One ( 20 Points) How have your views on creativity been changed by this course, by your engagement with course materials and/or by your work in this course? Or take another approach, perhaps one that argues the course reinforced views you already held, or did nothing to add to or change your views of creativity. You may respond creatively and/or refer to readings as you choose.

Two (20 Points)

All three required course texts discuss the role of "imagination" in terms of inspiration for, and development of creativity in human societies. Briefly, discuss how each of these texts offer differing views of imagination as essential to creativity. Cite at least one passage from each text to support your view about creativity and imagination.

"Reflect on your own creativity. Where does imagination come into play in your own sense of personal creativity? What does it mean for you to be imaginative, to imagine and what sorts of experiences, objects or processes inspire you to be imaginative?

CREATIVITY

FLOW AND THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DISCOVERY AND INVENTION

MIHALY CSIKSZENTMIHALYI

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

One: Setting the Stage

PART I THE CREATIVE PROCESS

Two: Where Is Creativity?

Three: The Creative Personality

Four: The Work of Creativity

Five: The Flow of Creativity

Six: Creative Surroundings

PART II THE LIVES

Seven: The Early Years

Eight: The Later Years

Nine: Creative Aging

PART III DOMAINS OF CREATIVITY

Ten: The Domain of the Word

Eleven: The Domain of Life

Twelve: The Domain of the Future

Thirteen: The Making of Culture

Fourteen: Enhancing Personal Creativity

Appendix A: Brief Biographical Sketches of the Respondents Who Were Interviewed for This Study

Appendix B: Interview Protocol Used in the Study

Notes

References

Searchable Terms

About the Author

Other Books by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

About the Publisher

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The idea for this book emerged in a conversation with Larry Cremin, then president of the Spencer Foundation. We agreed that it would be important to study creativity as a process that unfolds over a lifetime, and that no systematic studies of living creative individuals existed. With its customary vision, the Spencer Foundation then financed a research project, which was to last four years, to remedy this gap in our understanding. Without this grant the laborious task of collecting, transcribing, and analyzing the lengthy interviews would have been impossible.

The other contribution without which this book could not have been written is the assistance of the ninety-one respondents whose interviews form the bulk of the book. All of them are extremely busy individuals, whose time is literally invaluable—thus I deeply appreciate their availability for the lengthy interviews. It is indeed difficult to express my gratitude for their help, and I can only hope that they will find the results were worth their time.

A number of graduate students helped with this project and often contributed creatively to it. Several have written or coauthored articles about the project in professional journals. Especially important were four of my students who have been involved in the project since its inception and who have since earned their doctorates: Kevin Rathunde, Keith Sawyer, Jeanne Nakamura, and Carol Mockros. The others who took an active part are listed among the interviewers in appendix A, which describes the sample.

While we collected and analyzed the data, I had many opportunities to

consult with fellow scholars whose specialty is creativity. I should mention at the very least Howard Gardner, David Feldman, Howard Gruber, Istvan Magyari-Beck, Vera John-Steiner, Dean Simonton, Robert Sternberg, and Mark Runco—all of whom contributed, knowingly or not, to the development of ideas in this book.

Several colleagues helped with earlier drafts of the manuscript. I am particularly glad to acknowledge the inspiration and critique of my old friend Howard Gardner, of Harvard University. As usual, his comments have been exactly on target. William Damon, of Brown University, made several excellent suggestions that helped reorganize the contents of the volume. Benö Csapó, from the University of Szeged, Hungary, brought a different cultural perspective to the work.

Three chapters of the book were drafted while I was a guest of the Rockefeller Foundation in its Italian Center at Bellagio. The rest were written while I was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences in Palo Alto, with support from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation grant #8900078, and the National Science Foundation grant #SBR–9022192. I am grateful to them for the opportunity to concentrate on the manuscript without the usual interruptions—and in such glorious surroundings.

In the later stages of the work, Isabella Selega, who had the good grace to consent to marry me some thirty years ago, oversaw the editing of the manuscript and many other important details. She did the same when I wrote my doctoral dissertation in 1965 on the same topic. It is difficult for me to admit how much of whatever I have accomplished in the years in between I owe to her loving, if critical, help.

None of the shortcomings of this book should be attributed to any of those mentioned here, except myself. For whatever is good in it, however, I thank them deeply.

ONE

SETTING THE STAGE

This book is about creativity, based on histories of contemporary people who know about it firsthand. It starts with a description of what creativity is, it reviews the way creative people work and live, and it ends with ideas about how to make your life more like that of the creative exemplars I studied. There are no simple solutions in these pages and a few unfamiliar ideas. The real story of creativity is more difficult and strange than many overly optimistic accounts have claimed. For one thing, as I will try to show, an idea or product that deserves the label “creative” arises from the synergy of many sources and not only from the mind of a single person. It is easier to enhance creativity by changing conditions in the environment than by trying to make people think more creatively. And a genuinely creative accomplishment is almost never the result of a sudden insight, a lightbulb flashing on in the dark, but comes after years of hard work.

Creativity is a central source of meaning in our lives for several reasons. Here I want to mention only the two main ones. First, most of the things that are interesting, important, and human are the results of creativity. We share 98 percent of our genetic makeup with chimpanzees. What makes us different —our language, values, artistic expression, scientific understanding, and technology—is the result of individual ingenuity that was recognized, rewarded, and transmitted through learning. Without creativity, it would be

difficult indeed to distinguish humans from apes.

The second reason creativity is so fascinating is that when we are involved in it, we feel that we are living more fully than during the rest of life. The excitement of the artist at the easel or the scientist in the lab comes close to the ideal fulfillment we all hope to get from life, and so rarely do. Perhaps only sex, sports, music, and religious ecstasy—even when these experiences remain fleeting and leave no trace—provide as profound a sense of being part of an entity greater than ourselves. But creativity also leaves an outcome that adds to the richness and complexity of the future.

An excerpt from one of the interviews on which this book is based may give a concrete idea of the joy involved in the creative endeavor, as well as the risks and hardships involved. The speaker is Vera Rubin, an astronomer who has contributed greatly to our knowledge about the dynamics of galaxies. She describes her recent discovery that stars belonging to a galaxy do not all rotate in the same direction; the orbits can circle either clockwise or counterclockwise on the same galactic plane. As is the case with many discoveries, this one was not planned. It was the result of an accidental observation of two pictures of the spectral analysis of the same galaxy obtained a year apart. By comparing the faint spectral lines indicating the positions of stars in the two pictures, Rubin noted that some had moved in one direction during the interval of time, and others had moved in the opposite direction. Rubin was lucky to be among the first cohort of astronomers to have access to such clear spectral analyses of nearby galaxies —a few years earlier, the details would not have been visible. But she could use this luck only because she had been, for years, deeply involved with the small details of the movements of stars. The finding was possible because the astronomer was interested in galaxies for their own sake, not because she wanted to prove a theory or make a name for herself. Here is her story:

It takes a lot of courage to be a research scientist. It really does. I mean, you invest an enormous amount of yourself, your life, your time, and nothing may come of it. You could spend five years working on a problem and it could be wrong before you are done. Or someone might make a discovery just as you are finishing that could make it all wrong. That’s a very real possibility. I guess I have been lucky. Initially I went

into this [career] feeling very much that my role as an astronomer, as an observer, was just to gather very good data. I just looked upon my role as that of gathering valuable data for the astronomical community, and in most cases it turned out to be more than that. I wouldn’t be disappointed if it were only that. But discoveries are always nice. I just discovered something this spring that’s enchanting, and I remember how fun it was.

With one of the postdocs, a young fellow, I was making a study of galaxies in the Virgo cluster. This is the biggest large cluster near us. Well, what I’ve learned in looking at these nearby clusters is that, in fact, I have enjoyed very much learning the details of each galaxy.

I mean, I have almost gotten more interested in just their [individual traits], because these galaxies are close to us—well, close to us on a universal scale. This is the first time that I have ever had a large sample of galaxies all of which were close enough so that I could see lots of little details, and I have found that very strange things are happening near the centers of many of these galaxies—very rapid rotations, little discs, all kinds of interesting things—I have sort of gotten hung up on these little interesting things. So, having studied and measured them all and trying to decide what to do because it was such a vast quantity of interesting data, I realized that some of them were more interesting than others for all kinds of reasons, which I won’t go into. So I decided that I would write up first those that had the most interesting central properties (which really had nothing to do with why I started the program), and I realized that there were twenty or thirty that were just very interesting, and I picked fourteen. I decided to write a paper on these fourteen interesting galaxies. They all have very rapidly rotating cores and lots of gas and other things.

