1: It was 1968, and the executives at NASA had a problem.
“The space agency had a lot of smart people on staff, but smart and creative were different things,” Steven Kotler writes in his brilliant book The Art of Impossible.
“NASA’s lifeblood was innovation. They desperately needed their most creative engineers working their most difficult challenges,” Steven notes. ” Yet telling the Picassos from the paint-by-numbers crowd—that was the problem.”
Which is why NASA hired creativity expert George Land.
His job was to “help sift and sort engineers,” Steven writes.
So, George designed a test to measure divergent or nonlinear, outside-the-box thinking abilities.
The test included questions like: “Name as many purposes as you can for that jar of M&Ms.”
A logical, “convergent thinking” person would provide answers like a candy holder, pencil holder, or place to put errant coins.
A “divergent-thinking” answer would be a prison for cockroaches or a poorly insulated space helmet.
The test proved to be successful. George solved the problem, and the team at NASA was happy with the results.
2: “But success raised another question,” Steven notes: “Where does creativity come from in the first place, nature or nurture?”
Perhaps George’s test could help answer this bigger question as well.
“His test was so simple, it could be given to children,” Steven writes. ” In fact, it could be given again and again, tracking kids over time, seeing how nurture impacted nature along the way.”
George worked with NASA to have 1600 four- and five-year-olds from a wide variety of backgrounds take the test.
The results shocked everyone.
“Ninety-eight percent of the kids scored at the genius level of creativity,” writes Steven.
“It meant the average four-year-old could out innovate the average NASA engineer.”
Huh?
But this genius level of creativity didn’t last.
When George retested the same kids five years later, scores dropped 30 percent.” By age ten, for reasons unclear, some 68 percent of their creativity had vanished,” Steven notes.
And it didn’t stop there.” Five years later, the results were worse. Once these kids reached fifteen years of age,” Steven observes,” their level of creativity had dropped to 12 percent.”
George then gave the test to over one million adults.
Average age: Thirty-one.
Average creativity: Two percent.
George answered the bigger question of where creativity comes from: “Nature builds creatives; nurture tears them down,” Steven writes.
Or does it?
“Executive attention lives in the prefrontal cortex,” Steven notes, “but the prefrontal cortex doesn’t fully mature until the age of twenty-five.
“As a result, kids have weaker executive attention skills. This means poorer impulse control over themselves and their creative ideas. . .
“We’re born with a huge amount of connectivity between neurons,” he notes, “but those connections decline with age.
Which is why divergent thinking decreases over time.
“It’s not that education kills creativity,” Steven notes, “it’s that normal developmental processes get in the way.”
3: Fortunately, we have another means to activate our innate creativity.
The answer? Flow.
“In flow, the three major brain networks that underpin the creative process all work together in an unusual way,” Steven observes.
“The executive network is online but not completely. The part that generates task-specific laser focus is hyperactive; everything else is shut down. This means you can focus on your creative problem, but the inner critic remains silent.
“Concurrently, the salience network is both hyperactive and incredibly sensitive. It’s tuned into both internal signals being generated by the default mode network and external signals that demand executive attention.
“Lastly, the default mode network is wide awake and slightly tweaked,” he observes. ” The anterior cingulate cortex is hyperactive, the amygdala is mostly offline—meaning our ability to do pattern recognition and remote association is jacked up, but the brain’s normal bias for negative information is down low.”
The result? Flow drives our brains into “creative overdrive.”
“It mimics all the inventiveness that comes with being four years old,” Steven writes, “just, you know, without the downside of having a four-year-old brain.”
More tomorrow!
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Reflection: How much time do I spend in flow or “in the zone”?
Action: Learn how to use the four-stage flow cycle to get into flow more easily and more often.
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