The Aha! Moment: A Scientist's Take on Creativity

17 A Short Guide to Being Creative

245 17 A Short Guide to Being Creative P eople who would like to increase their own creativity may welcome a condensed account of my advice. So here’s a brief summary. General Most of the human mind is outside our awareness. The bit we are conscious of, the Observer-Reasoner, is at the top; below it is the Censor, of which we are largely unconscious and that guards us from the totally unconscious structure below. (Figure 1.1 shows my model of this arrangement .) The stuff at the bottom includes the Random-Ideas Generator, or RIG. We all have one. Indeed, when we tackle a problem by having ideas, we are asking the RIG to send those ideas upstairs to be judged or tested. My sad guess is that 80% of RIG ideas, even those that get past the Censor , are wrong. They fail that test. The RIG is not an intellectual entity; it is emotional and plays with the material it acquires. Yet it is the basis of human creativity. Where does the RIG get its material? The Observer-Reasoner, supplied by the senses, sends information downstairs to it, past the filtering Censor. The RIG plays with it, making odd combinations, and sends up ideas: often on demand, and sometimes after a delay, but sometimes spontaneously. Among lots of failures, it may push up a success, the Censor may let it through, and you may recognize it and take it further. This happens in all of us; at best, my advice may help to lubricate the process. 246 The Aha! Moment Your Large-Scale Environment This includes your position in society and your employment. If you are a student, or occupied with routine work, or self-employed domestically , it may be relatively simple. Once you have met current demands, you are free to think and do what you like, with whatever resources may be to hand. But suppose you do research or development? A business will probably have given you a mandate or a set of tasks. You may want to be creative about them or also to work on some project of your own. A university typically imposes a well-administered teaching load of lectures, seminars, marking, and practical classes on its staff. It may pay much less attention to your “own work,” that is, your private research. Yet any creative individual must, I feel, be subtly exploitative of the administration . I once worked as a company researcher for ICI Ltd. I intuited an unwritten company rule that if money was being spent and paper was being generated, then progress was being made. So I made sure that my company tasks did both of these. My private ventures (e.g., on bicycle stability, see chapter 5) may have exploited company facilities but were less obtrusive. Early on, I established a reputation as an “odd bird.” My hope was that the administration would not be alarmed if I later showed strange behavior. The strategy probably worked. I also avoided predictability and routine. I feel that the creative process can be usefully stirred up by any change—journeys, lectures, new places, new experiences, chats with strangers or “opposite numbers” in other organizations—in fact any sort of play with the opportunities that come along. Even a simple journey can spark a creative idea. Your Small-Scale Environment This is the world inside in your own head. We are all different, but I reckon that any creative person needs to amass a vast amount of information downstairs for the RIG to play with. So it always helps to be curious and inquisitive. I maintain a whole database of anything that appeals to me and comes my way (I describe it in chapter 14). All my life I have accumulated information of any kind on sheer whim, without A Short Guide to Being Creative 247 imposing any filter or plan or pattern. Every so often, like junk, a bit comes in handy. The RIG is primarily emotional. It seizes notions and ideas for their appeal rather than for their sense. The ideas it pushes up, even those that get past the Censor, are usually wrong. Most thinkers discard these wrong notions; but I reckon you should go along with them. Even if 80% of ideas fail to work, an absurd idea can sometimes be the forerunner of a bold and workable new notion. A related strategy is “thinking with...