essay on human creativity

Creativity is a human quality that exists in every single one of us

Reasercher for Durham Commission on Creativity, Durham University

Head of Department in the School of Education, Durham University

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When you think about creativity, it might be highly creative people like Mozart, da Vinci or Einstein who spring to mind. They were all considered to be “geniuses” for their somewhat unique talents that led to global innovation in their fields. Their type of creativity is what’s known as “ Big C creativity ” (or historical) and is not very common in everyday life. Not all of us can create works of art or music or scientific theories that are new to the world.

But while we can’t all be Mozart, da Vinci or Einstein, many people do enjoy creative activity – through hobbies such as water colour painting or playing the piano. And these types of pursuits are often what people think of when asked what being creative looks like. Our finished pieces may not be comparable with the likes of the great masters, but often the process is therapeutic and the end result can be aesthetically pleasing.

On top of hobbies and interests, we all possess creative attributes that can help as we solve life’s problems and make decisions. It is this type of creativity that enables us to plan different routes to get to the same destination, or how to fit in a trip to the supermarket when our schedule looks full.

It might not sound very creative, but this aspect of creativity relies on our ability to consider options and assess their suitability, as well as how to make decisions based on personal prior experience or what we have learnt formally or informally. These examples are known as “ small c creativity ” or “personal everyday creativity”.

Creative outcomes

While Big C creativity is valued and celebrated, it is often small c creativity that has allowed humans to flourish over thousands of years. It sets us apart from other animals and it is also the type of creativity which can be fostered through our education system and beyond into the workplace.

Traditionally, research tells us that creativity has been largely associated with the arts. Our previous research has shown that teachers are often able to give examples of creative activity in arts subjects, but find it harder to do so when asked to describe creativity in subjects such as science.

But there is a growing realisation that opportunities to be creative are found across a broader range of subjects. For instance, engineering provides opportunities to be creative through problem solving, and history gives the opportunity to think creatively about why events happened, and what motivated those involved.

Research has shown that training teachers to ask particular types of questions can be one way to help support creativity across the curriculum. This is because generating solutions to problems and explanations are creative processes, and these are vital if children are to have a “ complete education ”.

Our research also shows how it can be more helpful to talk about “thinking creatively” rather than “creativity”. This is because people tend to see thinking creatively as independence of thought and a willingness to take risks and seek new perspectives. It is also seen as a way to perceive new relationships, make new connections, and generate new ideas.

Moving creativity forward

The Durham Creativity Commission is a collaboration between Arts Council England and Durham University that aims to identify ways in which creativity, and specifically creative thinking, can play a larger part in our lives.

We are working alongside people in education, as well as businesses and arts and science communities, collecting their views on creativity and creative thinking. We will also be looking across these groups to determine whether or not there is a relationship between creativity and mobility, creativity and identity as well as creativity and well-being. We hope to be able to show that thinking creatively can not only be encouraged and furthered in a variety of contexts, but can also lead to positive outcomes on a personal, social and economic level.

In a rapidly changing world, creativity is important for people and society on many levels – it can help to generate personal satisfaction and be important for economic development. This is why creative thinking must be a key priority in educational environments.

In the same way, creativity must also be recognised and encouraged in the workplace. Because, after all, it’s creative thinking that leads to problem solving and innovation in a range of areas.

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Few things shape the human experience as profoundly or as pervasively as creativity does. And creativity raises a wealth of philosophical issues. Since art is such a salient domain of creativity, you might assume, at first, that the philosophy of creativity is the philosophy of art or aesthetics, or a branch thereof. But creativity invites questions of its own that go beyond the purview of those other fields.

Note that the adjective “creative” can be applied to three kinds of things: a person (“Beyoncé is creative”), a process or activity (“Tell us about your creative process”), or a product , where the latter is taken broadly to include an idea in someone’s mind or an observable performance or artifact (“That’s a creative design”).

Now suppose you are looking at a creative product, like a painting or sculpture. The philosophy of art may ask, “What makes this a work of art?” and aesthetics may ask, “What makes this beautiful?”. By contrast, the philosophy of creativity asks, “What makes this creative? Is it just that it’s new, or must it meet further conditions?” We may ask the same question not just of artworks but of any creative product, whether it be a new scientific theory, a technological invention, a philosophical breakthrough, or a novel solution to a mathematical or logical puzzle. Beyond creative products, we can ask about the creative process : Must it proceed without following rules? Is it conscious, unconscious, or both? Must it be an expression of the creator’s agency, and, if so, must that agency be exercised intentionally? Exactly how does the process manage to produce new things? Can it be explained scientifically? Furthermore, we can ask about creative persons, or more generally, creators. What does it mean for a person to be creative? Is it a virtue to be creative? What capacities and characteristics does a being need to have in order to be creative? Could a computer be creative? These are the kinds of questions animating the literature we’ll survey below.

Some of these questions have an empirical dimension, most obviously those which pertain to how the creative process is actually carried out. Thus, much of the research we’ll canvass falls under the inter-disciplinary umbrella of cognitive science, with contributions not only from philosophers but also from researchers in neighboring fields like psychology, neuroscience, and computer science.

1. The Philosophy of Creativity: Past and Present

2.1 challenges to the value condition, 2.2.1 surprise, 2.2.2 originality, 2.2.3 spontaneity, 2.2.4 agency, 2.3 is creativity a virtue, 3. can creativity be learned, 4. can creativity be explained, 5.1 preparation, 5.2.1 blind variation, 5.2.2 the default-mode network, 5.2.3 imagination, 5.2.4 incubation, 5.3 insight, 5.4 evaluation, 5.5 externalization, 5.6 worries and future directions, 6. creativity and artificial intelligence, 7. conclusion, other internet resources, related entries.

Given the significance creativity has in our lives and the deep philosophical questions it raises, one might expect creativity to be a major topic in philosophy. Curiously, it isn’t.

To be sure, some of the most prominent figures in the history of Western philosophy have been fascinated with creativity—or what we now call “creativity”. According to some scholars, the abstract noun for creativity did not appear until the nineteenth century—but the phenomenon certainly existed and many philosophers took an interest in it (McMahon 2013; Nahm 1956; Murray 1989; Tatarkiewicz 1980: chapter 8).

To name just a few examples: Plato (4 th century BCE) had Socrates say, in certain dialogues, that when poets produce truly great poetry, they do it not through knowledge or mastery, but rather by being divinely “inspired” by the Muses, in a state of possession that exhibits a kind of madness ( Ion and Phaedrus ). Aristotle (3 rd century BCE), in contrast, characterized the work of the poet as a rational, goal-directed activity of making ( poeisis ), in which the poet employs various means (such as sympathetic characters and plots involving twists of fate) to achieve an end (of eliciting various emotions in the audience). Margaret Cavendish (1623–1673) and Émilie du Châtelet (1706–1749) championed the creative use of the imagination to pursue freedom, overcome prejudice, and cultivate natural abilities even despite social and political oppression . Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) conceived of artistic genius as an innate capacity to produce original works through the free play of the imagination, a process which does not consist in following rules, can neither be learned nor taught, and is mysterious even to geniuses themselves. Schopenhauer (1788–1860) stressed that the greatest artists are distinguished not only by the technical skill they employ in the production of art, but also by the capacity to “lose themselves” in the experience of what is beautiful and sublime (Schopenhauer 1859: Vol. I: 184–194 and Vol. II: 376–402). Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) argued that the greatest feats of creativity, which he took to be exemplified by the tragic poetry of ancient Greece, was being born out of a rare cooperation between the “Dionysian” spirit of ecstatic intoxication, which imbues the work with vitality and passion, and the “Apollonian” spirit of sober restraint, which tempers chaos with order and form (Nietzsche 1872 [1967]). William James (1842–1910) theorized about creative genius exerts the causal power to change the course of history (Simonton 2018). This is just a glimpse of what each of these philosophers had to say about creativity, and many other figures could be added to their number.

Nevertheless, while some of the topics explored by earlier thinkers have come to occupy a central place in philosophy today—such as freedom, justice, consciousness, and knowledge—creativity is not among them. Indeed, “philosophy of creativity” is still a neologism in most quarters, just as, for example, “philosophy of action” and “philosophy of gender” were not too long ago. However, philosophical work on creativity has been picking up steam over the last two decades (as shown, for example, in a few important collections of essays: B. Gaut & Livingston 2003; Krausz, Dutton, & Bardsley 2009; Paul & Kaufman 2014; B. Gaut & Kieran 2018). We’ll now dive into those contributions, along with earlier work, beginning with what is perhaps the most basic question one can ask in this field.

2. What is Creativity?

As we noted at the outset, the term “creative” can be applied to three kinds of things: a person , a process , or a product (where a product could be an idea, performance, or physical artifact).

Most definitions focus on the product. According to one common approach, persons or processes are creative to the extent that they produce creative products, and a product is creative if it meets two conditions: in addition to being new it must also be valuable . Many theorists argue that novelty is not sufficient, because something can be new but worthless (e.g., a meaningless string of letters), in which case it doesn’t merit the compliment of being called “creative”. Immanuel Kant is often cited as anticipating this definition of creativity in his discussion of (artistic) genius. According to a common interpretation, Kant defines (artistic) genius as the ability to produce works that are not only “original”—since “there can be original nonsense”—but also “exemplary” (Kant 1790: §§43–50 [2000: 182–197]). (Hills & Bird [2018] challenge this reading of Kant.) This definition is so widely accepted among psychologists that it has come to be known as “the standard definition” of creativity in psychology. In practice, “creativity is often not defined” (J.C. Kaufman 2009: 19) in psychological experiments—more on this in §5 below. When psychologists do explicitly adopt a definition, however, they usually say that creative products are not only new, but also valuable in some way, though they variously express the product’s value in terms of its being “useful”, “effective”, “worthwhile”, “fit”, or “appropriate to the task at hand” (Bruner 1962: 18; A. J. Cropley 1967: 67; Jackson & Messick 1965: 313; Kneller 1965: 7; Cattell & Butcher 1968; Heinelt 1974; J.C. Kaufman 2009: 19–20; S.B. Kaufman & Gregoire 2016; Stein 1953; Sternberg & Lubart 1999: 3—for an overview, see Runco & Jaeger 2012). A few psychologists have suggested that the standard definition doesn’t fully capture the concept of creativity (Amabile 1996; Simonton 2012b). As for philosophers, at least one of them defends the standard definition with qualifications (Klausen 2010), but many of them challenge it, as we’ll soon see.

While it is uncontroversial that novelty is required for creativity, philosophers have refined that point. Certain examples may seem, at first, to suggest that novelty isn’t really necessary for creativity. Newton’s discovery of calculus was creative even if, unbeknownst to him at the time, Leibniz got there first—one of many examples of what are called “multiples” in the history of science (Simonton 2004). A beginning student’s idea that freedom is compatible with causal determinism might be creative even if, as she will soon learn, philosophers have been defending such “compatibilist” theories for millennia. However, examples like these do not force us to abandon the novelty requirement, but only to qualify it. Newton’s calculus and the student’s compatibilism were not new in all of history, but they were new to their respective creators, and that is enough for them to count as creative. In the terminology of philosopher Margaret Boden, these ideas are “psychologically creative” (P-creative) even though they are not “historically creative” (H-creative). Notice that P-creativity is more fundamental. Anything that is new in all of history (H-creative) must also be new to its creator (P-creative). Thus, creativity always exhibits psychological novelty, though it doesn’t always exhibit historical novelty.

Again, no one denies that a creative product must be new, at least to its creator. But as we’ll now see, some philosophers depart from the standard definition of creativity by rejecting the value condition ( §2.1 ), or by proposing some further condition(s) ( §2.2 ), or by doing both.

Some theorists have argued that although creative things are valuable, we shouldn’t build value into the definition of creativity, because doing so is not informative or explanatory:

Knowing that something is valuable or to be valued does not by itself reveal why or how that thing is. By analogy, being told that a carburetor is useful provides no explanatory insight into the nature of a carburetor: how it works and what it does. (Stokes 2008: 119; Stokes 2011: 675–76)

Those who maintain that value is required for creativity might reply that it doesn’t need to be informative or explanatory. Being a man is required for being a bachelor even though it’s not informative or explanatory to say that bachelors are men. Stokes notes that “creative” is a term of praise, and uses this point to argue that what is creative must be produced intentionally (since we don’t rightly praise what is unintentional or accidental)—an idea we’ll return to below. But the same point also seems to imply that what is creative must also have value (since we don’t rightly praise what doesn’t have value). And while the concept “carburetor” is value-neutral, as shown by the fact that a carburetor can be worthless or useless (if it’s broken), “creative”, one might argue, is a value-laden concept, like “progress”. Progress necessarily involves novelty or change, but we don’t praise change as progress unless it’s good change. Likewise, defenders of the value condition urge, creativity necessarily involves novelty, but we don’t praise novelty as creative unless it’s good novelty.

Other critics use counterexamples to argue that value isn’t necessary for creativity, the most prominent cases being ones of immoral creativity. (For a collection of essays by psychologists on the phenomenon of immoral or so-called “dark” creativity’, see D. Cropley et al. 2010). Putative cases of immoral creativity include creative accounting to cheat investors or creative testimony to mislead jurors, and the stock example in the literature is creative torture or murder. One can imagine novel and well-designed murders, as Thomas De Quincey once did in a satirical essay:

[S]omething more goes to the composition of a fine murder than two blockheads to kill and be killed—a knife—a purse—and a dark lane. Design, gentlemen, grouping, light and shade, poetry, sentiment, are now deemed indispensable to attempts of this nature. Mr. Williams has exalted the ideal of murder to all of us […] Like Æschylus or Milton in poetry, like Michael Angelo in painting, he has carried his art to a point of colossal sublimity. (De Quincey 1827; see also discussion in Battin et al. 1989)

Innovative ways of inflicting needless agony and craftily designed murders are not good (they have no value), and yet they can be creative. If this is right, then it seems to follow that creativity doesn’t require value.

One way of trying to save the value condition is by flatly denying that torture methods can be creative, and by denying more generally that creative things can be bad (Novitz 1999). But such denial seems ad hoc and implausible—“evil creativity” is not a contradiction in terms—and some have argued that this denial faces other problems besides (Livingston 2018).

Other theorists revise or qualify the value condition in order to accommodate examples of immoral creativity. Paisley Livingston (2018) proposes that a creative product only needs to be instrumentally valuable or “effective” as means to its intended end, regardless of whether that end is morally good, bad, or indifferent. Berys Gaut (2018) distinguishes between something’s being good (or good, period) versus being good of its kind . In his view, a new way of wielding blades and pulleys may be creative if it’s a good of its kind—good as a method of torture—even though it isn’t good. In order for something to count as creative, Gaut says, it doesn’t need to be good; it just needs to be good of its kind.

Alison Hills and Alexander Bird (2018) are unconvinced by such qualifications. They contemplate an elaborate torture device that ends up killing its victims immediately, “without enough suffering on the way”. The device may still be creative, they hold, even though “as a method of torture, it’s no good” (2018: 98). Indeed, they argue, a creative item needn’t be good in any way at all, not even for its creator. The ineffective torture device just described doesn’t satisfy its creator’s preferences, it doesn’t give him pleasure, it isn’t an achievement, it doesn’t contribute at all to his well-being—and yet, they contend, it may be creative, provided that it’s new and was produced in the right way. Exactly what “the right way” amounts to is the topic we turn to next.

2.2 Other proposed conditions

With or without the value condition, some theorists argue that a product must satisfy one or more further conditions, beyond being new, in order to count as creative. The four most prominent proposals are that the product must be (i) surprising, (ii) original (i.e., not copied), (iii) spontaneous, and/or (iv) agential. Each of these is a condition on the process of creativity. To be clear, we are still concerned with what it means for a product to be creative, but the proposals we’ll now consider say that in order for a product to count as creative, it must be brought about in the right way.

Margaret Boden holds that a creative product must be “ new, surprising, and valuable ” (2004: 1; cf. Boden 2010; 2014). It is perhaps most natural to assume that being surprising—like being new and valuable—is a feature of a product. But while Boden does think of creative products as surprising, her interest is more fundamentally in the underlying generative process, in how a creator manages to make something surprising. In her view, there are “three types of creativity”—combinatorial, exploratory, and transformative—“which elicit different forms of surprise, [and] are defined by the different kinds of psychological processes that generate the new structures” (2010: 1, italics added).

Combinatorial creativity occurs when old ideas are combined in new ways. Obvious examples include fictional hybrid creatures or chimeras: add wings to a horse (Pegasus), add the tail of a fish to a woman’s head and upper-body (a mermaid), add a lion’s body to a woman’s head and torso (Sphinx), and so on. Other combinations are found in analogies, such as when Niels Bohr compared an atom to the solar system. The term “combination” can refer either to the product of things combined or to the process of combining them, but Boden’s focus is on the process here, on the fact that one way to generate new ideas is to begin with old ideas and combine them in new ways.

To explain her other two kinds of creativity, Boden invokes the notion of a “conceptual space”, which is roughly a system comprising a set of basic elements (e.g., basic ideas or representations) as well as rules or “constraints” for manipulating or re-combining those elements. A conceptual space is not a painting, song, or poem, for example; it’s a way of creating a painting, song, poem, or theory. The rules or constraints are “the organizing principles that unify and give structure to a given domain of thinking”. And so a conceptual space is

the generative system that underlies that domain and defines a certain range of possibilities: chess moves, or molecular structures, or jazz melodies. (1994: 79)

We could think of a conceptual space as not just a set of thoughts but also a style of thinking defined by rules for generating new thoughts.

“Within a given conceptual space”, Boden observes, “many thoughts are possible, only some of which may have been actually thought” (2004: 4). Some conceptual spaces contain more possibilities than others. Consider different games. Tic-tac-toe is such a simple game that all of its possible moves have already been made many times over. The same is not true in chess, by contrast, which allows for a mind-boggling number of possible moves. The range of possible ideas is also practically inexhaustible in literature, music, the visual and performing arts, as well as the various domains of theoretical inquiry. And within those pursuits, there are various “structured styles of thought”—genres, paradigms, methodological orientations—which Boden thinks of as conceptual spaces.

Boden argues that the elements as well as the operating rules of a conceptual space can be, and in some cases have been, captured in computer programs. She has used this point not only to argue that computers can be creative (a topic we’ll return to below in §5 ), but also to suggest that we should employ the computational model of the mind in order to explain how humans create.

With her notion of conceptual spaces in hand, Boden says that exploratory creativity occurs within a given conceptual space. The new idea that emerges is one that was already possible within that space, because it was permitted by its rules. “When Dickens described Scrooge as ‘a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner,’” Boden writes, “he was exploring the space of English grammar” in which “the rules of grammar allow us to use any number of adjectives before a noun” (Boden 1994: 79). Dickens’s description may strike us somewhat surprising, unexpected, or improbable, but it doesn’t have an air of impossibility about it.

By contrast, Boden argues, another form of creativity does. In this kind of case, the creative result is so surprising that it prompts observers to marvel, “But how could that possibly happen?” (2004: 6). Boden calls this transformational creativity because it cannot happen within a pre-existing conceptual space; the creator has to transform the conceptual space itself, by altering its constitutive rules or constraints. Schoenberg crafted atonal music, Boden says, “by dropping the home-key constraint”, the rule that a piece of music must begin and end in the same key. Lobachevsky and other mathematicians developed non-Euclidean geometry by dropping Euclid’s fifth axiom. Kekulé discovered the ring-structure of the benzene molecule by negating the constraint that a molecule must follow an open curve (Boden 1994: 81–3). In such cases, Boden is fond of saying that the result was “downright impossible” within the previous conceptual space (Boden 2014: 228).

Boden’s definition of creativity has perhaps been most influential among researchers who share her intertest in computer creativity (e.g., Halina 2021; Miller 2019: ch. 3; du Sautoy 2019). In a variation of Boden’s account, one philosopher proposes that what makes a mental process creative is not that it actually involves “the recombination of old ideas or the transformation of one’s conceptual space”, but rather that the creator experiences the process as having one of those features (Nanay 2014).

Maria Kronfeldner (2009; 2018) argues that the process of making something creative must exhibit originality . As she uses the term “original”, it does not simply mean “new”; instead, it has to do with the kind of causal process the creator must employ. She motivates her view by asking why it’s the case that, as we noted earlier, psychological novelty is required for creativity while historical novelty is not. Why is it, for example, that Newton’s invention of calculus was creative even if Leibniz invented it first? The answer, of course, is that it’s because Newton didn’t copy his calculus from Leibniz. Insofar as Newton came up with calculus independently, on his own, then he exhibited originality in his discovery, even though someone else got there first. This originality, Kronfeldner argues, is essential to creativity.

Kronfeldner (2009; 2018) also argues that spontaneity is required for creativity. An idea occurs spontaneously to the extent that it is produced without foresight or intentional control. If you were to foresee the output of the creative process at the beginning of that process, then you wouldn’t need any further process to come up with it. So if an idea is creative, you cannot have fully seen it coming. To that extent, insight comes as a surprise, hence the common phenomenological observation that creative breakthroughs feel like they come unbidden or out of the blue: “Eureka!”, “Aha!”, a lightbulb turns on.

Gaut (2018: 133–137) agrees that creativity requires spontaneity, and he points out, as Kronfeldner does, that it comes in degrees. He explains that you do something spontaneously to the extent that do it without planning it in advance. If you are going to act creatively, he argues, you cannot set out to follow an “exact plan”—a mechanical procedure, routine, or algorithmic rule—which would give you advance knowledge of exactly what the outcome will be and exactly the means you'll take to achieve it. At the outset of a creative act, you have to be to some extent ignorant of the end, or the means, or both. That ignorance opens up room for spontaneity and creativity.

Some philosophers argue that an item does not count as creative unless it has been produced by an agent. Consider a unique snowflake with an intricate shape, a distinctive sunset with stunning layers of red-orange hues, a novel patterning of dunes across a wind-blown desert. All of these things are aesthetically valuable and new. None of them are creative, however, insofar as they all occurred naturally and were not made by an agent. Gaut uses examples like these to argue that creative things must be created by agents (B. Gaut 2018: 129–30; cf. B. Gaut 2010, and B. Gaut 2014b) and several other philosophers agree (Carruthers 2006, 2011; Kieran 2014a, 2014b; Stokes 2008, 2011, 2014; Paul & Stokes 2018).

Of course, many theists would maintain that everything in nature is the handiwork of an agent—namely, God—and so arguably it would make sense for them to regard a natural phenomenon as creative if it is valuable and new. For theists, the unparalleled beauty of nature is a reason to praise the Creator. But this only supports the conceptual point that creativity, by definition, requires agency. We may coherently regard valuable new things as creative if we attribute them to a creative agent, as the theist does with the natural world; otherwise, we can’t. So again, it seems, creativity requires agency.

This leaves open the question of exactly how a creator’s agency must be exercised in order for the result to count as creative. Some philosophers argue that the agent’s act of creation must be intentional . Suppose you are snowboarding on a powder day and, unbeknownst to you, the tracks from your board result in a pleasing new pattern as viewed from high above. The new pattern has aesthetic value, but it isn’t creative. And that is because you didn’t intend to make it. Underlying this intuition, as well as our intuitions about the natural phenomena above, is the fact that “creative” is a term of praise, and we do not extend praise (or blame) for things that are not done by an agent, or for things that an agent doesn’t do in some sense intentionally.

While a number of philosophers endorse some version of the agency requirement for creativity, many theorists make no mention of it, whether to endorse it or reject it, including all of the psychologists cited above. Further, at least two philosophers are willing to attribute creativity to natural phenomena like trees and evolutionary processes: Arnheim (2001) and, in recent work, Boden (2018). These latter theorists don’t discuss agency as such, but insofar as the natural phenomena they call creative are not the result of agency, their view would imply that agency isn’t required for creativity.

The four proposals we’ve just considered all say that a product must arise from a certain kind of process—a process that exhibits surprise, originality, spontaneity, or agency—in order to count as creative. While there is wide agreement among philosophers that creativity requires some special kind of process, not just a special product, there is no consensus on what is required of the process. Of the four process conditions described here, the agency condition seems to be the one that is explicitly endorsed by the greatest number of philosophers thus far, though even they are still just a handful. And as we’ve seen, the other proposed conditions have serious arguments in their favor as well.

Some philosophers argue that if any process requirement is correct, this has an intriguing corollary for judgements about creativity: Even when we are explicitly judging only that a product is creative, we are implicitly assuming something about the process by which it was made. Suppose, for illustration, that the agency requirement is correct—that being generated through an agential process is built into the very concept of a creative product. Suppose further that you are applying that concept competently. It follows that if you come across a captivating arrangement of stones on the beach and you judge it to be creative, you are at least implicitly assuming that it was created through an agential process. If someone later persuades you that the stones happened to be moved into place by the wind and waves, not by any agent but just by chance, then you may still regard the result as aesthetically interesting but you would have to rescind your judgement that it is creative. So if the agency condition is correct, whenever you point to some item and say, “This is creative”, what you are saying, in part is, “This resulted from a creative process”. Furthermore, on this view, analogous implications follow if any other process condition is correct (Paul & Stokes 2018).

Having considered what is required for something to count as a creative product , and whether it must be produced by a certain kind of process , we now turn to analysis of the creative person .

Some theorists suggest that creativity, as an attribute of persons, is an ability to perform creative acts or produce creative things (Boden 2004). Others argue, however, that creativity isn’t merely an ability. An ability is something you can possess without ever putting it to use. You might have the ability to learn Swahili, for example, without ever making the effort to learn that language, despite having ample opportunities to do so. Creativity is different in this regard. If someone has the ability to be creative but never uses that ability when given numerous chances to do so, we would not call that person creative. Creative people are not merely able to act creatively. They are, moreover, disposed to exercise that ability, such that they do act creatively, at least some of the time, when the occasion arises. On this view creativity is a disposition , also referred to as a trait (Grant 2012; cf. B. Gaut 2014b, 2018).

Philosophers have long distinguished virtues as a special subclass of dispositions or traits. In Western philosophy, the tradition of theorizing about virtues goes back to the ancient Greeks, and over the last half-century it has enjoyed a renaissance in ethics (see entry on virtue ethics ) and, more recently, in epistemology (see entry on virtue epistemology ) and aesthetics (Lopes 2008; Roberts 2018; Hills 2018). Traditional examples of virtues include wisdom, justice, temperance, and courage. Should creativity be added to the list?

The answer depends, of course, on what it means for a trait to be a virtue. At the very least, a virtue is a trait that is good or valuable. So whether creativity counts as a virtue in this minimal sense depends on whether creativity is necessarily valuable, a point which is contested, as we saw in the previous section. In fact, those who contend that creativity isn’t necessarily valuable often do so in order to prove that it isn’t a virtue.

But let’s suppose for the sake of argument that creativity is indeed a valuable trait. Is it also a virtue in some more robust sense? Virtue theorists commonly take their cue from Aristotle’s classic discussion in the Nichomachean Ethics . Citing justice and temperance as paradigm virtues, Aristotle asserts that a trait must meet at least three conditions to count as a virtue:

For actions in accord with the virtues to be done temperately or justly it does not suffice that they themselves have the right qualities. Rather, the agent must also be in the right state when he does them. First, he must know [that he is doing virtuous actions]; second he must decide on them, and decide on them for themselves; and thrid, he must also do them from a firm and unchanging state. ( EN II.4, 1105a28–1105a33)

So, for example, if you return something you’ve borrowed, that act exhibits the virtue of justice if and only if (1) you know that you’re returning what you borrowed, (2) you choose to do so because it is the just thing to do, and for no other reason, and (3) you are disposed to do the just thing across the range of circumstances when the opportunity arises. In addition to justice and temperance, Aristotle enumerates other ethical virtues like prudence, generosity, and courage, as well as the intellectual virtue of theoretical wisdom. In his view, each of these traits requires one to meet the three conditions above. While he does not consider whether creativity is a virtue, we may ask whether creativity also has these three criteria. Does one have to meet these three requirements in order to count as creative?

We’ll begin with the third requirement to set it to one side. Does a person’s act count as creative only “if he does it from a fixed and permanent disposition of character”? Examples suggest otherwise. Consider the poet Arthur Rimbaud, who abandoned poetry at the age of 21 to pursue a life of adventure. The fact that he never produced another poem after that does not count against the fact that he was a creative poet in his youth (B. Gaut 2014b). Unlike the Aristotelian virtues, then, creativity does not have to be a permanent disposition.

Even so, it would still be significant if creativity turned out to be like an Aristotelian virtue in meeting the first two requirements. And arguably, creativity does meet the first requirement. A person doesn’t count as doing something creative unless “he knows what he is doing”. This was already implied by the agency condition for creativity discussed earlier.

Where things get interesting is with Aristotle’s second criterion for virtue. In order for your action to count as virtuous, he says, you have to do it “for its own sake”—i.e., you have to do it because you value virtue as an end itself, and not as a means to some external reward like praise, money, status, fame, or winning a competition. Consider the virtue of generosity, for instance. If you give money to someone in need merely because it will make you look good in the eyes of your friends, then you aren’t really being generous. Your act may outwardly look like generosity, but it’s not the real thing. To exhibit real generosity, you have to pursue generosity as an end in itself; you have to help others just for the sake of helping others. Now contrast being generous with being polite. If you compliment your colleague on the good work she’s done, then even if you’re doing this in order to manipulate her, you are being polite to her. You can have an ulterior motive for being polite. So politeness is not a virtue the way generosity is.

Is creativity a virtue in this respect? That is, does being creative require acting creatively for its own sake? Matthew Kieran’s (2014a, 2014b, 2018) answer is a qualified yes. While he grants that you can be motivated by external rewards to exhibit “minimal creativity” in producing valuable new things, he maintains that “exemplary creativity” requires you to be motivated by the value of creativity itself. Thus, in his view, exemplary creativity is a virtue.

To support this claim, Kieran points to a research program in psychology which purports to show that creativity is driven by “intrinsic motivation” rather than “extrinsic motivation”. A classic experiment in this program is “the magic markers study”, in which kids end up producing less creative drawings when they are offered a prize (Lepper et al. 1973). Many other studies have reported similar results, which lead Teresa Amabile to conclude, at first without qualification, that creativity is enhances by intrinsic motivation and hampered by extrinsic motivation (Amabile 1983: 107).

Further research introduced complications. In some studies, subjects were given “immunization techniques” whereby they were first primed or trained to focus on intrinsically motivating factors like the pleasure or aesthetical value of engaging in artistic activities, and it was found that when they engaged in those activities afterward, external rewards actually enhanced their creativity.