Well, one of them was unusually interesting. I first took a spectrum of it in 1989 and then another in 1990. So I had two spectra of these objects and I had probably not measured them until 1990 or 1991. At first I didn’t quite understand why it was so interesting, but it was unlike anything that I had ever seen. You know, in a galaxy, or in a spiral or disc galaxy, almost all of the stars are orbiting in a plane around the center. Well, I finally decided that in this galaxy some of the stars were going one way and some of the stars were going the other way; some were going

clockwise and some were going counterclockwise. But I only had two spectra and one wasn’t so good, so I would alternately believe it and not believe it. I mean, I would think about writing this one up alone and then I would think that the spectra were not good enough, and then I would show it to my colleagues and they would believe it and they could see two lines, or they couldn’t, and I would worry about whether the sky was doing something funny. So I decided, because the 1991 applications for using the main telescopes had already passed, that in the spring of ’92 I would go and get another spectrum. But then I had an idea. Because there were some very peculiar things on the spectrum and I suddenly…I don’t know…months were taken up in trying to understand what I was looking at. I do the thinking in the other room. I sit in front of this very exotic TV screen next to a computer, but it gives me the images of these spectra very carefully and I can play with them. And I don’t know, one day I just decided that I had to understand what this complexity was that I was looking at and I made sketches on a piece of paper and suddenly I understood it all. I have no other way of describing it. It was exquisitely clear. I don’t know why I hadn’t done this two years earlier.

And then in the spring I went observing, so I asked one of my colleagues here to come observing with me. He and I occasionally do things together. We had three nights. On two of them we never opened the telescope, and the third night was a terrible night but we got a little. We got enough on this galaxy that it sort of confirmed it. But on the other hand it really didn’t matter because by then I already knew that everything was right.

So that’s the story. And it’s fun, great fun, to come upon something new. This spring I had to give a talk at Harvard and of course I stuck this in, and in fact it was confirmed two days later by astronomers who had spectra of this galaxy but had not [analyzed them].

This account telescopes years of hard work, doubt, and confusion. When all goes well, the drudgery is redeemed by success. What is remembered are the high points: the burning curiosity, the wonder at a mystery about to reveal itself, the delight at stumbling on a solution that makes an unsuspected order visible. The many years of tedious calculations are vindicated by the burst of

new knowledge. But even without success, creative persons find joy in a job well done. Learning for its own sake is rewarding even if it fails to result in a public discovery. How and why this happens is one of the central questions this book explores.

EVOLUTION IN BIOLOGY AND IN CULTURE

For most of human history, creativity was held to be a prerogative of supreme beings. Religions the world over are based on origin myths in which one or more gods shaped the heavens, the earth, and the waters. Somewhere along the line they also created men and women—puny, helpless things subject to the wrath of the gods. It was only very recently in the history of the human race that the tables were reversed: It was now men and women who were the creators and gods the figments of their imagination. Whether this started in Greece or China two and a half millennia ago, or in Florence two thousand years later, does not matter much. The fact is that it happened quite recently in the multimillion-year history of the race.

So we switched our views of the relationship between gods and humans. It is not so difficult to see why this happened. When the first myths of creation arose, humans were indeed helpless, at the mercy of cold, hunger, wild beasts, and one another. They had no idea how to explain the great forces they saw around them—the rising and setting of the sun, the wheeling stars, the alternating seasons. Awe suffused their groping for a foothold in this mysterious world. Then, slowly at first, and with increasing speed in the last thousand years or so, we began to understand how things work—from microbes to planets, from the circulation of the blood to ocean tides—and humans no longer seemed so helpless after all. Great machines were built, energies harnessed, the entire face of the earth transformed by human craft and appetite. It is not surprising that as we ride the crest of evolution we have taken over the title of creator.

Whether this transformation will help the human race or cause its downfall is not yet clear. It would help if we realized the awesome responsibility of this new role. The gods of the ancients, like Shiva, like Yehova, were both builders and destroyers. The universe endured in a

precarious balance between their mercy and their wrath. The world we inhabit today also teeters between becoming either the lovely garden or the barren desert that our contrary impulses strive to bring about. The desert is likely to prevail if we ignore the potential for destruction our stewardship implies and go on abusing blindly our new-won powers.

While we cannot foresee the eventual results of creativity—of the attempt to impose our desires on reality, to become the main power that decides the destiny of every form of life on the planet—at least we can try to understand better what this force is and how it works. Because for better or for worse, our future is now closely tied to human creativity. The result will be determined in large part by our dreams and by the struggle to make them real.

This book, which attempts to bring together thirty years of research on how creative people live and work, is an effort to make more understandable the mysterious process by which men and women come up with new ideas and new things. My work in this area has convinced me that creativity cannot be understood by looking only at the people who appear to make it happen. Just as the sound of a tree crashing in the forest is unheard if nobody is there to hear it, so creative ideas vanish unless there is a receptive audience to record and implement them. And without the assessment of competent outsiders, there is no reliable way to decide whether the claims of a self- styled creative person are valid.

According to this view, creativity results from the interaction of a system composed of three elements: a culture that contains symbolic rules, a person who brings novelty into the symbolic domain, and a field of experts who recognize and validate the innovation. All three are necessary for a creative idea, product, or discovery to take place. For instance, in Vera Rubin’s account of her astronomical discovery, it is impossible to imagine it without access to the huge amount of information about celestial motions that has been collecting for centuries, without access to the institutions that control modern large telescopes, without the critical skepticism and eventual support of other astronomers. In my view these are not incidental contributors to individual originality but essential components of the creative process, on a par with the individual’s own contributions. For this reason, in this book I devote almost as much attention to the domain and to the field as to the

individual creative persons.

Creativity is the cultural equivalent of the process of genetic changes that result in biological evolution, where random variations take place in the chemistry of our chromosomes, below the threshold of consciousness. These changes result in the sudden appearance of a new physical characteristic in a child, and if the trait is an improvement over what existed before, it will have a greater chance to be transmitted to the child’s descendants. Most new traits do not improve survival chances and may disappear after a few generations. But a few do, and it is these that account for biological evolution.

In cultural evolution there are no mechanisms equivalent to genes and chromosomes. Therefore, a new idea or invention is not automatically passed on to the next generation. Instructions for how to use fire, or the wheel, or atomic energy are not built into the nervous system of the children born after such discoveries. Each child has to learn them again from the start. The analogy to genes in the evolution of culture are memes, or units of information that we must learn if culture is to continue. Languages, numbers, theories, songs, recipes, laws, and values are all memes that we pass on to our children so that they will be remembered. It is these memes that a creative person changes, and if enough of the right people see the change as an improvement, it will become part of the culture.

Therefore, to understand creativity it is not enough to study the individuals who seem most responsible for a novel idea or a new thing. Their contribution, while necessary and important, is only a link in a chain, a phase in a process. To say that Thomas Edison invented electricity or that Albert Einstein discovered relativity is a convenient simplification. It satisfies our ancient predilection for stories that are easy to comprehend and involve superhuman heroes. But Edison’s or Einstein’s discoveries would be inconceivable without the prior knowledge, without the intellectual and social network that stimulated their thinking, and without the social mechanisms that recognized and spread their innovations. To say that the theory of relativity was created by Einstein is like saying that it is the spark that is responsible for the fire. The spark is necessary, but without air and tinder there would be no flame.

This book is not about the neat things children often say, or the creativity

all of us share just because we have a mind and we can think. It does not deal with great ideas for clinching business deals, new ways for baking stuffed artichokes, or original ways of decorating the living room for a party. These are examples of creativity with a small c, which is an important ingredient of everyday life, one that we definitely should try to enhance. But to do so well it is necessary first to understand Creativity—and that is what this book tries to accomplish.

ATTENTION AND CREATIVITY

Creativity, at least as I deal with it in this book, is a process by which a symbolic domain in the culture is changed. New songs, new ideas, new machines are what creativity is about. But because these changes do not happen automatically as in biological evolution, it is necessary to consider the price we must pay for creativity to occur. It takes effort to change traditions. For example, memes must be learned before they can be changed: A musician must learn the musical tradition, the notation system, the way instruments are played before she can think of writing a new song; before an inventor can improve on airplane design he has to learn physics, aerodynamics, and why birds don’t fall out of the sky.

If we want to learn anything, we must pay attention to the information to be learned. And attention is a limited resource: There is just so much information we can process at any given time. Exactly how much we don’t know, but it is clear that, for instance, we cannot learn physics and music at the same time. Nor can we learn well while we do the other things that need to be done and require attention, like taking a shower, dressing, cooking breakfast, driving a car, talking to our spouse, and so forth. The point is, a great deal of our limited supply of attention is committed to the tasks of surviving from one day to the next. Over an entire lifetime, the amount of attention left over for learning a symbolic domain—such as music or physics —is a fraction of this already small amount.

Some important consequences follow logically from these simple premises. To achieve creativity in an existing domain, there must be surplus attention available. This is why such centers of creativity as Greece in the

fifth century B.C., Florence in the fifteenth century, and Paris in the nineteenth century tended to be places where wealth allowed individuals to learn and to experiment above and beyond what was necessary for survival. It also seems true that centers of creativity tend to be at the intersection of different cultures, where beliefs, lifestyles, and knowledge mingle and allow individuals to see new combinations of ideas with greater ease. In cultures that are uniform and rigid, it takes a greater investment of attention to achieve new ways of thinking. In other words, creativity is more likely in places where new ideas require less effort to be perceived.

