us to know the difference between fiction and truth; Stafford asks if this something also, to some extent, inhibits our creativity. Source: Jonah Lehrer's November 23, 2009, post called “Lying and Creativity,” on the blog Frontal Cortex.

Let little kids BE little kids.
Kenneth M. Heilman, MD, suggested in his lecture at the 17th Annual Meeting of the American Neuropsychiatric Association that Albert Einstein’s “developmental dyslexia”—the fact that he still was not talking by the age of three—could have caused a greater development in his right-brain spatial intelligence. In Heilman's words: “Could Einstein’s dyslexia and lack of development of his left hemisphere have allowed his right hemisphere to grow and be well connected and to have excellent modules?” Source: NeuroPsychiatry Review, May, 2006. “Exploring the Brain's Role in Creativity,” by Fred Balzac.

Dr. Heilman's musings on Einstein's brain reminds us that delay isn't always bad. Other research findings indicate that pushing children into early reading, formal school practices at pre-school ages, and paper-and-pencil math in early grades all have deleterious results, at least for the majority of children. Heilman's work adds weight to the Better-Late-Than-Early idea by suggesting that pushing formal academics into earlier and earlier grades may unintentionally squelch creativity.

Education is not just readin', writin', and 'rithmetic.
Dr. Heilman cites work by Miller and colleagues at the University of California, San Francisco, on patients with frontotemporal dementia. Many of these patients had never had artistic hobbies before but, as their left anterior temporal lobes deteriorate, they suddenly take up one or more of the arts. Heilman writes, "They actually became creative—perhaps because the deterioration on the left side ‘disinhibited’ their right side, and the right side got creative doing artistic things." Of course, we have no intention of deliberately injuring anybody's brains, but the indication that the site of an inhibitory force is in the left side of the brain gives us a clue as to how to encourage creativity in healthy, whole brains: work on developing the right side of the brain.

Betty Edward's book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain has been a big seller, and it gives some very practical ideas for unleashing the power of our spatial intelligence. The book 's advice definitely works to improve drawing ability, which is really more about truly seeing forms and shades and colors than about how to move a pencil across the paper. A quick search on Amazon turns up several other books, too, that promise to develop our right-brain abilities.

(SIDE NOTE: Perusing the titles and authors' credentials of these other books makes me nervous that some of them dive into woo-waters. They seem to promise just a bit too much, for one thing. Authors Harary and Weintraub, who have gathered exercises to promote Right Brain Learning in 30 Days, have an entire “higher-consciousness” series that also shows people how to have Out-of-Body Experiences. I gather that OBEs are a legitimate brain phenomenon comparable to lucid dreaming, but categorizing them as “higher” consciousness gives me pause, and people reviewing the book on Amazon seem to think that their “astral travels” actually / metaphysically happened. Hmm.)

Even without special training in right-brain learning, we can encourage children's right-brain abilities by allowing lots of block play, lots of mucking around with sticks and sand, lots of make believe, lots of big crayon scribbles and drippy tempera dabblings and finger painting and play dough...Sounds an awful lot like old-fashioned preschool and kindergarten, doesn't it? But all these activities help develop spatial, kinesthetic, and interpersonal intelligences—in other words, right-brain stuff.

Brainstorming encourages divergent thinking.
Stafford writes that actors who do improvisation tap into the same creative powers that confabulators with brain damage tap into, but “in a controlled way. They learn to cultivate a 'dual mind,' part of which doesn't plan or discriminate and thus unleashes its inventive powers, while the other part maintains a higher level monitoring of the situation, looking out for opportunities to develop the narrative.”

It seems to me that improvisers do a quick, spur-of-the-moment version of the familiar two-step problem-solving process: first, brainstorm ideas, not judging yet, accepting any and all comers; then make choices among all the ideas generated, using one's best judgment. It is so important to have that first, uninhibited part!

To be creative, we must be free to make mistakes.
We all have an intuition that one reason young children are more creative than many adults is because they are freer with their imaginations, their words, and their behavior. They are very aware that there is a lot they can't do yet, a lot that they don't know—and so they are much less worried about making mistakes or looking foolish. Author Mary Lou Cook writes, “Creativity is inventing, experimenting, growing, taking risks, breaking rules, making mistakes, and having fun.”
Source: Quote Daddy.

Perhaps the best “creativity training” we can do for our children is to encourage this experimentation and play. Help them shrug off mistakes, when possible, and allow them to take risks, within reason. Model questioning authority, rationally and responsibly. Make a lot of room for fun.