What is Creativity Anyway?

Posted on July 21, 2011 by galarzamonsalve

I started Creating Brains.com because I needed to read it.  I have always thought of myself as creative but through years of having little children underfoot and family-size to-do lists my creative energy shrunk.  Still I read widely and went to graduate school. Then one sunny afternoon in May my oldest daughter died suddenly and cosmic entropy ensued.  Several years later I had to admit I was no longer creative.  How could I be? I could not even remember my last novel thought.  One dark night while in the hospital expecting my last child I began this blog. I read and wrote about Creativity every day for one year.  I poured-through Applied Creativity, Biography, History, Neuroscience, Creativity Theory and insights from contemporary highly Creative people on how to live the Creative Life—from Scientists, Architects, Writers and Humanitarians.  Along the way I tinkered with practicable plans to recover for myself and my still-young children what I once thought core to human nature– the capacity to Create beyond biology.

The first book I read and claim (after reading hundreds of books on and around this topic) as my favorite, Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi’s  Creativity, supplied the original working definition for this blog. Csikszentmihalyi defines Creativity as follows:

Creativity is any act, idea, or product that changes an existing domain, or that transforms an existing domain into a new one.

And,

The definition of a creative person is:  someone whose thoughts or actions change a domain, or establish a new domain…a domain cannot be changed without explicit or implicit consent of a field responsible for it.

Not everyone will agree with Csikszentmihalyi’s definition, of course, but I love it most because it inspires as well as defines.  Others have tried to define Creativity.  Check out some of my favorite attempts below:

  • Any act, idea, or product that changes an existing domain, or that transforms an existing domain into a new one with explicit or implicit consent of the field responsible for it. (Used by M. Csikszentmihalyi)
  • Makings things from scratch. (Used by Twyla Tharp– choreographer)
  • Building on and with the works of others. (If I have seen further, it is only because I stand on the shoulders of giants.– Isaac Newton). 
  • Self-expression with no editing. (Expressing with precision all the gold sparks the soul gives off. –Joan Miro, painter)

So what is Creativity then?  Is it an effect?  Is it a cause?  And why must we (still) define it anyway?

I’ll start with my last question.  Creativity must be defined and the definition must be accepted as standard so the topic may be studied scientifically rather than philosophically.  Sixty years ago historians wondered how to improve the study of history.  History was still a discipline of philosophy at the time– inexact, subjective. It lacked scientific definition and definitiveness. This is no longer the case.  Twenty-first century historians work governed by academic definitions and parameters, more science-like than philosophical. There are down-sides to definitiveness for sure. But the study of History has progressed like never before since this transition began in the late 1970′s.  The study of Creativity would benefit from a similar transition.  The Science of Creativity is becoming more, well, scientific.  With hi-tech research tools–  fMRIs and EEGs, scientists hone in on the particulars of the Creative process.  But a general, universally accepted, definition of Creativity is still at large. Eventually we’ll want to unite all we know about Creativity from history, psychology, philosophy, neuroscience and more but for now a definition seems the next crucial step.

Am I right?  Let me know what you think.

And now back to my first question– What is Creativity after all?  Do you agree with Csikszentmihalyi or Miro?

Do you have a definition to contribute?  (If yes, write a new definition in the comments section below).

I love comments! I can’t wait to read what you think.

*Note:  I play with my children, work on a book-length project, teach college History and am about to return to grad school to complete my PhD in Early Modern European History so I do not post on Creating Brains.com very often these days.  Still, the topic of Creativity fascinates me — I will be back and more often soon (or at least sort-of-soon).

Filed under: creativity, Defining Creativity, General Theory of Creativity, Idea Sharing, Ideas | Tagged: , , | 8 Comments »

Death and Mindset

Posted on January 5, 2011 by galarzamonsalve

Sometime after the birth of my first child I read The Good Life: Scott and Ellen Nearing’s Sixty Years of Self-Sufficient Living. Self-sufficient living is a backward idea overall, but one powerful image of the Nearings’ story has stuck with me.   Scott Nearing died by choice.  He lived to 100 years of age and on his birthday decided he was ready to die. He stopped eating and weaned himself from water.  He sat on the porch of the home he and Ellen built and held her hand. Some hours were quiet, other times they talked about everything. Scott slowed down to stillness and one morning, a few days later, he stayed in bed. By midday he closed his eyes forever. Ellen wrote of his quiet death as a coda to a life of intense peace.