As cultures evolve, it becomes increasingly difficult to master more than one domain of knowledge. Nobody knows who the last Renaissance man really was, but sometime after Leonardo da Vinci it became impossible to learn enough about all of the arts and the sciences to be an expert in more than a small fraction of them. Domains have split into subdomains, and a mathematician who has mastered algebra may not know much about number theory, combinatorix, topology—and vice versa. Whereas in the past an artist typically painted, sculpted, cast gold, and designed buildings, now all of these special skills tend to be acquired by different people.

Therefore, it follows that as culture evolves, specialized knowledge will be favored over generalized knowledge. To see why this must be so, let us assume that there are three persons, one who studies physics, one who studies music, and one who studies both. Other things being equal, the person who studies both music and physics will have to split his or her attention between two symbolic domains, while the other two can focus theirs exclusively on a single domain. Consequently, the two specialized individuals can learn their domains in greater depth, and their expertise will be preferred over that of the generalist. With time, specialists are bound to take over leadership and control of the various institutions of culture.

Of course, this trend toward specialization is not necessarily a good thing. It can easily lead to a cultural fragmentation such as described in the biblical story of the building of the Tower of Babel. Also, as the rest of this book amply demonstrates, creativity generally involves crossing the boundaries of domains, so that, for instance, a chemist who adopts quantum mechanics from physics and applies it to molecular bonds can make a more substantive

contribution to chemistry than one who stays exclusively within the bounds of chemistry. Yet at the same time it is important to recognize that given how little attention we have to work with, and given the increasing amounts of information that are constantly being added to domains, specialization seems inevitable. This trend might be reversible, but only if we make a conscious effort to find an alternative; left to itself, it is bound to continue.

Another consequence of limited attention is that creative individuals are often considered odd—or even arrogant, selfish, and ruthless. It is important to keep in mind that these are not traits of creative people, but traits that the rest of us attribute to them on the basis of our perceptions. When we meet a person who focuses all of his attention on physics or music and ignores us and forgets our names, we call that person “arrogant” even though he may be extremely humble and friendly if he could only spare attention from his pursuit. If that person is so taken with his domain that he fails to take our wishes into account we call him “insensitive” or “selfish” even though such attitudes are far from his mind. Similarly, if he pursues his work regardless of other people’s plans, we call him “ruthless.” Yet it is practically impossible to learn a domain deeply enough to make a change in it without dedicating all of one’s attention to it and thereby appearing to be arrogant, selfish, and ruthless to those who believe they have a right to the creative person’s attention.

In fact, creative people are neither single-minded, specialized, nor selfish. Indeed, they seem to be the opposite: They love to make connections with adjacent areas of knowledge. They tend to be—in principle—caring and sensitive. Yet the demands of their role inevitably push them toward specialization and selfishness. Of the many paradoxes of creativity, this is perhaps the most difficult to avoid.

WHAT’S THE GOOD OF STUDYING CREATIVITY?

There are two main reasons why looking closely at the lives of creative individuals and the contexts of their accomplishments is useful. The first is the most obvious one: The results of creativity enrich the culture and so they indirectly improve the quality of all our lives. But we may also learn from this knowledge how to make our own lives directly more interesting and

productive. In the last chapter of this volume I summarize what this study suggests for enriching anyone’s everyday existence.

Some people argue that studying creativity is an elite distraction from the more pressing problems confronting us. We should focus all our energies on combating overpopulation, poverty, or mental retardation instead. A concern for creativity is an unnecessary luxury, according to this argument. But this position is somewhat shortsighted. First of all, workable new solutions to poverty or overpopulation will not appear magically by themselves. Problems are solved only when we devote a great deal of attention to them and in a creative way. Second, to have a good life, it is not enough to remove what is wrong from it. We also need a positive goal, otherwise why keep going? Creativity is one answer to that question: It provides one of the most exciting models for living. Psychologists have learned much about how healthy human beings think and feel from studying pathological cases. Brain- damaged patients, neurotics, and delinquents have provided contrasts against which normal functioning may better be understood. But we have learned little from the other end of the continuum, from people who are extraordinary in some positive sense. Yet if we wish to find out what might be missing from our lives, it makes sense to study lives that are rich and fulfilling. This is one of the main reasons for writing the book: to understand better a way of being that is more satisfying than most lives typically are.

Each of us is born with two contradictory sets of instructions: a conservative tendency, made up of instincts for self-preservation, self- aggrandizement, and saving energy, and an expansive tendency made up of instincts for exploring, for enjoying novelty and risk—the curiosity that leads to creativity belongs to this set. We need both of these programs. But whereas the first tendency requires little encouragement or support from outside to motivate behavior, the second can wilt if it is not cultivated. If too few opportunities for curiosity are available, if too many obstacles are placed in the way of risk and exploration, the motivation to engage in creative behavior is easily extinguished.

You would think that given its importance, creativity would have a high priority among our concerns. And in fact there is a lot of lip service paid to it. But if we look at the reality, we see a different picture. Basic scientific

research is minimized in favor of immediate practical applications. The arts are increasingly seen as dispensable luxuries that must prove their worth in the impersonal mass market. In one company after another, as downsizing continues, one hears CEOs report that this is not an age for innovators but for bookkeepers, not a climate for building and risking but for cutting expenses. Yet as economic competition heats up around the globe, exactly the opposite strategy is needed.

And what holds true for the sciences, the arts, and for the economy also applies to education. When school budgets tighten and test scores wobble, more and more schools opt for dispensing with frills—usually with the arts and extracurricular activities—so as to focus instead on the so-called basics. This would not be bad if the “three Rs” were taught in ways that encouraged originality and creative thinking; unfortunately, they rarely are. Students generally find the basic academic subjects threatening or dull; their chance of using their minds in creative ways comes from working on the student paper, the drama club, or the orchestra. So if the next generation is to face the future with zest and self-confidence, we must educate them to be original as well as competent.

HOW THE STUDY WAS CONDUCTED

Between 1990 and 1995 I and my students at the University of Chicago videotaped interviews with a group of ninety-one exceptional individuals. The in-depth analysis of these interviews helps illustrate what creative people are like, how the creative process works, and what conditions encourage or hinder the generation of original ideas.

There were three main conditions for selecting respondents: The person had to have made a difference to a major domain of culture—one of the sciences, the arts, business, government, or human well-being in general; he or she had to be still actively involved in that domain (or a different one); and he or she had to be at least sixty years old (in a very few cases, when circumstances warranted, we interviewed respondents who were a bit younger). A list of the respondents interviewed thus far is in appendix A.

The selection process was slow and lengthy. I set out to interview equal numbers of men and women who met our criteria. A further desideratum was to get as wide a representation of cultural backgrounds as possible. With these conditions in mind, I began generating lists of people who met these attributes. In this task I availed myself of the best advice of colleagues and experts in different disciplines. After a while the graduate students involved in the project also suggested names, and other leads were provided by the respondents after each interview, producing what is sometimes called a “snowball sample.”

When the research team agreed that the achievements of a person nominated for the sample warranted inclusion, he or she was sent a letter that explained the study and requested participation. If there was no response within three weeks or so, we repeated the request, and then tried to contact the person by phone. Of the 275 persons initially contacted, a little over a third declined, the same number accepted, and a quarter did not respond or could not be traced. Those who accepted included many individuals whose creativity had been widely recognized; there were fourteen Nobel prizes shared among the respondents (four in physics, four in chemistry, two in literature, two in physiology or medicine, and one each in peace and in economics). Most of the others’ accomplishments were of the same order, even if they were not as widely recognized.

A few declined for health reasons, many more because they could not spare the time. The secretary to novelist Saul Bellow wrote: “Mr. Bellow informed me that he remains creative in the second half of life, at least in part, because he does not allow himself to be the object of other people’s ‘studies.’ In any event, he’s gone for the summer.” The photographer Richard Avedon just scrawled the answer “Sorry—too little time left!” The secretary of composer George Ligeti had this to say:

He is creative and, because of this, totally overworked. Therefore, the very reason you wish to study his creative process is also the reason why he (unfortunately) does not have the time to help you in this study. He would also like to add that he cannot answer your letter personally because he is trying desperately to finish a Violin Concerto which will be premiered in the Fall. He hopes very much you will understand.

Mr. Ligeti would like to add that he finds your project extremely interesting and would be very curious to read the results.

Occasionally the refusal was due to the belief that studying creativity is a waste of time. Poet and novelist Czeslaw Milosz wrote back: “I am skeptical as to the investigation of creativity and I do not feel inclined to submit myself to interviews on that subject. I guess I suspect some methodological errors at the basis of all discussions about ‘creativity.’” The novelist Norman Mailer replied: “I’m sorry but I never agree to be interviewed on the process of work. Heisenberg’s principle of uncertainty applies.” Peter Drucker, the management expert and professor of Oriental art, excused himself in these terms:

I am greatly honored and flattered by your kind letter of February 14th—for I have admired you and your work for many years, and I have learned much from it. But, my dear Professor Csikszentmihalyi, I am afraid I have to disappoint you. I could not possibly answer your questions. I am told I am creative—I don’t know what that means…. I just keep on plodding….

