Wired to Create: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Creative Mind by Scott Barry Kaufman and Carolyn Gregoire is a wonderful book about creativity. Having more breadth than depth, it provides a great overview of research into creativity. The authors might have titled the book
“10 things that creative people do differently”, because that is basically what it is about. Their 10 things are:
1. Imaginative Play
2. Passion
3. Daydreaming
4. Solitude
5. Intuition
6. Openness to Experience
7. Mindfulness
8. Sensitivity
9. Turning Adversity into Advantage
10. Thinking Differently
The authors made an odd choice in their wording “10 things that creative people do differently”, because not all items on their list can be DONE. What’s more, the wording is misleading in implying that anyone can be creative by doing those 10 things (similarly to “10 habits rich people have” and the like). Openness to experience and high sensitivity are traits that are largely inherited, or can’t be changed easily at least. The authors want to leave open the possibility that anybody can be creative. This is certainly true to some extent, however, there are differences between highly creative people, who are a clear minority and the majority of people. If high sensitivity is one criterion to go by, then the mark of highly creative people should hover around 20%. The authors more or less confirm this number later in the book:
Up to 80 percent of adults said that the task of “thinking differently” is uncomfortable or even exhausting, according to research conducted at Harvard. But making an effort to think unconventionally can help us connect the dots in new and innovative ways by increasing associational thinking.
The authors also write about all the adversity creative people face, starting in schools where they are less liked by teachers (who prefer conformist children) to becoming outcasts of society, having a higher risk for mental health problems, such as depression, psychosis and PTSD, and finally the resistance that they have to face when they finally come up with a highly creative achievement by society, which in general tends to be very conservative and reject innovations. Only a minority of highly creative people become famous during their lifetime, and even a lower percentage become famous at all. Being highly creative is not a choice anybody would make voluntarily. It’s to a large extent a matter of personality traits and those 10 habits listed in the book can be understood as such. These personality traits can be observed in young kids already. In the following account, I will highlight these traits as they are discussed in the book.
When my first son was about a year old he was such a curious baby that he refused to go in the baby stroller and I had to carry him on my shoulder so that he could take in everything (8). He soon noticed (7) that every house in our small village could be uniquely identified not by its colour, size or any other property inherent in a house, but by a symbol: its number. Within a short period of time he passionately (2) learned the names of the numbers and could point to the right house in our neighbourhood. He had created a mental map of our neighbourhood based on house numbers.
By the age of five, his passion for our walks together had not only decreased a lot, but he actively refused to go for a walk with me. Well, I understand there couldn’t possibly be anything new to learn about the village, but it’s important to get some exercise and fresh air after all. However, not begging or bribing (external motivation) would make him comply (10, conform) with my request. Then I changed my strategy, I tried to make walks more interesting by appealing to his imagination, instead of going for a walk we were going on “a mission”. We started to “gamify” (1) our “missions” more and more by adding a kind of Augmented Reality Middle Earth-like overlay to them. Familiar places received mysterious names such as the “Light Prognosticus” (a pavilion in our park) and a nearby forest received the name “Twilight Forest”. As my son started to play Minecraft our missions became more and more a kind of Minecraft crossover, with items like diamond swords and ocelots. It was like playing Pokemon Go (before it was actually invented) without technology merely using imagination.
My son was also quite solitary (4) in kindergarten and a daydreamer (3) in school. Bonus: he was extremely messy (the introduction in the book is called “messy minds”). All this is not to say that my son, like many other people with his temperament (inhibited) and personality type (INFP) will go on to be a creative genius. What it means is that creativity is strongly liked to rare personality types that can be observed from early childhood on. Van Gogh, Kafka, John Lennon, Kurt Cobain, Tori Amos, and William Shakespeare were all INFPs. Most famous scientists are NT types and so on. As the authors write, artists tend to be emotionally and aesthetically overexcitable people (and have a higher incidence of schizophrenia in their family) and scientists tend to be intellectually curious and overexcitable people (and have a higher incidence of autism spectrum disorder in their family).
I have argued that hunter-gatherers are physically more sensitive than farmers and herders as they live in nature and not against nature. Moreover, of all these subsistence strategies, foraging is the most cerebral one, requiring both a vast webbed knowledge of fauna and flora and a lot of imagination when tracking animals. In fact, you can imagine tracking an animal as a kind of augmented reality overlay. Foragers read an amazing amount of information out of tracks: species, sex, age, direction, state of exhaustion, etc. Most importantly of all, there are literally thousands of tracks and you have to recreate a world in which you find the most promising prey. It’s having a radar mind, constructing multiple possibilities and then hyperfocusing on the most promising one.
When Scott Barry Kaufman and Carolyn Gregoire describe the creative mind, they simultaneously describe a hunter-gatherer mind. Not only do hunter-gatherers think differently from farmers and herders, they also engage in a lot of play and most importantly their job is more like play than work for them: “Hunter-Gatherers' Work is Playful Because It Is Varied and Requires Much Skill, Knowledge, and Intelligence” writes Peter Gray.
Finally, the adversity and solitude side of creative people comes a lot from hunter-gatherer types living in a farmer-herder world. Foragers tend to leave their band when they aren’t happy, i.e. to separate themselves in face of adversity. A lot of highly sensitive hunter-gatherer types may have experienced at least a mild form of PTSD in childhood or their teens. If that sounds far-fetched consider that Native Americans experience PTSD at twice the rate of the general population (source).
The truth is, hunter-gatherer types are disadvantaged in a farmer society. That starts with schools and continues into adulthood and workplaces. Creativity often starts out as a survival strategy. If my hypothesis is correct, some of our most creative potential ends up undiscovered, homeless, or with mental health problems (both typical problems of Native Americans). The Japanese hikikomori may be exactly such unused creative potential, who prefer locking themselves into their homes to living in a hierarchical, status-oriented, and competitive society.
For more on the hunter-gatherer neurotribe hypothesis check out my book The hunter-gatherer neurotribe: gifted, geeks, aspies and other aliens in this world
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