Recently, my eight-year-old son started making witty remarks or jokes trailed by the phrase “and then he [or she] died“.  He doesn’t stop to catch anyone’s reaction.  He just moves on. I don’t know if he’s thinking about death in any serious sense.  But a few evenings ago, my husband finished reading the last book of the Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Halllows, in which various important and well-loved characters die.  I think my son is shedding some of the book’s intensity by treating the concept of death whimsically and lightly.

As a young man, French philosopher Michel de Montaigne obsessed about death and reading classical philosophers seemed to feed his morbid thoughts. Historian Sarah Bakewell says,

Death was a topic of which the ancients never tired.  Cicero summed up their principle neatly: To philosophize is to learn how to die.

When Montaigne wrote his own, now classic Essays–decades later, death was not so scary anymore.  He wrote,

If you don’t know how to die, don’t worry.  Nature will tell you what to do on the spot, fully and adequately. She will do this job perfectly for you.  Don’t bother your head about it.

Sarah Bakewell author of How to Live, or a Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer, says,

“Don’t worry about death”, became [Montaigne's] most fundamental, most liberating answer to the question of how to live.  It made it possible to do just that: live.

In any case, death of a loved one rocks your soul, regardless of how you have dealt with the concept of death in the past. About a month ago, I wrote about the predominance of death and loss in the lives of highly creative people. As for Montaigne, he came to his sanguinesque conclusion about death more than fifteen years after loosing his father, his wife and five of his six young children within one decade.  Other Highly Creative people stay in mourning-mode throughout the Creative process, from beginning to end. The excellent 2009 film Creation–about Charles Darwin, demonstrates this beautifully by highlighting Darwin’s intense inner struggle with the loss of his beloved nine-year old daughter, Annie.  Montaigne instead, seems to have gone through a lengthy mourning  period–fifteen years, before entering the Creative process.   Although Montaigne was one of the Renaissance’s most respected philosophers, he understood the world and analyzed it more like a Scientist– with detached fascination.  And Darwin, the father of modern biology–a scientist for sure, finally wrote down and published his theory of Natural Selection: On the Origin of Species to heal–more like a tortured, emotionally labile writer.

As I study the lives of Highly Creative people, I have come to notice creative-types enter the Creative process in either an archetypal Writer’s mindset–as Darwin did or an archetypal Scientist’s mindset, like Michel de Montaigne.

Filed under: Defining Creativity, General Theory of Creativity, The Child, The Scientist, The Writer | Tagged: , , , | 4 Comments »

To Draw, to Cook, to Create?

Posted on January 3, 2011 by galarzamonsalve

Four of my children are gathered around our dining room table this morning, coloring with pencils.  An art-loving college student–Elizabeth, who is on Winter break, is sitting with them.  She says,

In realism, you never draw the sun in your picture because if you did all your figures would need to be shadows.  So, if you want the lighting to seem real when you draw, pretend the sun is at your back.

They follow her instructions and draw pictures with no sun in sight.  Are my children being Creative?

My children are just learning the most basic techniques of art–by following directions.  They are far from changing the domain of Leonardo Da Vinci or Andy Warhol.

Last night, I really wanted to make broccoli soup. I opened my laptop and Googled “brocoli soup”.  Several recipes came up and I began to gather the ingredients for the one with the most butter and onions. But as I started chopping those onions my nine month old baby started to fuss– warning me, she had no patience to wait around for me to cook.

I love following recipes when I cook because I like to be surprised with new tastes.  I often get bored with my own combinations and want to try someone else’s.  Am I being Creative when I cook  someone else’s recipe?

Creativity is not a moment,  It is process that grows developmentally.  The first step in the creative process is imitation, but if you stop your creative development there,  you never create anything new and you slide into non-creativity.  My recipe-following could lead to Creation–if I put in thousands of hours and invest my life for Creativity in cuisine. But I’m not planning on that.  I cook because I love to eat, essentially for fun and pleasure only.

My husband can’t understand where the joy is in following a recipe.  He makes his own dish every time–he doesn’t even follow his own recipes.  He cooks on the fly.  Is he being Creative when he invents a never-before-tasted-exactly-this-way combination of flavors?

Although he is not imitating–few of the world’s grandest chefs would call on him to improve a gourmet dish.  My husband wants no access to that world. If he made the planet’s tastiest lasagna,  he’d get a kiss on the cheek from me and not much more.  He cooks for the same reasons I do.

My eleven-year-old daughter paints in her spare time.  She often takes her easel out to the front yard and paints some part of the landscape.  She isn’t following someone else’s instructions–she’s letting her inner eye and outer vision dictate what goes on the canvas.  Is she being Creative?