…I hope you will not think me presumptuous or rude if I say that one of the secrets of productivity (in which I believe whereas I do not believe in creativity) is to have a VERY BIG waste paper basket to take care of ALL invitations such as yours—productivity in my experience consists of NOT doing anything that helps the work of other people but to spend all one’s time on the work the Good Lord has fitted one to do, and to do well.

The rate of acceptance varied among disciplines. More than half of the natural scientists, no matter how old or busy they were, agreed to participate. Artists, writers, and musicians, on the other hand, tended to ignore our letters or declined—less than a third of those approached accepted. It would be interesting to find out the causes of this differential attrition.

The same percentage of women and men accepted, but since in certain domains well-known creative women are underrepresented, we were unable

to achieve the fifty-fifty gender ratio we were hoping for. Instead, the split is about seventy-thirty in favor of men.

Usually in psychological research, you must make sure that the individuals studied are “representative” of the “population” in question—in this case, the population of creative persons. If the sample is not representative, what you find cannot be generalized to the population. But here I don’t even attempt to come up with generalizations that are supposed to hold for all creative persons. What I try to do occasionally is to disprove certain widespread assumptions. The advantage of disproof over proof in science is that whereas a single case can disprove a generalization, even all the cases in the world are not enough for a conclusive positive proof. If I could find just one white raven, that would be enough to disprove the statement: “All ravens are black.” But I can point at millions of black ravens without confirming the statement that all ravens are black. Somewhere there may be a white raven hiding. The same lack of symmetry between what is called falsification and proof holds even for the most sacred laws of physics.

For the purposes of this book, the strategy of disproof is amply sufficient. The information we collected could not prove, for instance, that all creative individuals had a happy childhood, even if all the respondents had said that their childhood had been happy. But even one unhappy child can disprove that hypothesis—just as one happy child could disprove the opposite hypothesis, that creative individuals must have unhappy childhoods. So the relatively small size of the sample, or its lack of representativeness, is no real impediment to deriving solid conclusions from the data.

It is true that in the social sciences statements are usually neither true nor false but only claim the statistical superiority of one hypothesis over another. We would say that there are so many more black ravens than white ravens that chance alone cannot account for it. Therefore, we conclude that “most ravens are black,” and we are glad that we can say this much. In this book I do not avail myself of statistics to test the comparisons that will be reported, for a variety of reasons. First of all, the ability to disprove some deeply held assumptions about creativity seems to me sufficient, and here we are on solid ground. Second, the characteristics of this unique sample violate most assumptions on which statistical tests can be safely conducted. Third, there is

no meaningful “comparison group” against which to test the patterns found in this sample.

With a very few exceptions, the interviews were conducted in the offices or homes of the respondents. The interviews were videotaped and then transcribed verbatim. They generally lasted about two hours, although a few were shorter and some lasted quite a bit longer. But the interviews are only the tip of the iceberg as far as information about this sample is concerned. Most of the respondents have written books and articles; some have written autobiographies or other works that could be inspected. In fact, each of them left such an extensive paper trail that to follow it all the way would take several lifetimes; however, the material is extremely useful to round out our understanding of each person and his or her life.

Our interview schedule had a number of common questions that we tried to ask each respondent (a copy of it is in appendix B). However, we did not necessarily ask the questions in the same order, nor did we always use exactly the same wording; my priority was to keep the interview as close to a natural conversation as possible. Of course, there are advantages and disadvantages to both methods. I felt, however, that it would be insulting, and therefore counterproductive, to force these respondents to answer a mechanically structured set of questions. Because I hoped to get genuine and reflective answers, I let the exchanges develop around the themes I was interested in, instead of forcing them into a mold. The interviews are rich as well as being comprehensive—thanks in large measure also to the excellent cadre of graduate students who helped collect them.

When I started to write the book I was confronted with an embarrassment of riches. Thousands of pages clamored for attention, yet I could not do justice to more than a tiny fraction of the material. The choices were often painful—so many beautiful accounts had to be dropped or greatly compressed. The interviews I quote extensively are not necessarily those from the most famous or even the most creative people but the ones that most clearly address what I thought were important theoretical issues. So the choice is personal. Yet I am confident that I have not distorted the meaning of any of the respondents or the consensus of the group as a whole.

Even though the voice of some respondents is not represented by even a

single quotation, the content of their statements is included in the generalizations that occasionally are presented, in verbal or numerical form. And I hope that either I, my students, or other scholars will eventually tap those parts of this rich material that I was forced to shortchange.

TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE?

Contrary to the popular image of creative persons, the interviews present a picture of creativity and creative individuals that is upbeat and positive. Instead of suspecting these stories of being self-serving fabrications, I accept them at face value—provided they are not contradicted by other facts known about the person or by internal evidence.

Yet many social scientists in the last hundred years have made it their task to expose the hypocrisy, self-delusion, and self-interest underlying human behavior traits that were never questioned scientifically before the end of the nineteenth century. Poets like Dante or Chaucer were of course intimately acquainted with the foibles of human nature. But it was not until Freud explained the possibility of repression, Marx argued the power of false consciousness, and sociobiologists showed how our actions are the outcome of selective pressures that we had systematic insights into why our reports about ourselves may be so deceptive.

Unfortunately, the understanding for which we owe Freud and the rest of those great thinkers an immense intellectual debt has been marred to a certain extent by the indiscriminate application of their ideas to every aspect of behavior. As a result, in the words of the philosopher Hannah Arendt, our discipline runs the risk of degenerating into a “de-bunking enterprise,” based more on ideology than evidence. Even the novice student of human nature learns to distrust appearances—not as a sensible methodological precaution that any good scientist would endorse but as a certainty in the dogma that nothing can be trusted at face value. I can imagine what some sophisticated colleagues would do with the following claim made by one of our respondents: “I have been married for forty-four some years to someone I adore. He is a physicist. We have four children, each of whom has a Ph.D. in science; each of whom has a happy life.”

They would probably smile with refined irony and see in these sentences an attempt on the speaker’s part to deny an unhappy family life. Others would see it as an attempt to impress the audience. Still others may think that this person’s optimistic outburst is simply a narrative device that arose in the context of the interview, not because it is literally true, but because conversations have their own logic and their own truth. Or they would see it as the expression of a bourgeois ideology where academic degrees and comfortable middle-class status are equated with happiness.

But what if there is actual evidence that this woman has been married for forty-four years, that despite her busy schedule as a leading scientist she brought up four children who worked themselves into demanding professional careers, and that she spends most of her free time with her husband at home or traveling? And that her children appear contented with their lives, visit her often, and are in frequent contact with the parents? Should we not relent and admit, however grudgingly, that the meaning of the passage is closer to what the speaker intended than to the alternative meanings I attributed to the imaginary critic?

Let me present a passage from another interview that also illustrates the optimism that is typical of these accounts. This is from the sculptor Nina Holton, married to a well-known (and also creative) scholar.

I like the expression “It makes the spirit sing,” and I use it quite often. Because outside my house on the Cape we have this tall grass and I watch it and I say “It is singing grass, I hear it singing.” I have a need inside me, of a certain joy, you see? An expression of joy. I feel it. I suppose that I am glad to be alive, glad that I have a man whom I love and a life that I enjoy and the things which I work on which sometimes make my spirit sing. And I hope everybody has that feeling inside. I am grateful that I have a spirit inside me which often sings.

I feel that I do things that make a difference to me and give me great satisfaction. And I can always discuss things with my husband, and we find great parallels, you see, of when he has an idea when he works on something and when we come together and discuss our days and what we have been doing. Not always but often. It is a great bond between us. And

also he has been very interested in what I am doing and so in a way he is very much involved in my world. He photographs the things which I do and he is very, very much interested. I can discuss everything with him. It is not like I am working in the dark. I can always come to him and he will give me some advice. I may not always take it, but still there it is. Life feels rich with it. It does.

Again, a cynical reading might lead one to conclude that, well, it must be nice for a two-career couple to have a good time while being creative, but isn’t it common knowledge that to achieve anything new and important, especially in the arts, a person must be poor and suffering and tired of the world? So lives like these either represent only a small minority of the creative population, or they must not be accepted at face value, even if all the evidence suggests their truth.

I am not saying that all creative persons are well-off and happy. Family strain, professional jealousies, and thwarted ambitions were occasionally evident in the interviews. Moreover, it is probable that a selection bias has affected the sample I have collected. Focusing on people beyond sixty years of age eliminated those who may have led a more high-risk lifestyle and thus died early. Some of the individuals we asked to participate and who did not respond or refused may have been less happy and less adjusted than those who accepted. Two or three of those who initially agreed to be interviewed became so infirm and despondent that after the appointment was made they asked to be excused. Thus the individuals who ended up as part of the sample are skewed in the direction of positive health, physical and psychological.

