There's been a lot of buzz around creativity and the process of creation, since Da Vinci people think that creativity is a gift given to some human beings, an special brain full of original ideas previously canned ready to be used. Nowadays, this feeling is extremely increased and promoted by art schools and ad-agencies, who treat art directors as the true kings of the creativity kingdom crowned with originality and freshness. But is it that real? Do we have to be special in order to be creative? Is our brain fated to mundane tasks if not gifted with the seed of creativity?
How Our Brain Works
Some time ago I had the chance to read Marvin Minsky's The Society of Mind and I was really surprised by such an intense, simple and concise collection of essays around the inner working of the human brain. To those unfamiliar, Minsky is the founder of the Artificial Intelligent Lab at the MIT and has been researching on AI, improving it with models acquired from our incredible brains.
In The Society of Mind Minsky explores how simple pieces compose our complex minds. Those basic building blocks are called Agents and they are specialized in just a single task. More complex tasks can be created by combining the existing agents into more sophisticated Agencies, and some of this agencies can reuse agents. This way, our brains are molded for what they do the most: making tea, hunting or programming, it doesn't really matter. Basic agents are created before we even understand ourselves, and are automated so no connection is directly linked to the conscious mind; on the other hand, agencies are created over time, combining existing agents and producing new and amazing uses for them. During our mind-volution new agents and agencies are created as needed, for example when learning to swim, extending our capacity and knowledge.
All of this agents and agencies are created by demand and rate of use, to ease the inner brain processes, but they all depend on external stimuli. That said, our brain seems to be unable to invent from scratch, it always create its society of agents as a response to external events, to our environment.
The Evolution of the Gifted
It's been a while since the Unconference 4.0 was held in Madrid, but I still have quite fresh a discussion that arose between some of the participants. We were discussing about how people's creativity and finding original ways of solving problems, designing or creating experiences. At that point, lot of people thought about education, reading and practice, but Javier Cañada came up with a simple method he uses to explore alternative options: "I tend to mix concepts to find alternatives ways of representation" - he said - "for example, imagine how would your inbox look if viewed through Flickr. This kind of exercises always extend the limits of your creativity."
That idea of mixing our existing brain concepts was in my mind for a while, and now I'm almost sure that the most important thing to feed our creativity is just experiencing more, add more details to your brain, expand your field, explore new areas, go and try something really new, ask for ideas to someone completely unrelated to the topic... the most experiences we have inside our brains, the more open they are, and the more mix the brain can supposedly do. Or even easier, more ingredients means more combination and more dishes.
The Fall of the Creative-Ego
And it's been during the last week that I could confirm this line of thought... I was reading a tumblr by Anita when I discovered Derren Brown. Derren is a British magician that performs for Channel 4, although he is auto-called mind-reader instead of magician. I wouldn't say the performance is not impressive, I think is much better to call him mind-setter. The point is that Derren seems to know how the brain works, similarly to Minsky's society of agents, and he is setting up the needed inputs to force a predicted output from our brains.
I guess it's much better if you could spend a couple of minutes and have a look to Subliminal Advertising at YouTube just before I continue.
Ready? Seen it? Isn't it really impressive how easy is to manipulate our brains? Doesn't it provides a lot of clues of how our inner thoughts are created? What do you think?
What I really love from that video is the face of both art directors when Derren uncovers the image in the envelope. That moment, to me, is very important; it means that it doesn't matter how creative you think you are, how well did you performed at school, or where are you actually working... our brain is finding the experiences that fit the most and mixing them together to create something new. Just a fantastic get your feet back to the ground lesson.