The Ides of Creativity
Transcript and images from a talk given at the UK Hip Hop Ed seminar “original/Remix” on June 10.
I want to talk about mushrooms
Specifically about the mycelium. The mycelium is the root network of a fungus. The largest living organism in the world is a mycelium in Oregon that’s 2 and a half miles across and thousands of years old. It is the perfect metaphor for the potential of the human mind to create vast new networks.
Hold that thought while we take a look at a mediaeval torture instrument.
This is called a “pear”. The end of it is not solid, it is made of leaves that open out. You can figure the rest. I mention that not because there is inherently anything creative about mediaeval torture (though…) but because a couple of lectures I gave last year provide an illustration of the kind of creativity I want to talk about. The kind that uses similarities of a superficial kind and says “I wonder if those similarities go any deeper.”
A couple of years ago the Oxford University Maths department moved premises and in the move they found some hundred year old mathematical models
They illustrate surfaces that have been manipulated by a mathematical function.
Several of us were commissioned to write a poem about them.
Which brings me back to the pear. And the Judas Chair.
Not to mention those lines, which took me on a turn to shibari ropework.
And just a few months later when I was asked to give a Halloween lecture at the Ashmolean museum, those same images came back, and this time they took me to two classic Halloween-y videos.
Of course it’s all very well saying, “ooh look, same”, but the creative leap is in whether that similarity reflects a deeper similarity. Of course, in this case it does. Crucially it’s one I hadn’t considered previously but which when presented with these pictures is quite obvious.
Stretching.
And in particular the absolutely primal fear we have of skin that is stretched so thin it almost breaks and spills whatever it is holding in.
All of which makes a very simple point. Creativity has two parts. The “creative” part is hooking stuff up. But that works best when you have lots and lots of stuff to work with.
I first officially became interested in creativity 20 years ago this summer when I pitched up to the Royal Festival Hall for the first Creative Thinking World Championship and came away with the bronze medal and a comment from the judge that I had “an incredibly sick mind.”
It was also when I started my doctorate. I was studying “the erotic in Puritan marriage doctrine”. And that was not nearly so dry as you might think. It turns out the big ideological dispute of the time wasn’t about the kind of questions you might imagine if you know something about the history of the Reformation like predestination, or whether the communion wine turned into the blood of Jesus.
It was about the exact same subject as a groundbreaking piece of neuroimaging research undertake earlier this year at the Max Planck Institute — how we remember things. This had been a big deal for many centuries because in the days before Google knowledge really was power.
The Greeks had got really good at it. They invented what we would call the mind palace
the same thing you see on Sherlock, or Hannibal, which involved literally making a mental building full of rooms in each of which you would store images that represented different bits of your knowledge. The problem was that some of these Greeks didn’t just want to store all they knew about grain harvests and shipbuilding. They wanted to store esoteric secrets they believed had been passed to them by the god Hermes. And this connection carried on right through mediaeval times and into the early modern world of the alchemists, who instead of using imaginary rooms to store knowledge would use something they found even easier to memorise and navigate — astrological charts.
And that’s where the fight comes, because it didn’t matter that these techniques were really effective. What mattered to the Puritans was they believed that using pictures in your imagination was some kind of occult way of trying to make fictional things real (which in a way it was). And when those pictures involved astrological symbols you ended up with people we would today call memory athletes getting burned at the stake for summoning demons.
Instead of these dangerous pictures, the Puritans thought you should memorise things using a complex, word-based system of classification that broke everything down into ever more specific branches.
100 years and more after the invention of the printing press, this was, on a practical level, a technique that not only avoided accidentally opening the gates of hell. It was also more suited to sorting and finding information that existed not in your head but in libraries that you could go and consult. And when the Puritans set sail for America they took the system with them and out of it came the Library of Congress cataloguing system. We see it everywhere even today. It’s still the way we classify living organisms; it’s the way websites and online inventories are organized.
And when it comes to creativity it’s hopeless.
The first problem with lists that makes them worse than mind palaces is they just aren’t effective for learning stuff. The Max Planck Institute’s fMRI scans showed that the techniques used by modern memory athletes, which involved building complex sets of images, actually grew the connections made in the associative cortexes of the brain.
Building mind palaces works. And it’s an essential part of creativity. Because if creativity is all about sticking stuff together in innovative ways to find fruitful, fascinating new stuff, then the more original stuff you have the better.
But it’s not enough, and in fact memory techniques can be really unhelpful because they are all about what to do in a world where you don’t have Wikipedia. And if you don’t have Wikipedia, what you tend to do is treat knowledge as this sacred thing that’s somehow “out there” that you first have to uncover and then find a really efficient way to store, by building the walls around each bit of that knowledge to be really watertight.
But when what you want is to connect up everything you know in the almost infinite original ways available, what you need is walls that aren’t watertight but leaky. Because the thing that really matters, the really useful knowledge, lies in the infinite connections built between all the stuff — and those are connections that branched lists just won’t let you make, because they operate by putting every piece of knowledge in a single, identifiable location, the exact opposite of the kind of wobbly way of thinking about things you need to develop.
Different fMRI studies show that the way to utilise the enhanced associative cortex areas you have developed by building mind palaces is by turning off the parts of the brain’s frontal lobes linked to self-censorship. The most developed, “human” part of our brain literally spends its time like a rather worried conservative relative tutting at us “ooh, I really don’t think you should be doing that.” And as in politics, so in creativity, we need to find ways to turn this voice off so that we can use the information we have amassed without inhibition.
Which brings us back to Mycelium, which is the name for the tool I developed over the past two decades for training precisely those two things. I’m delighted that last month I was awarded the Oxford University Humanities Innovation Challenge Award to develop it first into a mass market card game and then next year into an app.
Here’s how it works. You have two decks of cards.
From the first you draw one of 10 challenging ways of connecting objects
here we have “What could blank learn about its future from blank?” You then draw two further cards from the second deck of 100 objects
from 10 different fields of knowledge, chosen specifically for their diversity and conceptual leakiness to produce a question.
here “what could a scholar learn about its future from a forest?” You then have 5 minutes to generate as many ideas as possible. For example, as the scholar in this case is a white guy (Peter Ramus, who came up with the idea of memorising lists), you might say that scholars could learn from Spruce forests that if you plant a monoculture you leach the soil and have ever decreasing returns.
It’s about priming your brain to grow its associative cortex areas by building stores of information in a mind palace. And then plumbing the mind palace with leaky pipes to help you build connections between the different areas of knowledge, by encouraging not only to connect stuff up but to do so in a way that encourages the kind of ridiculousness that helps your frontal lobe to get out of the way. The different ways of making those connections I call the Ides of Creativity
Collide (smashing stuff together and seeing what results),
Slide (like the very first examples I gave, looking at similarities between things and asking of those similarities tell us anything else or allow one object to function as a metaphor for another), and
Elide (sticking half of one thing onto half of another)
Build networks, like a series of underground tunnels in your mind that help you pass supplies and build alliances and link up ideas like buried sarcophagi that have been dormant for years until the day you disturbed them and brought them back to life. Nurture the roots by learning loads of stuff and skilling yourself up in the art of making ridiculous connections, and the mushrooms *will* grow.