But after several years of intensive listening and reading, I have come to the conclusion that the reigning stereotype of the tortured genius is to a large extent a myth created by Romantic ideology and supported by evidence from isolated and—one hopes—atypical historical periods. In other words, if Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy showed more than their share of pathology it was due less to the requirements of their creative work than to the personal sufferings caused by the unhealthful conditions of a Russian society nearing collapse. If so many American poets and playwrights committed suicide or ended up addicted to drugs and alcohol, it was not their creativity that did it but an artistic scene that promised much, gave few rewards, and left nine out

of ten artists neglected if not ignored.

Because of these considerations, I find it more realistic, if more difficult, to approach these interviews with an open skepticism, keeping in mind the bias in favor of happiness these people display and what we have learned about the human tendency to disguise and embellish reality. Yet at the same time, I am ready to accept a positive scenario when it appears to be warranted. It seems to me a risk worth running because I agree with these sentiments of the Canadian novelist Robertson Davies:

Pessimism is a very easy way out when you’re considering what life really is, because pessimism is a short view of life. If you look at what is happening around us today and what has happened just since you were born, you can’t help but feel that life is a terrible complexity of problems and illnesses of one sort or another. But if you look back a few thousand years, you realize that we have advanced fantastically from the day when the first amoeba crawled out of the slime and made its adventure on land. If you take a long view, I do not see how you can be pessimistic about the future of man or the future of the world. You can take a short view and think that everything is a mess, that life is a cheat and a deceit, and of course you feel miserable. And I become very much amused by some of my colleagues, particularly in the study of literature, who say the pessimistic, the tragic view, is the only true key to life—which I think is just self-indulgent nonsense. It’s very much easier to be tragic than it is to be comic. I have known people to embrace the tragic view of life, and it is a cop-out. They simply feel rotten about everything, and that is terribly easy. And if you try to see things a little more evenly, it’s surprising what complexities of comedy and ambiguity and irony appear in it. And that, I think, is what is vital to a novelist. Just writing tragic novels is rather easy.

Davies’s critique applies more broadly, and not just to the literary field. It is equally easy to explain creativity in a way that only exposes, debunks, reduces, deconstructs, and rationalizes what creative persons do, while ignoring the genuine joy and fulfillment their life contains. But to do so blinds us to the most important message we can learn from creative people:

how to find purpose and enjoyment in the chaos of existence.

I did not, however, write this book to prove a point. The findings I discuss emerged from the data. They are not my recycled preconceptions, nor those of anyone else. It is the extraordinary people whose voices fill these pages who tell the story of the unfolding of creativity. Its plot cannot be reduced to glib definitions or superficial techniques. But in its richness and complexity, it is a story that reveals the deep potentials of the human spirit. Having introduced some of the themes that the following chapters will develop, it is now time to get on with the show.

PART 1

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

TWO

WHERE IS CREATIVITY?

The answer is obvious: Creativity is some sort of mental activity, an insight that occurs inside the heads of some special people. But this short assumption is misleading. If by creativity we mean an idea or action that is new and valuable, then we cannot simply accept a person’s own account as the criterion for its existence. There is no way to know whether a thought is new except with reference to some standards, and there is no way to tell whether it is valuable until it passes social evaluation. Therefore, creativity does not happen inside people’s heads, but in the interaction between a person’s thoughts and a sociocultural context. It is a systemic rather than an individual phenomenon. Some examples will illustrate what I mean.

When I was a graduate student I worked part-time for a few years as an editor for a Chicago publishing house. At least once a week we would get in the mail a manuscript from an unknown author who claimed to have made a great discovery of one sort or another. Perhaps it was an eight-hundred-page tome that described in minute detail how a textual analysis of the Odyssey showed that, contrary to received opinion, Ulysses did not sail around the Mediterranean. Instead, according to the author’s calculations, if one paid attention to the landmarks, the distances traveled, and the pattern of the stars mentioned by Homer, it was obvious that Ulysses actually traveled around the coast of Florida.

Or it might be a textbook for building flying saucers, with extremely precise blueprints—which on closer inspection turned out to be copied from a service manual for a household appliance. What made reading these manuscripts depressing was the fact that their authors actually believed they had found something new and important and that their creative efforts went unrecognized only because of a conspiracy on the part of philistines like myself and the editors of all the other publishing houses.

Some years ago the scientific world was abuzz with the news that two chemists had achieved cold fusion in the laboratory. If true, this meant that something very similar to the perpetual motion machine—one of the oldest dreams of mankind—was about to be realized. After a few frenetic months during which laboratories around the world attempted to replicate the initial claims—some with apparent success, but most without—it became increasingly clear that the experiments on which the claims were based had been flawed. So the researchers who at first were hailed as the greatest creative scientists of the century became somewhat of an embarrassment to the scholarly establishment. Yet, as far as we know, they firmly believed that they were right and that their reputations had been ruined by jealous colleagues.

Jacob Rabinow, himself an inventor but also an evaluator of inventions for the National Bureau of Standards in Washington, has many similar stories to tell about people who think they have invented perpetual motion machines:

I’ve met many of these inventors who invent something that cannot work, that is theoretically impossible. But they spent three years developing it, running a motor without electricity, with magnets. You explain to them it won’t work. It violates the second law of thermodynamics. And they say, “Don’t give me your goddamn Washington laws.”

Who is right: the individual who believes in his or her own creativity, or the social milieu that denies it? If we take sides with the individual, then creativity becomes a subjective phenomenon. All it takes to be creative, then, is an inner assurance that what I think or do is new and valuable. There is nothing wrong with defining creativity this way, as long as we realize that

this is not at all what the term originally was supposed to mean—namely, to bring into existence something genuinely new that is valued enough to be added to the culture. On the other hand, if we decide that social confirmation is necessary for something to be called creative, the definition must encompass more than the individual. What counts then is whether the inner certitude is validated by the appropriate experts—such as the editors of the publishing house in the case of far-out manuscripts, or other scientists in the case of cold fusion. And it isn’t possible to take a middle ground and say that sometimes the inner conviction is enough, while in other cases we need external confirmation. Such a compromise leaves a huge loophole, and trying to agree on whether something is creative or not becomes impossible.

The problem is that the term “creativity” as commonly used covers too much ground. It refers to very different entities, thus causing a great deal of confusion. To clarify the issues, I distinguish at least three different phenomena that can legitimately be called by that name.

The first usage, widespread in ordinary conversation, refers to persons who express unusual thoughts, who are interesting and stimulating—in short, to people who appear to be unusually bright. A brilliant conversationalist, a person with varied interests and a quick mind, may be called creative in this sense. Unless they also contribute something of permanent significance, I refer to people of this sort as brilliant rather than creative—and by and large I don’t say much about them in this book.

The second way the term can be used is to refer to people who experience the world in novel and original ways. These are individuals whose perceptions are fresh, whose judgments are insightful, who may make important discoveries that only they know about. I refer to such people as personally creative, and try to deal with them as much as possible (especially in chapter 14, which is devoted to this topic). But given the subjective nature of this form of creativity, it is difficult to deal with it no matter how important it is for those who experience it.

The final use of the term designates individuals who, like Leonardo, Edison, Picasso, or Einstein, have changed our culture in some important respect. They are the creative ones without qualifications. Because their achievements are by definition public, it is easier to write about them, and the

persons included in my study belong to this group.

The difference among these three meanings is not just a matter of degree. The last kind of creativity is not simply a more developed form of the first two. These are actually different ways of being creative, each to a large measure unrelated to the others. It happens very often, for example, that some persons brimming with brilliance, whom everyone thinks of as being exceptionally creative, never leave any accomplishment, any trace of their existence—except, perhaps, in the memories of those who have known them. Whereas some of the people who have had the greatest impact on history did not show any originality or brilliance in their behavior, except for the accomplishments they left behind.

For example, Leonardo da Vinci, certainly one of the most creative persons in the third sense of the term, was apparently reclusive, and almost compulsive in his behavior. If you had met him at a cocktail party, you would have thought that he was a tiresome bore and would have left him standing in a corner as soon as possible. Neither Isaac Newton nor Thomas Edison would have been considered assets at a party either, and outside of their scientific concerns they appeared colorless and driven. The biographers of outstanding creators struggle valiantly to make their subjects interesting and brilliant, yet more often than not their efforts are in vain. The accomplishments of a Michelangelo, a Beethoven, a Picasso, or an Einstein are awesome in their respective fields—but their private lives, their everyday ideas and actions, would seldom warrant another thought were it not that their specialized accomplishments made everything they said or did of interest.

