Creative
Thinking
If restructuring is crucial, how
can a problem solver go about seeking some new per-spective, some new mental
set, when working on a difficult problem? One way to tackle these issues is by
examining cases of problem solving in which someone finds an entirely new and
wonderfully productive way to solve a problem. In these cases, we count the
problem solution as creative—one
that’s both new and valuable—and this leads us to ask: How do creative problem
solutions arise?
We can approach this issue by
examining individuals who have undeniably been creative—great artists like
Picasso or Bach, or innovative scientists like Charles Darwin or Marie Curie.
Studies suggest that these creative individuals do tend to have certain things
in common, so perhaps we can think of these shared elements as “prerequisites” for
great creativity. These individuals, first of all, have an enormous storehouse
of knowledge and skills in their domain of achievement. Second, they all tend
to be intel-ligent and to have certain personality traits—a willingness to take
risks, a willingness to ignore criticism, and an ability to tolerate ambiguous
findings or situations. Third, these highly creative people seem to be
motivated by the pleasure of their work rather than the promise of external
rewards. Finally, there’s an important sense in which these highly creative
people seem to have been “in the right place at the right time”—that is, in
environments that allowed them freedom, provided the appropriate support, and
offered them problems that were “ripe” for solution with the resources
available. (For discussion of these “prerequisites” for creativity, see
Amabile, 2001; Nakamura & Csikszentmihalyi, 2001; Sawyer, 2006; Sternberg
& Dess, 2001.)
But these various factors merely
set the stage for creativity; we still need to ask what goes on inside the mind
of the creative person. One proposal was offered many years ago by Graham
Wallas (1926), who argued that creative thought proceeds through four stages:
In the first stage, preparation, the
problem solver gathers information about the problem. This stage is typically
characterized by periods of hard and often frustrating work on the problem,
generally with little progress. In the second stage, incubation, the problem solver sets the problem aside and seems not
to be working on it. Wallas argued, though, that the problem solver was
continuing to work on the problem during this stage, albeit unconsciously.
Thus, the problem solution is continuing to develop, unseen—just like a baby
bird develops, unseen, inside the egg. This period of incuba-tion leads to the
third stage, illumination, in which
some key insight or new idea emerges; this stage paves the way for the fourth
stage, verification, in which the
problem solver confirms that the new idea really does lead to a solution and
works out the details.
Modern scholars are, however, quite
skeptical about Wallas’s proposal; let’s focus in particular on his notion of
incubation. Wallas based this idea on the many historical accounts in which
creative insights arose rather abruptly, when the thinker seemed not be working
on the problem at all. Thus, Beethoven and Darwin both reported that their
great ideas came to them not while sitting at the piano or a desk, but while
riding in a carriage. The great mathematician Poincaré claimed his discoveries
arose while he was stepping onto a bus. In the most celebrated case of all,
Archimedes allegedly was sitting in a bath-tub when he realized how to measure
the volume of a complex shape (Figure 9.25).
The more systematic evidence on
this point is, however, mixed. Several studies have shown that time away from a
problem does help in finding the problem’s solution, but many other studies
find no such effect (Dodds, Ward, & Smith, 2003; Vul & Pashler, 2007;
Zhong, Dijksterhuis, & Galinsky, 2008; but also see Sio & Ormerod,
2009). And even when time away from a problem is beneficial, incubation may not
be the reason. Time away from a problem may simply allow fatigue and
frustration to dissipate, which by itself may be helpful. The time away also
may allow problem solvers to shake off unproductive mental sets, so that
they can approach
the problem unburdened
by their earlier, unhelpful perspective and
assumptions (S. Smith & Blankenship, 1989; Vul & Pashler, 2007).
If we set aside Wallas’s
ambitious notions, then, where do creative discoveries come from? The answer
probably involves relatively straightforward mechanisms. For example, earlier
we discussed the notion of spreading
activation, in which retrieval of one memory causes activation to spread
out to the nearby nodes represent-ing related memories. This sort of unguided
memory search, letting the activation spread where the connections take it, is
inefficient for
most problem solving—and as we
said at the start, problem solving is usually much more orderly than this. It’s
guided by your current thoughts, your sense of the goal, and your understanding
of the problem’s structure. Even so, an unguided memory search, relying on
spreading activation, may be the best bet when the problem solver is otherwise
uncertain how to proceed (Schooler, Ohlsson, & Brooks, 1993; Yaniv &
Meyer, 1987). And, of course, this spreading activation is more likely to be
productive if the problem solver has a lot of knowledge about the domain (and
so many ideas that could be activated) and if that knowledge is richly
interconnected (so that the activation is more likely to reach the target).
Both of these points are typically in place for the individuals we call
creative, and this may be a large part of what contributes to creative
solutions.
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