creativity
Everything is fizzling and bobbling about
I devoured Steven Johnson’s forthcoming book, Where Good Ideas Come From, over the course of a few bus rides and absolutely loved it. Here’s one bit that’s now stuck in my head:
So, our brains are full of patterns, obviously. One of them is the oscillation between neurons firing all in sync and firing at random—sort of a flip-flop between coherence (the technical term is “phase-lock”) and noise. Well…
In 2007, Robert Thatcher, a brain scientist at the University of South Florida, decided to study the vacillation between phase-lock and noise in the brains of dozens of children. While Thatcher found that the noise periods lasted, on average, for 55 milliseconds, he also detected statistically significant variation among the children. Some brains had a tendency to remain longer in phase-lock, others had noise intervals that regularly approached 60 milliseconds. When Thatcher then compared the brain-wave results with the children’s IQ scores, he found a direct correlation between the two data sets. Every extra millisecond spent in the chaotic mode added as much as 20 IQ points. Longer spells in phase-lock deducted IQ points, though not as dramatically.
Thatcher’s study suggests a counterintuitive notion: the more disorganized your brain is, the smarter you are.
(Can we just pause here for a fist-pump and a quiet whispered “yesss”?)
It’s counterintuitive in part because we tend to attribute the growing intelligence of the technology world with increasingly precise electromechanical choreography. Intel doesn’t advertise its latest microprocessors with the slogan: “Every 55 milliseconds, our chips erupt into a blizzard of noise!” Yet somehow brains that seek out that noise seem to thrive, at least by the measure of the IQ test.
A few grafs later, to sum things up, here’s William James by way of Steven Johnson:
Instead of thoughts of concrete things patiently following one another, we have the most abrupt cross-cuts and transitions from one idea to another, the most rareified abstractions and discriminations, the most unheard-of combinations of elements… a seething cauldron of ideas, where everything is fizzling and bobbling about in a state of bewildering activity, where partnerships can be joined or loosened in an instant, treadmill routine is unknown, and the unexpected seems the only law.
He’s describing “the highest order of minds”—but he could just as easily be describing a startup, or a city. Which is exactly, I think, the point.
Iteration at Pixar
Pixar president Ed Catmull, in a speech to Stanford’s business school, talks about sharing work even (especially) when it’s incomplete:
In the process of making the film, we reviewed the material every day. Now, this is counter-intuitive for a lot of people. […]
Suppose you come in, and you’ve got to put together animation or drawings and show it to a famous, world-class animator. Well, you don’t want to show something which is weak or poor. So you want to hold off until you get it to be right.
The trick is actually to stop that behavior. We show it every day—when it’s incomplete. If everybody does it, every day, then you get over the embarrassment. And when you get over the embarrassment, you’re more creative.
It’s not obvious to people, but starting down that path helped everything that we did. Show it in its incomplete form. There’s another advantage to that. When you’re done… you’re done.
By that last bit, he means that if you haven’t been sharing your work every day, even (especially) when it’s incomplete, then when you get to the point where you say, “Whew, finished! Take a look at this,” it’s an illusion—your work is still just beginning.
It’s iteration! And seriously: it applies to everything.
On creating things and finding an audience
Steph Thirion, creator of the neat iPhone game Eliss, sums it up:
Often insomnia would strike in, and I would ask aloud, to the darkness of the room, “will anyone appreciate this”? (My girlfriend had by that time developed the habit of using earplugs). And then in a spectacle of light rays and stars, the Fairy of Reason would appear to me and speak tenderly: “good hearted child, if you love it, some people, who have things in common with you, will too”. And then, on my knees, holding my hands together, tears shaking on the corners of my begging eyes, I would ask, “what if I’m just a freak and no one is like me?” And then she’d say, in her soothing voice: “Well, it’s true that you do some weird shit. Do you always have to do the dishes with gloves on?” And then I’d reply: “I don’t like detergent, my hands get all dehydrated and”. But the Fairy of Reason would not wait for me to finish: “Do you really need four duvets, in springtime?” And me: “Look, I get chilly when I sleep. Can we get back to my game?” And then, just as she appeared, in a beautiful glow of white color, she was gone.