By the definition I am using here, one of the most creative persons in this study is John Bardeen. He is the first person to have been awarded the Nobel prize in physics twice. The first time it was for developing the transistor; the second for his work on superconductivity. Few persons have ranged as widely and deeply in the realm of solid state physics, or come out with such important insights. But talking with Bardeen on any issue besides his work was not easy; his mind followed abstract paths while he spoke slowly, haltingly, and without much depth or interest about “real life” topics.

It is perfectly possible to make a creative contribution without being brilliant or personally creative, just as it is possible—even likely—that

someone personally creative will never contribute a thing to the culture. All three kinds of creativity enrich life by making it more interesting and fulfilling. But in this context I focus primarily on the third use of the term, and explore what is involved in the kind of creativity that leaves a trace in the cultural matrix.

To make things more complicated, consider two more terms that are sometimes used interchangeably with creativity. The first is talent. Talent differs from creativity in that it focuses on an innate ability to do something very well. We might say that Michael Jordan is a talented athlete, or that Mozart was a talented pianist, without implying that either was creative for that reason. In our sample, some individuals were talented in mathematics or in music, but the majority achieved creative results without any exceptional talent being evident. Of course, talent is a relative term, so it might be argued that in comparison to “average” individuals the creative ones are talented.

The other term that is often used as a synonym for “creative” is genius. Again, there is an overlap. Perhaps we should think of a genius as a person who is both brilliant and creative at the same time. But certainly a person can change the culture in significant ways without being a genius. Although several of the people in our sample have been called a genius by the media, they—and the majority of creative individuals we interviewed—reject this designation.

THE SYSTEMS MODEL

We have seen that creativity with a capital C, the kind that changes some aspect of the culture, is never only in the mind of a person. That would by definition not be a case of cultural creativity. To have any effect, the idea must be couched in terms that are understandable to others, it must pass muster with the experts in the field, and finally it must be included in the cultural domain to which it belongs. So the first question I ask of creativity is not what is it but where is it?

The answer that makes most sense is that creativity can be observed only in the interrelations of a system made up of three main parts. The first of

these is the domain, which consists of a set of symbolic rules and procedures. Mathematics is a domain, or at a finer resolution algebra and number theory can be seen as domains. Domains are in turn nested in what we usually call culture, or the symbolic knowledge shared by a particular society, or by humanity as a whole.

The second component of creativity is the field, which includes all the individuals who act as gatekeepers to the domain. It is their job to decide whether a new idea or product should be included in the domain. In the visual arts the field consists of art teachers, curators of museums, collectors of art, critics, and administrators of foundations and government agencies that deal with culture. It is this field that selects what new works of art deserve to be recognized, preserved, and remembered.

Finally, the third component of the creative system is the individual person. Creativity occurs when a person, using the symbols of a given domain such as music, engineering, business, or mathematics, has a new idea or sees a new pattern, and when this novelty is selected by the appropriate field for inclusion into the relevant domain. The next generation will encounter that novelty as part of the domain they are exposed to, and if they are creative, they in turn will change it further. Occasionally creativity involves the establishment of a new domain: It could be argued that Galileo started experimental physics and that Freud carved psychoanalysis out of the existing domain of neuropathology. But if Galileo and Freud had not been able to enlist followers who came together in distinct fields to further their respective domains, their ideas would have had much less of an impact, or none at all.

So the definition that follows from this perspective is: Creativity is any act, idea, or product that changes an existing domain, or that transforms an existing domain into a new one. And the definition of a creative person is: someone whose thoughts or actions change a domain, or establish a new domain. It is important to remember, however, that a domain cannot be changed without the explicit or implicit consent of a field responsible for it.

Several consequences follow from this way of looking at things. For instance, we don’t need to assume that the creative person is necessarily different from anyone else. In other words, a personal trait of “creativity” is

not what determines whether a person will be creative. What counts is whether the novelty he or she produces is accepted for inclusion in the domain. This may be the result of chance, perseverance, or being at the right place at the right time. Because creativity is jointly constituted by the interaction among domain, field, and person, the trait of personal creativity may help generate the novelty that will change a domain, but it is neither a sufficient nor a necessary condition for it.

A person cannot be creative in a domain to which he or she is not exposed. No matter how enormous mathematical gifts a child may have, he or she will not be able to contribute to mathematics without learning its rules. But even if the rules are learned, creativity cannot be manifested in the absence of a field that recognizes and legitimizes the novel contributions. A child might possibly learn mathematics on his or her own by finding the right books and the right mentors, but cannot make a difference in the domain unless recognized by teachers and journal editors who will witness to the appropriateness of the contribution.

It also follows that creativity can be manifested only in existing domains and fields. For instance, it is very difficult to say “This woman is very creative at nurturing” or “This woman is very creative in her wisdom,” because nurturance and wisdom, although extremely important for human survival, are loosely organized domains with few generally accepted rules and priorities, and they lack a field of experts who can determine the legitimacy of claims. So we are in the paradoxical situation that novelty is more obvious in domains that are often relatively trivial but easy to measure; whereas in domains that are more essential novelty is very difficult to determine. There can be agreement on whether a new computer game, rock song, or economic formula is actually novel, and therefore creative, less easy to agree on the novelty of an act of compassion or of an insight into human nature.

The model also allows for the often mysterious fluctuations in the attribution of creativity over time. For example, the reputation of Raphael as a painter has waxed and waned several times since his heyday at the court of Pope Julius II. Gregor Mendel did not become famous as the creator of experimental genetics until half a century after his death. Johann Sebastian

Bach’s music was dismissed as old-fashioned for several generations. The conventional explanation is that Raphael, Mendel, and Bach were always creative, only their reputation changed with the vagaries of social recognition. But the systems model recognizes the fact that creativity cannot be separated from its recognition. Mendel was not creative during his years of relative obscurity because his experimental findings were not that important until a group of British geneticists, at the end of the nineteenth century, recognized their implications for evolution.

The creativity of Raphael fluctuates as art historical knowledge, art critical theories, and the aesthetic sensitivity of the age change. According to the systems model, it makes perfect sense to say that Raphael was creative in the sixteenth and in the nineteenth centuries but not in between or afterward. Raphael is creative when the community is moved by his work, and discovers new possibilities in his paintings. But when his paintings seem mannered and routine to those who know art, Raphael can only be called a great draftsman, a subtle colorist—perhaps even a personally creative individual—but not creative with a capital C. If creativity is more than personal insight and is cocreated by domains, fields, and persons, then creativity can be constructed, deconstructed, and reconstructed several times over the course of history. Here is one of our respondents, the poet Anthony Hecht, commenting on this issue:

Literary reputations are constantly shifting. Sometimes in trifling, frivolous ways. There was a former colleague of mine who, at a recent meeting of the English Department, said that she thought it was now no longer important to teach Shakespeare because among other things he had a very feeble grasp of women. Now that seems to me as trifling an observation as can be made, but it does mean that, if you take this seriously, nobody’s place in the whole canon is very secure, that it’s constantly changing. And this is both good and bad. John Donne’s position was in the nineteenth century of no consequence at all. The Oxford Book of English Verse had only one poem of his. And now, of course, he was resurrected by Herbert Grierson and T. S. Eliot and he’s one of the great figures of seventeenth-century poetry. But he wasn’t always. This is true of music, too. Bach was eclipsed for two hundred years and rediscovered by Mendelssohn. This means that we are

constantly reassessing the past. And that’s a good, valuable, and indeed necessary thing to do.

This way of looking at things might seem insane to some. The usual way to think about this issue is that someone like van Gogh was a great creative genius, but his contemporaries did not recognize this. Fortunately, now we have discovered what a great painter he was after all, so his creativity has been vindicated. Few flinch at the presumption implicit in such a view. What we are saying is that we know what great art is so much better than van Gogh’s contemporaries did—those bourgeois philistines. What—besides unconscious conceit—warrants this belief? A more objective description of van Gogh’s contribution is that his creativity came into being when a sufficient number of art experts felt that his paintings had something important to contribute to the domain of art. Without such a response, van Gogh would have remained what he was, a disturbed man who painted strange canvases.

Perhaps the most important implication of the systems model is that the level of creativity in a given place at a given time does not depend only on the amount of individual creativity. It depends just as much on how well suited the respective domains and fields are to the recognition and diffusion of novel ideas. This can make a great deal of practical difference to efforts for enhancing creativity. Today many American corporations spend a great deal of money and time trying to increase the originality of their employees, hoping thereby to get a competitive edge in the marketplace. But such programs make no difference unless management also learns to recognize the valuable ideas among the many novel ones, and then finds ways of implementing them.

For instance, Robert Galvin at Motorola is justly concerned about the fact that in order to survive among the hungry Pacific Rim electronic manufacturers, his company must make creativity an intentional part of its productive process. He is also right in perceiving that to do so he first has to encourage the thousands of engineers working for the company to generate as many novel ideas as possible. So various forms of brainstorming are instituted, where employees free-associate without fear of being ridiculously impractical. But the next steps are less clear. How does the field (in this case,

management) choose among the multitude of new ideas the ones worth pursuing? And how can the chosen ideas be included in the domain (in this case, the production schedule of Motorola)? Because we are used to thinking that creativity begins and ends with the person, it is easy to miss the fact that the greatest spur to it may come from changes outside the individual.