Actually, when she’s painting with no recipe, she has moved to a possible second stage in creative development–she’s re-creating what she sees.  She’s painting  the truth in forms present in the natural world outside our home.  If she does this for the next forty years,  her creative development will continue. But when she stops pushing herself to improve, she’ll begin sliding into non-creativity and remain a technician.

Creative development is long and has many stages.  Imitation is only the initial stage–the door to eventual Creation.  Recording is the second base stage–the doormat to Creation.  Of all the above examples,  my husband’s recipe-free cooking puts him farthest along on the Creative development path.  But he has light years to go to change the foodie’s domain,–so he’s also pretty green creatively.

Creativity is life and time-consuming.  It is much more than coloring in flow or cooking for fun.

Filed under: Art Concepts, Childhood, Defining Creativity, What is Creativity | Tagged: , , | 1 Comment »

Everyday Creativity–”Low Church”, High Creativity–”High Church”

Posted on November 3, 2010 by galarzamonsalve

Last Friday, my three oldest children put together a puppet show for little kids.  The puppets were fancy and store-bought, but the curtain behind which my children hid was makeshift, stained in various places and fraying at the bottom.  The audience, mostly small cousins and friends and their parents, clapped and laughed often enough to keep the show going for more than thirty minutes. The plot of the puppet show went something like this: A knight goes on a quest to win the princess’s heart, but she falls in love with a monkey instead. At some point the princess beats up a pirate.  Confused?  The audience and their parents were, a little.

My children live for extemporaneous performances. On-the-fly creativity feeds their souls and bonds them to each other. They need not practice 10,000 hours to make their little cousins laugh, or yawn. They come together with whatever skills they possess, add some props, and create a show.  This fun creativity is a lot like “low church“.

I first heard the phrase “low church” the July before my Junior year of college. My boyfriend–who later became my husband, sat with me on a cushioned pew in a pretty little church in Old Westbury, N.Y.  At the beginning of the service, the congregation stood and the first notes of the organ introduced the Doxology. The people took an audible deep breath, in unison.

A split-second too soon,  a single, not unpleasant, microphone-enhanced baritone voice began, Praise God from whom all blessings flow! The people followed, loud and clear and seemed not to notice when the baritone changed octaves to sing the second verse.

My boyfriend chuckled and whispered, He just changed octaves! I had not even noticed, but I nodded.  Still smiling, he said, I never thought I’d attend low church here in New York.

The people of the Old Westbury church wore well-cut suits and polished shoes.  Still, my California boyfriend saw it as the New York take on the “Little Mountain Church House” sung by The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band.

There’s a little mountain church in my thoughts of yesterday

Where friends and family gathered for the Lord

Where an ol’ fashioned preacher taught the straight and narrow way

For what few coins the congregation could afford

Dressed in all our Sunday best, We sat on pews of solid oak

And I remember how our voices filled the air

How mama sounded like an angel on those high soprano notes

And “When the Role is Called Up Yonder I’ll Be There.”

Low church is participatory and sometimes runs on the fly.  Low church is friendly and rules seem lax compared to “high church”. In low church, you could change octaves while leading the congregation in song and no one would care.

By contrast, High church is racked with rules and discipline.  The main role of high church isn’t to connect with people and enjoy fellowship.  High church aims at inspiration. In high church, you feel awe for God and His Universe. You connect to the beauty of the sacred. Cathedrals bring the eyes to heaven.  Handel’s Messiah makes you stand.

High Creativity is like high church.  Creators, regardless of domain, seek truth and beauty and grand connections with what is not seen.

Photographer Michele Shea says,

Creativity is…seeing something that doesn’t already exist.  You need to find out how you can bring it into being and that way be a playmate with God.

Everyday creativity adds joy to the mundane. High Creativity draws your vision away from the mundane.

Filed under: Defining Creativity | Tagged: , , , , | Leave a Comment »

What Defines Creative Work? The Negative Spaces

Posted on September 5, 2010 by galarzamonsalve

The laws of nature not only describe the results of observations, but the laws of nature delimit the scope of observations. -Robert Oppenheimer (Theoretical Physicist, 1958)

While in college, time stood still for me inside a speeding Benz one very black night.

My hands, each white-knuckling a clutch of passenger-seat piping and leather. My arms, each locked at its side in upward shrug position. My heart skipped more than a beat. I froze in a silent scream. One. Two.

Snap. Like bullets, my words shot out,

Sarah!!!!  What ARE YOU DOOOO-ING!!!!

My good friend Sarah laughed and turned the headlights back on.

Blacking-out any definition between car and unlit country road brought Sarah two seconds of joy or ecstasy or ultimate control. Maybe she just acted on some latent daredevil’s impulse. I don’t know. I still don’t care why she did it. And fortunately, we did not crash and suffered little more than a break in my trust of Sarah’s capability as driver. But that night I understood full-on, why seasoned artists ponder on Negative Space.