As researchers interpreted these findings, offering reward can support one’s intrinsic motivation, provided that the reward works either to boost one’s sense of agency or to provide useful feedback about what’s working and what isn’t. Intrinsic motivation is still what fuels creativity, on this interpretation; rewards help only indirectly, when they reinforce intrinsic motivation. This lead Amabile to revise her hypothesis as the Intrinsic Motivation Principle (IMP):

Intrinsic motivation is conducive to creativity; controlling extrinsic motivation is detrimental to creativity, but informational or enabling extrinsic motivation can be conducive, particularly if initial levels of intrinsic motivation are high. (1996: 107)

Kieran takes this as evidence for his claim that creativity, or at least what he calls exemplary creativity, requires intrinsic motivation and is therefore a virtue in that respect.

Objecting to this proposal, Gaut cites evidence that extrinsic motivation is not always detrimental to creativity. In one study, students in an introductory psychology class came up with more creative short story titles if they were offered a financial reward (Eisenberger & Rhodes 2001). In the studies where immunization techniques were used, proponents of IMP argue that rewards enhance creativity only indirectly, by buttressing intrinsic motivation. But in this case no such techniques were used, and so it seems the prospect of a reward enhanced creativity directly.

Further, Gaut argues that this point coheres with the role that rewards seem to play in so many real-world cases of creative achievement. In their quest to discover the structure of the DNA molecule, Watson and Crick were driven “to imitate Linus Pauling and beat him at his own game” (Watson 1968 [1999: 46]). Picasso and Matisse were both spurred on by their rivalry with each other (Flam 2003: 37). Paul McCready says he was driven to invent his award-winning human-powered glider in 1977 because he needed the prize-money to pay off his debts:

I felt that I didn’t have the time to mess with such things, but I had this strong economic motivation to take an interest in man-powered flight, so I charged around trying to figure out a way to solve it. (quoted in Sternberg & Lubart 1995: 242)

One historian argues that in World War II the Poles beat the French in cracking the Germans’ Enigma Code because they were more terrified of German invasion (Singh 1999: ch. 4). Gaut quips: “Fear of death is a more powerful motivator than the intrinsic satisfactions of code breaking” (Gaut 2014b: 196).

Finally, Gaut points out that even if IMP is true, it is only a causal, probabilistic claim: intrinsic motivation is “conducive” to creativity; extrinsic motivation is “detrimental”. But for a trait to be a virtue, intrinsic motivation must be conceptually necessary for the exercise of that trait. If we learn that someone gave to charity just to enhance his reputation, we conclude that he wasn’t really being generous. By contrast, if we discover that someone created gorgeous artwork just for the fame and glory, we may then lose some of our admiration for her creativity, but we do not deny that she was being creative.

Kieran could remind us that, in his view, intrinsic motivation is not required for all creativity, but only for the special form of it that he calls exemplary creativity. Anticipating this reply, Gaut says that to distinguish between two forms of creativity is just to concede his point. There are not two forms of generosity, one that requires intrinsic motivation and another that does not. If your act of giving isn’t motivated by the right kind of reason, then it doesn’t count as an act of generosity at all. Thus, Gaut argues, to grant the possibility of non-exemplary creativity is to grant that, unlike generosity, creativity isn’t a virtue in the traditional Aristotelian sense.

Another way to examine relations between creativity and virtue is through the lens of virtue epistemology. Linda Zagzebksi defines a virtue

as a deep and enduring acquired excellence of a person, involving a characteristic motivation to produce a certain desired end and reliable success in bringing about that end. (1997: 137, italics added)

While there is a lot packed into this definition, what we’ll pinpoint here is the idea that virtue involves reliable success in achieving a desired end, and that the agent who is epistemically virtuous, in particular, is one who is reliably successful in achieving knowledge. Knowledge requires truth, of course, so an epistemic virtue is a trait that is “truth-conducive”. Epistemologists typically regard a process as truth-conducive to the extent that the beliefs it produces are more often true than false. But Zagzebksi proposes that a process or trait may be truth-conducive in a different sense, insofar as it is necessary for advancing knowledge in some area, even if it produces a very small proportion of true beliefs. Creativity, she claims, is truth-conducive in this sense, and thus it qualifies as an epistemic virtue (1997: 182). Also note the emphasis on agency. In contrast to contemporary western epistemology, virtue epistemology identifies the agent (rather than, say her beliefs) as the essential locus of epistemic valence; it is the agent who is epistemically good (or not). This emphasis comports well with the proposal, discussed above, that the creator’s agency is necessary for genuine creative achievement. A virtue-theoretic approach thus illuminates what may (as we will discuss again later) be essential to creativity, namely, a process that non-trivially involves a responsible agent.

We’ve seen that even after we fix a specific referent for the term “creative”—whether it be a person, process, or product—there are lively disagreements about what it means. These debates often seem to presuppose that the term always expresses the same concept, for which we can seek necessary and sufficient conditions. But we’ve also seen that some theorists distinguish between different concepts of creativity, corresponding to different senses of the term “creative”. In future work we may see theorists develop such pluralistic approaches in more detail. The trick, though, will be to give principled reasons for multiplying different concepts of creativity so that the analyses do not simply reduce to saying that anything goes.

There is a long tradition of thinkers who answer no to the question above. Two of the most influential are from the eighteenth century—Edward Young and Immanuel Kant—who were concerned specifically with genius , the capacity for achieving the very highest levels of creativity. In Conjectures on Original Composition (1759), Young says,

An Original may be said to be of a vegetable nature; it rises spontaneously from the vital root of genius; it grows , it is not made …. (1759 [1966: 7])

His idea is that originality emerges naturally from something implanted in us by nature, and it can only be hindered by learning. Young seems to think of learning as proceeding either through imitation or through the following of rules, and both, he thinks, are detrimental to originality. Regarding imitation he writes,

Born Originals , how comes it to pass that we die Copies ? That meddling ape Imitation … destroys all mental individuality…. (1759 [1966: 20])

And insofar as learning is “a great lover of rules”, he warns that it “sets rigid bounds to that liberty, to which genius often owes its supreme glory” (1759 [1966: 13]).

Kant makes similar claims in his Critique of Judgment (1790). Like Young, he takes genius to be a natural capacity, though a very rare one:

such a skill cannot be communicated, but is apportioned to each immediately from the hand of nature and dies with him. (1790: §47 5:309 [2000: 188])

It certainly cannot be learned through imitation:

genius is entirely opposed to the spirit of imitation . Now since learning is nothing but imitation, even the greatest aptitude for learning, facility for learning (capacity) as such, still does not count as genius. (1790: §47 5:308 [2000: 187])

Nor can it be learned through rules, Kant holds, for genius is

the talent (natural gift) that gives the rule to art … the inborn predisposition of the mind ( ingenium ) through which nature gives the rule to art. (1790: §46 5:307 [2000: 186])

For Kant, a genius does not follow rules; a genius invents the rules, indirectly, by creating exemplary works from which other artists might extract rules and undertake “a methodical instruction in accordance with rules” (1790: §49 5:318 [2000: 196]).

Young and Kant are concerned with genius, specifically, but if we extend their reasoning to creativity in general, as Berys Gaut (2014a) has noted, we can discern two lines of argument:

The imitation argument All learning is a form of imitation. Imitating someone or something is incompatible with being creative. So, one cannot learn to be creative. The rules argument All learning consists in the following of rules. Following rules is incompatible with being creative. So, one cannot learn to be creative. (2014a: 266)

Gaut points out, first of all, that both arguments are invalid. In both cases, what the premises would entail is that learning cannot be creative, that, in other words, you cannot learn creatively (a claim about how you can learn). But even if that were true, it wouldn’t follow that you cannot learn to be creative (a claim about what you can learn). If you absorb the advice of a creative writing manual then this act of learning may not itself be creative. But if the manual is effective—and we’ll see in a moment how it can be—then what you will learn is how to become more creative.

Gaut also challenges the premises of these arguments. To start with the first premise of the imitation argument, it simply isn’t true that all learning proceeds through imitation, as we learn many things through direct experience, trial and error, and many other means.

The second premise is also suspect. Something superficially close to it is true: mere copying is incompatible with being creative. But to the extent that we learn from others by imitating them, this is not merely a matter of copying them. When a child learns to speak the language of those around her, she doesn’t simply parrot the exact same sentences she hears; she absorbs the vocabulary and underlying grammar in a way that enables her to form new sentences of her own devising.

Now for the rules argument. Contrary to the first premise, it cannot be the case that all learning consists in following rules, Gaut argues, because for any given rule there will be hard cases where it is unclear whether or how the rule applies to them, and so an individual still has to use her own judgment in applying the rule.

The second premise is false too. Recall the distinction from §3 above between two kinds of rules. An algorithm serves as an exact plan, specifying both the outcome and the path for getting to it in exact detail. In contrast, a heuristic is a looser “rule of thumb” that leaves room for an agent to exercise her own judgment, choice, and creativity in determining whether, when, and how to follow the rule. While algorithms, in this sense, may preclude creativity, heuristics do not, which is why, as we’ll see below, the teaching of creativity so often takes the form of heuristics.

There is a sense in which the question at hand can be answered empirically: We can show that creativity can be taught simply by pointing to cases where it has been taught. Gaut himself discusses such examples as they occur in mathematics and fiction writing, which we’ll turn to below. But while such cases may suffice to show that creativity can be taught, Gaut further enriches our understanding by explaining how this is possible . He does so partly by articulating and then debunking the imitation and rules arguments to the contrary. But in addition, he offers the following positive argument to show that creativity can be taught and learned. He calls it “the constitutive argument” because it begins with his view of what constitutes or defines creativity itself.

The constitutive argument

• Creativity is a disposition—involving both the ability and the motivation —to produce things that are new and valuable, and to do so in ways that express one’s agency through “the exercise of choice, evaluation, understanding, and judgment” (Gaut 2014a: 273).
• At least some people can learn to enhance their creative motivation .
• At least some people can learn to enhance their creative abilities .
• So, at least some people can learn to become more creative.

Premise 1 recapitulates the point we’ve already seen Gaut and others defend (in §2.3 above), that creativity is not merely an ability but a disposition or trait, whereby the creative person is disposed or motivated to exercise that ability when given the opportunity.

In support of premise 2, Gaut argues that you can strengthen both your intrinsic motivation to be creative (when you take pleasure in your creative activities), as well as your extrinsic motivation to be creative (when you are rewarded with praise, grades, pay, etc. for your creative efforts).

Defending premise 3, Gaut points out that you can develop your ability to produce valuable new things by practising and strengthening the relevant skills. And this development can be substantially aided by learning certain heuristics.

Heuristics are indeed a staple of education in creative pursuits from mathematics (draw the figure; consider special cases; consider extreme cases; generalize the problem; look for a related problem, etc.—see Pólya 1945; Schoenfeld 1982, 1987a, 1987b) to creative writing (write what you know; be specific and detailed in describing sensory experiences; practice seeing similarities between dissimilar things; show, don’t tell, etc.—see Bell & Magrs 2001; Anderson 2006; Maybury 1967; S. Kaufman & J. Kaufman 2009). Gaut also identifies several heuristics that might be used to foster creativity in philosophy, even among children (cf. M. Gaut 2010; B. Gaut & M. Gaut 2011).

With this last theme, Gaut has a kindred spirit in Alan Hájek (2014, 2016, 2017, 2018), who has independently proposed that by using various heuristics, philosophers can enhance their abilities to make valuable contributions to their field, including ideas that are distinctively creative. It has been said that anyone of average talent can become a strong chess player by learning and internalizing certain chess heuristics: “castle early”, “avoid isolated pawns”, etc. Analogously, Hájek suggests, philosophy has a wealth of heuristics— philosophical heuristics —although they have not been as well documented and studied. Sometimes these take the form of useful heuristics for generating counterexamples, such as “check extreme cases”. Sometimes they suggest ways of generating new arguments out of old ones, as in “arguments involving possibility can often be recast as arguments involving time, or space”. Sometimes they provide templates for positive arguments (e.g., ways of showing that something is possible). Hájek offers a catalogue of such philosophical heuristics to show that, contrary to a common assumption, creativity, even in philosophy, can be compatible with, and enhanced by, following rules.

Upon observing the work of creative people, it is natural to wonder: How do they do that? How do people create? The issue we turn to now is whether we could, at least in principle, answer this question scientifically, using the methods of modern empirical psychology and other cognitive and behavioral sciences. Those who take a negative stance on this matter are not merely saying that, in practice, it would be exceedingly difficult for science to explain creativity. They are saying that it’s altogether impossible that science could ever explain creativity.

Hospers (1985) defends this kind of pessimism based on the variety and complexity of creativity, given that creativity occurs not only in art, but in science, theorizing of any sort, engineering, business, medicine, sport, gaming, and so on. At least two worries may follow. First, given the complexity of any one of these individual domains, one might worry that there are simply too many variables to allow for a clear explanation. Art provides a paradigmatic example. Consider an artwork that you judge to be masterful (a sculpture, a painting, a film). Now imagine attempting to describe or identify all the reasons for which you think it is masterful. Take as much time as you like but, the skeptic will urge, any long description you construct will invariably strike you as woefully incomplete by comparison to the artwork, and the experience thereof. So, if the creative achievements of artists, in all of their complexity, cannot even be adequately described, we have little reason to think that such achievements can be explained.

How can theorists respond to these skeptical worries? Both the complexity and generalizability worries might be partially disarmed by noting analogies between creativity and other phenomena. For instance, consider the range of bodily movement involved in some of the very domains of activities listed above: art, science, engineering, medicine, sport. The kinds of bodily action specific to these domains are complex and vary dramatically: the relevant physical movements of the surgeon are much different from the tennis player. However, it is not plausible that this complexity and variety precludes explanation of bodily action in those domains. It simply implies that some features of the explanation will be context-sensitive, that is, specific to that domain of activity. And further to the analogy: the fact that the long description of, say, the tennis serve is incomplete does not preclude it from being apt and explanatory. If this line of reasoning is sound for bodily action, why not also for creative action?

At this point, one might argue that while complexity and generalizability worries would only show that creativity is difficult to explain in practice, the very nature of creativity implies, more strongly, that it could never be explained, not even in principle. Resources to support this kind of pessimism may be adduced from various past philosophers. We need to tread carefully, however, since most of the figures we are about to consider were writing long before the rise of the relevant sciences, so they could not have made any explicit claim either way as to whether creativity could be explained by those sciences. Nevertheless, some of them did make claims which entail, or seem to entail, that creativity simply isn’t the kind of thing that could be explained through scientific inquiry as we understand it today.

The classic expression of such a view comes from Plato. In his dialogues, Plato features his teacher Socrates as a spokesperson for his own views, and in the Ion he has Socrates argue that poets do not produce poetry through knowledge or skill. When you exercise a skill ( technē ), you apply techniques, rules, or methods to perform a given activity, like charioteering, fishing, or commanding an army. In principle, one could explain these activities by identifying the techniques they involve, and a student or apprentice could learn these activities by applying and practicing those techniques. But poetry is not like that, in Socrates’ view. A poet can only imitate the application of rules or techniques, mimicking the surface appearance of skill. Voicing an idea that was familiar in Ancient Greek culture, Socrates suggests that poetry emerges instead through divine inspiration, whereby a human being is inspired —literally “filled with a spirit”, with a god or goddess, with a muse:

You know, none of the epic [or lyric] poets, if they’re good, are masters of their subject; they are inspired, possessed, and that is how they utter all those beautiful poems. … [They] are not in their right minds when they make those beautiful lyrics, but as soon as they sail into harmony and rhythm they are possessed by Bacchic frenzy. […] For a poet is an airy thing, winged and holy, and he is not able to make poetry until he becomes inspired and goes out of his mind and his intellect is no longer in him. As long as a human being has his intellect in his possession he will always lack the power to make poetry or sing prophecy. […] You see, it’s not mastery [ technē ] that enables them to speak those verses, but a divine power. That’s why the god takes their intellect away from them when he uses them as his servants, as he does prophets and godly diviners, so that we who hear should know that they are not the ones who speak those verses that are of such high value, for their intellect is not in them: the god himself is the one who speaks, and he gives voice through them to us. In this more than anything, then, I think, the god is showing us, so that we should be in no doubt about it, that these beautiful poems are not human, not even from human beings, but are divine and from gods; that poets are nothing but representatives of the gods, possessed by whoever possesses them. ( Ion 534a-d)

Socrates repeats this view in the Phaedrus : “Some of the greatest blessings come by way of madness, indeed madness that is heaven-sent” (244a). He adds that while a poet may have some kind of skill, anyone who aspires to make poetry purely by skill, without the madness or the muse, will fail (245a).

It’s important to note that “madness”, for Plato, is a supernatural affair. From the vantage of contemporary behavioral science, we think of madness—or rather, mental illness—as a pathology arising from some combination of genetic and environmental factors, and those factors can be studied scientifically. So even if creativity is linked to mental illness—a highly controversial proposition—it could still be entirely within the scope of science. However, Plato’s talk of “madness” does not refer to any naturally occurring pathology, but rather to the result of divine intervention: the poet is taken over or “possessed” by the muse and that is precisely why he is “out of his mind”. Plato’s poet suffers divine madness.

According to this story, then, the person we call a poet isn’t really a creator of poetry, but is merely the vessel through which a divine being delivers poetry. If it is literally true that the source of poetry is supernatural, then poetic creativity could never be explained by science, which is limited to the investigation of natural causes. (For more on Plato, see Asmis 1992.)

This kind of supernaturalism has enjoyed a long afterlife in Western thought. In ancient Rome, the Latin term “ genius ” referred to a guiding spirit that was thought to accompany each person throughout their lives. The genius of an artist would occasionally deliver art through that person in the manner of Platonic inspiration.

Conceptions of the artist take a new turn when the idea of genius is transformed in the eighteenth century. As we saw above, Immanuel Kant defines genius as a natural capacity that a certain kind of artist possesses innately and which partly constitutes that artist’s identity. So rather than saying that a gifted artist “has a genius”, Kant says that such a person “is a genius”. What distinguishes the genius is fundamentally an imaginative capacity—an ability to engage in a “free play” of imagination to produce artworks of “exemplary originality”. These works are exemplary not only in the sense that they have artistic or aesthetic value, unlike “original nonsense”; they are also exemplary in the more radical sense of providing an exemplar—a new paradigm and precedent—for lesser artists to follow. A work of genius sets a new standard of artistic value, and, looking to that exemplar, lesser artists may then extract techniques or rules for their own craft. The genius therefore “gives the rule to art”. In creating such works, the genius does not follow any rules or methods. Instead the genius creates art through a “free play of imagination”—where the terms “free” and “play” characterize the nature of an activity unconstrained by any pre-established methods or rules:

[G]enius … is a talent for producing that for which no determinate rule can be given, not a predisposition of skill for that which can be learned in accordance with some rule …. (1790: §46 5:307–8; 2000 trans., 186)

Kant thought that genius, so conceived, is limited to the fine arts, poetry being chief among them. Meanwhile, in Kant’s view, there is no room for genius in science, for example, where good theories and hypotheses must emerge from the careful application of scientific method, and so he said that even Isaac Newton, “that great man of science”, was not a genius. We’ll soon consider why this view might seem to entail that creativity is inexplicable, but first it will be helpful to bring another figure, Arthur Schopenhauer, who was deeply influenced both by Kant and by Plato.

Like Kant, Schopenhauer thought of genius as a natural capacity that is limited to the fine arts. He also echoes Plato’s sentiments about madness, famously stating that “genius and madness have a side where they touch and even pass over into each other” ( The World as Will and Representation , 1859, WWV I: 190), and that “Genius lives only one storey above madness” ( Parerga and Paralipomena , SW 2:53, PP 2:49). In a state of madness, Schopenhauer’s genius is like Plato’s poet in experiencing a momentary loss of self, but what displaces the self is not any divine being but rather a pure Idea which seizes the author’s being and becomes the object of both his fascination and his artistic expression:

We lose ourselves entirely in this object, to use a pregnant expression; in other words, we forget our individuality, our will, and continue to exist only as pure subject, as clear mirror of the object, so that it is as though the object alone existed without anyone to perceive it, and thus we are no longer able to separate the perceiver from the perception, but the two have become one, since the entire consciousness is filled and occupied by a single image of perception. ( World WWV I: 178–179, §34).

With their focus on genius construed as a natural capacity, figures like Kant and Schopenhauer abandon the supernaturalism of the Platonic muse. Nevertheless, they retain the idea that creativity—specifically genius-level creativity in the fine arts—is not a matter of exercising a skill or applying given rules, methods, or techniques.

As we noted earlier, these figures did not and could not have explicitly denied that creativity could be explained by the sciences of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, but they are commonly taken to represent such a denial (Kronfeldner 2018). Why?

Perhaps figures like Kant and Schopenhauer seem to make creativity, or at least creative genius, inexplicable insofar they suppose it to be innate and as they have no story to tell about how one came to acquire an innate capacity except to say that it was either an accident of chance (which is no explanation at all) or a gift from God (which again is not a scientific explanation). But while these figures seemed to think of artistic genius as being endowed entirely by nature with no contribution from nurture, modern genetic theory rejects that dichotomy. Instead of positing all-or-nothing natural abilities, behavioral scientists today think in terms of genetically inherited predispositions. In order for a genetic predisposition to develop into a trait with an observable phenotype, it needs to be triggered and shaped through a complex interaction between an organism’s genes and certain kinds of stimuli or environmental conditions. There are still open questions about exactly how, and how much, genes and environment feed into the development of any given trait, but it’s misguided to pose the binary nature-versus-nurture question as if the two were mutually exclusive (see Tabery 2014). Many researchers agree that some people have a stronger natural predisposition toward creativity than others, and that genius-level creativity partly stems from such a predisposition. Even so, the predisposition itself can be understood scientifically in terms of genetic heritability. (For a sampling of the relevant studies, see the essays collected in S.B. Kaufman 2013.)

Perhaps creativity seems inexplicable according to these accounts because it doesn’t follow rules or methods. In order to explain how to do something—how to build a boat or lead an army etc.—perhaps I need to be able to identify the rules or methods you should follow in order to practice and apply those skills. How-to explanations are instructions. But scientific explanations needn’t be instructions. A lot of good science explains how something happens—e.g., how heat melts ice or how a bat navigates its environment by echolocation—without explaining how to do it yourself.

Perhaps creativity seems inexplicable according to these accounts because creators themselves do not know how they create. But a scientific explanation needn’t be available through introspection. Most people cannot explain how their own digestive, circulatory, or perceptual systems work, but scientists who study those systems can.

Another line of thought is perhaps implicit in Kant but comes to the fore in Schopenhauer, who says that “the nature of genius consists precisely in the preeminent ability” to

consider things independently of the principle of sufficient reason , in contrast to the way of considering which proceeds in exact accordance with this principle, and is the way of science and experience. ( World WWV: I: 192, §36)

The principle of sufficient reason says that for every fact there is a cause which completely explains that fact. So the defining ability of genius is to see things in a way that transcends the causal order and defies all explanation.

A version of this view is defended more recently by Carl Hausman (1975 [1984], 1979, 1985) who frames it in terms of novelty that creativity involves. Hausman asserts that if a product is creative, it must be metaphysically novel (or in his terms, “genuinely novel”) in the sense that it cannot be predicted from, or explained by, prior events—not even in principle. Creativity is therefore incompatible with causal determination and causal explanation: “A causal view of explanation sets a framework for ways of denying that there is anything new under the sun” (Hausman 1984: ix). If something can be explained by prior causes, it is not metaphysically novel, and is therefore, in Hausman’s view, not truly creative.

Against Hausman’s skeptical charge, Maria Kronfeldner (2009) argues that creativity is compatible with causal determination. First, causal determinism does not preclude novelty or change. Determinism says the emergence of new kinds of things can at least in principle be predicted in advance. Importantly, though, when this prediction becomes true, then something new is added to the world. Of course, not all novelty instantiates creativity. The question is whether the kind of novelty involved in creativity must be metaphysical novelty, which is by definition incompatible with causal determination. This is doubtful. Notice that, by definition, metaphysical novelty defies natural laws. The production of something metaphysically novel would therefore require supernatural powers. Traditional Western religions conceive of God as performing the miracle of creation ex nihilo . But are we positing a miracle every time we describe a human artifact or achievement as creative? Surely not. As noted above, human creativity is manifest in things that are novel relative to the agent producing them or new to human history, but both of those kinds of novelty (psychological and historical) are perfectly compatible with causal determination. As Kronfeldner explains, creativity does not preclude causes in general; it only precludes certain kinds of causes. A creative product, she argues, must be original —which means that it cannot be produced through a process of copying something prior. And it must be spontaneous (not produced through a routine or mechanical procedure)—which means that it is to some extent independent of the agent’s intentional control and previously acquired knowledge. (For more on originality and spontaneity, recall §2.2 above). Intuitively, the causes of something creative cannot simply be a matter of copying or following a routine. But it may have causes nonetheless, and cognitive science can investigate those causes, at least in principle. Indeed, as we’ll see next, it is doing so in practice.

5. The Cognitive Science of Creativity

Although creativity has been relatively understudied by contemporary philosophers, as we noted in §1 , it has been receiving a great deal of attention from psychologists over the past few decades. In 1950, J. P. Guilford gave a presidential address at the American Psychological Association calling for research on the topic, and the field soon took off with waves of research investigating the traits and dispositions of creative personalities; the cognitive and neurological mechanisms at play in creative thought; the motivational determinants of creative achievement; the range of institutional, educational, and environmental factors that enhance or inhibit creativity; and more. Today, the blossoming of this field can be seen in the flurry of popular writing on its results; an official division of the American Psychological Association for the psychology of aesthetics, creativity, and the arts (Division 10); numerous academic conferences; dedicated peer-reviewed journals ( Psychology of Aesthetics , Creativity and the Arts ; Creativity Research Journal ; Journal of Creative Behavior ; International Journal of Creativity and Problem Solving ); special issues of journals ( Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences , Takeuchi & Jung 2019); literature surveys (Hennessey & Amabile 2010; Runco & Albert 2010; Runco 2017; Glaveanu 2014; Williams et al. 2016); textbooks (J.C. Kaufman 2009; Sawyer 2012; R. W. Weisberg 1986, 2006); and a comprehensive encyclopedia (Runco & Pritzker 2020). According to one overview, creativity has been studied by nearly all of the most eminent psychologists of the twentieth century, and “the field can only be described as explosive” (Albert & Runco 1999: 17). There is also a groundswell of new work on creativity in the fields of computer science, artificial intelligence (AI), and robotics.

The present section surveys empirical work in psychology along with some related work in neuroscience, while the next section ( §6 ) covers research in computing, AI, and robotics. Throughout, we’ll see that philosophers are actively in dialogue with these fields under the broad, interdisciplinary umbrella of cognitive science.

The vast body of empirical research of creativity can be seen as addressing a variety of issues, but the central question that concerns us here is the one we identified above as the challenge for explaining creativity: How are people creative? This question is analogous to a number of other questions in cognitive science: How do people perceive through sense modalities such as vision? How do they form concepts? How do they acquire a language? How do they make inferences? Just as psychologists investigate the psychological and neurological processes, systems, and mechanisms at work in these other mental operations, as well as the internal and external factors that either enhance or hinder these operations, they are doing the same for creativity. There is no pretension to achieving a complete explanation which would include each and every causal factor, and provide the basis for perfectly predicting creative outcomes in advance. But to the extent that we identify some of the relevant causal factors involved in creativity we thereby make progress in explaining creativity, just as we do with other features of the mind.

As we noted in §2 , the standard definition of creativity in psychology says that a product (idea or artefact) is creative to the extent that it is both new and valuable (“effective”, “useful” or “appropriate”), and, in turn, people and processes are creative to the extent that they produce new and valuable things. As we also noted, many psychologists do not actually employ this, or any, definition of creativity in conducting their research. In one sampling of studies of creativity published in peer-reviewed psychology journals, only 38% of them included an explicit definition of creativity (Plucker, Beghetto, & Dow 2004), as they rely in one way or another on the assumption that we know it when we see it. For example, many studies use the Consensual Assessment Technique (CAT), whereby experimental subjects produce things that are then rated for how creative they are by a panel of experts in the relevant field; so paintings are rated by professional painters, stories by published authors, etc. Many other research methodologies are used, as we’ll see below.

Empirical research on creativity departs in several ways from the traditional approaches that seemed to place creativity outside the scope of science. For starters, in stark contrast to Plato’s supernaturalism, empirical psychologists take creativity to be a completely natural phenomenon. Creative people may of course be “inspired” in the sense of feeling energized or filled with ideas, but rather than being literally “breathed into” by some god or muse, their thoughts and behaviors are presumed to have causes that are perfectly natural. While it is difficult in practice to identify these causes, they are not in principle beyond the reach of science.

Further, the range of phenomena that contemporary researchers countenance within the ambit of creativity is far broader and more diverse than the traditional focus on poetry and the fine arts, as creativity can be manifest in any kind of art or craft, as well as in the sciences, technology, entrepreneurship, cooking, humor, or indeed in any domain where people come up with ideas or things that are novel and valuable in some way or another. Departing from Kant, genius, the highest echelon of creativity, may be acknowledged in virtually any of these domains, not just in the fine arts. And while a few researchers (e.g., Simonton 1984, 1994, 1997, 2009; Root-Bernstein & Root-Bernstein 1999) venture to examine genius (so-called “Big-C” creativity), most of them focus instead on relatively ordinary creative feats (“little-c” creativity) including the kinds of story-making, drawing, and problem-solving that can be elicited on command from regular people in experimental settings. Some researchers propose that in order to understand how the mind generates new ideas, we should begin with even more rudimentary phenomena. For example, philosopher Jesse Prinz and psychologist Lawrence Barsalou focus on how we form new concepts to categorize the things we perceive, a process which they claim is creative, albeit in a “mundane” rather than “exceptional” way (Prinz & Barsalou 2002; Barsalou & Prinz 1997; cf. Child 2018).

Of course, many feats of human creativity, and the ones that are most interesting, go far beyond the basic formation of concepts. A major step toward explaining those feats is to recognize that what we call “the creative process”, as if it were a single, homogenous phenomenon, is in fact an assembly of multiple stages or operations. The simplest recognition of this fact is the Geneplore model which distinguishes just two stages: generating ideas and exploring ideas (Finke 1996; Smith, Ward, & Finke 1995). This distinction may be seen as echoing one made by philosophers of science in the early twentieth century, between the context of discovery and the context of justification (Popper 1934). Other theorists posit up to eight stages of creativity (for a summary of proposals, see Sawyer 2012: 89). But the most influential stage-theory traces back to Henri Poincaré’s lecture, “Mathematical Creation” (1908 [1913: 383–394]), in which he identifies four phases in his own innovative work as a mathematician:

• conscious hard work or preparation ,
• unconscious incubation ,
• illumination , and
• verification .

