The tortured artist who produces a masterpiece of art or literature has been with us for as long as I can remember, Vincent Van Gogh cut off his ear to produce his masterpiece, other lived in poverty and gleaned lessons of life from their misery that found echoes in their writing. But is it true that you have to be truly miserable to produce great art or literature?
Creativity, however, involves more than moments of "unconcentration", relaxation and free association of unconnected thoughts. Human imagination, indeed all imagination, follows rules and thrives on constraints to provide clear-cut definitions to problems for which one seeks creative solutions. Creativity itself is undefinable. It is not originality. One of the easiest things in life is to be original and foolish. For long, creativity remained a mystery better left to poets, artists and the like. It always conjured up the messy, unverifiable world of muses, inspiration and intuition.
French mathematician Poincare identified four stages of creativity: preparation (you try to solve a problem by available, normal means), incubation (when these don't work and in frustration you move to other matters), illumination (the answer comes in a flash, when you are not looking for it), and verification (your reasoning powers re-assert and you are on the way to finding a solution). Most of us give up at the stage of incubation and miss the illumination and, consequently, the experience of creative joy. Mark Twain put it nicely: Happiness, he said, "is like the Swedish sunset. It's always there. Only, people look the other way and miss it".
There's thus a correlation between creativity and happiness. All creative persons are not happy, but all happy persons can be positively creative. They all love what they do. It is not the hope of achieving fame or amassing wealth that drives them; rather, it is the opportunity to do the things they enjoy most. They feel an inner glow and they exude it. Many people do the work they do, and many do it better, but most of them either do not enjoy it or do it as a painful duty expected of them. Or, the spur is fame, power, money, publicity, awards and honors.
I looked at my own experience in the past few months. During my very painful bout with shingles, I continued to write my blogs and columns at the usual pace. But when my son turned up to visit me last week, I have barely looked at the computer choosing instead to spend time with him. So maybe there is some truth in the saying that pain leads to creativity while happiness leads to contentment with life and no great urge to seek noble meanings in life around you. Of course, given the choice how many would choose pain?
From Lord Byron to Vincent Van Gogh, society has long believed that creativity is the product of a tortured soul.
Recent studies however, have shown that in fact, the opposite is true, and that everyday creativity is more closely linked with happiness than depression. In 2006, researchers at the University of Toronto found that sadness creates a kind of tunnel vision that closes people off from the world, but happiness makes people more open to information of all kinds. Not only are happy people more creative, but this creativity allows them to come up with new ways to solve problems or simply achieve their goals. This ability can lead to greater success or happiness, which spurs further creativity, feeding a self-perpetuating cycle in which these two qualities reinforce one another.
Recent studies however, have shown that in fact, the opposite is true, and that everyday creativity is more closely linked with happiness than depression. In 2006, researchers at the University of Toronto found that sadness creates a kind of tunnel vision that closes people off from the world, but happiness makes people more open to information of all kinds. Not only are happy people more creative, but this creativity allows them to come up with new ways to solve problems or simply achieve their goals. This ability can lead to greater success or happiness, which spurs further creativity, feeding a self-perpetuating cycle in which these two qualities reinforce one another.
Mut most of these studies about happiness and creativity focus on everyday creativity, or an ability to think outside of the box, and not necessarily on great artistic creativity. Although little evidence exists to link artistic creativity and happiness, it turnes out that the myth of the depressed artist has some scientific basis. Researchers have found a slight connection between mental illness and high levels of artistic creativity. A happy person is better equipped to apply creativity to everyday problems, but a person with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder might instead be more capable of creating great art. Scientists are unsure of the exact cause, but some believe that manic periods give the artist an amplified version of the creativity experienced by happy, healthy people. Illnesses such as schizophrenia allow people to make connections or experience emotions that would not occur to people without these diseases.
Creativity is nothing peculiar to genius. Nor is suffering a precondition for it. All happy persons can be positively creative. It is not the hope of achieving fame or amassing wealth that drives the creatives, rather it is the opportunity to do the things they enjoy most. According to a Yale University computer scientist, David Gelerntner, all human beings "slide along a spectrum of thought processes" on an average day and this could begin with "high-focus" thinking where "we can sandwich many memories and pieces of knowledge and quickly extract the thing they all have in common". It is not so much creative ability as assimilative expertise aiding swift decisions and quick action. Slide along the spectrum to "low focus" and we become less good at homing in on details but our memories are more vivid, concrete and detailed". The linking of memories and knowledge is more by emotion than by reason. When we are at the work place we are in "high-focus"; when we are in love, in "low-focus". It is when people are in "middle-focus" that they are at their most creative. This is because the mind is free from both obligatory, occupational concerns and mind-numbing, un-reasoning emotions. In "middle-focus", people make unusual connections—Newton and the apple, Archimedes and the bath tub, Kekule and the two snakes, Gandhi and the railway booking in South Africa—and they acquire insights which change the course of science, art and history. Gelerntner calls this mode "unconcentration", which provides a person the right insight into things that already are in high-focus.
Creativity, however, involves more than moments of "unconcentration", relaxation and free association of unconnected thoughts. Human imagination, indeed all imagination, follows rules and thrives on constraints to provide clear-cut definitions to problems for which one seeks creative solutions. Creativity itself is undefinable. It is not originality. One of the easiest things in life is to be original and foolish. For long, creativity remained a mystery better left to poets, artists and the like. It always conjured up the messy, unverifiable world of muses, inspiration and intuition.
French mathematician Poincare identified four stages of creativity: preparation (you try to solve a problem by available, normal means), incubation (when these don't work and in frustration you move to other matters), illumination (the answer comes in a flash, when you are not looking for it), and verification (your reasoning powers re-assert and you are on the way to finding a solution). Most of us give up at the stage of incubation and miss the illumination and, consequently, the experience of creative joy. Mark Twain put it nicely: Happiness, he said, "is like the Swedish sunset. It's always there. Only, people look the other way and miss it".
There's thus a correlation between creativity and happiness. All creative persons are not happy, but all happy persons can be positively creative. They all love what they do. It is not the hope of achieving fame or amassing wealth that drives them; rather, it is the opportunity to do the things they enjoy most. They feel an inner glow and they exude it. Many people do the work they do, and many do it better, but most of them either do not enjoy it or do it as a painful duty expected of them. Or, the spur is fame, power, money, publicity, awards and honors.
I looked at my own experience in the past few months. During my very painful bout with shingles, I continued to write my blogs and columns at the usual pace. But when my son turned up to visit me last week, I have barely looked at the computer choosing instead to spend time with him. So maybe there is some truth in the saying that pain leads to creativity while happiness leads to contentment with life and no great urge to seek noble meanings in life around you. Of course, given the choice how many would choose pain?
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