CREATIVITY IN THE RENAISSANCE

A good example is the sudden spurt in artistic creativity that took place in Florence between 1400 and 1425. These were the golden years of the Renaissance, and it is generally agreed that some of the most influential new works of art in Europe were created during that quarter century. Any list of the masterpieces would include the dome of the cathedral built by Brunelleschi, the “Gates of Paradise” crafted for the baptistery by Ghiberti, Donatello’s sculptures for the chapel of Orsanmichele, the fresco cycle by Masaccio in the Brancacci Chapel, and Gentile da Fabriano’s painting of the Adoration of the Magi in the Church of the Trinity.

How can this flowering of great art be explained? If creativity is something entirely within a person, we would have to argue that for some reason an unusually large number of creative artists were born in Florence in the last decades of the fourteenth century. Perhaps some freak genetic mutation occurred, or a drastic change in the education of Florentine children suddenly caused them to become more creative. But an explanation involving the domain and the field is much more sensible.

As far as the domain is concerned, the Renaissance was made possible in part by the rediscovery of ancient Roman methods of building and sculpting that had been lost for centuries during the so-called Dark Ages. In Rome and elsewhere, by the end of the thirteen hundreds, eager scholars were excavating classical ruins, copying down and analyzing the styles and techniques of the ancients. This slow preparatory work bore fruit at the turn of the fifteenth century, opening up long-forgotten knowledge to the artisans and craftsmen of the time.

The cathedral of Florence, Santa Maria Novella, had been left open to the

skies for eighty years because no one could find a way to build a dome over its huge apse. There was no known method for preventing the walls from collapsing inward once the curvature of the dome had advanced beyond a certain height. Every year eager young artists and established builders submitted plans to the Opera del Duomo, the board that supervised the building of the cathedral, but their plans were found unpersuasive. The Opera was made up of the political and business leaders of the city, and their personal reputations were at stake in this choice. For eighty years they did not feel that any proposed solution for the completion of the dome was worthy of the city, and of themselves.

But eventually humanist scholars became interested in the Pantheon of Rome, measured its enormous dome, and analyzed how it had been constructed. The Pantheon had been rebuilt by the emperor Hadrian in the second century. The diameter of its 71-foot-high dome was 142 feet. Nothing on that scale had been built for well over a thousand years, and the methods that allowed the Romans to build such a structure that would stand up and not collapse had been long forgotten in the dark centuries of barbarian invasions. But now that peace and commerce were reviving the Italian cities, the knowledge was slowly being pieced back together.

Brunelleschi, who in 1401 appears to have visited Rome to study its antiquities, understood the importance of the studies of the Pantheon. His idea for how to complete the dome in Florence was based on the framework of internal stone arches that would help contain the thrust, and the herringbone brickwork between them. But his design was not just a restatement of the Roman model—it was influenced also by all the architecture of the intervening centuries, especially the Gothic models. When he presented his plan to the Opera, they recognized it as a feasible and beautiful solution. And after the dome was built, it became a liberating new form that inspired hundreds of builders who came after him, including Michelangelo, who based on it his design for the cupola of St. Peter’s in Rome.

But no matter how influential the rediscovery of classical art forms, the Florentine Renaissance cannot be explained only in terms of the sudden availability of information. Otherwise, the same flowering of new artistic

forms would have taken place in all the other cities exposed to the ancient models. And though this actually did happen to a certain extent, no other place matched Florence in the intensity and depth of artistic achievement. Why was this so?

The explanation is that the field of art became particularly favorable to the creation of new works at just about the same time as the rediscovery of the ancient domains of art. Florence had become one of the richest cities in Europe first through trading, then through the manufacture of wool and other textiles, and finally through the financial expertise of its rich merchants. By the end of the fourteenth century there were a dozen major bankers in the city —the Medici being only one of the minor ones—who were getting substantial interest every year from the various foreign kings and potentates to whom they had lent money.

But while the coffers of the bankers were getting fuller, the city itself was troubled. Men without property were ruthlessly exploited, and political tensions fueled by economic inequality threatened at any moment to explode into open conflict. The struggle between pope and emperor, which divided the entire continent, was reproduced inside the city in the struggle between the Guelf and Ghibelline factions. To make matters worse, Florence was surrounded by Siena, Pisa, and Arezzo, cities jealous of its wealth and ambitions and always ready to snatch away whatever they could of Florentine trade and territory.

It was in this atmosphere of wealth and uncertainty that the urban leaders decided to invest in making Florence the most beautiful city in Christendom —in their words, “a new Athens.” By building awesome churches, impressive bridges, and splendid palaces, and by commissioning great frescoes and majestic statues, they must have felt that they were weaving a protective spell around their homes and businesses. And in a way, they were not wrong: When more than five hundred years later Hitler ordered the retreating German troops to blow up the bridges on the Arno and level the city around them, the field commander refused to obey on the grounds that too much beauty would be erased from the world—and the city was saved.

The important thing to realize is that when the Florentine bankers, churchmen, and heads of great guilds decided to make their city

intimidatingly beautiful, they did not just throw money at artists and wait to see what happened. They became intensely involved in the process of encouraging, evaluating, and selecting the works they wanted to see completed. It was because the leading citizens, as well as the common people, were so seriously concerned with the outcome of their work that the artists were pushed to perform beyond their previous limits. Without the constant encouragement and scrutiny of the members of the Opera, the dome over the cathedral would probably not have been as beautiful as it eventually turned out to be.

Another illustration of how the field of art operated in Florence at this time concerns the building of the north and especially the east door of the baptistery, one of the uncontested masterpieces of the period, which Michelangelo declared was worthy of being the “Gate of Paradise” when he saw its heart-wrenching beauty. In this case also a special commission had been formed to supervise the building of the doors for this public edifice. The board was composed of eminent individuals, mostly the leaders of the guild of wool weavers that was financing the project. The board decided that each door should be of bronze and have ten panels illustrating Old Testament themes. Then they wrote to some of the most eminent philosophers, writers, and churchmen in Europe to request their opinion of which scenes from the Bible should be included in the panels, and how they should be represented. After the answers came in, they drew up a list of specifications for the doors and in 1401 announced a competition for their design.

From the dozens of drawings submitted the board chose five finalists— Brunelleschi and Ghiberti among them. The finalists on the short list were given a year to finish a bronze mock-up of one of the door panels. The subject was to be “The Sacrifice of Isaac” and had to include at least one angel and one sheep in addition to Abraham and his son. During that year all five finalists were paid handsomely by the board for time and materials. In 1402 the jury reconvened to consider the new entries and selected Ghiberti’s panel, which showed technical excellence as well as a wonderfully natural yet classical composition.

Lorenzo Ghiberti was twenty-one years old at the time. He spent the next twenty years finishing the north door and then another twenty-seven finishing

the famed east door. He was involved with perfecting the baptistery doors from 1402 to 1452, a span of a half century. Of course, in the meantime he finished many more commissions and sculpted statues for the Medicis, the Pazzis, the guild of merchant bankers, and other notables, but his reputation rests on the Gates of Paradise, which changed the Western world’s conception of decorative art.

If Brunelleschi had been influenced by Roman architecture, Ghiberti studied and tried to emulate Roman sculpture. He had to relearn the technique for casting large bronze shapes, and he studied the classic profiles carved on Roman tombs on which he modeled the expressions of the characters he made emerge from the door panels. And again, he combined the rediscovered classics with the more recent Gothic sculpture produced in Siena. However, one could claim without too much risk of exaggeration that what made the Gates of Paradise so beautiful was the care, concern, and support of the entire community, represented by the field of judges who supervised their construction. If Ghiberti and his fellows were driven to surpass themselves, it was by the intense competition and focused attention their work attracted. Thus the sociologist of art Arnold Hauser rightly assesses this period: “In the art of the early Renaissance…the starting point of production is to be found mostly not in the creative urge, the subjective self-expression and spontaneous inspiration of the artist, but in the task set by the customer.”

Of course, the great works of Florentine art would never have been made just because the domain of classical art had been rediscovered, or because the rulers of the city had decided to make it beautiful. Without individual artists the Renaissance could not have taken place. After all, it was Brunelleschi who built the dome over Santa Maria Novella, and it was Ghiberti who spent his life casting the Gates of Paradise. At the same time, it must be recognized that without previous models and the support of the city, Brunelleschi and Ghiberti could not have done what they did. And that with the favorable conjunction of field and domain, if these two artists had not been born, some others would have stepped in their place and built the dome and the doors. It is because of this inseparable connection that creativity must, in the last analysis, be seen not as something happening within a person but in the relationships within a system.