In his book, The Art of Thought (1926), the psychologist Graham Wallas endorses Poincaré’s four stages with corroborating evidence from the personal reports of other eminent scientists like Hermann von Helmholtz. Wallas’s scheme, as a development of Poincaré’s, is still the one that is most widely cited, and we employ a version of it here with some slightly different terminology and with two more substantive alterations: instead of “incubation”, we identify the second operation more generally as the “generation” of ideas, which may include unconscious incubation but may also occur in conscious, deliberate thought; and we add “externalization” for a total of five operations:

• Preparation —You invest a great deal of effort learning and practicing in order to acquire the knowledge, skills, and expertise required for work in a given domain.
• Generation —You produce new ideas, whether through conscious reflection or unconscious incubation.
• Insight —You consciously experience the emergence of a new idea, which would strike you with a feeling of surprise: “Aha!”, “Eureka!”
• Evaluation – You assess the idea to determine whether it should be discarded, retained, revised, or amended.
• Externalization —You express your idea in a concrete, observable form.

Artists provide compelling examples (though not the only ones) of each of these five operations. Such examples can be especially illustrative since they come straight from the artists’ mouths, as they reflect upon, and share, their creative process. The twentieth century painter Jacob Lawrence was known for painting in the style of visual narratives. Lawrence developed a system, much like a filmmaker’s storyboard, for the preparation of these paintings. He would lay as many as 60 wood panels on the studio floor, each with individual scenes and sometimes with captions. From these storyboards, Lawrence would generate and evaluate ideas and insights for a visual narrative, culminating in the paintings such as those in his Migration Series (see Whitney Museum, 2002, in Other Internet Resources ). Toni Morrison, the Nobel prize winning novelist, remarks on the labors and sustained effort required at the preparation, generation, evaluation, and externalization stages of a creative writing process. Commenting on her novel Jazz , she says,

I thought of myself as like the jazz musician—someone who practices and practices and practices in order to be able to invent and to make his art look effortless and graceful. I was always conscious of the constructed aspect of the writing process, and that art appears natural and elegant only as a result of constant practice and awareness of its formal structures.

She further notes that insight does not always come in a flash,

[I]t’s a sustained thing I have to play with. I always start out with an idea, even a boring idea, that becomes a question I don’t have any answers to. (T. Morrison 1993)

Writer Ishmael Reed claims that insight can come unexpectedly and in various contexts:

One can find inspiration from many sources. The idea of Japanese by Spring originated in a news item that claimed the endowment to a major university was traced to Japanese mob, the Yakuza. Flight to Canada began as a poem. The Terrible series began when I heard someone at party mention that there was a black figure, Black Peter, in the Dutch Christmas, and by coincidence I was invited to the Netherlands shortly afterwards, where I witnessed the arrival of Saint Nicholas and Peter on a barge that floated into Amsterdam with crowds looking on. I took photos of the ceremony …. (Howell 2020: 91)

And with signature profundity, James Baldwin suggested that all elements of the creative artistic process, from preparation to externalization, require a basic enabling condition: being (and willing to be) alone (Baldwin 1962).

As Wallas recognized (1926: 81), and as the above examples suggest, the “stages” of the creative process are not necessarily discrete steps that follow one another in a tidy sequence. Creative work is messy: over time you have numerous ideas, keeping some and abandoning others in multiple rounds of trial-and-error; you incubate new ideas for one problem while you’re busy externalizing your ideas for another; and your moments of insight, evaluation, and externalization trigger further generative processes that send you cycling through these operations many times over. It’s still important to distinguish these operations, however, because, as researchers are confirming, they are enabled and influenced by different causal factors.

Among the additional stages that researchers have posited, one of the most widely discussed is known as problem-finding. Psychologists often conceptualize creative thought in terms of problem-solving: the ideas generated within the creative process are seen as candidate solutions to a given problem—where “problems” are broadly construed to include any creative aim, like that of producing a particular kind of artwork or proving a particular theorem, etc. (Flavell & Draguns 1957: 201; Newell, Shaw, & Simon 1962). But following some early work by Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi (1965), many researchers came to appreciate that a lot of creative work is done not just in solving problems but in finding the right problem to begin with (Abdulla et al. 2020; Csikszentmihalyi & Getzels 1970; Getzels 1965; Getzels & Csikszentmihalyi 1975). While we agree that problem-finding often plays a key role in creativity, we have not assigned it to a separate stage, for the following reasons. Consider that you might settle on a problem to work on in either of two ways. On one hand, you might choose a problem to work on from a pre-existing menu of options. In that case, your choice would fall under the evaluation phase; it’s just that the idea you select is a problem that calls for the pursuit of further ideas. If, on the other hand, you develop a new problem, you would thereby be engaging in the generation of a new idea—the new problem—which may emerge in a moment of insight . Einstein and his colleague celebrated the novelty in such problem-finding:

The formulation of a problem is often more essential than its solution, which may be merely a matter of mathematical or experimental skill. To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle, requires creative imagination and marks real advance in science. (Einstein & Infeld 1938: 92)

Either way—whether you “find” a problem by picking a pre-existing one or by coming up with a new one yourself—problem-finding, though important, does not need to be seen as an additional operation beyond the five listed above; it’s just a special case of generation, insight, or evaluation.

The next five sub-sections will respectively examine the five operations of creative work. Notice that three of them—preparation, evaluation, and externalization—are uncontroversially ordinary activities that involve no apparent mystery; it’s a challenge to explain them but no one is tempted to regard them as inexplicable or as violating the laws of nature. As we saw in §4 , traditional skepticism about the possibility of explaining creativity is really focused on the two remaining phenomena: the generation of new ideas ( §5.2 ) and the experience of insight whereby an idea seems to come out of the blue, as if from a god ( §5.3 ).

It’s myth that outsiders are more creative. To put yourself in a position to create anything of value, you have to spend a great deal of time and effort acquiring the relevant knowledge, skills, and expertise. In what has come to be called “the ten-year rule”, Howard Gardner (1993) found that, on average, people spend about 10 years learning and being immersed in a domain before they make any significant creative contribution to it.

Though a certain amount of rote learning is required, gaining mastery in a field is not simply a matter of passively absorbing information. Much of it involves what Anders Ericsson calls deliberate practice, where you focus on tasks which are a little beyond your current abilities, but which you eventually conquer through feedback and repetition. Across a variety of domains—including physics, medicine, programming, dance, and music—Ericsson found that, on average, world-class performance becomes possible for people only after 10,000 hours of deliberate practice in their chosen activity. This finding also converges on the ten-year rule, because if you engage in deliberate practice four hours a day, five days a week, that would add up to 10,000 hours in ten years (Ericsson, Krampe, & Tesch-Römer 1993; Ericsson et al. 2006).

However, there seems to be a point at which too much formal training can dampen creativity. Simonton (1984: 70–73) has reported that the relationship between creativity and education level is an inverted-U, as too much schooling can reinforce familiar, pre-established styles of thought. Even so, the point remains that, before you run into diminishing returns, years of preparatory learning and practice are required for exceptional creativity.

5.2 Generation

In this section we discuss four kinds of mental capacities or processes that researchers have posited for generating new ideas.

Psychologist Donald T. Campbell (1960, 1965) proposed that creative thought proceeds through “blind variation and selective retention (BVSR)”. The “variations” he refers to are the various ideas that might occur to a creator, and the process of generating them is “blind” to the extent that it is not guided or directed by prior knowledge of how valuable or useful they will be: “Real gains must have been the products of explorations going beyond the limits of foresight or prescience , and in this sense blind” (Campbell 1960: 92, emphasis added). Once ideas have been generated, however, there is a subsequent stage where the creator selectively retains some of those ideas while discarding others, and Campbell says this stage is “sighted” rather than blind since it is guided by the creator’s judgments as to which ideas are valuable. While there is little debate that selective retention is sighted in this sense, there has been more controversy over whether the initial production of ideas is, by contrast, blind.

In his prolific body of work, Dean Keith Simonton has extended and refined Campbell’s proposal. His work nicely illustrates the interdisciplinary nature of creativity research as he, like Campbell, is a psychologist who engages with philosophers, some of whom are broadly sympathetic to the BVSR theory (Briskman, 2009; Nickles, 2003), while others are skeptical (Kronfeldner 2010, 2011, 2018). In earlier writings Simonton suggested, in a way Campbell did not, that BVSR is to be understood on the model of Darwinian evolution (Simonton 1999a, 1999b). But Simonton (forthcoming: 2–3) has come to rescind the Darwinian framing of BVSR, conceding that it is misleading. Reprising Campbell’s core idea, he says that a process of generating an idea is blind to the extent that it is not guided by “the creator’s prior knowledge of the variation’s utility” (Simonton forthcoming: 5; cf. Simonton 2011, 2012a, 2012b, 2018). He stresses that blindness is not all-or-nothing; it comes in degrees. An example of a highly sighted process is that of using the quadratic formula to find the roots of a quadratic equation: you know in advance that if you apply the formula correctly, it will yield the correct answer. Examples of relatively blind processes include remote association and mind wandering.

Despite the foregoing criticism of BVSR, recent neuroscientific studies suggest a network of brain activity that may serve the blind variation role. Brain activity doesn’t cease when one is not focusing on a task, when one is at rest, daydreaming, and so on. Following this insight, researchers have used neuroimaging methods to identify what is now called the default mode network (DMN). The precise anatomy of this network is still a matter of investigation, but it is supposed to be less active when one is focused on an external task (say a problem in the real world or in the lab) and more active when one is not so focused (Raichle et al. 2001; Buckner & DiNicola 2019). Notice then, that while this network is not creativity-specific—it is supposed to be active during memory recall, imagining future events, daydreaming, and so on—it does seem especially well-suited for creativity, and particularly for the random idea generation hypothesized by the BVSR (Jung et al. 2013). Creativity researchers in these fields often refer to this more “free” production of ideas as “divergent thinking”, and some argue on the basis of neuroimaging studies that creative thought requires cooperation between this mode of thought as well as that under “executive control”. As one team puts the point,

In general, we contend that the default network influences the generation of candidate ideas, but that the control network can constrain and direct this process to meet task-specific goals via top-down monitoring and executive control.. (Beaty, Benedek, et al. 2016; see also Mayseless, Eran, & Shamay-Tsoory 2015; Beaty, Seli, & Schacter 2019; Chrysikou 2019)

Notice how well this comports with both the Geneplore and the BVSR frameworks, perhaps identifying a way to keep some of the insights of both without commitment to a special creativity mechanism after all.

At least since Kant, theorists have identified an important link between creativity and imagination; indeed, the two are sometimes unfortunately conflated. Construed broadly, imagination can take various forms: sensory imagery, propositional imagination, supposition, free association. Berys Gaut (2003, 2009, 2010) and Stokes (2014, 2016) have both recently argued that, although imagination and creativity are distinct, imagination is especially well-suited to creative thought because of its characteristic flexibility. They both agree that imagination is decoupled from action (Gaut 2003) and “non-truthbound” (Stokes 2014) in the sense that, unlike belief, imagination is not limited by the proper function of accurately representing (some part of) the world. This freedom or playfulness of imagination is crucial to generating new ideas, since it allows one to safely “try out” hypotheses, conceptual combinations, strategies for solutions, and so on, without epistemic or behavioral commitment.

A series of studies illustrates both the need for non-truthbound capacities in creative thought, as well as the difficulty of employing them. When people—children and adults alike—are asked to imagine and draw non-existent houses, people, or animals, they depict things that are strikingly similar to their familiar counterparts in the real world: imagined people, for example, were generally drawn with some version of a head, limbs, eyes, and so forth. (Karmiloff-Smith 1990, 1992: 155–61; Cacciari et. al 1997; Ward 1994, 1995). This suggests that we are highly constrained in our creativity by the concepts we already have. Concepts of existing things are truth-bound: your concept of an animal, for example, has the proper function of accurately representing the range of things that are in fact animals. When you try to envision a new, fictional kind of animal, you begin with a mental image that exemplifies your existing concept of animal, which is why you are constrained by that concept. You then have to manipulate your initial image, varying its features in ways that abandon the aim of accuracy, using a capacity that isn’t truthbound. Generalizing this point yields the cognitive manipulation thesis , according to which creative thought requires cognitive manipulation, which involves thinking in ways that are not bound to the truth (Stokes 2014: 167). Plausibly, imagination is the mental capacity which is best suited to serve in this cognitive manipulation role. In the studies just cited, subjects must use their imagination to manipulate their existing concepts so as to form new ideas.

Recent empirical research on visual imagery seems to corroborate this claim. Various studies have identified positive correlations between creative problem solving and visual image generation, image transformation, and vividness of imagery (Finke 1990, 1996; Zemore 1995; R. Morrison & Wallace 2001; Pérez-Fabello and Campos 2007). A more recent study highlights the importance of image transformation ability—the ability to mentally manipulate a given image—and the ability to achieve high degrees of visual creativity. Further, the results of this study suggest that although vividness negatively correlates with the practicality of images created, vividness positively correlates with novel idea generation (Palmiero et al. 2015). The novelty involved is minimal, but again it appears that imagination, here in the form of imagery, well serves the role of cognitive manipulation.

Stokes observes further that we can voluntarily control imaginative states (in contrast with other non-truthbound states, like desires and wishes). And because imagination connects in important ways with inferential systems, as well as affective systems, the thoughts it produces can often be integrated with knowledge and skills to formulate an innovative strategy or solution to a problem. Finally, this role for imagination in creativity is not exclusive to the rich creativity of artists and scientists, but indeed seems to characterize the minimally creative behavior that we all enjoy. This claim is partly motivated by the empirical research just discussed. Here, as in the more radical cases, instances of novel achievement or learning by subjects requires more than rote memorization; it requires cognitive manipulation of the information in the relevant conceptual space (e.g., combining concepts about houses and persons). This kind of cognitive activity is best done by using the imagination.

Peter Carruthers has argued that imagination is important to creativity on evolutionary grounds (2002, 2006; see also Picciuto & Carruthers 2014). Like the above analyses, he focuses on the playfulness of imagination. Pretend play typically develops early in childhood in humans. And imagination in adults provides the right mechanisms for generating and exploring ideas (just as required by the Geneplore model). Carruthers argues that imagination evolves under adaptive advantage as a kind of practice for adult creativity—and may have been accordingly selected for, aligning with the putative creativity explosion of 40,000 years ago (Mithen 1996, 1998; Harris 2000). This, he argues, is the most parsimonious explanation of both the emergence and the ubiquity of creativity in the human species. See B. Gaut (2009) for a critique of Carruthers’ analysis.

While we may generate ideas consciously in imagination, we may also do so during a period of unconscious incubation, when we are focused on something else. This point is illustrated by any number of famous stories, though some are probably embellished after years of retelling. Isaac Newton witnessed an apple fall from a tree (on some accounts, falling upon Newton’s head) and thereby found the insight for his laws of gravity. August Kekulé is reported to have discovered the structure of the benzene molecule while daydreaming of a serpent circling upon and seizing its own tail. Henri Poincaré alleged that, while boarding a bus, he enjoyed a needed flash of insight that led to his discovery of non-Euclidian geometry. Richard Feynman, the Nobel prize winning physicist, claimed to find inspiration while sipping soda and doodling at adult clubs. And Einstein reported:

I was sitting in a chair in the patent office at Bern when all of a sudden a thought occurred to me. “If a person falls freely he will not feel his own weight”. I was startled. This simple thought made a deep impression on me. It impelled me toward a theory of gravitation. (Einstein, “Kyoto Lecture”, translated and quoted in Pais 1982: 179)

In each case, someone is suddenly struck with a flash of insight about one thing while engaged with something else entirely. The empirically-minded theorist rejects the notion that such ideas arise ex nihilo or through divine possession. So how are they explained in terms of natural mental phenomena?

Arthur Koestler, partly inspired by the work of Henri Poincaré (1908 [1913]), hypothesized that during creative thought processing, ideas are combined in novel ways, and this combination is performed largely unconsciously , by what Poincaré called the subliminal self (Koestler 1964: 164–5). For Poincaré there are only two ways we might think of the unconscious. One, we might think of the unconscious in Freudian terms, as a self capable of careful and fine discernment and, importantly, distinctions and combinations that the conscious self fails to make. Alternatively (and this is the option favored by both Poincaré and Koestler), we can think of the unconscious as a sub-personal automaton that mechanically runs through various combinations of ideas. Importantly, this unconscious process (or, if one likes, automaton) generates random conceptual associations and ideas. And these can then be further considered, examined, explored, and revised.

In the context of creativity in particular, there is precedent, or at least overlap, in Colin Martindale’s cortical arousal theory. This theory centers around the nature of focuses of attention (Martindale 1977, 1981, 1995, 1999; Martindale & Armstrong 1974; Martindale & Hines 1975). Martindale proposes a multi-stage model of problem solving, which if the right mechanism is possessed, leads to creative thought. In the initial stages, information is gathered, various approaches are taken to the problem, and there is a high level of cortical arousal with a narrow focus of attention. As information increases and the problem remains unsolved, two kinds of responses may occur. The first kind of response is to keep attempting the same solutions to the problem such that the arousal and attention focus stay high and narrow, respectively. Alternatively, some persons experience a decrease in cortical arousal coupled with a wider range of attention focus. Information then enters what Martindale calls primary processing: a kind of subconscious cognition not under the complete control of the agent. It is this kind of processing, and the arousal mechanisms that enable it, that distinguish creative insight or achievement from non-creative ones. The first kind of response typically results in frustration and failure (fixation), while the second often results in creative insight.

Some early studies on these phenomena centered around a familiar observation. Consider the tip-of the-tongue phenomenon, when you know that you know some bit of information (an actor’s name or the title of a song) but, try as you may, you just can’t recall it. It often helps to give up for a moment and allow the memory to surface without effort. Researchers found that the same approach—forgetting about a problem—works well to overcome fixation on ineffective ideas so as to allow the actual solution to pop up. Smith and Blankenship primed two groups of subjects with inappropriate or misleading solutions to problems. They left one group to continue struggling with the same problem, while they distracted the second group with a distinct but cognitively demanding task. The second group thereby overcame fixation and outperformed the first group when returning attention to the original target problem (Smith & Blankenship 1989, 1991; see also Smith, Ward, & Finke 1995).

These behavioral methods can be combined with contemporary understanding of neural plasticity and the effects of cognitive effort and attention. Neuroscientists have long recognized that the human brain is plastic —stable in genetic material but constantly undergoing functional change and development in neural networking in response to external stimuli, with the work of Donald Hebb in the middle of the twentieth century being one important early precedent. As Hebb put it, neural cells that “fire together, wire together”. Cell assemblies thus form as a result of the synchrony and proximity of the firing of individual cells.

[A]ny two cells or systems of cells that are repeatedly active at the same time will tend to become “associated”, so that activity in one facilitates activity in the other. (Hebb 1949 [2002: 70])

And continued attention to a problem, what some have called cerebral effort , causes changes in the networking of the brain’s cortex (Donald 2001: 175–8). Importantly, these changes can continue to take place, to “reverberate” even after one has removed attention from that problem. This motivates a simple (and somewhat unsurprising) hypothesis: attending to and performing cognitive tasks affects neural networking (Posner et al. 1997; Posner & Raichle 1994; see also Kami et al. 1995), and those changes can involve strengthening of synaptic connectivity (which correlate with conceptual connections and associations). These changes, again, can occur both when one is attending to a task and after one has diverted attention elsewhere. And, finally, the latter goes some way to explain a moment of insight after incubation (the so-called incubation effect): when one returns attention to the target problem, new or newly strengthened neural connectivity (as a result of previous cognitive effort) can give rise to a new idea. And because that neural process is not in any sense done by you, the emergence of the new idea can feel like a burst of insight (see Stokes 2007; Thagard & Stewart 2011; Ritter & Dijksterhuis 2014; and Heilman 2016).

There are also various recent studies on closely related topics: on mindwandering and spontaneous thought (Christoff et al. 2016; Irving & Thompson 2018; Murray et al. forthcoming), on so-called “divergent thinking” (Mekern et al. 2019), and more on the neural basis of insight (Jung-Beeman et al. 2004; Bowden et al. 2005; Limb & Braun 2008; Dietrich & Kanso 2010; Kounios & Beeman 2014).

It should be intuitive that creativity often involves solving problems and doing so in interesting or surprising ways. In exceptional cases, the individual identifies a problem solution that perhaps no one (including the creator) anticipated. But there are countless examples of more mundane instances of problem solving, where the solution may be surprising (or especially interesting) to only a few individuals, perhaps even only to the problem solver. One broad, standard experimental method used by researchers thus focuses on insight in problem solving. Some problems (thankfully!) can be solved by straightforward appeal to memory, or by applying some technique or method of calculation in a mechanical way. Solving the problem may still take time and effort, but the solution will come so long as one executes the appropriate strategy or applies the relevant knowledge from memory. An insight problem, by contrast, typically requires something new on the part of the individual, and one must often “change views” of the structure of the very problem. Predictably, there are a variety of definitions or characterizations of “insight” in the literature. Here are two recent, representative examples. Bowden et al. suggest that insight occurs

when a solver breaks free of unwarranted assumptions, or forms novel, task-related connections between existing concepts or skills. (Bowden et al. 2005: 322)

More recently, Kounios and Beeman write,

we define insight as any sudden comprehension, realization, or problem solution that involves a reorganization of the elements of a person’s mental representation of a stimulus, situation, or event to yield a nonobvious or nondominant interpretation. (2014: 74)

There are at least two, separable components of insight thus understood. First, an insight problem requires non-mechanical or non-algorithmic solution, and this in turn requires some kind of conceptual reorganization. A hackneyed phrase may come to mind here: one has to “think outside the box”.

The second element of insight as understood here is subjective or phenomenological. An insightful problem solution is often described as occurring suddenly and with little or no apparent effort. It is an aha moment, even if less dramatic than the traditionally romanticized Eureka moment. One way researchers have tested for this subjective feature is to ask subjects to report nearness or “warmth” relative to solving a problem. They find that for insight problems, by contrast to non-insight problems, subjects report that as they near solution they experience abrupt changes in the sense of warmth for solving the problem (Metcalfe & Wiebe 1987; see also Dominowski 1995; Laukkonen & Tangen 2018). More recently, researchers have begun to employ neuroimaging techniques to study insight and insightful problem solving (Luo & Niki 2003; Mai et al. 2004).

First, researchers have developed methods for using subjective report, where subjects rate whether they felt that they used insight in solving a designated problem (Bowden et al. 2005). And second, and coupled with those report methods, researchers have developed simple problems that can be solved with insight. One such example is the “Compound remote associates problem” (CRA). Here is an example of a CRA problem:

Each of the three words in (a) and (b) below can form a compound word or two-word phrase with the solution word. The solution word can come before or after any of the problem words. french, car, shoe boot, summer, ground [ 1 ] (Bowden et al. 2005: 324)

Because of their simplicity, these problems can be solved unambiguously and quickly, and with this speed comes better potential for neuroimaging study. In instances where subjects report insight solutions to these kinds of problems,

EEG shows a burst of high-frequency (gamma-band) EEG activity over the right temporal lobe, and fMRI shows a corresponding change in blood flow in the medial aspect of the right anterior superior temporal gyrus (Jung-Beeman et al. 2004). (Kounios & Beeman 2014: 78)

The question for neuroscientists is whether this convergence of evidence is sufficient to establish neural correlates of insight.

A moment of “insight” can be misleading, as what initially strikes you as a promising idea may ultimately turn out to be a dead end. You may have countless ideas in the course of undertaking a complex creative project, while only a few of them will make the final cut. A crucial part of your creative work therefore consists in evaluating your ideas. For any idea that occurs to you, you might have to ask: Will this work? Is it new? How does it fit in with other parts of your project? Do you have the resources and abilities to bring it to fruition? Is it worth the time and effort?

Much of the research on this phase of the creative process is concerned to identify and categorize the range of factors that people take into consider as they evaluate their ideas (Blair & Mumford 2007; Dailey & Mumford, 2006). Unsurprisingly, those factors vary from one domain to another. New culinary dishes are judged by factors like aroma, taste, texture, color, presentation (Horng & Lin 2009), whereas improved musical performances are judged according to their complexity, originality, and technical virtuosity (Eisenberg & Thompson 2003), and so on. Your understanding of the relevant factors is part of your internalized model of the domain (Bink & Marsh, 2000; Csikszentmihalyi & Sawyer 1995). And since you acquired and refined that model through years of preparation, your capacity for evaluation is largely a consequence of your efforts from that initial stage.

Somewhat more surprisingly, there is some evidence that people who are good at evaluating ideas are also good at generating them (Runco 1991; Runco & Dow 2004; Runco & Chand 1994; Runco & Vega 1990).

Other studies support what Sawyer calls Sawyer (2012: 131) calls the productivity theory, which says that the best way to get good ideas is to have lots of ideas and just throw away the bad ones. In historiometric studies, Simonton found that creators who yielded the greatest number of works over their lifetimes were mostly likely to produce works that were significant and stood the test of time. Even more striking, he discovered that, from year to year, the periods when creators were most productive were also the ones in which they were most likely to do exceptional work (Simonton 1988a, 1988b). Linus Pauling, who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1954 as well as the Nobel Peace Prize in 1962, summed up the productivity theory in a famous remark:

If you want to have good ideas you must have many ideas. Most of them will be wrong, and what you have to learn is which ones to throw away. (quoted by Crick 1995 [time 34:57])

The final operation of the creative process—externalizing ideas—may involve any number of disparate activities, which Keith Sawyer sums up as follows:

Creativity research has tended to focus on the early stages of the eight-stage creative process—particularly on the idea-generating stage. But a lot has to happen to make any idea a reality. Successful creators are skilled at executing their ideas, predicting how others might react to them and being prepared to respond, identifying the necessary resources to make them successful, forming plans for implementing the ideas, and improvising to adjust their plans as new information arrives. These activities are important in all creativity, but are likely to be even more important in practical domains such as technological invention and entrepreneurship (Mumford, 2003; Policastro & Gardner, 1999). (Sawyer 2012: 133–4)

It may be tempting to assume that the real creative work is finished once a new idea emerges in the moment of insight, and that externalization is just the uncreative, mechanical chore of making the idea public. But a closer look at the phenomenon reveals that externalization is often integral to creativity itself.

Vera John-Steiner (1985) interviewed, and examined the notebooks of, over 70 exceptional creators (ranging from author Anaïs Nin to composer Aaron Copland), and consulted the notebook of another 50 eminent historical creators such as Leo Tolstoy and Marie Curie. A recurring theme throughout was that at the beginning of each creative endeavor and continually throughout its development, creators manipulate and build upon their impressions, inklings, and tentative hunches using sketches, outlines, and other external representations.

Perkins (1981) corroborated this finding by analyzing the 61 sketches Picasso made en route to painting his famous work, Guernica , as well as Beethoven’s musical drafts and Darwin’s notebooks. In each case, the artist progressed by engaging with external representations.

Other studies found that people discovered and solved more problem when they used sketches during a task (Verstijnen 1997), and that people come up with better ideas for improving inventions when they work with visual diagrams (Mayer 1989).

One reason externalization is so vital to substantial creative work is because of our limited capacity to consciously hold and manipulate information in our minds. It helps to offload ideas and store them in the form of physical symbols and expressions in order to free up space for the mind to examine those ideas at arm’s length while entertaining new ones. Thus research shows that internal strategies like mental visualization can help with relatively simple tasks, but for more complex projects externalization is key (Finke et al. 1992: 60).

We close our survey of the cognitive science of creativity with a brief discussion of some general worries about current work, and some prescriptions for future research.

Some have worried about the validity of the psychometric measures employed in neuroimaging studies. One such concern regards the confidence that we should have that the tests employed are really tracking creative behavior. This is of course a general problem, partly symptomatic of the challenges that come with defining creativity (like other phenomena) and with the special challenges that attach to features such as insight and incubation. But there are particular challenges that come with using neuroimaging technologies such as fMRI scanning to attempt to study naturally occurring phenomena. Use of this technology is almost invariably ecologically invalid—one cannot run an fMRI in the artist’s studio. And because of the cost and sensitivity of these imaging systems, the correlative behavioral tests are often significantly abbreviated. This may impose constraints on space for occurrence of the target phenomena—novel thinking and insight—during the imaging session. As one researcher worries,

Too often single tests are used—or even single items! This is contrary of psychometric theory in general (where longer tests allow errors to cancel themselves out and are thus more reliable) and true of the research on creativity assessment in particular, where differences among items and even tests are common (Richards, 1976; Runco, Mohamad, & Paek, 2016 [sic should be Runco, Abdulla et al. 2016). Results from any one test will not generalize to other tests. Results from a single item of course have even less generalizability. (Runco 2017: 309–310; see also Abraham 2013)

Another empirical researcher criticizes what he sees as “the wild goose chase” in the neuroscience of creativity. Arne Dietrich (2019) recapitulates the above worries about validity of psychometric measures and their abbreviated and piecemeal application. He further worries about the now dominant emphasis on divergent thinking, and the default mode network (as well as the now mostly abandoned emphasis on notions such as madness, the right brain, and REM sleep). Dietrich’s concern in each case is that the research emphasis is unhelpfully myopic, and that while the imaging methods are sound and state of the art, the characterization of creativity is not. He decries the temptation to identify what may be a feature of creativity with the whole of the phenomenon. Divergent thinking, he suggests, is likely a cluster of various mental phenomena rather than a singular one, and

there is no effort underway to dissect divergent thinking and link it to the kinds of cognitive processes we use to operationalize all other psychological phenomena, such as working memory, cognitive control, semantic memory, perceptual processes, or executive attention. (2019: 37)

Notice, then, that the “wild goose” for Dietrich is to hastily conclude and then center studies around a singular, special creativity mechanism.

Dietrich also offers various prescriptions for remedy. To combat myopia, he suggests (as some have in other disciplines, e.g., Boden 2004) a plurality of types of creativity (and/or features of creativity). He cautions,

Since different types of creativity contain opposing brain mechanisms—focused versus defocused attention, for instance—any all-encompassing claim about creativity in the brain will almost certainly qualify as phrenology. (2019: 39)

He pairs this with a prescription for a more interdisciplinary approach to the topic. Others in the field have made the same prescription, advocating a “systems” approach sensitive both to the multi-faceted nature of creativity and the value of theorizing at multiple levels of explanation (Hennessy & Amabile 2010).