Scottish artist, Marion Boddy-Evans says,

Artists use negative space to define a subject. Negative space works when there’s a balance between the positive and negative spaces. Negative space also works when it draws the viewer’s eye into the subject at hand.

Before  my friend Sarah turned off the headlights, light showcased the country road.  But without light, she had no subject, no road before her.

Betty Edwards, author of Drawing On the Right Side of the Brain, explains the concept of negative space with a Bugs Bunny analogy. She says,

Imagine Bugs Bunny speeding along and running through a door. What you’ll see in the cartoon is a door with a bunny-shaped hole in it. What’s left of the door is the negative space, that is the space around the object, in this case Bugs Bunny.

Highly Creative people, in all fields, figure out negative space to define their work.  Albert Einstein found time (the speed of light) to be the limiting factor defining energy. Only with energy’s limit defined, could he formulate the Theory of Relativity.

What limits Creative work, highlights it.

Filed under: Art Concepts, Complexity, creativity, Defining Creativity, Truth | Tagged: , , | Leave a Comment »

Creativity’s Terrain, Part 9: Setting Your Own Path

Posted on August 26, 2010 by galarzamonsalve

You have less control over your environment and the environment in which your children grow than you think. The variables are infinite. For two weeks I’m writing about Creativity’s Terrain and the variables you can control. Yesterday I wrote about Following Childhood Dreams .

Right in the middle of my life,  I realized that I wasn’t where I wanted to be. It was like I’d wandered off the right path into a very, very bad neighborhood. I don’t even want to remember how scary that place was–makes me feel like I’m going to die or something. I’m only telling you about it because a lot of good came out of it in the long run…I felt like I’d been sleepwalking.– Dante Aligheri, 1307 (as translated by Martha Beck)

Sooner or later, Highly Creative people say no to paths set by others and choose their own.

Poet Robert Frost knew this. He said,

Two roads diverged in a wood and I – I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.

The luckiest people drop-off expectations set for them, not by them, sooner. They recognize a bad neighborhood when they first see it.

Nobel laureate Neurologist, Rita Levi-Montalcini (now over a century old), recalls deciding at a very young age, to never marry.  She describes her early family life as very happy,  and her father as loving and respectful of women. But still, she felt her mother was “dominated”.

I decided I would never marry and I kept my word. I did not want to be ‘in second place’ like my mother, whom I adored. I told my father I did not intend to be just a wife and mother. I didn’t know I wanted to be a scientist then, I didn’t know what science was, but I wanted to dedicate my life to helping others.

Mahatma Ghandi‘s parents wished him to become a barrister, a lawyer.  At the time, he could not see the benefit of this path. He respected their opinion enough to pursue law but,  he did so his way. At 19, against his parent’s wishes and aware he would be ostracized in his native Porbandar, Gandhi headed to London, a non-Hindu, forbidden place, to study law at University College London.

The big “No”, may come with ease or may need ardent fighting-for, but it must come for Creativity to bloom.  As Gandhi said,

A ‘No’ uttered from the deepest conviction is better than a ‘Yes’ merely uttered to please, or worse, to avoid trouble.


Filed under: Creativity's Terrain, Defining Creativity | Tagged: , , , , , , , | 2 Comments »

Creativity: The Mind’s W-A-T-E-R

Posted on August 8, 2010 by galarzamonsalve

Creativity has not yet found its perfect definition, one to encompass the full force of the idea.

Humans live by definitions. Words order the world.

With words we name our children and describe places we love. With words we immortalize today. Because words define our ideas, without them we stand in confused darkness.

At night Anne Sullivan fell to bed exhausted. Sometimes she cried herself to sleep, angry, frustrated, almost to despair, but not quite. Her mission:  to free one silent child oppressed in a deep, dark existence.

Helen, Sullivan’s charge,  became deaf and blind in 1880, due to scarlet fever before age two. Years growing wild, the child’s world, a cacophony of bumps, edges and vibrations, made her a formidable pupil indeed.  Neuronal stirrings connected randomly for lack of definitions. Her mind knew no words.

But the epiphany that is language did hit Helen Keller. The big bang to define her existence came under chilly water falling from the backyard pump. Over and over again, Sullivan signed into Helen’s hand,

W-A-T-E-R.

One moment, Helen stood confused. But suddenly, the next, Helen understood. Sullivan freed Helen with words spelled out to define what she touched and felt and experienced.

