Top Quotes: “The Creative Curve: How to Develop the Right Idea, at the Right Time” — Allen Gannett

“In the medieval view of creativity, the artist was merely an imitator, copying God’s reality. Accordingly, early Western society viewed artists as mere craftspeople. Professor Deborah Haynes, who’s written numerous art history books, told me these early artists were ranked in the social order below merchants and only a rung above slaves.

There was no concept of a ‘famous artist.’ Most pieces of art were unsigned. In part, this was because art was typically a collective effort, created in workshops. What’s more, most of the work artists created wasn’t original. Instead, artists followed strict guidelines by imitating the recurring political and religious art required by churches and civic orgs.

Artists were skilled workers, nothing more divine than that. They would be analogous to today’s trained carpenters or bricklayers.”

“George Gordon Byron, the 28-year-old famed Romantic poet, had cabin fever. Huddled at his lake house, Byron and his friends had spent the summer of 1816 surrounded by rain and darkness thanks to a volcanic eruption, which had turned winter into a 12-month season, and the trip to the lakeside had devolved into countless hours stuck inside the house. To kill time, George and his friends had started reading aloud a book of German ghost stories. It was under these conditions that George laid out his challenge — that each of them write a ghost story. Among them was 18-year-old Mary, the lover of another cabin guest, Percy. Percy and Mary had run off 2 years earlier and had been traveling the world. Her parents were both well-known literary giants, but she was still trying to find her way in the world. As she sat beside Percy, she was stumped. What kind of ghost story could she write?

Hours turned to days. George and Percy both started piercing together their ghoulish tales. Percy would ask Mary about her progress, but she had nothing. One day she overheard Percy and George talking about a recent scientific finding. A botanist had claimed to observe microscopic animals that continued to move, seemingly after their own deaths. The men talked about the idea of a human corpse coming back to life. With all the scientific advancement of the age, it didn’t seem impossible.

The conversation was all Mary needed to start writing her ghost story, and soon she had a short story completed. Encouraged by the feedback she got, the story eventually grew into a novel that she published anonymously 2 years later. She named it Frankenstein.

Mary Wollstonecraft was only 20 when her book was published, yet the young writer had created a gripping tale that has survived for generations. Her story, again, is based on a stereotype of a creative genius, a brilliant scientist who goes mad and uses his expertise to create a monster.”

“According to 1 study, both men and women create 1,400+ new brain cells every day.

Once new brain cells are created, they take 8 weeks to mature. During that time, they migrate to the most active areas of your brain. If you’re a cabbie, constantly navigating London, these new brain cells join forces with the part of your brain that controls your navigation skills. As a result, your brain starts to adapt to the skills you’re learning. As Shaffer describes it, ‘You can influence the career choice of that brain cell.’

Furthermore, if you don’t challenge these cells with new experiences, they risk dying off.”

“The truth is when people talk about creativity, they’re usually talking about a creative output that’s widely adopted or accepted. Of course, this is different from the ability to come up with novel ideas.

Put slightly differently, a person’s work has to be accepted by other people to garner the creative label, and by even larger numbers of people for a person to be labeled a creative genius.

Creative genius, it turns out, is a social phenomenon rather than simply a reflection of how innovative, forward thinking, or influential any one person is.”

“According to the Social Security Admin, Lisa was the #1 name for newborn girls in the US throughout most of the 60s. As the decades passed, Lisa lost favor. By 2016, Lisa had dropped to 833rd on the name popularity list; that year, only 342 newborn girls in the entire US were named Lisa.

The New York Times Magazine even ran an article entitled ‘Where Have All the Lisas Gone?’”

“Dr. Zhang observed a surprising effect. ‘What we found is that once our participants have been exposed to a prototypical Korean face, they start to show less adverse reactions to other faces in the same racial category.’

Familiarity was actually able to reduce race-based biases.

So what about the approach reflex? Interestingly, with increased familiarity, it neither changed nor increased. Familiarity doesn’t make us like things more. Rather, it makes us fear things less.”

“Duzel explained why the popular notion of dopamine makes no sense. You can prevent dopamine activity in someone’s brain and they’ll still find pleasure in things. When researchers block the dopamine receptors of drug addicts, the addicts still consume, enjoy, and crave drugs. So what’s going on?

‘Dopamine isn’t so much about the pleasure of consuming something, it’s about the motivation to obtain something that’s signaled by dopamine,’ Duzel explains. The actual role of dopamine in our brains, he says, is to determine when we should approach something to learn more about it. Duzel explained that dopamine signals to our motor system that we have to do something — and only then does it trigger the learning process. Dopamine, in short, isn’t the pleasure neurotransmitter; it’s the motivation neurotransmitter.”