These directives for future research seem hard to resist. At the very least, it would seem advantageous to ensure that the full range of empirical method across the behavioral and brain sciences is communicated across the relevant sub-disciplines. This would ideally lead to better collaboration amongst such researchers. What’s interesting is that a cousin to this prescription is not well heeded by the same researchers advancing it here. However little crossover there is between, say, behavioral psychologists and neuroscientists in studies of creativity, there is comparatively even less crossover (almost none) between the psychological sciences and computational approaches to creativity. The next section thus begins by highlighting this “gap”, and identifying some of the potentially fruitful areas for interdisciplinary work on that front. It then continues with a discussion, generally, of research on creativity in the fields of computing science, artificial intelligence, and robotics.

Just as we find in psychology and neuroscience, there is a rich research literature on creativity in artificial intelligence and computer science, with devoted journals, special issues, and conferences ( The Journal of Artificial Creativity , The Journal of Creative Music Systems , Digital Creativity , Minds and Machines special issue on Computational Creativity [Gervás et al. 2010], The International Conference on Computational Creativity ). The question we focus on here is whether a computer could be creative . As background, it is worth considering how theorists approached the analogous question as to whether a computer could think .

Although theorists of various kinds have asked whether machines can think since at least the early modern period, the most important conceptual innovations on the topic came from Alan Turing, centering around his 1950 paper “Computing machinery and intelligence”. Here Turing provided a number of groundbreaking insights. Perhaps most familiar is Turing’s “imitation game”, now commonly known as “the Turing Test”. In brief, the test involved an unknowing interrogator who could ask an open-ended series of questions of both a human and a computer. If the interrogator could not distinguish computer from human, Turing postulated that this would suffice to illustrate genuine intelligence. There is no shortage of controversy regarding the aptness of the test for intelligence, and arguably no computer has yet passed it. (For more thorough discussion of Turing and the Turing test see entries on Alan Turing , Turing machines , and the Turing test ).

Successful performance in Turing’s game would require remarkable behavioral flexibility. And it is highly operational: specify a threshold for imitation, and then simply allow the interrogator to ask questions, then assess performance. If the behavior is sufficiently flexible to fool the interrogator, Turing claimed, the behavior was intelligent and, therefore, the computer intelligent.

With this background in mind, what are some of the cases in AI research lauded as success cases, and how do they align with some of Turing’s criteria?

Many of the familiar success cases are highly specialized. Deep Blue defeated chess master Garry Kasparov (Kasparov & Greengard 2017); some language processing systems managed to navigate social contexts such as ordering from a menu at a restaurant (Schank & Abelson 1977); AlphaGo more recently defeated the world champion Go player. This specialization is both a virtue and a limitation. On the one hand, achievement in such a specialized domain implies an exceptional amount of detailed memory and skill. On the other hand, this knowledge and skill does not generalize. Neither Deep Blue nor Alpha Go could successfully order from a menu, along with countless other basic human tasks. Put in terms of Turing’s imitation game, these systems would fail miserably to fool a human, or even remotely imitate one (except for their performance in a very narrow domain). What about systems such as IBM’s Watson , which famously won (against humans) on the television game show Jeopardy! This performance is more general, since topics on the show vary widely, and seemed to require both language comprehension and some minimal reasoning skills (see entry on artificial intelligence for extended discussion). Even so, Watson’s capabilities are still quite limited: it cannot make fluid conversation “in real time” and is largely insensitive to temporal and other factors that come with context.

There are many, many more examples of computational systems that display sophisticated behavior, from the highly specialized to the more general. On the language processing front, very recent AI systems such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s LaMDA significantly outperform the systems described above. To be clear, these are remarkable achievements that display substantial complexity and, it appears in some cases, significant flexibility—features Turing highlighted in characteristically human behaviors. But this also underscores a distinction, often invoked by critics of artificial intelligence research. There is a difference between a computer’s displaying or merely imitating an intelligent behavior, and a computer’s instantiating intelligence through such behavior. And the critic will say, even if a computer behaves as if it is intelligent, this is just modeling or simulating intelligence. The greater ambition, though, is “genuine artificial intelligence”, a system that actually thinks. John Searle refers to this as the distinction between “weak AI” and “strong AI”, respectively.

• Weak AI : Could a computer behave as if it thinks?
• Strong AI: Could a computer genuinely think?

The general worry here is that however sophisticated a system’s behavior may appear “from the outside”, for all we know it may just be a “hollow shell” (Haugeland 1981 [1997]; Clark 2001). The worry has then been fleshed out in various ways by specifying what is missing from the shell, as it were. Here are three standard such candidates. And, again, in each case however sophisticated the computer’s behavior may appear it still may be lacking in any or all of the following. First, the computer may lack consciousness . Second, the computer may lack any understanding of the symbols over which it computes (Searle 1980). Finally, the computer may operate without caring about its own behavior or, as John Haugeland colorfully puts it, without “giving a damn”. In each case, any kind of response from the ambitious AI researcher encounters the substantial challenges that come with theorizing mental phenomena such as consciousness, understanding, linguistic competence, and emotion. (Turing 1950, for instance, recognized but largely eschewed these kinds of topics).

It’s one thing to ask whether computers could think, and another to ask whether they could be creative. And just as the prospect of artificial intelligence or thinking divides into two questions—of weak AI and strong AI—we may distinguish two analogous questions about artificial creativity, which we’ll refer to as the questions of “weak AC” and “strong AC”, respectively. To begin with the former:

• Weak AC : Could a computer behave as if it’s creative?

Something behaves as if it’s creative if it produces things which are psychologically new (new to that thing) and valuable . Arguably, a number of computers have already done that.

In the 1970s, Harold Cohen began using computational technologies to produce new drawings and paintings. The work of his computer painter, Aaron, has exhibited at galleries such as the Tate and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. David Cope’s “EMI” (Experiments in Musical Intelligence) has composed musical works in the style of various known composers and styles, even a full-length opera. Some of these works have been recorded and produced by bona fide record labels. Just search “Emily Howell” on Spotify or Apple Music and give it a listen (Cope 1996, 2006). Simon Colton’s The Painting Fool is an ongoing project, involving a software that abstracts phrases, images, and other items from newspaper articles and creates collage-style pieces. It has also produced portraits, based on images of film characters, of the same individual in different emotional states (see Painting Fool in Other Internet Resources ; see Colton 2012 for theoretical discussion). Even more recently, there have been explosive developments in generative art systems like DALL•E, Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, VQGAN+CLIP. (For discussion see Paul & Stokes 2021). In all of these cases, the relevant outputs of the computer program are new relative to its past productions—so they are psychologically (or behaviorally) novel, which again is all the novelty that creativity requires. And although historical novelty isn’t required for creativity, it’s worth noting that these products appear to be to be new in all of history as well.

What about value? As noted above in §2.1 , some theorists reject the value condition, but even if value is required for creativity, that too is a condition these computer artworks seem to meet. Assessments of value can be controversial, but that is no less true for the outputs of human creativity. The fact that these works are critically acclaimed, showcased in prestigious galleries, and commissioned by selective record labels testifies to their artistic merit, and viewers find them pleasing, interesting, and appealing, even before being apprised of their unusual origin. So it is reasonable to conclude computer programs like the ones just described exhibit at least weak AC insofar as they produce works of valuable novelty, and one could cite many more examples in the same vein.

Some theorists have noted that, whether or not the original Turing test is a good test for intelligence or thinking, we might adopt an analogous test for creativity: If a computer can fool human observers into thinking that it is a human creator, then it is in fact creative (Pease & Colton 2011; see also Chen 2020 for useful discussion of artificial creativity, including many additional examples of particular cases, and so-called Dartmouth-based Turing tests). If we employ this test, we might find ourselves with an unexpected conclusion: computers can be creative; in fact, some of them already are. But one might reasonably worry that the test is inadequate and the conclusion is too quick (Berrar & Schuster 2014; Bringsjord et al. 2001). From the fact that a computer operates as if it’s creative, one might argue, it doesn’t follow that it really is. Which brings us to our next question:

• Strong AC : Could a computer genuinely be creative?

This obviously returns us to the question of what conditions something must meet in order to count as being genuinely creative. And here we need go beyond the outwardly observable product-features of novelty and value to consider the underlying processes of genuine creativity. As we saw in §2.2 , theorists have variously proposed that in order for a process to count as creative, it must be surprising, original, spontaneous, and/or agential. There is no consensus to appeal to here, but if any one of these conditions is indeed required for genuine creativity, then a computer could be genuinely creative only to the extent that it executes processes which satisfy that condition.

The classic statement of skepticism regarding the possibility of computer creativity is due to Lady Ada Lovelace who had this to say while remarking on “the Analytical Engine” designed by her friend Charles Babbage:

It is desirable to guard against the possibility of exaggerated ideas that might arise as to the powers of the Analytical Engine. The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. (Lovelace 1843, italics added)

Though Lovelace does not frame her comments in terms of “creativity” as such, she explicitly denied that a computer could satisfy at least one condition that is plausibly required for creativity, namely originality . A computer cannot be the originator, the author, or the creator of anything new, she contends; it can only do what it is programmed to do. We cannot get anything out of a computer that has not already been programmed into it. Further, Lovelace may also be interpreted as expressing or implying doubt about whether a computer could satisfy the three other proposed requirements for genuine creativity. Insofar as a computer’s outputs cannot be original, one might also suspect that they cannot be surprising . The image of a machine strictly following rules invokes precisely the kind of mechanical procedure that is the antithesis of spontaneity . And it may seem that such a machine could not be a genuine agent either. The problem isn’t just that a computer can’t produce anything original; it’s that it deserves no credit for whatever it does produce. Any praise or blame for the outputs of a computer rightly go to the engineers and programmers who made the machine, not to the machine itself. While these points may be intuitive, at least some of them are being challenged by modern technologies, which have come a long way since Babbage’s invention.

Consider AlphaGo again. This is a “deep learning” system, which involves two neural networks: a Policy network and a Value network. Very briefly: The system is trained using a vast number of legitimate moves made in actual games of Go played by professional human players (28.4 million moves from 160,000 games, to be precise; see Silver et al. 2016 and Halina 2021). The network is further trained, again using learning algorithms, by playing many games (some 100 million) against previous versions of itself (in the sense of a differently weighted neural network). The weights of nodes in the network are then adjusted by a learning algorithm that favors moves made in winning games. The value network is trained over a subset of these many games, with node weighting adjustments resulting in reliable probability assignments to moves vis-à-vis their potential to contribute to a win. Finally, the system employs a Monte Carlo search tree (MCT). Generally, this kind of algorithm is designed to simulate a decision process to optimize success given chosen parameters. In this case, the search algorithm selects a given path of moves, then adds some valid moves to this path, and then if this process does not terminate (end in win/loss), the system performs a “rollout”. A rollout essentially plays the game out for both players (using samples of possible moves) to its conclusion. The information that results from the MCT and processing by the value network are then fed back (back propagated) into the system. This entire process (once the system is trained) is rapid and determines how AlphaGo “decides” to move in any given game.

Here are some things to note. AlphaGo’s style of play is surprising . As commentators have noted, it is starkly unconventional relative to standards of human play (Halina cites Baker and Hui 2017 [ Other Internet Resources ]). Indeed, Lee Sodol, the world champion Go player defeated by AlphaGo in 2016, remarked that AlphaGo’s play revealed that much of human play is, contrary to prior common opinion, not creative after all—intimating that at least some of the play of AlphaGo is . Note further that this system is flexible. While there are learning algorithms and rules that adjust network weights, the system is not mechanical or predictable in the same fashion as earlier, classical systems (including Deep Blue , for example). In a recent paper, Marta Halina has made this argument (Halina 2021). She explicitly invokes Boden’s characterization, which requires novelty, value, and surprise of creativity. Again, the novelty and value should be plausibly attributed in this case. Regarding surprise, Halina suggests that it is AlphaGo’s employment of MCT that enables a kind of “insight”, flexibility, and unpredictable results. She writes,

It is the exploration parameter that allows AlphaGo to go beyond its training, encouraging it to simulate moves outside of those recommended by the policy network. As the search tree is constructed, the system starts choosing moves with the highest “action value” to simulate, where the action value indicates how good a move is based on the outcome of rollouts and value-network evaluations. (Halina 2021: 324)

Halina grants that given its domain-specificity, as we have already noted, this system’s particular abilities do not generalize in a way that may be required to properly attribute genuine intelligence. But she suggests that the complex use of the MCT search may amount to “mental scenario building” or, we might say, a kind of imagination. And insofar as this search algorithm technology can be applied to other systems in other domains, and imagination is a general component of intelligence, perhaps here lies space for generalizability. AlphaGo also affords at least some reply to the traditional Lovelace worry.

Artificial systems do not act only according to preprogrammed rules hand-coded by engineers. Moreover, current deep-learning methods are capable of producing systems that are superhuman in their abilities to discover novel and valuable solutions to problems within specific domains. (Halina 2021: 327)

If this is right, then AlphaGo exhibits originality . Finally, the flexibility with which this system operates may also satisfy Kronfeldner’s spontaneity requirement.

Some of these same features are found in a related approach in AI, namely research in evolutionary robotics. These systems also involve various forms of machine learning but in this case the learning is distributed, as it were, across a population of individuals rather than one individual. This approach can be understood, albeit imperfectly, as analogous to natural evolution. One begins, typically in computer simulation, with a population of agents. These agents are typically identified with individual neural networks, the connections and weightings of which are random to start. Relative to some task—for instance, avoiding obstacles, collecting objects, performing photo or phonotaxis—a genetic algorithm assigns a fitness value to each individual agent after a certain period of time or number of trials. Fitter agents are typically favored and used to generate the next population of agents. Also included in this generation are random mutation and genetic crossover (digital breeding!). Although it can take hundreds of generations, this is a discovery approach to engineering or constructing a system that successfully performs a task; it is “gradient descent learning” (Clark 1996). In this bottom-up approach, no single individual, nor even an entire population, are in any strict sense programmed. Rather, successful agents have “learned” as a result of generations of randomness, crossover, and small fitness improvements (and lots and lots of failures). Early success cases evolved robots that can follow trails (Koza 1992), locomote in insect-fashion (Beer & Gallagher 1992), guide themselves visually (Cliff, Husbands, & Harvey 1993), and collect garbage (Nolfi & Floreana 2000). See Bird and Stokes (2006, 2007) and Stokes and Bird (2008) for analysis and study of creativity in the context of evolutionary robotics.

These systems most certainly produce novelty. Later, fit individuals achieve novelty at their aimed task relative to whole generations and populations of previous agents. And this novelty is often surprising to the engineers and programmers that build them, indeed sometimes even unpredictably independent of any relevant task for individuals in the population. There are many examples in the literature. Indeed Lehman and others (2020) catalog a large range of cases where digital evolution surprises its creators, categorizing them in four representative groups: “mis-specified fitness functions”, “unintended debugging”, “exceeded experimenter expectations”, and “convergence with biology”. Here is one now relatively famous example of the first type of case. In early research in artificial life (A-Life), Karl Sims (1994) designed virtual creatures that were supposed to learn to walk (as well as swim and jump) in a simulated environment. The fitness function assessed individual agents on their average ground velocity across 10 seconds. Some of the fittest individuals to evolve were surprising: they grew tall and rigid and when they would fall over they would achieve high ground velocity, thus maximizing fitness given the (mis)specified parameters in unpredicted ways.

This is but one example of how systems like these can evolve in unpredictable or surprising ways. This unpredictability has occurred not just in simulated robotics, but in embodied robotics as well. In using a genetic algorithm to attempt to evolve oscillating sensors, researchers unintentionally evolved a radio antenna (Bird & Layzell 2002). This unexpected result arose from a combination of the particular algorithm used (which was intended) and various physical features of the space such as proximity to a PC monitor (which the researchers had presumably deemed irrelevant but which the evolved system, in a sense, did not). And one might be further inclined to describe some of these achievements as creative (and not just in the trivial sense that they are original instances of robotic success), since they also produce value, at least insofar as they are useful at performing a task, whether it is locomoting or locating a source of light or sensing radio waves.

Some theorists in this domain might argue that these systems achieve spontaneity as well. Given the substantial inclusion of randomness in the system’s development—both at the outset when the individual’s neural networks are randomized and more importantly with random mutation across populations—it is intuitive to describe the system’s as not following a mechanical procedure. Indeed, the way in which systems exploit fitness functions and data patterns further underscores this point. (Again, see the rich catalog of cases offered by Lehman et al. 2020).

On the face of it, then, recent technologies in AI, evolutionary robotics, and artificial life, seem to fulfill many of the conditions proposed for genuine creativity. These systems produce things that are novel and valuable, and do so through computational processes that are plausibly surprising, original, and spontaneous. The one requirement we have yet to address, however, is agency . Recall the suggestion, implicit in Lovelace’s remarks, that whatever a computer produces is to the credit of the programmer, not the computer. Notice that as sophisticated as current technologies in artificial creativity may be, presumably they are still not subject to praise or blame for what they do. If any beings are responsible for the work of these programs, it still seems to be the programmers and engineers who make them, not the programs themselves. The programs themselves do not seem to “give a damn”. So, if the creative process requires agency, arguably we have not yet created, programmed, or evolved a computational system that is really creative, however much they might appear to be. In the pursuit of strong AC, agency might be the final frontier (Paul & Stokes 2021).

It should be clear from the above discussions that there are rich and lively research programs, across a range of scientific disciplines, studying human creativity. These approaches substantiate the view that, contrary to the romantic tradition, creativity can be explained. Psychological functions and neural correlates have been identified, and remarkable advances are being made with computational and robotics technologies. What may be less clear is that, despite these advances, the distinct research programs in question are largely disjoint or siloed.

In a recent paper, Geraint Wiggins and Joydeep Bhattacharya (2014) highlight this “gap” between scientific studies of creativity. Their particular emphasis is on the gaps between research in neuroscience and research in computer science, and they advocate a bridge in the form of a neurocomputational approach. This kind of bridging may be called for even beyond what these authors prescribe, since there are gaps not just between these disciplines, but also between these and behavioral psychology, AI and A-Life research, and philosophical analysis. Creativity is a deeply complex and deeply important phenomenon. Fully understanding it will require us to integrate a variety of theoretical perspectives, and, as this survey reveals, philosophy has a vital role to play in that endeavor.

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• Baker, Lucas and Fan Hui, 2017, “ Innovations of AlphaGo ”, on the DeepMind blog, 10 April 2017. Accessed 9 July 2021.
• Whitney Museum, 2002, The Migration Series: His Painting Method .

artificial intelligence | epistemology: virtue | ethics: virtue | imagination | Turing, Alan | Turing machines | Turing test

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The Importance of Creativity

Personal perspective: creative pursuits enhance work/life balance and bring joy..

Posted October 1, 2022 | Reviewed by Gary Drevitch

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• Acts of creativity add meaning, shape, purpose, and richness to our days.
• Educators, particularly in higher education, face institutional demands that often constrain creativity.
• A commitment to creativity can enhance work/life balance.

What is creativity ? It’s usually defined in terms of imagination and innovation and especially related to the production of artwork. Yet creativity isn’t necessarily about art per se but is a quality of being artful. It’s about how we make and weave meaning and richness into our days. Being creative means possessing curiosity, the ability to observe keenly, and a passion for innovation to move about in space and time in new ways. It means trying something different, which requires us to take the leap to trust our intuition so we can play in the unknown.

In academe, we need to teach and write in ways that reveal a depth of interpretation, that demonstrate meaning-making, that forge connections, that push the boundaries of existing modes of thought, and that play with new questions and ideas. When it comes to teaching, we might create a new course that invigorates us as teachers. Such new preparations breathe new energy into teaching and keep us engaged as lifelong learners, an important thing to model for students. Recently, I’ve created three new courses for our sociology curriculum and each was transformative for my teaching and writing practice.

It’s paradoxical that in higher education many faculty members often report feeling stifled or deadened when it comes to creative practices. One would think academe would be one of the more open arenas for nurturing creativity. But, formulaic and status-quo constructions generally prevail for what makes scholarship and pedagogy good enough for us to achieve successful annual reviews and ascend the ranks through tenure and promotion.

It saddens me tremendously to hear so many in academe, including several of my important mentors, confess that they can’t wait to retire just to finally write the sort of stuff they want to write. Living and working suspended like that is so conditional and constraining; it functions like a chokehold on our inner creative life. I couldn’t bear to wait that long.

I’ve come to regard the reclamation of my own creativity as a radical act. It’s a way of being more present in my life and work and responding to the urgent and important inner whispers that insist I be more creative today—not decades from now in retirement .

I’ve found the best way to anchor more deeply into that mindset is to borrow energy and momentum from another arena of invention. When I attend concerts, I think about the habits, routines, and practices of the musicians. And I’m always energized to hear about others’ seemingly mundane daily rituals that pave the way for creativity. Witnessing others’ creativity can jump-start our own.

Over the past two years since my mother died, I’ve been unpacking boxes of her paintings. I’ve been blown away by how vast a body of work she produced and inspired by how she kept at it, constantly taking new risks and trying again. In the mornings, after having espresso, I’ve found myself going into the guest room, now turned art gallery, and caressing the nuanced details of some of the pieces. Sometimes I take photographs of them that I pair with fresh flowers or with the work of a favorite potter—playing with colors, shape, light, and form—and then share them on social media .

Invariably, people ask if my mother and the potter created work in tandem because of how much their art complements each other. I explain that, no, in fact, I just noticed the parallels and decided to photograph them together. It’s in the act of making such visual connections and juxtapositions that I feel a high of creative and playful synthesis, and I find that it propels me to want to sit down to do my own writing.

Creativity involves imagining new ways of seeing, sensing and being. Another simple way I do that is to look around a room in my home and find an object, meditate for a moment on its functions and then consider what else it might be used for. The simple act of repurposing an object changes my relationship to it and keeps things fresh. When I get stuck, I try to pause and reflect on times I felt most in a creative flow state, and I call up a multisensory picture of that experience to revisit it for the qualities I most need to tap into.

While we grapple with intense institutional demands and constraints, it’s still possible to craft a creative dossier. For those of us committed to being creative public intellectuals, the issue becomes one of educating colleagues about what we’re doing and why it’s important. At my university, where I work in a multidisciplinary department of social sciences and humanities and where faculty members from disciplines all across the university comprise the tenure and promotion committee, I crafted a personal statement for my file that captured my intentionality around public sociology and the ways it’s a legitimate and firmly grounded part of my discipline.

We’ve seen how the pandemic has changed how people conceptualize work, space, and place, and we can use that to creatively rethink how we manage our time for tasks such as office hours. It might be possible to conduct them outside, or to do a walk-and-talk session with a student on campus. Or perhaps we can offer phone appointments while walking. The spirit of these ideas isn’t to amplify multitasking, but rather to consider ways we might be able to give back to ourselves while supporting others’ success and growth. The point isn’t about adding more but about how we negotiate our time in ways that prioritize creative spaciousness.

Similarly, much of the service being done across campuses is unpaid labor for the purpose of institutional maintenance. We might want to create our own service opportunities. Years back, a colleague and I created monthly events related to gender issues and invited the entire campus community. No such thing had existed there before, and various campus leaders appropriately recognized that endeavor as a meaningful and special contribution of service.

We’re limited by blocking beliefs that if only we could have endlessly unfolding hours and days, we would finally be able to write and publish more—that until it’s perfect, we dare not submit our work yet, and that we probably don’t know what we’re doing anyway, given the impostor syndrome so pervasive in academe. But that mentality of “if only,” “when” and “not until” ramps up our self-expectations and fear and holds us back from taking creative risks. It also feeds into a mentality of scarcity that runs counter to a creative life.

We must make room for our creative endeavors by prioritizing them and not becoming overwhelmed or sidetracked by other demands. I’ve learned that if our initial gut instinct is to say no to something, it’s best to say it or to say, “I’ll have to think about it and get back to you,” and then return with the no. Some colleagues bear down in meetings with intense praise and pressure to get us to agree to something. It’s OK to say, “Thanks for thinking I’d be good at this, but if you need an answer right now, it will have to be no.” In my mind, I picture the famous New Yorker cartoon where a man on the phone looks at his calendar and says, “How about never—is never good for you?”

Our personal lives offer us endless opportunities to be creative. In The Artist’s Way , Julia Cameron suggests daily walks, writing morning pages every day, and taking a creative excursion as regularly as possible. Contained in that model is the need for rituals and structure to be creative. I’d add that being in friendships and intimate relationships that nourish our creativity is essential.

It’s advantageous to approach our responsibilities as creatively as possible, as doing so will enhance work-life balance. When we drop down into the most creative oasis within ourselves, we’re able to experience unleashed freedom, timelessness, flow, and energy in ways that life looks light-filled, colorful, and more spacious than ever before.

An earlier version of this article appeared in Inside Higher Ed on September 23, 2022.

Deborah J. Cohan, Ph.D., is a professor of sociology at the University of South Carolina-Beaufort where she teaches and writes about the intersections of the self and society.

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Eight Lessons From My Research on Creativity

When I was at the beginning of my Ph.D. studies, my advisor at Stanford, Professor Gordon Bower , invited each of his first-year graduate students to his house for dinner. After dinner, he asked each of us what we wanted to study in graduate school. 

We all thought we knew what he wanted to hear—“ semantic memory ”—which was what he was studying. There were five guys there, all of us first-year students (and all male). The first one got up and he said, as you would predict, “semantic memory.”  The second and third guys said the same. I knew at least two of them were lying and just sucking up. It was like a Solomon Asch experiment, where people hear others lie and then say the same thing so as to be part of the crowd. 

Then my turn came. I assure you, I’m no suck-up. I knew what I wanted to study, and it wasn’t semantic memory. But when Gordon asked me what I wanted to study, I said…. “semantic memory”! Like the others, I chickened out. Or to put it another way, I was a coward. What I really wanted to study was human intelligence and creativity. I was just afraid to admit it.

That night, I was humiliated. I thought that if that was the way I was going to run my scholarly career—as a coward—I needed to find something else to do. I told myself I would never sell myself out again. I never have, although I’ve certainly had many opportunities.

In a way, this episode became the beginning of a career as a psychologist studying creativity. Here are eight lessons from my research.

1. Creativity is not so much an innate ability as it is an attitude toward life.

There are lots of people with “creative abilities,” but they lack what the late Professor Roger Schank called the “creative attitude,” so they do not manifest their creativity.

By 1995, I proposed, in collaboration with Professor Todd Lubart (then my graduate student), an “ investment theory of creativity .” The idea was that creativity is, in large part, a decision that one is willing to defy the crowd—exactly what I was unwilling to do that night at Gordon’s house. Creativity requires, more than anything else, the courage to go one’s own way, regardless of what others do.

When I was a teenager, my male peers wore tight pants—all the better, they thought, to attract girls. I wore loose pants. I’m claustrophobic and tight clothes don’t work for me. I’d like to think I was showing a creative attitude. I was also showing myself to be a bit of a dork, but I didn’t care. If you are creative, be prepared to be labeled a “dork,” or worse. Maybe much worse. That’s a price you have to be willing to pay.

2. A key ingredient of creativity is courage.

You can’t be creative unless you are willing to stand up to the crowd. Sometimes, people will dump all over you, and you have to keep going, not fold.

By 2018, I came to a somewhat broader conclusion in a “ triangular theory of creativity ”—that creativity requires not only the courage to defy the crowd, but also the courage to defy oneself and all the ways of thinking that one has always assumed are just “the way things are.”

Often, the hardest thing is not to stand up to others, but to stand up to one’s own entrenched ways of thinking.

3. If you want to be creative, you have to stand up not only to the crowd, but also to yourself.

You have to be willing to let go of ideas that are either wrong or that have served their purpose and now are obsolete. When the time comes, you have to be willing to move past your ideas that have passed their prime.

I have tried to show that courage in my own career and put behind me the mistake I made at Gordon’s house. In my first book , in 1977, I defied the conventional psychometric view of intelligence as just IQ and related abilities. I argued that the problem with this view was that it failed to elucidate the information-processing components that underlie those abilities. 

Contemplation and Creativity

A collection of practices that encourage contemplation and creativity

For example, someone could score low on a verbal-analogies test not because they were a poor verbal reasoner, but simply because they did not know what the words meant. If their native language was not that of the test, or if they grew up in a house that was educationally challenged, such knowledge was often not immediately available. I thought I knew all about low IQ scores, because I had had them when I was a child, I liked to think because of test anxiety.

My manuscript was published by Larry Erlbaum; he published it despite a 17.5-page negative, indeed, vitriolic review. The book later became a citation classic . I thought my creative ideas about intelligence would see me through my career.

I was wrong, as we’ll see. If you want to be creative, be prepared to say you were wrong—a lot.

4. Being creative requires you to admit you were wrong or, at least, not quite right.

If you need to be right all the time, you will cut yourself off from the possibility of being creative. You will, at best, be a one-hit wonder.

In my second year as an assistant professor at Yale, I was invited to give a lecture at a big testing company. I thought: “This is great. After all these years doing the wrong thing, they finally are ready to admit the errors of their ways and do the right thing!”

I gave the talk. It bombed. Badly. They hated it. I went from wondering what glory awaited me when I returned to New Haven to wondering whether I still would have a job when I got back. It was yet another humiliation. But then I realized what I had learned, which turned humiliation into a sense of intellectual humility .

5. The more creative your ideas are, the more resistance those ideas will encounter, and the more resilience, perseverance, humility, and sheer courage you will need to keep going in the face of opposition.

Of course, the testers hated the talk. Did I think that a company with zillions of dollars invested in conventional tests, which hired people to work for them who excelled on conventional tests and loved those tests, which showed how smart they were, were going to listen to a 26-year-old upstart? No way!

By 1985, I realized my ideas about intelligence were not as good as I had thought they were. In fact, they were seriously deficient, because although I was studying mental processes, I was studying only the mental processes needed to score high on IQ tests; buts the tests themselves were seriously flawed. 

I was director of graduate studies in psychology at Yale at the time, and saw that intelligence required more than the knowledge and abstract-analytical reasoning skills required by IQ tests (and SATs and ACTs and the whole alphabet soup of standardized tests).

I had one student, “Alice,” who was test-smart but not creative; another, “Barbara,” who was highly creative but not nearly as test-smart as Alice; and yet another student, “Celia,” who lacked Alice’s analytical skills and attitudes, and Barbara’s creative skills and attitudes, but who had tremendous practical intelligence (i.e., common sense). So, I had to have the courage to defy myself and propose a new theory of intelligence, which I called triarchic, because it had three parts (analytical, creative, practical).

My work on intelligence and creativity was going well—until it wasn’t. I realized my theories were still incomplete. After a couple of decades of the 21st century, it became clear to me that intelligence and creativity, in themselves, were not nearly as wonderful as I had thought they were.

