TIME ᠰᠡᠳᠬᠦᠯ ᠤᠨ ᠨᠣᠮ ᠤᠨ ᠬᠡᠪ ᠤᠨ 2019 .5. ᠰᠠᠷ᠎ᠠ ᠶᠢᠨ ᠬᠤᠭᠤᠴᠠᠭ᠎ᠠ （ᠠᠩᠭ᠍ᠯᠢ ᠬᠡᠪᠯᠡᠯ） Time Bookazines – May 2019.pdf

THE SCIENCE OF CREATIVITY SPECIAL EDITIONContents 4 Introduction: Striving for the New THE CREATIVE ANIMAL 10 This Is Your Brain on Creativity 18 Learning from Leonardo 28 Under the Hood THE CREATIVE MIND 38 Are Neurotics More Creative? 42 A Fine Madness 48 The Power of Sleep 52 Inside the Creative Space CREATIVITY IN ACTION 60 Seven Secrets to Unleashing Creativity 64 Pushing Your Envelope 70 Does Screen Time Stunt Kids’ Creativity? CREATIVITY AT ANY AGE 78 You’re Never Too Old 82 When Schools Get Creative 88 How Parents Can Excite and Inspire 94 Eureka Moments 96 The Last Word Parts of this edition appeared previously in TIME. 3ar e you cr eat ive? it ’s a quest ion many of us have heard at some point in our lives, and whether we’ve answered it with hubris, hesitation or humil- ity, our reply was likely informed by some common preconceptions about the very notion of creativity. The term carries a kind of mystical aura, its special power imbued with a touch of the divine. After all, creativity supplies the first verb of the Bible—“In the beginning, God created . . . ”—and, of course, the deity itself is alternatively dubbed the Creator, no- where more famously than in the Declaration of In- dependence, in which He/She endows us with those “certain inalienable rights. ” Advocates of intelligent design survey the universe, marvel at the exquisite celestial choreography and—even if they do believe in science and the big-bang theory of cosmogene- sis—insist the stars, galaxies, planets and moons could never have sprung up solely through some spontaneous, random event. Closer to home, they say, terrestrial geology, flora and fauna—including our own elegant, if fatally flawed, physiology—can’t be the result of a mere accident. Only a supreme ge- nius could have imagined it all and set the whole thing in motion. Yet for all its metaphysical and theological over- tones, creativity is also the most fundamentally STRIVING FOR THE NEW OTHER CREATURES MAY BE BIGGER OR BADDER, BUT ONLY PEOPLE IMAGINE POSSIBILITIES— AND MAKE THEM HAPPEN BY RICHARD JEROME INTRODUCTION 4 The splattered floor in East Hampton, N.Y., where Jackson Pollock (1912–56) created his Abstract Expressionist paintings5THE SCIENCE OF CREATIVITY INTRODUCTION human of qualities. It is, in fact, “the unique and defining trait of our species,” writes the Pulitzer Prize–winning biologist Edward O. Wilson in his book The Origins of Creativity. As Wilson frames it, creativity is “an innate quest for originality, ” driven by the enduring human passion for novelty, “the dis- covery of new entities and processes, the solving of old challenges and disclosure of new ones, the aes- thetic surprise of unanticipated facts and theories, the pleasure of new faces, the thrill of new worlds. ” University of Notre Dame anthropologist Agustín Fuentes, author of The Creative Spark: How Imagina- tion Made Humans Exceptional, puts it this way. “In a nutshell,” he says, “the essence of creativity is to look at the world around us, see how it is and imag- ine other possibilities that are not immediately pres- ent or based on our immediate personal experience. Creativity is seeing the possibilities and then trying to make those imaginings into material reality. ” To be sure, no other species can lay claim to our capacity to devise something new and original, from the sublime to the sublimely ridiculous. Other animals do build things—birds assemble their intricate nests, beavers con- struct dams, and ants dig elaborate networks of tunnels. “But airplanes, strangely tilted skyscrapers and Chia Pets, well, they’re pretty impressive, ” Fuentes says, adding that from an evolutionary standpoint, “creativ- ity is as much a part of our tool kit as walking on two legs, having a big brain and really good hands for manipulating things.” For a physi- cally unprepossessing primate, without great fangs or claws or wings or other obvious physical advan- tages, creativity has been the great equalizer—and more—ensuring, for now, at least, the survival of Homo sapiens. Still, even if we acknowledge that creativity and innovation are uniquely human, people tend to think creators—or “creatives, ” as they’re now known in the professional world—are, if not divine, then members of a special rarefied class. Even more narrowly, cre- ativity is often stereotyped as the province of artists. Painters, from Giotto to Leonardo and Michelangelo to Rembrandt and Vermeer, the French Impression- ists, Picasso, Pollock, Basquiat, Banksy. Or poets and writers from Homer to Shakespeare, to Dickens, George Eliot, Proust and Borges. Or the great com- posers, filmmakers, actors and dancers. Flamboyant figures, perhaps, passionate, dramatic, bohemian in dress and attitude. That’s the caricature, at least. But some of the world’s most illustrious “creatives” wore lab coats or never picked up a brush or pen except to scrawl num- bers and formulas. Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Einstein, Nash, Hawking, who all saw the universe in some new way; Darwin, Mendel, Curie, Watson and Crick—who mapped human evolution, discov- ered new elements and cracked the genetic code. Or the inventors, from Archimedes to Gutenberg, Watt, Whitney, Bell, Edison, Tesla and Jobs, along with un- told researchers who labored obscurely in the em- ploy of large companies and industrial labs. Indeed, although the concept of creativity conjures all-star lineups stacked with historical heavyweights, it’s a mistake to become wedded to the Great Man or Woman theory of human innovation. “People pigeonhole creativity as belonging to a single individual or a group of ge- niuses, ” Fuentes says. “They don’t re- alize that each and every human has this incredible capacity to imagine and to change things. Auto mechan- ics can be amazingly creative—so can people trying to stretch a paycheck to the end of a month.” In a busi- ness context, think of a publication like this one—or maybe a website or an ad agency. The design and edito- rial teams may reap all the creative kudos and cachet—but let’s put in a good word for Mary Ellen in Finance, who figured out novel ways to make all that spellbinding prose and imagery come in under budget without sacrificing quality. Some of humankind’s most creative achieve- ments have served seemingly quotidian, utilitarian ends—beginning, perhaps, with stone tools discov- ered in Africa that date back some 1.8 million years. “No living thing on the planet has ever thought to take a rock and modify it in certain ways so that it becomes a successful tool, ” Fuentes says. “You look at these old stone artifacts and you can see them as the iPhones of 2 million years ago.” Several hun- dred thousand years later, societies were grinding up ocher and painting themselves as well as their tools—and, eventually, adorning the walls of their caves with figures and scenes—the origins of art and the peculiarly human drive to create purely “Creativity is as much a part of our tool kit as walking on two legs and having a big brain.” —anthropologist Agustín Fuentes 6for the sake of aesthetic pleasure. In other ways, utilitarian items evolved into objects of sensual delight. Animal skins into haute couture; meat— cooked by that newfangled thing called fire—into filet mignon. Language, from basic communication tool into One Hundred Years of Solitude and Fifty Shades of Grey. In this TIME special edition we explore human creativity from a range of angles, delving into its neu- rological underpinnings in the brain as well as its relation to the psyche. We’ll touch on many nota- ble creators, past and present—highlighting, for ex- ample, Leonardo da Vinci, the ultimate Renaissance man and the subject of a 2017 biography by Wal- ter Isaacson. This and other chapters offer up ways to learn from great creative minds and apply those lessons to tap into your own imaginative reservoir. That points to another key to human creativity: its essentially derivative and collaborative nature. As authors Anthony Brandt and David Eagleman point out, creators manipulate and reconfigure existing ideas and forms; the most breathtaking art, science and other innovations don’t spring forth from a vac- uum. All creators, even the most celebrated ones, draw on the work of others, influenced consciously or not by what’s come before—and what’s happen- ing around them. “That capacity to think together, to imagine possibilities and to hope, ” Fuentes says, “that’s what got us here. ” 7 The evolution of imaging, from (left) cave paintings of hunting or fighting in Africa’s Sahara region that date back as far as 40,000 B.C. to (right) a computer- generated depiction of the DNA double helixCHAPTER ONE THE CREATIVE ANIMAL “Creativity is the art of combining a little idea with another little idea, you may have another little idea, and so on . . . at the end maybe a great idea will come up.” —Serge Bloch Bloch is a French illustrator whose iconic work has appeared in newspapers and magazines around the world—and appears at left. He has also illustrated and written several books and received two gold medals from the Society of Illustrators. THE IMPULSE TO INVENT AND INNOV ATE IS AN INTEGRAL PART OF BEING HUMAN 9Don’t be t oo aweD by t h e wonDer of cr eat iv- ity. Much of it is simply moving matter around— a bit of clever rearranging. A Chippendale cabinet is nothing more than a transformed tree. The land- scape artist, even a Van Gogh or Monet, did not in- vent the flowers—he just ran with them. And the most succulent hunk of beef bourguignonne you ever whipped up seems a lot less remarkable when you accept that somebody already spotted you the cow. You were not responsible for creating so much as a single molecule in your final product. But what about the ideas that guided the way you manipulated that matter? The shape the cab- inet would take—its whorls and lines and its final umber color materialized in a brain before they ma- terialized in