DOMAINS OF KNOWLEDGE AND ACTION

It seems that every species of living organism, except for us humans, understands the world in terms of more or less built-in responses to certain types of sensations. Plants turn toward the sun. There are amoebas sensitive to magnetic attraction that orient their bodies toward the North pole. Baby indigo buntings learn the patterns of the stars as they look out of their nests and then are able to fly great distances at night without losing their way. Bats respond to sounds, sharks to smell, and birds of prey have incredibly developed vision. Each species experiences and understands its environment in terms of the information its sensory equipment is programmed to process.

The same is true for humans. But in addition to the narrow windows on the world our genes have provided, we have managed to open up new perspectives on reality based on information mediated by symbols. Perfect parallel lines do not exist in nature, but by postulating their existence Euclid and his followers could build a system for representing spatial relations that is much more precise than what the unaided eye and brain can achieve. Different as they are from each other, lyric poetry and magnetic resonance spectroscopy are both ways to make accessible information that otherwise we would never have an inkling about.

Knowledge mediated by symbols is extrasomatic; it is not transmitted through the chemical codes inscribed in our chromosomes but must be intentionally passed on and learned. It is this extrasomatic information that makes up what we call a culture. And the knowledge conveyed by symbols is bundled up in discrete domains—geometry, music, religion, legal systems, and so on. Each domain is made up of its own symbolic elements, its own rules, and generally has its own system of notation. In many ways, each domain describes an isolated little world in which a person can think and act with clarity and concentration.

The existence of domains is perhaps the best evidence of human creativity. The fact that calculus and Gregorian chants exist means that we can experience patterns of order that were not programmed into our genes by biological evolution. By learning the rules of a domain, we immediately step beyond the boundaries of biology and enter the realm of cultural evolution.

Each domain expands the limitations of individuality and enlarges our sensitivity and ability to relate to the world. Each person is surrounded by an almost infinite number of domains that are potentially able to open up new worlds and give new powers to those who learn their rules. Therefore, it is astounding how few of us bother to invest enough mental energy to learn the rules of even one of these domains, and live instead exclusively within the constraints of biological existence.

For most people, domains are primarily ways to make a living. We choose nursing or plumbing, medicine or business administration because of our ability and the chances of getting a well-paying job. But then there are individuals—and the creative ones are usually in this group—who choose certain domains because of a powerful calling to do so. For them the match is so perfect that acting within the rules of the domain is rewarding in itself; they would keep doing what they do even if they were not paid for it, just for the sake of doing the activity.

Despite the multiplicity of domains, there are some common reasons for pursuing them for their own sake. Nuclear physics, microbiology, poetry, and musical composition share few symbols and rules, yet the calling for these different domains is often astonishingly similar. To bring order to experience, to make something that will endure after one’s death, to do something that allows humankind to go beyond its present powers are very common themes.

When asked why he decided to become a poet at the age of seven, György Faludy answered, “Because I was afraid to die.” He explained that creating patterns with words, patterns that because of their truth and beauty had a chance to survive longer than the body of the poet, was an act of defiance and hope that gave meaning and direction to his life for the next seventy-three years. This urge is not so very different from physicist John Bardeen’s description of his work on superconductivity that might lead to a world without friction, the physicist Heinz Maier-Leibnitz’s hope that nuclear energy will provide unlimited power, or the biochemical physicist Manfred Eigen’s attempt to understand how life evolved. Domains are wonderfully different, but the human quest they represent converges on a few themes. In many ways, Max Planck’s obsession with understanding the Absolute underlies most human attempts to transcend the limitations of a body doomed

to die after a short span of years.

There are several ways that domains can help or hinder creativity. Three major dimensions are particularly relevant: the clarity of structure, the centrality within the culture, and accessibility. Say that pharmaceutical companies A and B are competing in the same market. The amount of money they devote to research and development, as well as the creative potential of their researchers, is equal. Now we want to predict whether company A or B will come up with the most effective new drugs, basing our prediction solely on domain characteristics. The questions we would ask are the following: Which company has the more detailed data about pharmaceuticals? Where are the data better organized? Which company puts more emphasis in its culture on research, relative to other areas such as production and marketing? Where does pharmaceutical knowledge earn more respect? Which company disseminates knowledge better among its staff? Where is it easier to test a hypothesis? The company where knowledge is better structured, more central, and more accessible is likely to be the one where—other things still being equal—creative innovations are going to happen.

It has been often remarked that superior ability in some domains—such as mathematics or music—shows itself earlier in life than in other domains— such as painting or philosophy. Similarly, it has been suggested that the most creative performances in some domains are the work of young people, while in other domains older persons have the edge. The most creative lyric verse is believed to be that written by the young, while epics tend to be written by more mature poets. Mathematical genius peaks in the twenties, physics in the thirties, but great philosophical works are usually achieved later in life.

The most likely explanation for these differences lies in the different ways these domains are structured. The symbolic system of mathematics is organized relatively tightly; the internal logic is strict; the system maximizes clarity and lack of redundancy. Therefore, it is easy for a young person to assimilate the rules quickly and jump to the cutting edge of the domain in a few years. For the same structural reasons, when a novelty is proposed—like the long-awaited proof of Fermat’s last theorem presented by a relatively young mathematician in 1993—it is immediately recognized and, if viable, accepted. By contrast, it takes decades for social scientists or philosophers to

master their domains, and if they produce a new idea, it takes the field many years to assess whether it is an improvement worth adding to the knowledge base.

Heinz Maier-Leibnitz tells the story of a small physics seminar he taught in Munich, which was interrupted one day by a graduate student who suggested a new way to represent on the blackboard the behavior of a subatomic particle. The professor agreed that the new formulation was an improvement and praised the student for having thought of it. By the end of the week, Maier-Leibnitz says, he started getting calls from physicists at other German universities, asking in effect, “Is it true that one of your students came up with such and such an idea?” The next week, calls began to come in from American universities on the East Coast. In two weeks, colleagues from Cal Tech, Berkeley, and Stanford were asking the same question.

This story could never have been told about my branch of psychology. If a student stood up in a psychology seminar at any school in the world and uttered the most profound ideas, he or she would not create a ripple beyond the walls of the classroom. Not because psychology students are less intelligent or original than the ones in physics. Nor because my colleagues and I are less alert to our students’ new ideas. But because with the exception of a few highly structured subdomains, psychology is so diffuse a system of thought that it takes years of intense writing for any person to say something that others recognize as new and important. The young student in Maier- Leibnitz’s class was eventually awarded the Nobel Prize in physics, something that could never happen to a psychologist.

Does this mean that a domain that is better structured—where creativity is easier to determine—is in some sense “better” than one that is more diffuse? That it is more important, more advanced, more serious? Not at all. If that were true, then chess, microeconomics, or computer programming, which are very clearly structured domains, would have to be considered more advanced than morality or wisdom.

But it is certainly true that nowadays a quantifiable domain with sharp boundaries and well-defined rules is taken more seriously. In a typical university it is much easier to get funding for such a department. It is also

easier to justify promotion for a teacher in a narrowly defined domain: Ten colleagues will willingly write letters of recommendation stating that professor X should be promoted because she is the world’s authority on the mating habits of the kangaroo rat or on the use of the subjunctive in Dravidic languages. It is much less likely that ten scholars would agree on who is a world authority on personality development. From this it is easy to make the regrettable mistake of inferring that personality development is a scientifically less respectable domain than the one that studies the mating practices of the kangaroo rat.

In the current historical climate, a domain where quantifiable measurement is possible takes precedence over one where it does not. We believe that things that can be measured are real, and we ignore those that we don’t know how to measure. So people take intelligence very seriously, because the mental ability we call by that name can be measured by tests; whereas few bother about how sensitive, altruistic, or helpful someone is, because as yet there is no good way to measure such qualities. Sometimes this bias has profound consequences—for instance, in how we define social progress and achievement. One of futurist Hazel Henderson’s life goals is to convince world governments to start computing less easily measured trends in their Gross Natural Product. As long as the costs of pollution, depredation of natural resources, decline in the quality of life, and various other human costs are left out of the reckoning of the GNP, she claims, entirely distorted pictures of reality result. A country may pride itself on all its new highways while the resulting auto emissions are causing widespread emphysema.

FIELDS OF ACCOMPLISHMENT

If a symbolic domain is necessary for a person to innovate in, a field is necessary to determine whether the innovation is worth making a fuss about. Only a very small percentage of the great number of novelties produced will eventually become part of the culture. For instance, about one hundred thousand new books are published every year in the United States. How many of these will be remembered ten years from now? Similarly, about five hundred thousand people in this country state on their census forms that they are artists. If each of them painted only one picture a year, it would amount to

about fifteen million new paintings per generation. How many of these will end up in museums or in textbooks on art? One in a million, ten in a million, one in ten thousand? One?

George Stigler, the Nobel laureate in economics, made the same point about new ideas produced in his domain, and what he says can be applied to any other field of science:

The profession is too busy to read much. I keep telling my colleagues at the Journal of Political Economy that anytime we get an article that fifteen of our profession, of the seven thousand subscribers, read carefully, that must be truly a major article of the year.

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