All those books and papers I had written—and many others had written as well—seemed to be missing a fundamental point. Much of intelligence and creativity were being used for dark purposes. Creative professionals were using their creativity to addict people to nicotine, alcohol, various illegal drugs, and social media that was increasing toxicity in society and even causing people to harm themselves. 

As Arthur Cropley and others realized, dark creativity was a serious threat to the future of the world. Narcissistic use of creativity (and, as I have argued in a submitted paper, intelligence) literally can and might destroy the world. Intelligence and creativity without wisdom—the search for a common good—can be dangerous.

6. The world does not need more seriously smart and creative people who are using their talents to advance themselves but also to take down others in the process.

By 2021, I had written a paper on what I called “transformational creativity,” and I now have an edited book in press with Professor Sareh Karami on this topic. 

Transformational creativity is wise creativity. It is creativity that makes the world a better place. It is creativity directed toward a common good. 

Why is transformational creativity important? Because so much creativity is going toward truly bad ends. How much positive creativity does one see these days in the seat of U.S. government, and how much negative creativity?

7.  What the world needs today is not just creativity but, rather, transformational creativity that is oriented toward achieving a common good that will make the world a better place for us all.

Transformational creativity does not seem to be commonplace in the world today. It is so much easier just to look out for one’s own interests.

In a 2022 pape r I wrote with Professor Lubart, we argued for the importance, in creativity, of integrity. Creativity with integrity means that one’s ideas are consistent with each other and that they do not just fly off into outer space. One ensures that the ideas correspond with reality—not a fantasy we imagine, or wish were true. Politicians, please take note!

8. Transformational creativity is so hard not because people lack creativity, but rather because there is so much pressure not to do the right thing—actually to thwart the common good through a lack of integrity.

In other words, courage is hard.

At various points in all our lives, we face the hard decision of whether we will, as a book title once put it, just “look out for #1.”  With the serious problems the world faces—pollution, climate change, budding autocrats, weapons of mass destruction, school shootings, racism, xenophobia—we just cannot afford to keep turning out students whose main credentials are their high GPAs, standardized test scores, or preprogrammed extracurricular activities. What we all need most is transformational creativity: the courage to seek a common good in the face of the obstacles the world puts in front of us.

New Course! Courage in Education

Facing Challenges with Strength, Determination, and Hope

About the Author

Robert J. Sternberg

Cornell university.

Robert J. Sternberg is Professor of Psychology in the College of Human Ecology at Cornell University and Honorary Professor of Psychology at Heidelberg University, Germany. Sternberg is a Past President of the American Psychological Association and the Federation of Associations in Brain and Behavioral Sciences. Sternberg’s PhD is from Stanford University, and he holds 13 honorary doctorates. Sternberg has won the Cattell Award and the James Award from the Association for Psychological Science, and the Grawemeyer Award in Psychology. He has been cited over 234,000 times in the scholarly literature. He was cited in 2023 by research.com as the #7 top psychological scientist in the US and #15 in the world.

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Everyday Creativity and New Views of Human Nature

Available formats, also available from.

• Table of contents
• Contributor bios
• Reviews and awards
• Book details

What is everyday creativity? A capacity, a strategy, a process, all of these. It is an ability that is intimately woven into our daily lives and our personalities, one that we use from hour to hour; yet it remains, for most of us, underdeveloped and, unfortunately, underacknowledged. Writes editor and leading creativity researcher Ruth Richards, "Everyday creativity is about everyone, throughout our lives, and fundamental to our very survival. It is how we find our lost child, get enough to eat, make our way in a new place and culture…With our everyday creativity, we adapt flexibly, we improvise, we try different options, whether we are raising a child, counseling a friend, fixing our home, or planning a fundraising event."

In this provocative collection of essays, an interdisciplinary group of eminent thinkers and writers offer their thoughts on how embracing creativity—tapping into the "originality of everyday life"—can lead to improved physical and mental health, to new ways of thinking, of experiencing the world and ourselves. They show how creativity can refine our views of human nature at an individual and societal level and, ultimately, change our paradigms for survival—and for flourishing—in a world fraught with urgent challenges. Neither a dry treatise nor a manual, this anthology draws upon the latest research in the area to present a lively examination of the phenomenon and process of everyday creativity and its far-reaching ramifications for self, culture, history, society, politics, and humankind's future.

Part I looks at creativity and individuals—our well-being, potential for new and transformative understandings, and openings to richness, immediacy, and profundity of experience. Part II involves social creativity—including issues of complexity, collaboration, contextual relativity, inclusiveness, and creative systems evolving from the ground up (vs. more hierarchical models). Part III presents a detailed and multilayered discussion of 12 potential benefits of living more creatively.

Contributors

Foreword —Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Introduction —Ruth Richards

I. Creativity and Our Individual Lives

• Everyday Creativity: Our Hidden Potential —Ruth Richards
• Living Well Creatively: What's Chaos Got to Do With It? —David Schuldberg
• Artist and Audience: Everyday Creativity and Visual Art —Tobi Zausner
• To Understand Is to Create: An Epistemological Perspective on Human Nature and Personal Creativity —Mark A. Runco
• Audience Flow: Creativity in Television Watching With Applications to Teletherapy —Steven R. Pritzker
• Structures of Consciousness and Creativity: Opening the Doors of Perception —Allan Combs and Stanley Krippner

II: Creativity and Society

• Telling the New Story: Darwin, Evolution, and Creativity Versus Conformity in Science —David Loye
• Standing Up for Humanity: Upright Body, Creative Instability, and Spiritual Balance —Mike Arons
• Creativity in the Everyday: Culture, Self and Emotions —Louise Sundararajan and James R. Averill
• A "Knowledge Ecology" View of Creativity: How Integral Science Recasts Collective Creativity as a Basis of Large-Scale Learning —S. J. Goerner
• Cyborgs, Cyberspace, Cybersexuality: The Evolution of Everyday Creativity —Frederick David Abraham
• Our Great Creative Challenge: Rethinking Human Nature—and Recreating Society —Riane Eisler

III: Integration and Conclusions

• Twelve Potential Benefits of Living More Creatively —Ruth Richards

Author Index

Subject Index

About the Editor

Ruth Richards, MD, PhD, is a board certified psychiatrist and educational psychologist. She is a professor of psychology at Saybrook Graduate School in San Francisco, California; a research affiliate at McLean Hospital, Belmont, Massachusetts (psychiatric affiliate of Massachusetts General Hospital); and a lecturer in the Department of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts.

For many years, Dr. Richards has studied everyday creativity in clinical and educational settings and has published on creativity and social action as well as spiritual development. She is the principal author of The Lifetime Creativity Scales , which broke new ground as a broad-based assessment of real-life everyday creativity in a general population. With Mark A. Runco, Dr. Richards coedited Eminent Creativity, Everyday Creativity, and Health . She served on the executive advisory board for the Encyclopedia of Creativity and is also on the editorial boards of three journals: The Creativity Research Journal ; The Journal of Humanistic Psychology ; and Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts , the journal for APA Division 10 (Society for the Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts), where she is also an at-large member of the executive committee.

Personally, Dr. Richards draws, writes, plays three instruments badly, and learns even more about creativity from her teenage daughter.

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The Philosophy of Creativity

This collection of new essays on creativity integrates philosophical insights with empirical research.

The Philosophy of Creativity is a collection of new essays which integrates philosophical insights with empirical research. These essays explore creativity in relation to consciousness, imagination, virtue, personal identity, artificial intelligence, and education, among other topics.  The volume (available here ) was co-edited by two of the Creativity Post's co-founders, Elliot Samuel Paul and Scott Barry Kaufman, and was published this month by Oxford University Press. 

Some of the chapters grew out of presentations at a conference held at Barnard College, Columbia University, commemorated in this video by filmmaker Tao Ruspoli . 

There is little that shapes the human experience as profoundly and pervasively as creativity. Creativity drives progress in every human endeavor, from the arts to the sciences, business, and technology. We celebrate and honor people for their creativity, identifying eminent individuals, as well as entire cultures and societies, in terms of their creative achievements. Creativity is the vehicle of self-expression and part of what makes us who we are. One might therefore expect creativity to be a major topic in philosophy, especially since it raises such a wealth of interesting philosophical questions, as we will soon see. Curiously, it isn’t.

To be sure, some of the greatest philosophers in history have been taken with the wonder of creativity. [1]   To name just few examples: Plato has Socrates say, in certain dialogues, that when poets produce truly great poetry, they do it not through knowledge or mastery, but rather by being divinely “inspired”—literally, breathed into—by the Muses, in a state of possession that exhibits a kind of madness. [2]  Aristotle, in contrast, characterized the work of the poet as a rational, goal-directed activity of making ( poeisis ), in which the poet employs various means (such as sympathetic characters and plots involving twists of fate) to achieve an end (of eliciting various emotions in the audience). [3]   Kant conceived of artistic genius as an innate capacity to produce works of “exemplary originality” through the free play of the imagination, a process which does not consist in following rules, can neither be learned nor taught, and is mysterious even to geniuses themselves. [4]   Schopenhauer stressed that the greatest artists are distinguished not only by the technical skill they employ in the production of art, but also by the capacity to “lose themselves” in the experience of what is beautiful and sublime. [5]   Nietzsche saw the greatest feats of creativity, exemplified in the tragic poetry of ancient Greece, as being born out of a rare cooperation between the “Dionysian” spirit of ecstatic intoxication, which imbues the work with vitality and passion, and the “Apollonian” spirit of sober restraint, which tempers chaos with order and form. [6]   This is just the barest glimpse of what each of these philosophers had to say about creativity, and many other figures could be added to their number.

Nevertheless, while some of the topics explored by earlier thinkers have come to occupy a central place in philosophy today—such as freedom, justice, consciousness, and knowledge—creativity is not among them. Philosophy has seen some very important work on creativity in the last few decades, [7] but not nearly at the rate that we see for subjects of comparable range and importance. Indeed, “the philosophy of creativity” is still a neologism in most quarters—just as, for example, “the philosophy of action” and “the philosophy of music” were not too long ago.

In contrast, psychology has seen a definite surge of interest in creativity. In 1950, J. P. Guilford gave a presidential address at the American Psychological Association calling for research on the topic. [8] And the field soon took off with waves of research investigating the traits and dispositions of creative personalities; the cognitive and neurological mechanisms at play in creative thought; the motivational determinants of creative achievement; the interplay between individual and collective creativity; the range of institutional, educational, and environmental factors that enhance or inhibit creativity; and more. Today, the blossoming of this field can be seen in the flurry of popular writing reporting on its results [9] ; an official division of the American Psychological Association on the psychology of aesthetics, creativity, and the arts (Division 10); numerous academic conferences; multiple peer-reviewed journals [10] ; several textbooks [11] ; and a growing number of undergraduate and graduate courses all devoted to the psychology of creativity. According to one historical overview, creativity has been studied by nearly all of the most eminent psychologists of the 20th century, and “the field can only be described as explosive.” [12]

The swell of interest in the science of creativity is an inspiring example for the philosophy of creativity, but more importantly, it offers a resource that philosophers should be mindful of as they pursue this effort. Unfortunately, philosophers writing on creativity have sometimes tended to ignore the scientific literature. In some cases, they have gone so far as to claim—after citing just a few studies—that creativity is by its very nature unpredictable and therefore beyond the scope of science. [13] Although the question of whether creativity is explicable is a philosophical question, it is not one that is impervious to empirical work. After all, anyone who declares from the armchair that something cannot be explained is liable to be refuted in the event that researchers do find ways to uncover explanations. The question of whether creativity can be explained empirically is itself, at least partly, an empirical question.

In fact, a number of issues arise at the nexus between philosophy and psychology and are handled best with contributions from both. This interdisciplinary approach is embraced by a new school of creativity researchers who are part of much broader trend toward dialogue and collaboration between scientifically-minded philosophers and philosophically-minded scientists. [14] And the essays in this volume illustrate numerous ways in which the exchange can be fruitful, as philosophers draw on scientific research and scientific work is informed by philosophical perspectives. Below, we present a bird’s-eye view of these chapters and the themes and issues they explore. [15]

The Concept of Creativity

Perhaps the most fundamental question for any study of creativity, philosophical or otherwise, is What is creativity? The term “creative” is used to describe three kinds of things: a person , a process or activity , or a product , whether it is an idea in someone’s mind or an observable performance or artifact. There is an emerging consensus that a product must meet two conditions in order to be creative. It must be new , of course, but since novelty can be worthless (as in a meaningless string of letters), it must also be of value . (Researchers sometimes express this second condition by saying a product must be “useful,” “appropriate,” or “effective.”) [16] This definition is anticipated, in a way, by Immanuel Kant, who viewed artistic genius as an ability to produce works that are not only original—“since there can be original nonsense”—but also “exemplary.” [17]

In chapter 1 , Bence Nanay argues that creativity is primarily an attribute not of products, but of mental processes. Some have suggested that what makes a mental process creative is the use of a certain kind of functional or computational mechanism, such as the recombination of old ideas or the transformation of one’s conceptual space. Against this view, Nanay offers what he calls an experiential account of creativity. He contends that what is distinctive about the creative mental process is not any functional/computational mechanism, but the way in which it is experienced. In particular, the process yields an idea that the creator experiences as one she hadn’t taken to be possible before.

Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art

One might suppose that if creativity has been understudied in philosophy at large, this couldn’t be so when philosophers are focused on art in particular. Art was long thought to have a monopoly on human creativity [18] ; it is still the paradigm of a creative domain, as “creative” is sometimes used more or less as a synonym for “artistic” and, at least in modern times, artists are disparaged when seen as derivative and praised for originality. But while the philosophy of art has been concerned with such issues as the definition, interpretation, and ontology of art, it has tended not to reflect on the artist as a creator , or the artist’s labors as a creative process , or the work of art as an expression of creativity . Thus Gaut and Livingston observe that “[a]lthough the creation of art is a topic that should be a central one for aesthetics, it has been comparatively neglected in recent philosophical writing about art.” [19]

Gregory Currie brings the issue of creativity to the fore in chapter 2, where he examines the popular idea that eminently creative works of literature provide insight into the workings of the human mind. Many advocates of this view write as if its truth were self-evident. Currie suggests that it is not, that indeed there is little evidence in its favor, and he considers how the claim might be tested. Recent experimental studies by Oatley and colleagues look promising in this regard, but Currie suggests that their results so far provide very weak evidence at best. In the absence of better evidence, Currie puts a new spin on the debate by emphasizing the creativity that goes into producing such great works of fiction. Are there aspects of literary creativity that should reliably lead to insights about the mind? He considers two such aspects—the institutions of literary production and the psychology of literary creativity—and suggests that in both cases, there are some grounds for thinking that literary creativity is not reliably connected with the production of insight.

Noël Carroll brings another dimension of creativity into view in chapter 3. Although he agrees that we should attend to the creative activities of the artist, he suggests that we should also acknowledge the contribution of the audience . For in order for the artist to accomplish the effects to which she aspires, Carroll argues, the audience must creatively cooperate with what the artist has initiated. He explores how audiences co-create artworks through the play of imagination. Rather than treating the imagination as if it were a single monolithic phenomenon, however, he identifies and analyzes several different imaginative activities that are engaged in response to a variety of artworks, such as reasoning counterfactually, filling-in unspecified content, constructing story-worlds around fictional objects, mentally simulating characters’ experiences and points of view, and freely devising and playing with different meanings, interpretations, and unifying themes. By means of these activities, Carroll suggests, it is ultimately the audience’s contribution that makes a work of art “work.”

In chapter 4, Christopher Peacocke raises interesting questions for aesthetics that bear upon the study of creativity. While philosophers have long debated the question of what makes something a work of art, Peacocke asks: What makes a work an example of a particular artistic style ? He suggests that answering this question is a precondition for research on creativity in musical composition. Just as researchers who study perception understand that we cannot account for how the content of a perception is computed without specifying what the content is, Peacocke suggests that we cannot explain how a composer creates in his particular style unless we identify what is distinctive about that musical style. Using the example of the Romantic style of music, Peacocke’s approach draws on the perception of expressive action in combination with an account of what is involved in hearing emotion and other mental states in music. The account can link the phenomenology of musical perception with the ideas and ideals of the Romantic movement. He notes that by changing various parameters in the account, we can explain what is variously distinctive about impressionist music, expressionist music, and some neoclassical composing in the style of Stravinsky.

Ethics and Value Theory

One thing that makes creativity such a gripping topic is that we cannot fully understand ourselves without taking it into account. Creativity seems to be linked to our very identity; it is part of what makes us who we are both as human beings and individuals. With regard to the latter, each of us can ask, “What makes me who I am (as an individual)?” and we might wonder whether the answer has something to do with creativity.

According to an ancient and still influential view, the self (one’s life) is some kind of dramatic or artistic performance. Exploring this idea in chapter 5, Owen Flanagan notes that there are metaphysical and logical questions about whether and how self-creation and self-constitution are possible. But he points out that there are also normative questions associated with the idea that life is a performance and the self is something that both emerges in and is constituted by that performance. Are there norms or standards that apply to self-constituting performances, and if so, what are they? Flanagan examines three contemporary psychopoetic conceptions of person—“day-by-day persons,” “ironic persons,” and “strong poetic persons”—in order to explore potential normative constraints on “performing oneself.” Flanagan’s provocative paper has implications for a number of diverse views in philosophy and psychology, from Jerome Bruner’s narrative theory of “self-making stories” to David Velleman’s paradox of self-constitution.

In chapter 6, Matthew Kieran asks what it is to be a creative person, and whether it involves a kind of virtue or excellence of character. He notes that there is a minimal sense according to which being creative means nothing more than having the ability to produce novel and worthwhile artifacts. Yet, he argues, there is a richer sense of the term that presupposes agential insight, mastery, and sensitivity to reasons in bringing about what is aimed at. A stroke victim who reliably produces beautiful patterns as a byproduct of his actions is not creative in the richer sense in which an artist who aims to produce them and could have done so differently is. Is creativity in this richer sense ever more than just a skill? In the light of suggestive empirical work, Kieran argues that motivation is central to exemplary creativity. Exemplary creativity, he argues, involves intrinsic motivation and is a virtue or excellence of character. We not only praise and admire individuals whose creative activity is born from a passion for what they do but, other things being equal, we expect them to be more reliably creative across different situations than those who are extrinsically motivated. This is consistent with the recognition that intrinsic motivation is not required to be creative and people’s creative potentials differ. Creativity in people will flourish when intrinsic motivation is foregrounded, with the relevant values and socioeconomic structures lining up appropriately. It tends to wither when they do not (unless a person’s creativity, like Van Gogh’s, is exceptionally virtuous).

Philosophy of Mind and Cognitive Science

In chapter 7, Simon Blackburn briefly remarks on the history of the idea—voiced by Plato, echoed by philosophers and artists in the Romantic tradition, and still present in the popular imagination—that creativity involves something mystical or supernatural. Against this notion, Blackburn draws on findings of modern psychology to offer a tamer view. He argues that even the most extraordinary creative achievements are the result of ordinary cognitive processes.

In chapter 8, Dustin Stokes ventures to clarify exactly what the relation is between creativity and imagination. In his view, imagination is important for even the most minimally creative thought processes. This would be a pointless tautology if “imagination” just means (the capacity for) creativity. The key, then, is to identify what imagination is such that it is not the same thing as creativity but still essential for it nonetheless. As Stokes notes, few philosophers have thought through the distinction between imagination and creativity, and few psychologists have directly tested the difference between the two constructs. While grounding his paper in contemporary philosophy, Stokes also draws on cognitive and developmental psychology to identify the architectural features common to genius-level creativity, as well as more everyday forms of creativity. He starts by making a distinction between “truth-boundedness”—cognitive states that function to accurately represent the world—and “non truth-bound” states that do not function to accurately represent the world, but instead facilitate the manipulation of the information they represent. He argues that richly creative achievements in the arts and sciences, as well as more everyday breakthroughs, draw on cognitive manipulation processes. Stokes concludes that imagination serves the cognitive manipulation role and is typified by four features: It is non truth-bound, under immediate voluntary control, engages with affective and motivational systems, and drives inference and decision- making. Stokes’s essay has implications for a number of philosophical problems relating to imagination and fiction, as well as psychological issues relating to the role of conscious, deliberate thought in creativity.

On the latter question, there is a tendency that appears in various forms throughout intellectual and artistic history to regard conscious thought as irrelevant or even inimical to creativity. In the classical story where creative inspiration comes to an artist from an external muse, the artist’s consciousness is not the source, but rather the recipient, of creative work. The same is true when an insight is said to emerge from the unconscious mind, showing up in consciousness as a kind of pleasant surprise (Eureka!). There is also the popular perception that conscious thought impedes creativity; thus the familiar accounts of artists using drugs, alcohol, or other trance-inducing practices as a means of surrendering conscious control and giving free rein to the creative unconscious.

In chapter 9, however, psychologists Roy Baumeister, Brandon Schmeichel, and C. Nathan DeWall suggest that consciousness deserves more creative credit. They present evidence to support the notion that creativity requires an interactive collaboration of conscious and unconscious processes. In their view, creative impulses originate in the unconscious but require conscious processing to edit and integrate them into a creative product. They review psychological experiments showing that creativity declines sharply when consciousness is preoccupied (for example, improvising jazz guitar while counting backward by six, or drawing with colored pencils while listening closely to music). They conclude that the research contradicts the popular view in both psychology and philosophy that consciousness is irrelevant or an impediment to the creative process. Instead, they believe that the research fits well with recently emerging understandings of the special capabilities of conscious thought.

Earlier, when we discussed the potential connection between creativity and self-understanding, we were concerned with what makes each of us who we are as individuals. But we can also ask, more generally, what makes us who we are as a species , and there is a long tradition of Western thought that seeks to understand what makes us human in terms of what makes us distinctively human, and set apart from other animals in particular. Whatever we think of the existing proposals that highlight our allegedly unique possession of reason, language, and metacognition, creativity seems as good a candidate as any. The tricky question, of course, is how did creativity evolve in humans?

In chapter 10, Elizabeth Picciuto and Peter Carruthers provide an integrated evolutionary and developmental account of the emergence of distinctively human creative capacities. Their main thesis is that childhood pretend play (e.g., imagining battling spaceship invaders) is a uniquely human adaptation that functions in part to enhance adult forms of creativity.

In support of their view, they draw on a wide literature spanning evolutionary, cognitive, and developmental psychology. They begin by reviewing evolutionary accounts of what makes humans unique, including our language, enhanced working memory, culture, and convergent and divergent thinking. They consider pretend play as a distinctively human ability, noting its universality, and showing that nearly all children, cross-culturally, engage in it. They review existing views of the functional roles of pretend play, including the facilitation of social schemata and theory of mind. Unconvinced by these accounts, they argue instead that pretend play facilitates creative thought—a process that involves both defocused attention and cognitive control. They review a number of common capacities of both pretend play and creativity, including generativity, supposing, bypassing the obvious, and selection of valuable but less obvious ideas. They conclude that childhood pretense paves the way for creativity in adulthood. This chapter is a fine example of how philosophers can contribute to our understanding of issues that are also pursued by scientists, in this case concerning the emergence of the capacities we have as human beings to pretend and create.

In our technologically driven age, it is not uncommon to think of what makes us human in contrast not only to other animals but also to machines, computers, and robots. Artificial intelligence is becoming ever more sophisticated, and some programs already display certain marks of creativity, appearing in major art galleries and garnering patents. These are machines whose products are both valuable and new. In addition to these two standard conditions, Margaret Boden maintains in chapter 11 that a creative product is one that is surprising as a result of the combination, exploration, or transformation involved in producing it. She gives examples of artificial intelligence systems that fit all of these criteria, and raises this intriguing question: Could a computer-based system ever “really” be creative? This leads to interesting philosophical issues about what constitutes “real” creativity. With some qualification, she argues that real creativity involves autonomy, intentionality, valuation, emotion, and consciousness. But as she points out, the problem is that each one of these elements is controversial in itself, even if we don’t consider it in relation to creativity and/or artificial intelligence. Boden concludes that we will not be able to understand whether creativity and artificial intelligence are contradictions in terms until we have clear and credible accounts of all these matters. Her chapter thus highlights the important role that philosophy can play in both psychology and artificial intelligence by further clarifying the constructs involved.

Philosophy of Science

Today, it’s understood that creativity can be at work in virtually every human pursuit. In the past, however, thinking about creativity tended to be much less inclusive. Once again, Kant is a telling example. Having defined genius as the capacity to produce ideas that are both original and exemplary (i.e., “creative” in our terms), he asserted that genius could only be manifested in the fine arts. [20] Scientists were not geniuses because they follow the set procedures of the scientific method rather than giving free rein to their imaginations. Even Isaac Newton, whom Kant called the “great man of science,” was not deemed to be a creative genius. Nor, for that matter, was Kant himself!

Despite the much broader scope that we now accord to creativity, there is still a remnant of the Kantian intuition in popular stereotypes of the creative person that are more strongly associated with the artist than with anyone else. In chapter 12, psychologist Dean Keith Simonton argues, in effect, that there is something right about this Kantian tendency, as he explores the question: How does creativity differ between domains? In so doing, he integrates two philosophical traditions. The first tradition, stemming back to Auguste Comte, is concerned with whether the sciences can be arrayed into a hierarchy. The second tradition, which includes Alexander Bain and William James, concerns whether creativity and discovery involve a process of blind-variation and selective-retention (BVSR). The key part for this issue is blind-variation. Roughly, a process is “blind” to the extent that the probability of it’s generating a certain idea is not a function of that idea’s utility or value. A completely random procedure would be an example, though not the only example, of a blind process. Drawing on psychological research, Simonton shows that a valid hierarchy can be formed based on objective criteria regarding creative ideas, products, and persons. In place of Kant’s stark dichotomy between the sciences and the fine arts, Simonton’s hierarchy comprises a wide range of disciplines in the sciences, the humanities, and the arts. Where a discipline falls in the hierarchy depends on the extent to which practitioners need to engage in BVSR processes in order to make contributions that are creative (new and useful). Domains at the top of the hierarchy (i.e., sciences) rely more on sighted variations, whereas domains at the bottom (i.e., arts) depend more on blind variations. Simonton also shows that a discipline’s position in the hierarchy depends on the characteristics and developmental experiences of the creator. Simonton’s chapter is an intriguing synthesis of issues in both psychology and philosophy regarding the classification of creativity across domains.

Philosophy of Education (and Education of Philosophy)

Our final two chapters deal with the teaching and learning of creativity. It is not unusual to find people who assume that creativity is an innate capacity that cannot be taught or learned. Edward Young and Immanuel Kant were part of a long tradition of thinkers who held such a view, and in arguing for it, they did us the service of exposing the kinds of assumptions that make it seem compelling. In chapter 13, Berys Gaut identifies two key arguments: The first is that learning requires imitation, which is incompatible with creativity; the second is that learning consists in following rules, which is incompatible with creativity. After criticizing these arguments, Gaut develops a positive case for the teachability of creativity, based on the teachability of the kinds of abilities and motivations that are involved in creativity. There is a sense in which Gaut’s question can be settled empirically: We can show that creativity can be taught simply by pointing to cases where it has been taught. Gaut himself discusses such examples as they occur in mathematics and fiction writing, noting in particular how heuristics or rules of thumb are used in these domains. But while such cases may suffice to show that creativity can be taught, Gaut further enriches our understanding by explaining how this is possible despite the common misconceptions that may seem to rule it out. Having given a philosophical account of how creativity can be taught, he ends by applying his analysis to the teaching of creativity within philosophy itself.

With this last theme, Gaut has a kindred spirit in Alan Hájek, the author of our final chapter. In fact, between the two of them, we have an instance of “multiples” in creativity research, cases where people working independently arrive at the same discoveries at about the same time. [21] Although Gaut and Hájek were unaware of each other’s essays before submitting them for this volume, they converged on an interesting proposal—that by using various heuristics, philosophers can enhance their abilities to make valuable contributions to their field, including ideas that are distinctively creative.

As Hájek notes, it is said that anyone of average talent can become a strong chess player by learning and internalizing certain chess heuristics —“castle early,” “avoid isolated pawns,” and so on. Analogously, Hájek suggests, philosophy has a wealth of heuristics— philosophical heuristics —although they have not been nearly so well documented and studied. Sometimes these take the form of useful heuristics for generating counterexamples, such as “check extreme cases.” Sometimes they suggest ways of generating new arguments out of old ones, as in “arguments involving possibility can often be recast as arguments involving time, or space.” Sometimes they provide templates for positive arguments (e.g., ways of showing that something is possible). Hájek offers this chapter partly as an introduction to a larger project of identifying and evaluating philosophical heuristics, illustrating them with numerous examples from the philosophical literature. This work is a creative contribution to the philosophy of education. And it offers insights for the philosophy of creativity too, as it shows in fine detail how, contrary to a common assumption, creativity can be compatible with and even enhanced by the following of rules.

We are thankful for the input, encouragement, and support of Lloyd and Satesh Bassit, Kate Brubacher, Taylor Carmen, Kephun Chazotsang, Tamara Day and the Day family, Hamutal Dotan, Michael Della Rocca, Milena Fisher, Eugene Ford, Nancy France, Don Garrett, Tamar Szabó Gendler, Lydia Goehr, Joy Hanson, Ben Irvine, the Joseph family, Markus Labude, Karen Lewis, Michael and Barbara Kaufman, Rebecca McMillan, John Morrison, Emily Downing Muller, Fred Neuhouser, Eugenia Paul,  Stan and Sabina Reid, Carol Rovane, Michael Taylor, and our wonderful colleagues and students at Barnard College, Columbia University, and New York University. Special thanks to Liz Boylan, former provost of Barnard College, for generously sponsoring the conference we held on the philosophy of creativity in preparation for this volume. We thank film director Tao Ruspoli for making a video of the event, artists Jill Sigman and Paul D. Miller (a.k.a. “D.J. Spooky”) for their participation as special guests, and Geovanna Carrasco, Melissa Flores, and Emily Neil for their excellent work as research assistants. We thank Peter Ohlin, Lucy Randall, Stacey Victor, and their colleagues at Oxford University Press for helping us see this book to print.

Last but not least, we are very grateful to our contributors for illustrating the value of interdisciplinary exchange, the intellectual richness of the philosophy of creativity, and the exciting possibilities for how this field can grow. We hope this volume helps to stimulate new insights, questions, and collaborations—new ways to illuminate (and perhaps even to exemplify) this magnificent facet of human life.