the world. The same is true of the lines THIS IS Y OUR BRAIN ON CREA TIVITY WHAT NEURAL NETWORKS UNDERLIE THOSE “ AHA ” MOMENTS OF INSPIRATION AND INVENTION? BY JEFFREY KLUGER of a sonnet or the chords in a symphony or the vision of what Sunfl owers should look like before it looked like anything at all to anyone but Van Gogh himself. The source of such inspiration has long stymied scientists. We’re all born with more or less the same brain, and we all use it in more or less the same way, but people we call creative seem able to summon up something else—insight from the ether, music from the void. There is no such ether, of course, and by definition, a void is a void. It’s the brain, at bottom, that is the seat of all creativity. Somewhere in the 100 billion neurons and the 100 trillion connections they form are the lines of neural code that gave us The Nutcracker, Huckle­ berry Finn, the Saturn V rocket and every other bit of artistry or invention human beings have ever summoned up. Increasingly—thanks to better im- aging techniques, a deeper understanding of the interplay of brain regions and more—scientists are learning how to trace the creative insight back to its 11 11 At the Drexel University EEG Lab, elastic caps are rigged with multicolored EEG electrodes to help map the thinking brain.THE SCIENCE OF CREATIVITY NEUROSCIENCE source, understand what sparked it and figure out why that spark happens more often in some of us than in others. “Some people think that creativity should be like magic,” says experimental psychologist Mark Bee- man of Northwestern University. “But scientists are becoming better able to trace it to its precursors—to what was responsible for what we experience as an insight or ‘aha’ moment. ” One of the most important steps in figuring out how creativity works is to understand how it doesn’t work. Popular wisdom in recent years has held that the brain’s two hemispheres neatly divide the day’s tasks. The left brain, so the thinking goes, is the seri- ous brain—critical, analytical, skeptical, mathemati- cal. It’s also where language lives. The right brain, by contrast, is the wild child—artistic, abstract, in- sightful, intuitive. That’s not quite right. For starters, one of the brain’s great features is its redundancy, its ability to create workarounds or to share tasks. Although it’s true that one brain region may be principally responsible for certain functions— the left hemisphere does do more of the heavy lifting when it comes to language—there’s also a lot of load distribution across brain structures. That’s especially true of creativ- ity. Beeman and his colleague John Kounios, a professor of applied cog- nitive and brain sciences at Drexel University, have investigated the cre- ative process, using functional mag- netic resonance imaging (fMRI) and high-density electroencephalogra- phy (EEG) to watch the brain as it sorts though a problem. The particular problem Beeman and Kounios chose for their study was what is known as a re- mote association test, in which subjects are given three seemingly unrelated words and asked to de- termine a third word with which they could each be paired. Some are very easy: “loser, throat and spot” can all be paired with “sore. ” Some are harder: “pine, crab and sauce,” for example, share “apple.” Some are harder still, like “wise, work and tower, ” which share “clock. ” There are two ways to solve any of these puz- zles. One is to think it through deliberately, rigor- ously, pairing up one word with a possible answer (“pine” with “cone, ” say) and seeing if it works with the others (in this case, nope). The other, the seem- ingly magical way, is simply to stare at the words, let them roll around in your head until—bang!—the an- swer presents itself. Psychologists label those twin approaches the analytical and the intuitive, and it’s no contest that the intuitive feels better, more excit- ing—more creative. The brain arrives at the answer and gives itself—and you—a reward in the form of a sense of surprise and satisfaction. “You solve a problem and you have this burst of enthusiasm, ” says Kounios (seen at right). He and Beeman were able to map how all that happens. During the studies, the subjects were shown the three test words and were told to press a button and announce the solution as soon as they had it and to press another button to indicate whether they arrived at it analytically or intuitively. When the answer was intuitive, about a third of a second before the subject pushed the answer button, the EEG picked up a burst of gamma-wave oscillations above the right ear. The fMRI pinpointed that activity in the right inferior-superior temporal gyrus. That region of the brain has a role in a number of processes, including language; it also helps mediate the neurology of the reward experience. The gyrus, it seems, was working on the problem all on its own and served up both the answer and the feel-good experience at the same time. “That was the moment the solu- tion popped into con