Creativity is a life-giving force strong and powerful, the mind’s W-A-T-E-R.  But we still stand, as Helen did, trying to define it.

Filed under: Defining Creativity | Tagged: , , , , , | 1 Comment »

Is Creativity Undefinable?

Posted on August 7, 2010 by galarzamonsalve

Brand-new Porsche tires on my minivan we zoomed down the open highway to Monart School of the Arts this past week. Two kids spent 3 hours a day in flow, following step-by-step drawing-instructions to imitate the masters. One day Chagall, another, Picasso.

The rest of us chilled at the local beach playground.

But, for all the joys of pushing my toddler on a swing facing the Pacific Ocean I lost my time to write.  I chatted with moms and nannies.  I laughed with my girls and sought shade for the baby. And, I thought a lot.

You can’t create without a large dose of pondering.  So although my writing output was slight this past week, I had the luxury of ponder-time.

These last few months, I’ve realized the topic Creativity is as ill-defined as God.  Last week I wrote Defining Creativity, from the beginning of History to Early Modern times.

But as a drove this week I asked myself,

Is Creativity really definable?

And,

Does Creativity need to be defined at all?

For me, yes.

I am the creative-type. I feel sick without Creativity’s nectar. Knowing what creativity is helps me organize my days so I participate in my own potential.  It’s like holding the proper ID so I can drink Creativity:  life’s most potent anti-oxidant, and swim in it, at the same time. But how about for the rest of the world?

Can we define Creativity, like Gravity or Relativity? Or any other law of Physics?  And, would a mere definition clear-out life-wasting twaddle to make space for true Creation?

This coming week I’m writing about definitions and why, in most cases, they change the world for the better.


Filed under: Defining Creativity | Tagged: , , , | Leave a Comment »

Defining Creativity, Part 7: Creativity as Experimentation in the Enlightenment

Posted on August 4, 2010 by galarzamonsalve

Every day, for a week,  I’m writing about the definitions of Creativity thinkers have offered throughout history and why each one cannot be the final definition. Yesterday I wrote about Cultural Suppression of Creativity.

Sitting under an apple tree, Isaac Newton discovered gravity. A falling apple answered for him all questions regarding the mechanics of the Universe.  So goes the legend you read in 6th grade Science.

Yes, Newton did formulate the Universal Law of Gravitation and an apple tree may have helped fine-tune his ideas about gravitational pull and power.  But, Newton’s influence directs Western Science farther and wider than gravity itself, including ideas regarding Creativity.

Newton sought to separate natural philosophy from objective observation-based science. The Scientific Method, generally divorced from pre-conceived spiritual or magical interpretations, led  to the dichotomy between science and religion.

Enlightenment ideas of High Creativity ignored the inspiration portion of Creation, because it could not be explained via the Scientific Method.  Creativity, defined by long hours and experimentation, think Vincent Van Gogh and Paul Gauguin, had little to do with magic or the unexplained.

Still, some Creators had sparkle enough to cause suspicion that a final, workable definition of Creativity had not yet arrived.

Filed under: Creativity: Historical Perspective, Defining Creativity, General Theory of Creativity, Ideas, What is Creativity | Tagged: , , , , , | 2 Comments »

Defining Creativity, Part 6: Creativity can be Supressed by Culture

Posted on August 2, 2010 by galarzamonsalve

Every day, for a week,  I’m writing about the definitions of Creativity thinkers have offered throughout history and why each one cannot be the final definition. Yesterday I wrote about Renaissance Women with Self-Control and True Believers.

China’s High Creativity first peaked while Europe wallowed in bloody Dark Age wars and then again during Europe’s bubonic plagued Middle Ages.

But Creativity in art, music, writing, medicine and global exploration came to a halt in China just as Europe emerged weak, but hungry-for-life, for the Renaissance.

Economist Diego Cumin says a region’s creativity and technology in A.D. 1500 is an extraordinarily reliable predictor of wealth today, across the globe, with the exception of China.

The great halt of Creation in China, as real as its Great Wall, could have been limited to just decades. But China’s  future Creative potential keep declining. Chinese culture grew more rigid and more impenetrable. Eventually extreme cultural convergence took hold to the exclusion of the individual growth. Trade with other nations closed and stagnation set in.

Creativity is not a Lone-Ranger process.  Creativity is fostered or suppressed by cultural milieus and economic opportunities.

Individuals today are breaking free from the culture of conformity in China, but the cultural redirection towards openness will be slow.  Creative output in China is still tiny relative to the size of its population.



Filed under: Creativity's Terrain, Creativity: Historical Perspective, Defining Creativity, Uncategorized, What is Creativity | Tagged: , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

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