[1] Or what we now call “creativity.”  According to some scholars, that abstract noun did not exist in European languages until the 19 th century—but the phenomenon, and interest in it, certainly did. (See, e.g. Władysław Tatarkiewicz, A History of Six Ideas: An Essay in Aesthetics (The Hague, NL: Martinus Nijhoff, 1980), esp. chapter 8.) For other discussions of the complex history of terms and concepts associated with creativity, see, e.g., Darrin M. McMahon, Divine Fury: A History of Genius . Perseus Books Group, 2013; Murray, Penelope, ed. Genius: The history of an idea . New York: Basil Blackwell, 1989; Milton Charles Nahm, Genius and Creativity: An Essay in the History of Ideas . Harper & Row, 1965.

[2] Plato, Ion and Phaedrus , in The Complete Works of Plato, eds. John M. Cooper and D. S. Hutchinson (Hackett Publishing, 1997).  Cf. Elizabeth Asmis, “Plato on Poetic Creativity,” in The Cambridge Companion to Plato , ed. Richard Kraut (Cambridge University Press, 1992).

[3] Aristotle, Poetics , in The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Trans- lation , vol. II, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton University Press, 1984).  For a sophisticated defense of the Aristotelian idea that the creative process is fundamentally rational, see Gaut, Berys. "Creativity and Rationality." The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 70, no. 3 (2012): 259-270.

[4] Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment , eds. Eric Matthew and Paul Guyer (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 43–50

[5] Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation , vols. I and II, trans. E. F. J. Payne (New York: Dover, 1969). See vol. I, pp. 184–194, and vol. II, pp. 376–402.

[6] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings , eds. Raymond Geuss and Ronald Speirs (Cambridge University Press, 1999).

[7] Samples of this work can be found in these two collections: Michael Krausz, Denis Dutton, and Karen Bardsley, The Idea of Creativity (Boston: Brill, 2009); and The Creation of Art: New Essays in Philosophical Aesthetics , eds. Berys Gaut and Paisley Livingston (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

[8] J. P. Guilford, “Creativity,” in American Psychologist 5 (1950), pp. 444–454.

[9] See, e.g., the psychology section of The Creativity Post : http://www.creativitypost.com/psychology.

[10] Psychology of Aesthetics; Creativity and the Arts; Creativity Research Journal; Journal of Creative Behavior; International Journal of Creativity and Problem Solving.

[11] J. C. Kaufman, Creativity 101 (New York: Springer, 2009). K. Sawyer, Explaining Creativity: The Science of Human Innovation , 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). R. W. Weisberg, Creativity: Understanding Innovation in Problem Solving, Science, Invention, and the Arts (New York: Wiley, 2006).

[12] Robert S. Albert and Mark A. Runco, “A History of Research on Creativity,” in Handbook of Creativity , ed. Robert J. Sternberg (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 16–31 at p. 17.

[13] Paul Feyerabend, “Creativity—A Dangerous Myth,” in Critical Inquiry 13, no. 4 (1987), pp. 700–711; Carl R. Hausman, “Criteria of Creativity,” in The Concept of Creativity in Science and Art , eds. Denis Dutton and Michael Krausz (Amsterdam: Springer, 1985), pp. 75–89. Carl R. Hausman, A Discourse On Novelty and Creation (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1975). I. C. Jarvie, “The Rationality of Creativity,” in The Concept of Creativity in Science and Art , eds. Denis Dutton and Michael Krausz (Amsterdam: Springer, 1985), pp. 109–128. John Hospers, “Artistic Creativity,” in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 43, no. 3 (1985), pp. 243–255. For more optimistic perspectives, see Dustin Stokes, “Incubated Cognition and Creativity,” in Journal of Consciousness Studies 14, no. 3 (2007), pp. 83–100. Larry Briskman, “Creative Product and Creative Process in Science and Art,” in Inquiry 23, no. 1 (1980), pp. 83–106; and Maria Kronfeldner, “Creativity Naturalized,” in The Philosophical Quarterly 59, no. 237 (2009), pp. 577–592.

[14] For reflections on different trends in this movement, see Jesse Prinz, “Empirical Philosophy and Experimental Philosophy,” in Experimental Philosophy , eds. Joshua Knobe and Shaun Nichols (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008); and “Introduction: Philosophy and Cognitive Science” in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Cognitive Science , eds. Eric Margolis, Richard Samuels, and Stephen P. Stich (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 3–18. The chapters of this handbook explore connections between philosophy and cognitive science on various topics. The integration is especially pronounced in research on such topics as color perception (e.g., Alex Byrne and David R. Hilbert, “Color Realism and Color Science,” in Behavioral and Brain Sciences 26, no. 1 [2003], pp. 3–21) and causal cognition (e.g., Tania Lombrozo, “Causal-Explanatory Pluralism: How intentions, functions, and mechanisms influence causal ascriptions,” in Cognitive Psychology 61, no. 4 [2010], pp. 303–332).

[15] For another survey of the field, see Berys Gaut, “The Philosophy of Creativity,” in Philosophy Compass 5, no. 12 (2010), pp. 1034–1046.

[16] Notable exceptions to this view include Dustin Stokes, “Minimally Creative Thought,” in Metaphilosophy 42, no. 5 (2011), pp. 658–681; and Mark A. Runco, “Parsimonious Creativity and its Measurement,” in Measuring Creativity: Proceedings of European Council Meeting On Creativity and Innovation , ed. E. Villalba (Luxembourg: Publications Office of the European Union, 2010), pp. 393–405, who argue that (at least for certain purposes) it’s best to work with a more minimal conception of creativity that involves novelty but doesn’t require value. There may also be additional requirements. It has been argued, for example, that in order for a product to count as creative, it must be surprising (Novitz; Boden), or produced intentionally (Gaut), or in a non-mechanical fashion with flair (Gaut).

[17] Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment , eds. Eric Matthew and Paul Guyer (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 43–50. See also Paul Guyer, “Exemplary Originality: Genius, Universality, and Individuality,” in The Creation of Art , eds. Berys Gaut and Paisley Livingston (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 116–137.

[18] Władysław Tatarkiewicz, A History of Six Ideas: An Essay in Aesthetics (The Hague, NL: Martinus Nijhoff, 1980), esp. chapter 8.

[19] Berys Gaut and Paisley Livingston, “Introduction: The Creation of Art: Issues and Perspectives,” in The Creation of Art: Issues and Perspectives , eds. Berys Gaut and Paisley Livingston (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 1.

[20] Kant (ibid.).

[21] Dean Keith Simonton, Creativity in Science: Chance, Logic, Genius, and Zeitgeist (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

This article is taken from The Philosophy of Creativity: New Essays , edited by Elliot Samuel Paul and Scott Barry Kaufman (Oxford University Press).

• cognitive science
• elliot samuel paul
• philosophy of creativity
• scott barry kaufman

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Understanding the Psychology of Creativity

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What Is Creativity?

When does creativity happen, types of creativity, what does it take to be creative, creativity and the big five, how to increase creativity, frequently asked questions.

What is creativity? Creativity involves the ability to develop new ideas or utilize objects or information in novel ways. It can involve large-scale ideas that have the potential to change the world, such as inventing tools that impact how people live, or smaller acts of creation such as figuring out a new way to accomplish a task in your daily life.

This article explores what creativity is and when it is most likely to happen. It also covers some of the steps that you can take to improve your own creativity.

Studying creativity can be a tricky process. Not only is creativity a complex topic in and of itself, but there is also no clear consensus on how exactly to define creativity. Many of the most common definitions suggest that creativity is the tendency to solve problems or create new things in novel ways.

Two of the primary components of creativity include:

• Originality: The idea should be something new that is not simply an extension of something else that already exists.
• Functionality: The idea needs to actually work or possess some degree of usefulness.

In his book Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention , psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi suggested that creativity can often be seen in a few different situations.  

• People who seem stimulating, interesting, and have a variety of unusual thoughts.
• People who perceive the world with a fresh perspective, have insightful ideas and make important personal discoveries. These individuals make creative discoveries that are generally known only to them.
• People who make great creative achievements that become known to the entire world. Inventors and artists such as Thomas Edison and Pablo Picasso would fall into this category.

Experts also tend to distinguish between different types of creativity. The “four c” model of creativity suggests that there are four different types:

• “Mini-c” creativity involves personally meaningful ideas and insights that are known only to the self.
• “ Little-c” creativity involves mostly everyday thinking and problem-solving. This type of creativity helps people solve everyday problems they face and adapt to changing environments.
• “Pro-C” creativity takes place among professionals who are skilled and creative in their respective fields. These individuals are creative in their vocation or profession but do not achieve eminence for their works.
• “Big-C” creativity involves creating works and ideas that are considered great in a particular field. This type of creativity leads to eminence and acclaim and often leads to world-changing creations such as medical innovations, technological advances, and artistic achievements.

Csikszentmihalyi suggests that creative people tend to possess are ​a variety of traits that contribute to their innovative thinking. Some of these key traits include:

• Energy: Creative people tend to possess a great deal of both physical and mental energy. However, they also tend to spend a great deal of time quietly thinking and reflecting.
• Intelligence: Psychologists have long believed that intelligence plays a critical role in creativity. In Terman’s famous longitudinal study of gifted children, researchers found that while high IQ was necessary for great creativity, not all people with high IQs are creative. Csikszentmihalyi believes that creative people must be smart, but they must be capable of looking at things in fresh, even naïve, ways.
• Discipline: Creative people do not just sit around waiting for inspiration to strike. They ​are playful, yet they are also disciplined in the pursuit of their work and passions.

Certain personality traits are also connected to creativity. According to the big five theory of personality , human personality is made up of five broad dimensions:

• Conscientiousness
• Extroversion
• Agreeableness
• Neuroticism

Each dimension represents a continuum, so for each trait, people can be either high, low, or somewhere between the two. 

Openness to experience is a big five trait that is correlated with creativity. People who are high on this trait are more open to new experiences and ideas. They tend to seek novelty and enjoy trying new things, meeting new people, and considering different perspectives. 

However, other personality traits and characteristics can also play a role in creativity. For example, intrinsic motivation , curiosity, and persistence can all determine how much people tend to pursue new ideas and look for novel solutions.

While some people seem to come by creativity naturally, there are things that you can do to increase your own creativity .

Some strategies that can be helpful for improving creativity include: 

• Being open to new ideas : Openness to experience is the personality trait that is most closely correlated with creativity. Focus on being willing to try new things and explore new ideas.
• Be persistent : Creativity is not just about sitting around waiting for inspiration to strike. Creative people spend time working to produce new things. Their efforts don't always work out, but continued practice builds skills that contribute to creativity.
• Make time for creativity : In addition to being persistent, you also need to devote time specifically toward creative efforts. This might mean setting aside a little time each day or each week specifically to brainstorm, practice, learn, or create.

Csikszentmihalyi has noted that creativity requires both a fresh perspective combined with discipline. As Thomas Edison famously suggested, genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.

A Word From Verywell

Creativity is a complex subject and researchers are still working to understand exactly what factors contribute to the ability to think creatively. While some people seem to come by creativity naturally, there are also things you can do to build and strengthen this ability.

The late Maya Angelou also suggested that thinking creativity helps foster even greater creativity, "The important thing is to use it. You can’t use up creativity. The more you use it, the more you have," she suggested.

Creativity does not reside in one single area of the brain; many areas are actually involved. The frontal cortex of the brain is responsible for many of the functions that play a part in creativity.

However, other parts of the brain impact creativity as well, including the hippocampus (which is important to memory) and the basal ganglia (which is essential in the memory of how to perform tasks). The white matter of the brain, which keeps the various parts of the brain connected, is also essential for creative thinking.

Research suggests that people can train their brains to be more creative. Engaging in cognitively stimulating tasks, going on a walk, finding sources of inspiration, and meditating are a few strategies that may help boost creative thinking abilities. 

The "big five" are the broad categories of traits that make up personality. The five dimensions are openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. Each trait involves a range between two extremes, and people can be either at each end or somewhere in the middle.

American Psychological Association. The science of creativity .

Csikszentmihalyi M. Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention .   New York: HarperCollins; 2013.

Kaufman J, Beghetto R. Beyond big and little: The four C model of creativity .  Review of General Psychology . 2009;13(1):1-12. doi:10.1037/a0013688

Kaufman SB, Quilty LC, Grazioplene RG, et al. Openness to experience and intellect differentially predict creative achievement in the arts and sciences .  J Pers . 2016;84(2):248-258. doi:10.1111/jopy.12156

Elliot J.  Conversations With Maya Angelou . Jackson, Miss.: University Press of Mississippi; 1998.

Cavdarbasha D, Kurczek J. Connecting the dots: your brain and creativity . Front Young Minds . 2017;5:19. doi:10.3389/frym.2017.00019

Sun J, Chen Q, Zhang Q, Li Y, Li H, Wei D, Yang W, Qiu J.  Training your brain to be more creative: brain functional and structural changes induced by divergent thinking training .  Hum Brain Mapp . 2016;37(10):3375-87. doi:10.1002/hbm.23246

By Kendra Cherry, MSEd Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."

Essays About Creativity: Top 5 Examples and 7 Prompts

Creativity helps us understand and solve problems in different ways. Discover our top essays about creativity examples and use our prompts for your writing.

Albert Einstein defines creativity as “seeing what others see and thinking what others have not thought.” But what makes it such a popular topic to write about? Every person has a creative view and opinion on something, but not everyone knows how to express it. Writing utilizes ideas and imagination to produce written pieces, such as essays.

Creativity reinforces not only new views but also innovation around the world. Because creativity is a broad topic to write about, you’ll need several resources to help you narrow down what you want to discuss in your essay.

5 Essay Examples

1. way to foster creativity in young children by anonymous on ivypanda.com, 2. phenomenon of creativity and success by anonymous on ivypanda.com, 3. do schools kill creativity: essay on traditional education by anonymous on gradesfixer.com, 4. creativity in dreams essay by writer pete, 5. the importance of creativity in higher education by anonymous on gradesfixer.com, 1. what is creativity, 2. how creativity affects our daily lives, 3. the impact of creativity on students, 4. the importance of creativity, 5. creativity: a product of perception, 6. types of creativity, 7. art and creativity.

“There are different ways to foster creativity in young children. They include different approaches to the problem of making children more self-reliant, more creative, and more interested in the process of receiving education, obtaining experience, achieving certain results in the sphere of self-study.”

The essay delves into the importance of promoting creativity by teaching music to young students. The author says music’s intention, rhythm, and organizational features help people understand performance, improve their mood, and educate them about the world they live in, unlike noise. Music is an important area of life, so it is important to teach it correctly and inspire children.

Since music and creativity are both vital, the author notes that music teachers must find ways to facilitate ventures to enhance their students’ creativity. The author also believes that teachers must perform their duties appropriately and focus on shaping their students’ behavior, personality, and worldview. You might be interested in these articles about art .

“Over the past few decades, creativity has evolved from a characteristic normally associated with artistic activities into a quality that is found in people of various professions. However, in the 21st century, creativity has become a rather controversial issue.”

The author discusses that while creativity dramatically contributes to the success of individuals and companies, creativity in the 21st-century workplace still has mixed reception. They mention that creativity leads to new ideas and innovations, helps solve complex problems, and makes great leaders. 

However, some still see creative people as irrational, disorganized, and distracting in the workplace. This often results in companies rejecting applicants with this quality. Ultimately, the writer believes creativity is vital in all organizations today. Hiring people with this unique trait is highly beneficial and essential to achieving the company’s goals. For more inspiration, check out these essays about achievement and essays about curiosity .

“… the traditional education system has caused much controversy since the beginning of formal education because traditional education can hurt children’s ability to think creatively, innovate, and develop fascinating minds.”

The essay discusses how school rules and norms affect students’ expression of true individuality. The author mentions that today’s schools focus on students’ test performance, memorization, and compliance more than their aspirations and talents, preventing students from practicing and enhancing their creativity.

The author uses various articles, shows, and situations to elaborate on how schools kill a student’s creativity by forcing them to follow a specific curriculum as a means to succeed in life. It kills the student’s creativity as they become “robots” with the same beliefs, knowledge, and values. According to the writer, killing a child’s creativity leads to a lack of motivation and a wrong career direction.

“Creativity is enhanced whether one chooses to pay attention to it, or not. Each person has the capacity to learn much from their creative dreaming, if they would only think more creatively and openly when awake.”

The essay contains various studies to support claims about people being more creative when asleep. According to the author, the human brain processes more information when dreaming than in the waking state. While the brainstem is inactive, it responds to PGO Waves that trigger the human CMPG, which puts images into the dream to move. The author discusses two main perspectives to discuss how creative dreaming occurs.

First, creativity is enhanced when a person sleeps, not through dreaming but because the mind is free from stress, making the brain more focused on thinking and creating images. The second is that the dreaming mind gathers and processes more information than the human brain unconsciously accumulates daily. The author states that creativity helps express feelings and believes people should not take their creativity in dreams for granted.

“When students have the opportunity to be creative, they’ll have the freedom to express themselves however they want, which satisfies them and drives them to work hard.”

The essay focuses on how the role of creativity is getting slimmer as a student enters higher education. To explain the importance of creativity, the author shares their experience showing how elementary schools focus more on improving and training students’ creativity than higher education. Although rules and restrictions are essential in higher education, students should still practice creativity because it enhances their ability to think and quickly adapt to different situations.

If you want to use the latest grammar software, read our guide to using an AI grammar checker .

7 Prompts for Essays About Creativity

Creativity is an important topic that significantly affects an individual’s development. For this prompt, discuss the meaning of creativity according to experts versus the personal interpretation of creative individuals. Compare these explanations and add your opinion on these similarities and differences. You can even discuss creativity in your life and how you practice creativity in your hobbies, interests, and education.

There are several impacts of creativity in one’s life. It improves mental health, strengthens the immune system, and affects one’s ability to solve problems in school and real life. Sometimes, being creative helps us be more open to various perspectives to reduce our biases. 

Use this prompt to write about a specific situation you experienced where creativity made you more innovative, inventive, or imaginative. Discuss these particular moments by pointing out creativity’s impact on your goal and how things would differ without creativity. You may also be interested in learning about the different types of creativity .

Creativity significantly impacts students’ enthusiasm and feeling of belongingness as they share their passion. Additionally, creativity’s effects stretch to students’ career choices and mental health.

Use this prompt to start a discussion of the pros and cons of creativity with students. Give examples where a student’s creativity leads to their success or failure. You can also share your observations as a guardian or a student.  

Sometimes, when we lose touch with our creative side, our viewpoint becomes shallow. Creativity not only works for art but also broadens everyone’s perspectives in life. 

For this prompt, speak about how creativity matters and prove its importance by providing a situation. Theorize or discuss how creative people and people who fail to increase their creativity respond to the case. 

Perception is an underlying characteristic of creativity. It interprets what we observe, while creativity allows us to make sense of them. Use this prompt to define perception to the readers through the lens of creativity.

List your experience proving creativity is a product of perception. For example, people can have vastly different interpretations of a painting or sound depending on how they perceive it. 

There are several types of creativity, some people believe creativity is a natural talent, but others say it can be cultivated. In this prompt, briefly define creativity and identify each type, such as musical, artistic, or logical. 

Discuss how creativity can be taught and cultivated, and look into how some people are naturally creative. In your essay, use real-life examples; this could be someone you know who has studied a creative subject or a friend who is a naturally creative songwriter.

When people say creativity, they usually think about art because it involves imaginative and expressive actions. Art strongly indicates a person’s ongoing effort and emotional power. 

To write this essay effectively, show how art relates to a person’s creativity. Briefly explain creativity and art and incorporate the factors that link these two. Note that art can be anything from contemporary dance and music to sculptures and paintings. For help with your essay, check our round-up of best essay writing apps .

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The evolution of human artistic creativity

Creating visual art is one of the defining characteristics of the human species, but the paucity of archaeological evidence means that we have limited information on the origin and evolution of this aspect of human culture. The components of art include colour, pattern and the reproduction of visual likeness. The 2D and 3D art forms that were created by Upper Palaeolithic Europeans at least 30 000 years ago are conceptually equivalent to those created in recent centuries, indicating that human cognition and symbolling activity, as well as anatomy, were fully modern by that time. The origins of art are therefore much more ancient and lie within Africa, before worldwide human dispersal. The earliest known evidence of ‘artistic behaviour’ is of human body decoration, including skin colouring with ochre and the use of beads, although both may have had functional origins. Zig-zag and criss-cross patterns, nested curves and parallel lines are the earliest known patterns to have been created separately from the body; their similarity to entopic phenomena (involuntary products of the visual system) suggests a physiological origin. 3D art may have begun with human likeness recognition in natural objects, which were modified to enhance that likeness; some 2D art has also clearly been influenced by suggestive features of an uneven surface. The creation of images from the imagination, or ‘the mind’s eye’, required a seminal evolutionary change in the neural structures underpinning perception; this change would have had a survival advantage in both tool-making and hunting. Analysis of early tool-making techniques suggests that creating 3D objects (sculptures and reliefs) involves their cognitive deconstruction into a series of surfaces, a principle that could have been applied to early sculpture. The cognitive ability to create art separate from the body must have originated in Africa but the practice may have begun at different times in genetically and culturally distinct groups both within Africa and during global dispersal, leading to the regional variety seen in both ancient and recent art. At all stages in the evolution of artistic creativity, stylistic change must have been due to rare, highly gifted individuals.

Introduction

Art, in its many forms, is practised by almost all human cultures and can be regarded as one of the defining characteristics of the human species. In all societies today, the visual arts are intimately intertwined with music, dance, ritual (marking life landmarks, death, religion and politics) and language (poetry, song and story-telling). Vocalization, ritualized movement and visual display are part of animal courtship and dominance competition as well as human ritual and communication, so it is likely that the roots of music, dance and body decoration lie deep in the evolutionary history of the animal kingdom. Nevertheless, with the evolution of human cognition, they were deployed in new ways, with complex symbolic meaning becoming attached to them.

There is good evidence for a neurological relationship between visual creativity and language. Stout et al. (2008) studied the brain activity of subjects who had become expert in Early Stone Age tool-making. The tools were of the Oldowan and Acheulian types, representing a period of some 2 million years during which time the brain of our hominin ancestors expanded and tools became more advanced. The brain activation detected by positron emission tomography during tool-making included both visuomotor and language circuits, suggesting that tool-making and language share a basis in the human capacity for complex goal-directed manual activity. As this includes artistic creativity, evidence of the increasing sophistication of tool technology, as well as evidence from crania of increasing brain size, suggests that our ancestors had the ability to create art or proto-art much earlier in evolution than is suggested by current knowledge of art-related artefacts.

There is no consensus on how to define art, although most definitions emphasize aesthetics. Layton (1991) wrote: ‘we identify art works in a formal sense because we find them aesthetically pleasing and we find that they enhance our perception of the world around us through the apt use of images’. Haselberger (1961) defined works of art as objects produced with the intention that they be aesthetically pleasing and not merely pragmatically functional. A broader definition would include the decoration of useful objects such as tools and weapons, and allow for the possibility that most early art may have had a ritual or religious significance. We simply cannot know whether any prehistoric art was created simply for the sake of providing aesthetic pleasure, although there must surely have been an element of this on the part of both artist and viewer. It is also generally accepted that art incorporates a symbolic element (e.g. Gombrich, 1960 ; Layton, 1991 ) but, even where symbolism was not intended, a pattern or animal shape may have a totemic function; a particular pattern or animal form may be specific to a group or tribe and may mark their territory or clothing. The cross-cultural views of Morphy (2007) of what can be categorized as art in the European-Australian context are also relevant to the prehistoric perspective. Until recently, aboriginal art was considered as being of only ethnographic interest; a more open-minded and informed view has resulted in the inclusion of this category of art in mainstream galleries.

In this article I take an inclusive view of art, to encompass: (i) the use of colour, applied to the body, another natural or created 3D object or a flat surface; (ii) pattern, whether or not made with symbolic intent; (iii) the modification of naturally occurring forms; (iv) the de-novo creation of 2D or 3D images. The first three of these probably arose independently but the fourth synthesizes elements of all of them as well as representing a fundamental cognition-related change. I present evidence that the origins of art lie within Africa and that the oldest known European art was already recognisably characteristic of this region some 30 000 years ago. Although few in number, artefacts from older excavations in Africa and the Levant (the strip of land forming the eastern border of the Mediterranean Sea) suggest some of the possible stages in the evolution of human artistic creativity preceding the stage at which the evolution of technical skills, combined with the evolution of modern cognition, enabled humans to make representations of living beings in two or three dimensions.

The periods of human evolution to be covered, and some of the artefacts mentioned in the text, are summarized in the time-line shown in Fig. 1 .

Periods of time and species of Homo , and some of the artefacts mentioned in the text alongside their dates (right column); the vertical axis is log scale. Homo dates are taken from Wood & Lonergan (2008) . The African Middle Stone Age (MSA) dates from at least 285 000 BP, based on the earliest use of stone point technology and hafted tools in East Africa, succeeding the use of Acheulian stone technology characterized by cleavers and handaxes ( Tryon and McBrearty, 2002 ). The transition to the Later Stone Age (LSA) does not coincide precisely with the beginning of the European Upper Palaeolithic (UP). The UP periods (Aurignacian, Gravettian, Solutrean and Magdalenian) are named after tool technology characteristic of key sites but the actual dates show geographical variations. The European Middle Palaeolithic is divided into Mousterian and Châtelperronian, after Neanderthal tool types made before and after the arrival of modern humans.

How, when and where was art first created?

Much has been written on the origin or ‘birth’ of art. Most of these articles and books are mainly or entirely concerned with the European cave art of the Upper Palaeolithic and 3D artefacts such as the fertility doll-like ‘Venus’ figurines (see below). The long-held view that modern human behaviour, including art, only began when Homo sapiens migrated from Africa to Europe around 45 000 years before present (BP) is based on the idea that there was a rapid evolutionary change in the human brain and hence cognition at this time, which is referred to as the ‘Upper Palaeolithic Revolution’ (e.g. Bar-Yosef, 2002 ; see also references in McBrearty & Brooks, 2000 ) or the ‘Transition’ (e.g. Lewis-Williams, 2002 ). Is it possible, or even plausible, that the first real drawings and paintings were those created by Cro-Magnon man 30 000 years ago on cave walls and that the first real sculptures and clay models were those of Upper Palaeolithic Eurasia? Surely not – as Gombrich (1956 , 1960) emphasized, art is tied to tradition, so there cannot be an ‘innocent eye’ or an ‘original genius’. He proposed that art develops through a dialogue between artist and viewer; although based within its cultural context, it develops a life of its own and influences the formation of taste.

The concept of a rapid revolution that characterized the Middle to Upper Palaeolithic transition has been challenged by McBrearty & Brooks (2000) , on the basis of a reassessment of the archaeological evidence of modern behaviour from Middle Stone Age Africa. Recent excavations, most revealingly in South African caves, have provided significant insight into symbolling activity including the use of colour, engraving of patterns, bone technology and bead-making, dating from up to 164 000 years ago ( Henshilwood et al. 2001 , 2002 ; d’Errico et al. 2005 ; Jacobs et al. 2006 ; d’Errico & Henshilwood, 2007 ; Marean et al. 2007 ).

These finds confirm that European Upper Palaeolithic paintings, engravings and carvings, many of which are mature works of skilled craftsmanship, have a long history in terms of human evolution and culture behind them. The unrivalled wealth of European material, which clearly indicates a highly developed artistic culture, may indeed be due to a sudden flowering of a more sophisticated symbolic creativity. Alternatively it may be a historical artefact arising from a change in the use of locally available sites, materials and traditions, e.g. from rock surfaces exposed to the elements to the protected environment of enclosed caves for painting. Sculpture probably began with wood carving; even today, the favoured material for sculpture in Africa is wood, which is a perishable material unless fossilized. The few centuries-old African stone carvings that have survived are sophisticated in representational skill and aesthetic sensitivity, indicating a long-established creative tradition there ( Koloss, 2002 ; Willett, 2002 ). One traditional element of Yolngu art in Arnhem Land, Australia, is the creation of symbolic patterns in sand, whose temporary nature is part of their ritual purpose ( Morphy, 2007 ). We simply cannot know how much art was created in perishable materials and has therefore been lost to the archaeological record. Any discussion on the origins of art is therefore inevitably biased towards consideration of the evidence from materials that have endured to the present day.

Human evolution and the origin of art

Evidence for a pre-hominin origin of colour appreciation and enjoyment of the creative process.

Many captive chimpanzees enjoy painting with colour – their ‘art’ resembles the paintings that young children make with pots of colour applied with fingers or brushes. Congo, an exceptionally intelligent chimpanzee resident in London Zoo, was encouraged to paint by the zoologist/anthropologist Desmond Morris in the late 1950s. Three of Congo’s paintings were sold at auction for a high price in 2005 ( http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/1492463/Art-world-goes-wild-for-chimpanzees-paintings-as-Warhol-work-flops.html ). Between the ages of 2 and 4, he completed more than 400 drawings and paintings. He had a real involvement in his work and could not be persuaded to stop before, or continue after, arriving at his own conviction of having completed a painting. Examples of his ‘art’ were acquired (and admired) by Picasso and Miro, and are quite pleasing to the 21st century human eye, schooled as it is to enjoy abstract work. Comparison of Congo’s enjoyably attractive paintings with those of other chimps ( http://stores.ebay.com/ChimpArt ) suggests that the creative gift is not uniform among chimpanzees, as it is not among humans. Since the evolutionary divergence from the last common ancestor of modern humans and chimpanzees occurred 4–8 million years ago ( Bradley, 2008 ), we can be certain that the potential for some individuals to enjoy applying colour to a surface is at least this ancient. It is, however, important to note that chimpanzees in the wild do not exhibit any behaviour equivalent to painting – there is a vast gulf between the cognitive ability to use colour and the initiation and cultural assimilation of this behaviour.

Body painting and decoration – the earliest form of art?

The human love of body decoration also involves the application of colour. Modern cosmetics and tattoos have a long history, probably originating with the use of ochre for colouring the skin hundreds of millennia ago. The oldest known use of ochre is ∼ 164 000 BP from a South African coastal site, Pinnacle Point, where 57 pigment pieces were found ( Marean et al. 2007 ). At least 10 of the pieces had been ground or scraped; these had been deliberately selected as the most intensely red pigments. The possibility that they were used for body colouring has been accepted on the basis of this colour selection, as none of the other possible functions of ochre would require this ( McBrearty & Stringer, 2007 ). Body decoration, whether with pigments or with beads made from pierced shells such as those found in the Blombos caves of South Africa ( Henshilwood et al. 2002 ; dated to ∼ 100 000 BP by Jacobs et al. 2006 ), suggests highly developed cognitive functions and symbolling activity. The people who made these beads were anatomically modern humans: the earliest African skulls identified as H. sapiens are those from Kibish, Ethiopia dated to 195 000 BP ( McDougall et al. 2005 ), those from Herto, Ethiopia date from 160 000 BP ( Clark et al. 2003 ; Stringer, 2003 ; White et al. 2003 ).