“While listening intently to the music, the students’ enjoyment of the music followed a bell-shaped curve. From the 2nd to the 8th time they were exposed to each song, the students reported liking it more. From the 8th to the 32nd time, they liked the song less every time they heard it. Similar to the results of Zajonc’s painting experiment, by the final time they heard a song they actually liked the song noticeably less than they did when the first heard it.”

“Over time our avoidance reflex is activated less and less often as we learn that the new thing won’t harm us. At this point, the novelty bonus begins to outweigh our avoidance reflex. Our fear begins to dissipate. We start wondering if this new thing, or experience, could potentially be useful or valuable.

Once this happens, we start to express liking that thing increasingly every single time we see or experience it. This upward slope is what I call the sweet spot of the creative curve.”

“In the Canadian music study, it turned out that the bell curve happened only when students were asked to listen to the music intently. If the music was played faintly in the background, the students often kept on liking the song more and more as they heard it over and over again, with no apparent end. So why is this?

It turns out that when we consume something superficially, whether it’s an ad, song, or work of art, our brains process it in a different way than they do when we consume something in depth, or over time. A process that neuroscientists call perceptual fluency takes hold. It works like this: The first time we see or experience something, our brains have to work hard to process it. However, if we’ve already experienced that thing, we’re naturally more fluent in it, and our brains can process it more efficiently. The thing is, typically we tend to confuse this ease of processing with actual liking. When you think about it, it’s a lot easier for us to process a song we’ve overheard in the supermarket or drugstore 100 or so times. Along the way, we tend to mistake ease with actual enjoyment.

Ad researcher Christy Nordhielm has studied this effect in advertising. She found that if a print ad repeatedly displayed a small or superficial feature — a background, say, or a logo — people reported liking the product in question more every time they saw it. This is why marketers deem logos and brand colors as essential to creating and maintaining consumer goodwill. The little things make it a lot easier for our brains to process the ads we see every day — and the ease of mental processing often gets mistaken for actually liking that toothpaste, aftershave, or insurance company.”

“Seeking as ever to build his own identity within the group and continue to grow artistically, Harrison came to the conclusion that the sitar could bring about some much-needed change for himself, but musically and personally. Back in London, he bought his first-ever sitar.

That October, the Beatles got stuck completing a new song called ‘Norwegian Wood.’ Finally, they thought to try out Harrison’s new sitar. The melody clicked. Today ‘Norwegian Wood’ is remembered as the first mainstream Western song to feature a sitar — but not the last.

As the song gained in popularity, the sitar began popping up elsewhere. in 1966, the Rolling Stones used it in their hit song ‘Paint It Black,’ solidifying the instrument’s new role in rock music. By 1967, the ‘sitar craze’ was sweeping pop music. Danelectro went so far as to release an electric version, known as the Coral electric sitar. This version of the sitar was accessible to many musicians; it was strung like a guitar but had the recognizable twang of an actual sitar.”

“Researchers believe there are 3 origins of aha moments.

The first are shower moments. In this scenario, you might already have a solution to something in your brain’s right hemisphere, but the activity in the left hemisphere is crowding it out. Once the left hemisphere’s logical processing fails to deliver an answer, its activity tends to fade. Once the left hemisphere’s activity falls below that of the right hemisphere, the answer from the right hemisphere pops up as if by magic. Aha!

That’s why when we wake up, go out for a run, or take a shower, we often experience what feel to us like ‘flashes of genius.’ Generally these are occasions when our brains aren’t overwhelmed with thoughts, the result being that we experience what seems like sudden inspiration. But if you want to know the truth, it’s really just the result of our brains being empty of the crowded chaos of our left brain thinking, which in turn allows long-percolating right brain ideas to make their appearance.

The second origin of aha moments is through combination. Here, your brain’s right hemisphere, knowing that one single concept is unable to give a satisfactory answer, is subconsciously working to connect multiple concepts. If your right hemisphere is able to braid together what feels like a workable solution, it becomes activated. It’s this sudden burst of brain activity that creates that flash-of-genius feeling.

As we learned from the two-cords experiment, the third origin of aha moments involves a trigger. In this case, an environmental factor subconsciously ignites an association with something already stored in your brain’s right hemisphere. For example, if we get stuck working on a crossword puzzle and an hour later walk past the word we were seeking on a billboard, we may well experience a flash of genius without even being aware we saw the missing word.

All three of these methods happen below the average human’s conscious level of awareness. Is it any surprise, then, that these solutions often feel mystical and sent from above by some benevolent deity? In reality, it’s not magic, it’s biology. Bowden explained that aha moments are simply ‘a normal cognitive process but they have a surprising result.’”

“The days of soap company-sponsored TV shows (hence soap operas)”