Body decoration is likely to have been an important precursor to the creation of art separate from the body. The use of colour to decorate skin, bones and beads suggests enjoyment of form and colour. The practice of piercing teeth, shells and bones, and stringing them, singly or multiply, to make a pendant or necklace is the oldest known form of personal decoration after body painting. This behaviour required recognition of the potential of these objects to be modified by piercing, strung together and worn, and recognition of a symbolic importance in the wearing. The individual wearing a necklace would have been enhanced in some way that could include some aspect of status related to social structure; and or it could give status to the creator, who may or may not also have been the wearer.

There are of course alternative, non-symbolic explanations for the origin of face painting and bead use. Hunters to this day use face paint as camouflage when stalking their prey; face painting could also be group-specific, enabling group recognition at a distance. Among the !Kung of the Kalahari, strung ostrich-eggshell beads similar to those found in a Kenyan site dated to >30 000 BP are used in times of food scarcity as a means of exchange with other groups whose food production is in surplus ( Ambrose, 1998 ). Hence the ritual and decorative functions of body decoration could have arisen secondarily to their survival-enhancing functions.

It is possible that the use of colour for body decoration was not unique to H. sapiens and may have arisen independently in Middle Palaeolithic Europe. Soressi & d’Errico (2007) describe evidence for the use of manganese dioxide for body decoration in at least 70 European Mousterian (Neanderthal) sites, in which blocks of this black pigment were found (over 500 at one site alone). Many of the blocks had markings consistent with intentional abrasion (scraping) or had been polished; they were discovered together with grindstones and flint tools consistent with these functions. Although this indicates preparation of powdered pigment, which was probably mixed with a binding agent before use, some pieces had been formed into points bearing traces of use as crayons. Blocks of red and yellow ochre were also found but in smaller numbers and, in contrast to the manganese dioxide, did not show clear evidence of use. Neanderthals also used charcoal in a similar manner. These observations suggest the use of pigment for body decoration or camouflage by European Neanderthals at least 60 000 years ago, apparently with a preference for black.

The use of pigment by both early African H. sapiens and European Neanderthals suggests that the cognitive ability and symbolling behaviour inherent in body decoration pre-dates the last common ancestor of these two species. The date of this split is not known but 28 skeletons of archaic Homo discovered in a cave at Sima de los Huesos in Atapuerca, Spain ( Bermúdez de Castro et al. 1997 ) have been dated to ∼ 600 000 years ago, which places them at the beginning of the Neanderthal evolutionary lineage ( Bischoff et al. 2007 ). These skeletons share features with both H. erectus and H. neanderthalensis , and were considered to be a new species, H. antecessor , a strong candidate to be ancestral to both H. neanderthalensis in Europe ( Bermúdez de Castro et al. 1997 , 2003 ) and H. sapiens in Africa ( Harvati, 2007 ). Body painting may have begun later than this split, originating independently in modern humans and Neanderthals, although the large cranial capacity of H. antecessor and its close relative H. heidelbergensis (1125–1450 cm 3 , see below) suggests the possibility of a relatively high order of cognition and some symbolic behaviour. It is not impossible that body painting was practised by these earlier species.

One important prerequisite for body painting was the loss (or great reduction) of body and facial hair. The fossil record does not tell us precisely when this occurred but we do know that the hair keratin gene KRTHAP1 , which is functional in chimpanzees and gorillas, was inactivated in the line leading to modern humans within the past 240 000 years ( Winter et al. 2001 ; Bradley, 2008 ).

Body painting is still used by peoples whose traditional way of life has not yet been entirely swept away by the inroads of Western modernity, as well as the tattoos and cosmetics of many modern cultures. It has multiple ritual functions, e.g. henna skin decoration for weddings and ash for mourning. The use of colour for body decoration, as well as beads and perishable items such as feathers or plant-derived items of which there is no archaeological record, is, however, conceptually a long way from the creation of patterns and representational art separate from ourselves.

Pattern: the first art form separate from the human body

The earliest known decorative patterns include the zig-zag patterns on a 77 000 BP ochre block from the Blombos caves, South Africa ( Henshilwood et al. 2002 ) and the rainbow-like nested curves and parallel lines etched on a piece of flint from around 54 000 BP in the Levant ( Marshack, 1996 ) ( Fig. 2 ). Bednarik (2003b) and Soressi & d’Errico (2007) document several other examples of parallel lines, nested curves and zig-zag patterns on bones and bone implements from the Lower and Middle Palaeolithic of Europe; these are associated with Neanderthal and older Homo remains. Engraved cupules of Lower Palaeolithic (Acheulian) origin in India are the oldest currently known deliberately made rock markings ( Bednarik, 2003b and references therein).

The Quneitra artefact, a flat flint cortex (7.2 cm) incised with nested semicircles and vertical lines (Levantine Middle Palaeolithic, ∼ 54 000 BP) (from Marshack, 1996 ).

The cognitive activity underlying pattern-making is complex, involving planning and intention, but the original idea of pattern may be a function of the brain: nested curves and zig-zag patterns are characteristic of entopic phenomena ( Clottes & Lewis-Williams, 1998 ), i.e. images seen in altered states of consciousness such as that preceding a migraine, in a schizophrenic hallucination or induced by temporal lobe epilepsy or certain drugs (as utilized in the psychedelic art of the 1960s and 1970s). Although the examples of early patterns mentioned above have been taken to imply symbolling activity, this is not necessarily the case. Seeing an entopic image ‘projected’ onto a surface can lead to a desire to draw it, simply to make sense of seeing this unbidden pattern (I have done this with a pre-migraine-generated image).

It may be that symbolic meanings of engraved and painted patterns came after their origin, i.e. that patterns originating from within the visual system were only later harnessed for symbolic or totemic functions. The geometric patterns in European Upper Palaeolithic caves are in positions that clearly suggest symbolic meaning. Leroi-Gourhan (1958 , quoted and illustrated by Clottes & Lewis-Williams, 1998 ) has suggested that geometric shapes and rows of dots are female and male symbols, respectively. Pattern is the dominant feature in the Yolngu art of Arnhem Land, Australia, and has a huge range of symbolic meanings ( Morphy, 2007 ). Ancient petroglyphs (rock engravings) based on complex patterns have survived in many Australian sites but are difficult to date accurately; one example, in Malangine cave, South Australia, has been dated to > 28 000 BP by uranium series analysis ( Bednarik, 2003b ). Geometric rock engravings associated with habitation sites dated to 15 000–16 000 BP have been discovered in Upper Egypt; their meaning is unknown but mushroom-shaped designs among them have been identified as diagrams of fish-traps ( Huyge, 2009 ), a reminder that prosaic rather than symbolic meanings are possible wherever we are unable to interpret intention.

Modification of suggestive forms to create images: the origin of 3D art?

Many sculptors feel that in working on a block of stone or other material they are releasing or revealing the form they create. This was graphically described by Michelangelo, e.g. ‘I saw an angel in the marble and carved until I set him free’, and is poignantly illustrated by his unfinished sculptures of slaves, on display at Florence’s Accademia gallery. This approach requires the 3D form to pre-exist in the mind of the sculptor, which, even with the aid of 2D working drawings, involves a highly sophisticated cognitive ability that few of us possess. A precursor of this process, not requiring the final form to be held in the mind, is to recognize a natural form as loosely resembling something else and to modify it to create a better likeness. Modifying a wooden clothes peg (the old-fashioned type with a knob at the top and split shaft) to make a doll uses this simple approach, as does the recognition of an anthropoid form in an oddly-shaped root vegetable. Ernst Gombrich credited the Florentine Renaissance philosopher, humanist and art theorist Leon Battista Alberti (1404–1472) with the idea that sculpture originated accidentally from noticing contours in tree trunks or lumps of earth that looked like other objects and could then be adjusted by addition or subtraction to create a perfect likeness, ‘not without pleasure’ (from De Statua , quoted by Gombrich, 1960, pp. 105–106 ). There are indeed some candidate examples from pre-history that suggest that this proto-creative process may have occurred in pre-modern humans. Although the following examples are not universally accepted as evidence of proto-artistic behaviour, they deserve serious consideration.

The artefact illustrated in Fig. 3A was excavated at Bere-khat Ram in the Golan Heights ( Marshack, 1997 and references therein to Naama Goren-Inbar). It was found in association with late Acheulian lithic tools in a layer estimated to date from 250 000–280 000 BP. It is a 3.5 cm-long volcanically-ejected piece of red tuff consisting of a fine-grained agglomerate matrix whose natural shape has been modified by scraping, bevelling and grooving, probably using flake tools. The Acheulian tool technology and dating of the site classify it as pre-Neanderthal, suggesting that the modification was carried out by H. heidelbergensis. Marshack (1997) considered the modification to have had the express purpose of enhancing the pebble’s suggestive shape of the head and torso of a woman. In particular, the groove that forms the ‘neck’ has been deepened and the shape of the right ‘arm’ altered (there is no clear left arm). This interpretation was not widely accepted until the more rigorous study of d’Errico & Nowell (2000) , which used a variety of microscopic methods on the artefact itself and carried out experimental carving of similar pieces of tuff found at the site. The discussion by six other archaeologists included with their article indicates general acceptance that the modification is anthropogenic but there is still some controversy concerning whether the modification was purposely representational, i.e. the product of symbolic thought in the mind of the carver. This debate is important because the status of this artefact, including whether or not it should be regarded as a ‘figurine’, is relevant to the question of the evolutionary origin of art beyond body decoration.

Modified artefacts. (A) The Berekhat Ram figurine, a piece of anthropogenically modified volcanic tuff from a Levantine late Acheulian layer of estimated date ∼ 250 000–280 000 BP (from Marshack, 1997 ). (B) Figurine-like piece of quarzite from Tan-Tan, Morocco (from Bednarik, 2003b ).

The likelihood that a H. heidelbergensis individual was capable of perceiving and improving upon a suggestively-shaped stone raises questions about the evolution of brain structure and function. Measurements of cranial capacity are rather crude indicators but they are all that we have. Anatomical studies of H. erectus crania suggest a much lesser cranial capacity (850–1290 cm 3 ) than those of Upper Palaeolithic H. sapiens (1302–1600 cm 3 ) and H. neanderthalensis (1200–1689 cm 3 ) ( Cobb, 2008 ), with only a short period of post-natal brain maturation ( Coqueugnio et al. 2004 ). The difference here is sufficiently great that it seems unlikely that the cognitive skills of H. erectus were sufficiently advanced for complex symbolic behaviour, although those of H. heidelbergensis and/or H. antessessor (both 1125–1450 cm 3 ) could have been. The possession of a level of cognitive intelligence that is less than that of H. sapiens does not rule out the possibility of recognizing something that ‘looks like’ something else, in this case an anthropomorphic form, and wanting to enhance it without using it for a symbolic purpose. Recognition of likeness, or ‘visual ambiguity’, is common in the animal kingdom and much studied by ethologists, e.g. a robin defending territory will attack a stuffed robin or even a bundle of red feathers ( Lack, 1943 ). Human perceptions of visual ambiguity are related to conscious processes in the visual brain and can range from alternative perceptions of simple objects and drawings to higher levels of ambiguity such as the interpretation of facial expression in a painting ( Zeki, 2006 ). It is not the idea of an early human seeing a likeness in a stone that is at issue but the acceptance of this particular artefact as evidence of deliberate symbolic modification.

Likeness recognition in natural objects and the idea of image creation

The discovery of an even earlier figurine-like artefact in a fluvial terrace deposit south of Tan-Tan, Morocco in 2001 reopened this debate ( Bednarik, 2003a , b ;) ( Fig. 3B ). This piece of quartzite, bearing a strong resemblance to a simple doll, was found within a layer containing an assemblage of typical Middle Acheulian stone tools including handaxes, cleavers and flakes. The Tan-Tan deposits have not been dated but Middle Acheulian tool assemblages elsewhere have been dated to between 300 000 and 500 000 BP. The form of the stone, some 5.8 cm long, is almost entirely natural but minimal percussive modification has enhanced five of the eight grooves that suggest the hairline, body/legs border and position of the eyes (not shown). Furthermore, traces of colour, analysed as containing iron and manganese, are present in minute depressions on the front, suggesting that, on this side at least, it could have been intentionally coloured ( Bednarik, 2003a ). It is not just the modification that suggests that this piece of stone was recognized as resembling a human form but the fact that it was found in an undisturbed deposit within centimetres of the nearest handaxes. Its position, and the evidence of percussive modification with a sharp tool, is compatible with the interpretation that it had been spotted as an interesting shape, picked up and its potential understood and enhanced by the brain, eye and hand of an early human, probably H. heidelbergensis .

There is one even older example that suggests likeness recognition but without modification. Oakley (1981) described a dark red jasperite pebble found at a South African archaeological site (Makapansgat Member 4) dated to around 3 million years ago. The pebble has a shape that is reminiscent of a humanoid face and was transported far from its site of origin, suggesting that it was valued by the (probably) Australopithecine hominin who found it, perhaps because of its suggestive form.

Another form of likeness recognition that delights young children and fascinates adults is the discovery of stones containing fossils. This enjoyment is clearly very ancient. Fossil coral, gastropod and brachiopod molluscs have been found at the Arcy-sur-Cure (France) Neanderthal site more than 30 km from their sites of origin ( Soressi & d’Errico, 2007 and references therein). Otte (1996, p. 177) considers that their choice and transportation might indicate a talismanic or similar symbolic function. It is clear that the selection and keeping of these objects indicates that Neanderthals were able to recognize the fossils as similar or identical to their living counterparts. Feliks (1998) speculates that by comparing the invertebrate, plant or fish fossils that he saw in rocks with living forms, early man would have learned the same lesson that modern children learn when looking at photographs: ‘that iconic images of living things can exist in non-living materials’. Feliks (1998) also points out that some fossils, e.g. ferns, look almost identical to their living forms and, like a shadow of the same form on a flat surface, supply the experience of seeing the image of a familiar object in another medium and in two dimensions.

Art from a blank template: evidence for an African origin

One can envisage a continuity of progressive creative sophistication beginning with the recognition, collection and cleaning of fossils, through the modification of suggestive anthropoid shapes, through choice of an oddly-shaped block or uneven surface with creative potential, perhaps also the outlining of silhouettes, culminating in the use of a 2D or 3D ‘blank canvas’. These stages, although progressively more complex, are not mutually exclusive, e.g. the use of surface features coexisted with ‘flat surface’ painting ( Fig. 4A ). Each stage would have required an incremental increase in the ability to hold an image ‘in the mind’s eye’ before starting work but it is only the ‘blank canvas’ stage, in which the artist works entirely from imagination and visual memory, for which the ‘mind’s eye’ is an absolute requirement. Some evolutionary changes in cerebral structures governing visual consciousness must have been involved, together with cultural inheritance (tradition) as the practice became established. The neural changes required for this fundamental shift in artistic potential must have pre-dated both practice and the cultural incorporation of artistic tradition. Their origin and evolution may have corresponded to the origin and increasing sophistication of tool-making; between 1.6 million to 300 000 BP, changes in the shape of Acheulian tools reveal an increasingly complex sense of symmetry, which is a function of the visual brain ( Hodson, 2009 , and references therein).

Outline drawings. (A) Calcite-covered drawing of a mammoth in red ochre (Chauvet cave, Ardèche; Aurignacian, ∼ 29 000–32 000 BP), using natural features of the stalactite-covered wall as a partial outline of the head and trunk (right), legs and back (from Clottes, 2003 ). (B) Engraved bovids from a 1.7 m block at Qurta II, Upper Egypt (probably 15 000–16 000 BP); the double belly line is common in these drawings. Note the nicely observed relationship between the root of the tail and the haunches (from Huyge & Claes, 2008 ).

Gowlett (1984 , 2009) has discussed the necessity of the Acheulian tool-maker to see the outline of the tool ‘in the mind’s eye’ or to use a ‘visuospatial sketchpad’. The creation of an Acheulian biface (a handaxe worked on both sides) by H. erectus in East Africa (and, after 600 000 BP, by H. heidelbergensis ) involved, first, the choice of a stone with a correctly curved surface, followed by a series of actions that followed a defined set of instructions – a ‘virtual manual’, memorized by demonstration and repetition. The instructions involved the formation of separate planes along different axes, minimizing the computational complexities required to create the 3D finished product. Gowlett (2009) points out that the normal process of human vision begins with 2D images on both retinas that are combined through neural processing to perceive a 3D image; this suggests that the brain may have a predisposition to revert to 2D concepts through a kind of mental ‘reverse engineering’. His analyses of biface construction methods suggest that the cognitive abilities required for creating 3D objects from promisingly-shaped stones evolved in the context of tool-making and were only later deployed for aesthetic purposes. The concept of a defined set of instructions could be equally applicable to standardized 3D art pieces such as figurines; although there is no evidence that H. erectus or H. heidelbergensis created sculptures, evidence of modification of the Tan-Tan ‘figurine’, together with the ability to make complex tools, suggests early stirrings in the conceptual direction of sculpture.

With the exception of the creation of patterns that may have originated from entopic phenomena, there is no evidence that any species of Homo other than H. sapiens was capable of seeing potential in a non-suggestive piece of stone or a flat, unmarked surface. As the old archaeological saying goes, ‘absence of evidence is not evidence of absence’; nevertheless, the conclusion that only anatomically modern humans were capable of creating art de novo seems inevitable. The earliest known examples of art created on a flat surface date from 30 000 BP or later, from the Later Stone Age of Namibia, the Late Palaeolithic of Egypt and the Upper Palaeolithic of Europe. Seven stone slabs with animal figures found buried in a cave in Namibia are of unknown date but the time of their burial (i.e. the time of collapse of the cave) has been radiocarbon-dated to 26 000–29 000 BP ( Wendt, 1974 ; Bednarik, 2003b ; Masson, 2006 ); these images are similar in style to more recent and better known examples of South African rock art (e.g. Le Quelle, 2004 ). Recently, engraved (hammered and incised) drawings have been discovered in the Nile Valley, attributed to a 15 000–16 000 BP culture ( Huyge et al. 2007 ; Huyge & Claes, 2008 ) ( Fig. 4B ). They comprise naturalistic images of animals – aurochs (primitive cattle), hartebeest, gazelle, hippopotamus, birds and fishes, and stylized or partial images of humans, randomly orientated and without an imaginary ground line. The similarity of these African images to some of those of Upper Palaeolithic Europe confirms an African origin of naturalistic art on a flat surface. They are no less conceptually sophisticated than the European engravings and should not be unfavourably compared with European cave paintings since drawing by engraving a rock surface cannot reproduce the subtleties of painting with pigments or even of finger-drawing on a soft surface (see below).

Out of Africa

Anatomically modern humans are thought to have emigrated from Africa to populate the rest of the world over a long period of time. Settlements on the Red Sea coast dated to 125 000 years ago have been linked to a migration route across the mouth of the Red Sea and along the coast of South Asia, eventually reaching Australia either 60 000 years ago ( Thorne et al. 1999 ; Stringer, 2000 ; Walter et al. 2000 ) or 45 000 years ago ( O’Connell & Allen, 2004 ). This migration (according to the dates of Walter et al. 2000 ) took place at a time when low sea levels would have enabled people to reach Indonesia without crossing the sea. It was only the crossing to New Guinea and Australia that would have required the use of boats or rafts, although this, too, could have been accomplished by land (via the Sahul landmass) if the later dates of O’Connell & Allen (2004) are correct. Genetic data support the idea that the migration out of Africa took the form of serial exodus events by genetically different populations ( Deshpande et al. 2009 ). This view is also supported by studies on neurocranial morphometrics of fossil skulls in Africa and geographically dispersed and extant human groups ( Gunz et al. 2009 ) but is disputed on archaeological grounds by Mellars (2006) , who prefers the interpretation that a single dispersal event took a southern route around Asia to arrive in Australia around 45 000 BP, with a branch that led north from Western Asia to Europe.

It is clear that the neurological potential to create art, and probably the creation of art, was established before H. sapiens left Africa but we cannot know whether regional stylistic differences were already established within each emigrating group or were acquired en route or in their final destinations. The archaeological record is more generous in information on tool-making and it is beyond doubt that all of these H. sapiens groups left Africa with an accomplished ability to create 3D tools with a great variety of forms and applications, and that they were more advanced than H. erectus and H. heidelbergensis in manual dexterity and cognition.

No artistic style is static, so the passage of time and generations, with different cultural and environmental influences, changes in climate, different available materials and technological skills, not to mention specific highly-gifted individuals, must have been important factors influencing stylistic development, culminating in the regional variety apparent in world art today. Regional variety of artistic style is apparent within Africa as well as around the world; the rock paintings of the Khoisan groups of South Africa have more in common with Upper Palaeolithic European cave art than with the large ceremonial items and smaller sculptures in terra cotta, wood and ivory dating from the late 10th century to the present day that are on display in ethnological museums such as the exceptionally fine collection in Berlin ( Koloss, 2002 ) and the Pitt Rivers museum in Oxford. One can also see, in the formalized animal and ‘abstract’ pattern combinations portrayed in some of the cloth artwork of Southern Africa, a resemblance to some of the traditional art of North Australia (personal observations). These examples are intimations that, like the genetic differences, there is (and/or was) at least as great a variety within Africa as in the world as a whole.

It was not until the Upper Palaeolithic, 45 000 years ago at the earliest, that anatomically modern humans populated Europe. This was a relatively late event, given that the earliest evidence of modern human occupation of Australia dates from this date or earlier. To claim that art originated de novo in Upper Palaeolithic Europe is to claim either that the early Europeans took their creative impulses and skills back to Africa or that art within Africa developed later than that of Europe and wholly independently of it. Both seem unlikely.

Early European art

The richness of Upper Palaeolithic discoveries in Europe, compared with the rarity of African examples, as well as the long history of excavation and academic study, go a long way towards explaining why the Eurocentric view of the origins of art is still prevalent (e.g. Lewis-Williams, 2002 , 2004 ). In Europe we have an amazing resource of cave paintings (95% of which are, for unknown reasons, in France), carved objects, reliefs and engravings, not to mention skeletal material in defined burial places and settled sites that were inhabited for several millennia. We know from the excavation of domestic hearths that, during the Upper Palaeolithic, reindeer were a major source of protein (the last ice age was from 75 000 to 10 000 BP) but there was also a broad spectrum of dietary protein sources including mammals, birds, fish and shellfish ( Richards et al. 2005 ). It is intriguing that only a subset of animal food sources is represented in cave art. Manual dexterity is witnessed by evidence that skins were sewn together with bone needles to make clothing and tents, and that over the course of 35 000 years, tool-making became ever more refined and specialized ( Delluc et al. 1990 ). No other part of the world can yet rival the range of securely dated artefacts or the depth of archaeological knowledge that Western Europe has accumulated. This article can only discuss a small number of examples, in an attempt to give some insight into the humanity behind the creative process.

Humans, like animals, have two major drives: preservation of the individual and preservation of the species. Preservation of the individual (and the social group) is inherent in images related to hunting or to animals (and, more rarely, fish) that are important food sources. Preservation of the species, which involves sex and fertility, nurturing and group protective behaviour, is inherent to many images, both overtly in pubic triangles and phallus-like objects and more covertly with images of rutting or combative animals. Unlike animals, and from an unknown stage in our evolutionary history, humans also became concerned about where we came from and what happens when we die. This third concern is the basis of religion. Ethnographic observations during the past two centuries have shown that shamanism is an important element of religion in hunter-gatherer cultures around the world. The cultural specifics differ in all groups but in general shamanism is a magico-religious phenomenon that may co-exist with other forms of magic, healing and religion but is distinguished from them by the technique of ecstasy ( Eliade, 1964 ). The shaman is able to induce a trance state through which his (or her) soul is able to leave the body and ascend to the sky in magical flight, or descend to the underworld. The shaman can communicate with helper spirits and, through them, with the dead. The ecstatic shaman may inhabit the body of an animal and perceive himself in animal form or with an animal head. It is now clear that there are strong indications of shamanism in the subject matter of some prehistoric art ( Clottes & Lewis-Williams, 1998 ). These insights originated with the work of the philologist Wilhelm Bleek and his sister-in-law Lucy Lloyd, who transcribed the oral traditions of the /Xam, !Kung and other South African tribes.

Art relating to sex and pregnancy

In both human and animal representations, fertility is the dominant theme in both portable and parietal (cave wall) art. The ‘Venus’ figurine is a relatively common type of portable art object that has been found in Upper Palaeolithic sites throughout Eurasia. These figures, dating from up to 27 000 years ago and typically around 10 cm tall, have in common that they appear to be a caricature of a multiparous woman, well-fed and possibly lactating and/or pregnant ( Fig. 5 ). Another common feature is the lack of feet, which suggests that they were designed to be held in the hand. One possible explanation for this is that these iconic representations of successful pregnancy might have been used to reassure young women during (especially) their first labour – a hazardous and frightening experience. These figures may well have had the same function as present-day African fertility dolls, which are believed by many cultures to symbolize a fertility goddess who will ensure the conception and safe delivery of a healthy child, if the household believes in their effectiveness. For more examples and other interpretations of Venus figurines, reliefs and engravings, see Cohen (2003) .

Venus figurines. (A) ‘Venus of Vestoniche’, the oldest known ceramic, from 25 km south of Brno, Czech Republic (Pavlovian, ∼ 27 000 BP). (B) ‘Venus of Willendorf’, a limestone sculpture from Lower Austria (Gravettian, ∼ 24 000–26 000 BP). Both are ∼ 10 cm high.

A newly-discovered figurine from Hohle Fels cave, south-west Germany, puts the earliest date of European female fertility carvings back to at least 35 000 BP, although calibration of the measured radiocarbon date suggests that it may date to as early as 40 000 BP ( Conard, 2009 ). It is made from mammoth ivory, a hard material that would have been difficult to carve with Aurignacian tools. The breasts and vulva are greatly exaggerated but there is no suggestion of a current pregnancy, rather, with its enlarged vulva and raised, taut breasts, not to mention the abdominal striations, it resembles a female body that has recently given birth. Although the legs are incomplete stumps, they do not seem to have been designed for holding in the hand; the head is represented only by a loop that has been smoothed by use, suggesting that the figurine has been suspended on a string. Unlike the later examples described above, it lacks any pretence to beauty but it would be no exaggeration to describe its sexual symbolism as blatant. The context of this find is important; the Swabian Jura of south-west Germany was a key area of cultural innovation in the early Aurignacian. Excavations from this region have revealed many early examples of figurative art (including the Vogelherd horses), personal ornaments (beads and pendants), new forms of tools made from bone, ivory and stone, and the earliest known musical instruments (bone flutes) ( Conard & Bolus, 2003 ; Conard et al. 2009 ), indicating a well-established and sophisticated culture.

Figure 6 shows the relief carving from a rock shelter in Laussel, Haute-Garonne, France. It represents a female figure that is at first glance similar to the Venus figurines but is unique in having originally been fixed in place and in being 46 cm high, with rudimentary feet. More significantly, this is not a stylized figure: the pattern of fat distribution suggests that it is a representation of a real woman, celebrated for her fecundity. The pendant breasts have carefully carved, well-suckled nipples. She holds a horn with 13 notches, perhaps indicating the number of her children (was this the original meaning of the ‘horn of plenty’?). It has also been suggested that the 13 lines represent the 13 lunar months and hence the number of menstrual periods in a year. This seems unlikely for a woman whose pregnancies and periods of lactation would have spanned most of her reproductive lifetime. The position of her left hand on her rounded belly has been taken to suggest a current pregnancy ( Delluc et al. 1990 ), although an indication of past pregnancies is just as likely. She looks like a woman whose reproductive achievements have raised her to cult, or even goddess, status in her society.

‘Venus à la corne’, originally carved on the wall of Laussel rock shelter, Dordogne, France (Gravettian, ∼ 25 000 BP; 46 cm high).

One of the earliest known types of carved image is the female pubic triangle ( Fig. 7 ). Female sex and/or sexuality has been reduced to a triangle for the mons pubis and an engraved line to represent the vulva. Nothing could be simpler or more instantly recognisable for what it is. The clear symbolic nature of this simple iconic form represents an enormous advance on the process of likeness enhancement. The example shown has been dated to 32 000–34 000 BP; many other examples, engraved and drawn with charcoal, are found on the walls of Chauvet cave, dated to about 32 000 BP ( Clottes, 2003 ; Cuzange et al. 2007 ).

Pubic triangles are common symbols of female sexuality; these are carved on a limestone block (56 × 40 cm) from La Ferrassie, Dordogne (Aurignacian, ∼ 32 000–34 000 BP).

The most astonishing portrayal of a pubic triangle, unique in being set within an elaborate composition, is shown in Fig. 8A . A natural projection from the ceiling of the cave has been decorated with a charcoal drawing illustrating a pubic triangle with vulva, set between thighs that continue down through bent knees to the ankles. Above the pubic triangle is a bison’s head with horns; only the head is covered with fur, the rest of the body, represented by a back curving around the surface of the projection and an arm with fingers lying over the woman’s left thigh, is human. The resemblance of a Picasso Minotaur composition to this drawing is uncanny ( Fig. 8B ). Both suggest a fantasy that is ancient and deeply embedded in the psyche of (at least some) human males. In addition to the print illustrated, two others are relevant here, ‘ Le viol ’ (rape) and ‘ Minotaur assaulting girl ’, both made in 1933. Picasso (who died before the discovery of Chauvet cave) is known to have identified with the Minotaur, recognizing it as the beast within. It is interesting that the Chauvet drawing and the myth of the Minotaur are both located in the environment of a dark cave. Picasso’s acknowledged recognition of a part of himself in the Minotaur may offer some insight into the mind of the Chauvet artist who created this strikingly similar image. On seeing Lascaux, Picasso is reported to have said ‘Nous n’avons rien appris’. How, I wonder, would he have reacted to Chauvet if he had lived to see it?

Two representations of an ancient male fantasy? (A) Charcoal drawing on a natural projection from the Ceiling, Chauvet cave, Ardèche (∼ 29 000–32 000 BP). The head of a bison is shown with a human body; the back curves around the pillar to the right and the line from the chin continues into the left arm, which bends at the elbow and ends in simple lines to represent fingers. The forearm rests on the left thigh of a woman, who is represented by two legs bent at the knees (there are no feet) and a black-filled pubic triangle with a line for the vulva. (B) Pablo Picasso: Minotaur carressant une dormeuse. Drypoint print, 1933.

Shamanism and parietal art

The representation of a human body with an animal head suggests shamanism. Some Upper Palaeolithic figures of this nature (therianthropes) are known, both carved and painted. Perhaps the best known is the 30 000–34 000 BP lion-headed man carved in mammoth ivory, from south-west Germany ( Dalton, 2003 ; also illustrated in Clottes, 2008 ). The oldest known example painted on rock is a 32 000–34 000 BP red ochre representation of a man with either an animal head or horned head-dress, from Fumane cave, Italy ( Fig. 9 ) ( Balter, 2000 ; Clottes, 2008 ). Interestingly, one of the arms of that figure is holding a stick-like object that may be one of the common features of the shaman’s ‘kit’ ( Eliade, 1964 ). The Upper Palaeolithic examples of therianthropes in French caves (e.g. at the Volp caves, Ariège, at Gabaillou and Lascaux, both in the Dordogne Department) have one important factor in common- they are all in the deepest, most inaccessible parts of the cave, where no natural light penetrates. Although the most common interpretation of these composite figures is that they represent shamans or ‘sorcerers’, an alternative (or additional) possibility is that they represent a god who was ‘master of animals’ ( Clottes & Lewis-Williams, 1998 ).

Red ochre drawing on a stone found in Fumane cave, Italy (Aurignacian, 34 000–35 000 BP), thought to represent a shaman because of the head shape, which suggests either an animal head with horns or an elaborate head-dress.

The interpretation that therianthropes represent shamans has a sound basis in recently-observed societies. Even today, animal (and grossly caricatured human) masks are used for ritual purposes in many parts of Africa, including medicine, divination, the combating of dangerous witches (only visible to the mask-wearer) and to reincarnate ancestors ( Koloss, 2002 ). They are also used by dancers in festivals of the dead (recorded on film on view at the Ethnological Museum, Berlin). In many of these uses, the mask-wearer is driven to the point of ecstasy by the dance and subsumes his personality to that of the mask, which of itself has great authority.

There is one other painting in Chauvet that may well have a shamanic element, the rhinoceros illustrated in Fig. 10A . The animal is outlined in black but the horns are filled in red: red curved lines extend from the nose and mouth, as if bleeding from the nose. South African San shamans sometimes suffer a nasal haemorrhage when in a trance; nasal bleeding is illustrated in several rock paintings, including that of an antelope-headed human figure, and indicates that ‘the being is a San shaman who has entered an altered state of consciousness and thus travelled to the spirit world where people assume animal features’ ( Lewis-Williams, 2002 ). There are other signs that the Chauvet rhinoceros is particularly significant: the wall on which it is painted was prepared by scraping to create a clean, flat surface and it is in a dominant position, being more than 2 m from the floor, in contrast to the paintings made from floor-level. It faces a cleft in the wall, from which, just below its head, a bison appears to be emerging and, on the other side of the cleft (not shown), a rhinoceros. It seems to me to have been painted by a man with a strong conviction of his own power, both in relation to the spirit world and within his community. There is considerable evidence that the cave wall (or rock surface in the case of rock art in other parts of the world) was regarded as a membrane between the human and spirit worlds ( Clottes & Lewis-Williams, 1998 ). The bison and rhinoceros of this group of images may thus represent spirits enticed from the other side of the wall/membrane by the shaman-rhinoceros. Another image that has been interpreted as an embodied spirit being enticed across the membrane is the engraved horse’s head and neck in Gabillou cave, Dordogne, that appears to be emerging from a natural depression in the wall ( Fig. 10B ).

The wall as a veil. (A) Charcoal drawing of a rhinoceros with red ochre marks possibly signifying a shamanistic nose-bleed; the head of a bison (bottom left) seems to be emerging from a crevice in the wall (Chauvet cave, Ardèche; Aurignacian, ∼ 29 000–32 000 BP). (B) Engraving suggesting a horse emerging from a hole (Gabaillou cave, Dordogne, France; Solutrean/early Magdalenian, ∼ 17 000–19 000 BP).

Symbolic contact with the spirit world can be made by placing the hands on the wall. Negative or stencilled hand prints, produced by placing a hand on the wall and blowing pigment around it and between the fingers, are found throughout world rock art, in European caves and on rocks from Australia, America and South Africa ( Clottes, 2008 ). Lorblanchet (1991) placed his hands onto those on a replica of the Peche-Merle horses (illustrated in Lewis-Williams, 2002 , Plate 19) and found that this brought his face so close to the horse images that a person doing this would have been breathing (his/her life) onto the wall, ‘transforming himself into the horses’. Lewis-Williams (2002) considered that the pigment making the prints was most likely to have been blown by a second person. This would separate the act of communion with the spirits from the act that sealed the hands onto the membrane, enabling total concentration on the part of the communicant, possibly as part of a ritual act. The prints themselves would remain as a tangible record of that act.

The extent to which shamanism and an altered state of consciousness are associated with the creation of cave and rock art has been much discussed (see Layton, 2000 for analysis and references). Clottes & Lewis-Williams (1998) and Lewis-Williams (2002) proposed that images seen in a deep trance were later painted as if ‘projected’ onto the cave wall in a manner equivalent to the projection of entopic images, and that altered states of consciousness were the link between the evolution of higher states of consciousness and the origin of art. Lewis-Williams (2002 , p. 252 and illustration) wrote of Lascaux that ‘the way in which the images swirl around and over the ceiling of the Axial Gallery recalls the neurologically generated vortex with its surrounding images that leads into the deepest stage of altered consciousness and the most vivid hallucinations. This impression is strikingly heightened by the Falling Horse turning over at the focus of the vortex’ (see Aujoulat, 2005 for illustrations) (see also Fig. 14 , which is from this group of images).

‘Second Chinese horse’, right wall/ceiling of the axial diverticulum (Lascaux cave, Dordogne, ∼ 19 000 BP; mixed pigments).

Although the self-induction of trance states is well documented for many extant and recent hunter-gatherer communities, it is not clear that it is an essential preliminary to the creation of rock or cave art. Clottes & Lewis-Williams (1998) acknowledge this, citing the example of Lascaux’s Hall of Bulls ( Fig. 11 ) as a co-operative endeavour. The analysis by Aujoulat (2005) of the images of animals in this chamber concludes that they were painted in the following order: horses, aurochs and then deer, and that each species shows physical features characteristic of its breeding season – the horses have the thick coats of late winter/early spring, the aurochs have their summer coats and the deer have antlers and are represented in groups characteristic of early autumn. The decoration of the whole wall was thus carried out over a period of 6–9 months, assuming that it was completed in a single year. It may also be relevant that most of the animals depicted here are ‘grounded’ rather than ethereal, the exception being the horse located above the three stags, which appears as if surrounded by a low mist; this could well have been a real observation but seeing animals partially above a mist like this could also enhance the perception of them as spiritual beings.

Left wall of the ‘Hall of Bulls’, Lascaux cave, Dordogne (∼ 19 000 BP). The frieze shows a fantastic animal (left), horses, aurochs and deer; another horse (middle) appears to float in mist.

Reindeer bones marked by human teeth were found on the floor of the Axial Gallery, suggesting that the artists were eating as they painted the ceiling, sitting on their scaffolding support ( Leroi-Gourhan, 1982 ). Another factor to bear in mind is the extent to which an artist, with no shamanic intent, may experience trance-like states while painting. Anish Kapoor (1998) wrote ‘I have always felt drawn towards some notion of fear in a very visual sense, towards sensations of falling, of being pulled inwards, of losing one’s self’. Mark Rothko felt ‘drawn into’ his large (but not small) canvases as he painted ( Baal-Teshuva, 2003 ). The relationship between altered states of consciousness and artistic creation seems to be more subtle than the shamanic trance interpretation implies.

Intention and perception: communication between artist and viewer

Painting with a conscious aim to portray symbolic content for communication with the viewer is inherent in the work of mature artists, in which category I include the artists of Lascaux and Chauvet (although Chauvet also contains many engravings and finger-drawings of lesser artistic skill, see Clottes, 2008 ). Rothko and his fellow artist Adolf Gottlieb, replying to a New York Times critic’s comments on a 1942 exhibition of their work, wrote that art is ‘the significant rendition of a symbol’; in their manifesto of aesthetic beliefs, they asserted that the point of a painting did not lie in an ‘explanation’ but in the interaction with the viewer, who must be persuaded by the paintings to see the world ‘the artist’s way’, not his own way ( Baal-Teshuva, 2003 ).

We cannot take on the mental framework of the intended viewers when we look at Upper Palaeolithic paintings but perhaps we should not be too concerned about the validity of our reaction to them. My predominant reaction to Lascaux was awe; whether the artists’ intent or not, this must also have been the reaction of the non-participant contemporary viewers on entering this painted cave for the first time. Human biology has not changed since the Upper Palaeolithic and, if we attempt to divest ourselves of at least some of our own cultural baggage and open our minds to the paintings, the meanings that seem to speak to us may not be so far from their meanings for the original viewers. As Howard Morphy (2007) wrote, ‘there is a dialectic between common humanity and particular ways of being human’. In looking at Upper Palaeolithic paintings, we need to bear in mind two concepts that may not be familiar: the experience of embodiment (of spirits in animals and the painter and/or viewer in the animal depicted) and acceptance of the wall as a membrane between ourselves and the spirit world. Embodiment is particularly important; not only can a shaman ‘become’ an animal through the trance state but for all individuals in hunter-gatherer societies the boundary of the self is fluid and the identification with spirits in animal form is of fundamental importance ( Clottes, 2003 ). The idea of passing through a surface may be unfamiliar to Western adults but it is a normal part of our childhood world, in which children can pass through a mirror, the back of a wardrobe, a wall at King’s Cross station, or a patch cut out of the air, to enter a realm in which animals can talk and children can fly ( Carroll, 1872 ; Lewis, 1950 ; Pullman, 1997 ; Rowling, 1997 ). Finally, it is essential to remember to put aside the modern Western secular, scientific world view and attempt to look through the eyes of an acute observer of nature, for whom nature and the spiritual world are one and the same.

Looking at the Chauvet paintings with this freedom of mind, one can see the whole gamut of human emotions. Anger, aggression and conflict are embodied by powerful rhinoceros images. One remarkable portrait, the upper animal in Fig. 12A , has three extra body outlines and a total of seven anterior horns suggesting an animal tossing its head in a display of threat. This image, like the shaman-rhinoceros ( Fig. 10A ), has been drawn in a high position on a prepared wall, emphasizing the sense of dominance that it conveys. The conflict behaviour of male animals, as seen in the young rhinoceros’s challenge to the older one (the alpha male?) in Fig. 12B , is easy to relate to human competitive behaviour. In these two examples, and in the possible shaman-rhinoceros of Fig. 8 , the artist seems to be a dominant male member of the group. The minotaur-like shaman-bison of Fig. 9A is incontrovertibly male – as a woman I find that image threatening.

Charcoal drawings of rhinoceros and cave lions, suggesting (A) threat, (B) aggressive competition and (C) organized purpose (Chauvet cave, Ardèche; Aurignacian, ∼ 29 000–32 000 BP).

Humans living close to wild carnivores, such as the people of the Mongolian grasslands who lived in close proximity to wolf packs ( Rong, 2009 ), have a sense of awe and respect for the organizational strength, social structure and division of labour that underpins the group’s hunting success; the Mongolian nomads regarded the wolves as their mentors. European lions may have played a similar role for the communities associated with Chauvet. There are 72 drawings of lions in this cave, more than in all of the other French caves combined ( Clottes, 2008 ). Like wolves, lions are successful co-operative hunters and the group portrayed in Fig. 12C suggests that the artist identifies with their power, sense of common purpose and concentrated intent. Their unidirectional movement, their heads held at the same angle and their pinpoint eyes all idealize the subsuming of individual egos into the hunting group for the good of all. The vivacity and accuracy of this drawing suggest that the artist spent long periods of quiet observation of these animals. Intentional portrayal of a group, rather than overlapping or superimposed individual animals, is unusual.

Alert watchfulness, stillness and patience are important both as a part of hunting skills (stalking) and for protecting the group from danger. These qualities are also embodied by owls, which are able to rotate their heads to look backwards ( Fig. 13A ); their hunting flight is near-silent.

Images from Chauvet cave. (A) Finger-drawing of a long-eared owl looking backwards; (B) charcoal and (C) finger-drawings of horses; (D) red ochre drawing of a cave bear.

Kindliness and good parental care are of prime importance for family life, social cohesion and human happiness. The horse portraits shown in Fig. 13B,C are clearly by different hands but both suggest these attributes. The near-vertical position of their long heads suggests a benign nature and their behaviour in the wild confirms this. Teeth and hooves, their only equipment for conflict, are rarely used and are not shown in the images. The human love affair with horses is well represented on many cave walls but it is in Chauvet that a sense of artist-identification seems to be most clearly inherent in the horse portraits.

The attitude of humans to cave bears suggested by the exquisite drawings in Chauvet is more difficult for 21st century humans to understand, perhaps because our history with them is complex. They amuse us by their occasional bipedalism and we have tamed their image to that of cuddly teddy bears, yet not so long ago we put collars round their necks and induced them to fight or dance for human entertainment. Bears are dangerous, unapproachable animals, which hibernated in Chauvet cave both before and after the two periods of human occupation. Some of the skulls left by bears that had died in the cave were deliberately moved by humans, one being placed carefully on a ledge ( Clottes, 2008 ). The bear images are unusual for Chauvet in being drawn in red ochre rather than charcoal. The one illustrated in Fig. 13D is mainly outline but enhanced by some shading; the left eye is not drawn but the position of the left ear establishes a 3D quality that makes the marking of the eye unnecessary. This exceptionally skilled drawing seems to me to embody real warmth in the artist’s attitude to this animal that is at odds with its fierce nature.

These few examples offer a very selective glance into a cave that is rich with images, painted by Europeans of the Aurignacian period some 30 000 years ago. They combine simplicity and economy of line with a conceptual sophistication and come from such an early time in our history that some archaeologists are unable to accept their antiquity ( Pettitt, 2008 ), in spite of repeated verification of the dates using several different methods in several different laboratories ( Cuzange et al. 2007 ).

Lascaux cave (17 000–19 000 BP, Solutrean/Early Magdalenian), shows a much greater degree of sophistication in the sourcing, variety and preparation of pigments, in the use of multiple colours for single animals, and the use of scaffolding to reach high walls and ceilings ( Leroi-Gourhan, 1982 ). It has a pastoral feel (e.g. Fig. 11 ) in contrast to the raw emotion of Chauvet and gives the impression of being a window into a gentler society. There is something joyful about the ‘Chinese’ horse ( Fig. 14 ), leaping through ripe barley-like cereal grasses. [Although organized farming began 9–10 millennia later, the existence of pestles and mortars suggests that cereal grains could have been used for food. The earliest archaeological association of wild barley and human settlements is known from 19 000 BP in the Levant ( Zohary & Hopf, 2000 ).] The meaning of the symbol above the horse is not known.

Human artistic creativity clearly had a long history before the well-developed art of the European Upper Palaeolithic, which was created by anatomically modern humans whose brains, although not culture or tradition, were like ours. Linking this history to the evolutionary anatomy of cognition is impossible, for three reasons: (i) cranial capacity, and hence brain size, is only a crude indication of cerebral function, as illustrated by the fact that the similar cranial capacities of Neanderthals and anatomically modern humans are not matched by equivalent artistic creativity or flexibility in tool-making; (ii) the huge individual differences in artistic skills among humans in our own time make it plain that a study of brain evolutionary anatomy would be meaningless for this purpose, even if we had access to fresh material; and (iii) studies on brain-damaged artists have failed to reveal specific parts of the cortex that are essential for artistic creativity, which seems to use many different areas ( Zaidel, 2010 , this issue). We have only the artefacts and their archaeological context. Surviving art and putative proto-art artefacts have left a fragmented record that has encouraged the probably erroneous (or at least exaggerated) concept of a revolution at the start of the European Upper Palaeolithic.

Lithic tools, in contrast, are plentiful and provide a much more complete guide to the evolution of the cognitive ability and manual dexterity required to engineer defined shapes. Reference has been made in this article to studies indicating a link between tool-making and language ( Stout et al. 2008 ), and to a possible link to the cognitive skills required for art ( Gowlett, 2009 ). Both of these studies analysed relatively simple tools (bifaces) made by H. erectus . Further development of these promising avenues of research through analysis of the changing patterns of tool-making by H. heidelbergensis , H. neanderthalensis and early H. sapiens might shed some light on the evolution of artistic creativity. The analysis of Gowlett (2009) is particularly helpful in its insights into the closely related nature of 2D and 3D visualization.

Linking anatomy to the origins of art is impossible for a fourth reason: the cognitive machinery required for the creation of art de novo (as an advance on likeness recognition and modification) must have been in place well before the first exceptionally gifted individuals actually created what we now regard as art. Art does not exist in a vacuum but requires a social context, otherwise it is meaningless. To be fully ‘seen’ by a viewer, there must be some awareness of the symbolism being communicated. The social context of humans has universal elements. Those relating to survival, reproduction and religion have been alluded to in this article. The religious element is specifically communicated to us through parietal art but the spiritual aspect portrayed here seems to encompass limited aspects of life and death. The paintings suggest that the ultimate discontinuity of body and spirit represented by death had been come to terms with through belief in the continuity of the human spirit with that of animals, but there is another basic element of the human need to explain where we come from that is either missing or not yet identified: a creation myth. This could be subsumed within the animal–human spiritual continuity, but extant human societies have origin myths that are distinct from explanations of death ( Leeming & Leeming, 1994 ). Creation myths could have been communicated through story-telling and song but one would still expect some representation through visual art.

Although there is a great deal that cannot be known about the origins of art, some things are becoming clear. The virtually ubiquitous existence of art today suggests that the neurological potential to create art was established within all of the human populations who remained within and migrated out of Africa. European Upper Palaeolithic art, and the art of hunter-gatherer societies of all periods throughout the world, cannot have arisen fully formed but must have long traditions behind them that are mainly lost to us. Stylistic similarities between European Upper Palaeolithic art and Late Palaeolithic art in Upper Egypt suggest a cultural continuity between the two regions. There is a rich archaeological record of stone tool technology from the upper Nile Valley, whose styles and dates suggest a more rapid cultural advance than that of Upper Palaeolithic Europe ( Midant-Reynes, 1999 ). A highly developed artistic culture in this region is a likely correlate of the sophisticated tool technology. In contrast, the artistic styles (and their inherent symbolism) of the descendants of the original inhabitants of Australia and the Americas are quite different from those of European and ancient Near-Eastern cultures, supporting the hypothesis that their respective ancestors left Africa independently and earlier than those who populated Europe, possibly taking different African regional styles with them.

The conundrum of a single or multiple origins of art will never be definitively known but a consideration of individual human development provides one clue. Babies, like human ancestors, are born with a greater or lesser potential for artistic creativity. As they grow older, some would never even try if not taught, whereas others are precociously gifted. The example of the chimpanzee painters described at the start of this article suggests that this individual variability is evolutionarily very ancient. The rarity of outstandingly gifted creative artists today suggests that, from Congo the chimpanzee to Turner, Picasso, Bacon and others of our own time, each human (and pre-human) population has produced exceptionally creative visual artists who have radically changed the way that art is made and hence changed how we see not only art but the world around us. At each evolutionary stage, the cognitive potential to create art must have preceded practice; special individuals at different times, in different regions and in genetically different populations must have broken through the cultural norms to create new forms of art, whether at the stage of likeness recognition/modification or creation de novo . The major stylistic differences in world art suggest that at least some of these breakthroughs occurred independently in different populations after emigration from Africa. Although the establishment of artistic traditions must have reflected pre-existing cultures, creative change generated by rare individuals may have contributed to cultural change, reinforcing regional differences.

One important question remains: art is a wonderfully enjoyable aspect of human culture but not essential to survival, so why did artistic creativity arise? A key phrase that has been used in this article, and which is commonplace in our description of everyday experience, is ‘the mind’s eye’. In addition to the functional application of this facility in tool-making, it would have had an important survival function in hunting. The long-distance runner Bernt Heinrich, in his book ‘Racing the Antelope’ ( Heinrich, 2001 ), points out that when animals hunt they give up the chase when the prey disappears from view; humans, however, know that an animal that has disappeared over the horizon or behind a group of rocks is still there to be followed. The neural changes that provided our ancestors with the imagination to understand, through logic, the continued existence of something that is no longer visible, together with the anatomical attributes that enabled them to outrun prey over long distances, would have had a genuine evolutionary advantage. Without these survival-enhancing functional origins, it is unlikely that we would have the neural equipment to create art.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the following sources for permission to reproduce the images used in this article: Fig. 2 , Current Anthropology ; Fig. 3A , Antiquity ; Fig. 3B , Robert Bednarik; Figs 4A , ​ ,5, 5 , ​ ,8A, 8A , ​ ,10 10 and ​ and12, 12 , Jean Clottes; Fig. 4B © D. Huyge, Royal Museums of Art and History, Brussels; Fig. 5A , Martin Oliva, Moravské zemské Museum de Brno; Fig. 5B , Don Hitchcock; Fig. 6 , Alain Roussot; Fig. 7 , Jean-Jacques Cleyet-Merle, Musée national de Préhistoire; Fig. 8B , The San Diego Museum of Art; Fig. 9A , Alberto Broglio; Fig. 9B , Locutus Borg; Figs 11 and ​ and14, 14 , Hans Hinz/ARTOTHEK. I am very grateful to Sarah Elton, Jonathan Bard and Matt Gatton for critical reading of the manuscript at various stages.

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Individual qualities of creative persons

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creativity , the ability to make or otherwise bring into existence something new, whether a new solution to a problem, a new method or device, or a new artistic object or form.

A number of personality characteristics have been shown to be associated with creative productivity. One of these is autonomy: creative individuals tend to be independent and nonconformist in their thoughts and actions. Equally important is mastery of a particular domain—that is, a sphere of activity or knowledge that requires a high level of ability. For example, in applying their knowledge of computers to the design of the Apple II, inventors Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak revolutionized the computer industry by appealing to individuals as well as businesses. French fashion designer Coco Chanel forever changed the way women dressed by designing simple yet stylish clothes. On the other hand, creative people may not have equally strong gifts across the spectrum of human ability. (A notable exception was Leonardo da Vinci , whose achievements in the visual arts, mechanics, and engineering disclosed the talents of a creative polymath.) Some creative people show an interest in apparent disorder, contradiction, and imbalance—perhaps because they are challenged by asymmetry and chaos . Creative individuals may also exhibit a high degree of self-assurance. Some possess an exceptionally deep, broad, and flexible awareness of themselves. Others are shown to be intellectual leaders with a great sensitivity to problems.

The unconventionality of thought that is sometimes found in creative persons may be in part a resistance to acculturation , which may be seen as demanding surrender of one’s unique fundamental nature. In fact, independence is critical to the creative process, in that creative people must often be able to work alone and must also be willing to express ideas or develop products that others might perceive as radical. It should be pointed out, however, that a nonconformist lifestyle is not essential to creativity; indeed, many creative individuals lead quite ordinary lives, expressing their autonomy mainly in their unconventional ideas and work. Another trait common among creative people is that of introversion. While this does not imply a lack of social skills, it suggests that creative people tend to be reflective and inner-directed; they look to their own intuition rather than depending upon interaction with others to inform their attitudes and responses.

A third crucial characteristic combines curiosity and problem seeking. Creative individuals seem to have a need to seek novelty and an ability to pose unique questions. In Defying the Crowd (1995), for example, the American psychologists Robert Sternberg and Todd Lubart likened the combined traits of autonomy and problem solving to buying low and selling high in the “marketplace of ideas.” By this they meant that the creative individual identifies a unique need—perhaps a problem or opportunity that no one else recognizes. This is the “buying low” phase, because it typically involves dismissing a popular solution and embracing an unheard-of solution or an idea that has no currency . When creative persons find a better solution, they then work toward “selling” others on the concept. This process can be seen in the work of inventors such as Margaret Knight , who designed a number of household and industrial devices, Raymond Kurzweil , who designed text scanners and speech-recognition software, and Dean Kamen , whose numerous inventions include medical devices, water-purification systems, and the IBOT, a motorized wheelchair .

High intelligence is common in creative persons, yet while they can meet the problems of life as rationally as anyone else can, their intellect does not rule at the expense of intuition or other seemingly nonrational influences. Most studies of the relationship of creativity to intelligence have also shown that extreme general intelligence does not necessarily kindle creativity. Findings such as these contributed to the “threshold” model of intelligence and creativity, which claims that, above a certain level, intelligence has little correlation with creativity—i.e., a highly intelligent person may not be as highly creative. It may be that intelligence sets the limits on the amount of information a person can learn and retain, while creative thinking provides the flexibility necessary for the original production of ideas. A distinction is sometimes made between convergent thinking (the analytic reasoning measured by intelligence tests) and divergent thinking (exemplified by a richness of ideas and originality of thought). Both seem necessary to creative performance, although the degree of each varies according to the task or occupation (i.e., a mathematician may exhibit more convergent than divergent thinking, while an artist would exhibit the reverse).

Psychological experiments in the fields of motivation and learning have demonstrated the power of novelty as an inducement to action. This stems from the tension that exists between the regularity of daily life and interruptions that bring possibilities of new experience. Psychological studies of highly creative people have characterized this tension in terms of such dualities as intellect and intuition , the conscious and the unconscious , mental health and mental disorder , the conventional and the unconventional, and complexity and simplicity.

Other qualities of creative individuals were identified by the American educational psychologist E. Paul Torrance. They include fluency, or the ability to think of many ideas rapidly; flexibility, the capacity to use ideas and tools in unusual ways; and originality, the capacity to think of novel ideas and products. In 1966 Torrance and his colleagues developed a means of assessment , the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking (TTCT), that accounts for all of these skills. The TTCT became one of the most widely used measures of creativity. Torrance provided additional support for his approach in follow-up studies of his subjects after 7, 12, and 22 years, and the passage of time has shown the TTCT to be among the more valid of all creativity tests.

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Essays on Creativity

Crafting a creativity essay is an exciting journey into exploring and articulating the nuances of creativity, innovation, and original thought. This type of essay offers a unique platform to focus on personal insights, historical analysis, or the impact of creativity across various fields.

Engaging Prompts to Kickstart Your Creativity Essay

Prompt 1: Discuss how a moment of creative insight led to an unexpected outcome or discovery in your personal life or in a historical context.

Prompt 2: Analyze the role of creativity in solving a complex problem in an area of your interest, such as technology, art, or social change.

Prompt 3: Reflect on the process of creative thinking in your own life or in the work of an individual you admire. How does this process defy conventional wisdom?

Brainstorming Techniques for a Captivating Creativity Essay Topic

To unearth a compelling essay topic, immerse yourself in environments that spark your creativity. Reflect on personal experiences where creativity led to meaningful insights or outcomes. Explore historical instances where creativity has reshaped industries or societies. Aim to find a unique angle or a less-trodden path that can provide fresh perspectives on the nature of creativity.

Innovative Creativity Essay Topics to Explore

• The Impact of Digital Technology on Creative Expression in the 21st Century
• Creative Failures: How Mistakes Have Paved the Way for Success
• The Role of Creativity in Environmental Conservation Efforts
• Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Creativity and Innovation
• The Psychology Behind Creative Blocks and How to Overcome Them

Inspirational Writing Samples for Your Creativity Essay

"In the realm of creativity, every failure is not a dead end but a detour to a new beginning. When I embarked on the journey of creating [Project/Artwork], I encountered numerous setbacks. Yet, it was through these very challenges that the project found its true direction, transforming obstacles into stepping stones toward innovation."

Phrases for Inspiration:

• "The essence of creativity lies not in the arrival but in the journey..."
• "In the tapestry of [Field/Subject], it's the threads of creative thought that weave the most vibrant patterns..."
• "Facing the abyss of the unknown, creativity becomes the bridge to unimaginable discoveries..."
• "Creativity thrives in the interplay between discipline and the freedom to explore..."
• "At the heart of every creative endeavor is a story of resilience, experimentation, and the relentless pursuit of vision..."

Imagination and Creativity

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The Creative Process and Artistic Skills Involved in Cosplay

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Computing Creativity: Can A.I. Produce Art?

We are honoring the top 10 winners of our Student STEM Writing Contest by publishing their essays. This one is by Judah Spiegel.

By The Learning Network

This essay, by Judah Spiegel, 14, from Albany High School in Albany, Calif., is one of the top 10 winners of The Learning Network’s fourth annual STEM Writing Contest , for which we received over 3,000 entries.

You can find all of our student winners here .

In 1992, Edward de Bono argued that “creativity is the most important human resource of all.” But might computers have the capacity to be creative? Could artificial intelligence surpass us in even the most human of phenomena? These questions have moved to the forefront of society with the launch of ChatGPT and DALL-E, two powerful deep learning models capable of creating art, albeit heavily based on existing ideas.

The source of human creativity is a complex and heavily-debated topic. One theory supposes that creativity emerges from solving problems in new ways. The game designer Mark Rosewater explains that “if you use the same neural pathways, you get to the same answers, and with creativity, that’s not your goal.” But studies from the University of Virginia suggest humans most default to solving problems by building on known solutions, restricting originality.

Some neuroscientists propose another theory regarding creativity. Research from the University of Calgary reveals that when being creative, humans don’t use the same brain regions associated with thought and problem-solving, implying that creativity is primarily an unconscious process. According to this theory, the brain solves problems best when not directly focusing on them using the frontal lobe, instead letting the other parts of the brain take over.

A.I. cannot currently emulate the full complexity of the human mind. Do these deep learning networks even have the required components that we use when we are creative? Douglas Hofstadter, in his award-winning book “Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid,” explains how “emergent phenomena,” such as creativity, correspond to connections between levels within mental systems. Similar connections could exist in artificial neural networks, even if the underlying mechanics differ. For example, modern artificial intelligence employs attention circuits that may cause it to behave similarly to the frontal lobe where most of the brain’s focusing tendencies come from.

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The evolutionary roots of creativity: mechanisms and motivations

2015, Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences

We consider the evolution of cognition and the emergence of creative behaviour, in relation to vocal communication. We address two key questions: (i) what cognitive and/or social mechanisms have evolved that afford aspects of creativity?; (ii) has natural and/or sexual selection favoured human behaviours considered &#39;creative&#39;? This entails analysis of &#39;creativity&#39;, an imprecise construct: comparable properties in non-humans differ in magnitude and teleology from generally agreed human creativity. We then address two apparent problems: (i) the difference between merely novel productions and &#39;creative&#39; ones; (ii) the emergence of creative behaviour in spite of high cost: does it fit the idea that females choose a male who succeeds in spite of a handicap (costly ornament); or that creative males capable of producing a large and complex song repertoire grew up under favourable conditions; or a demonstration of generally beneficial heightened reasoning capacity; o...

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