We’re in a technological era like no other before. Yet, I’m not the only one who has noticed an opposite decline in creativity.

In 1958, E. Paul Torrance pioneered a creativity evaluation system. Though not without error, these tests have predicted and projected children’s creative accomplishments as adults with enough accuracy to remain the standard tests for the past 50 years.

Based on these tests, a recent article in Newsweek, titled “Creativity in Crisis” shows that while IQ scores are up, Creativity is down:

Kyung Hee Kim at the College of William & Mary discovered this in May, after analyzing almost 300,000 Torrance scores of children and adults. Kim found creativity scores had been steadily rising, just like IQ scores, until 1990. Since then, creativity scores have consistently inched downward. “It’s very clear, and the decrease is very significant,” Kim says.

The article goes on to say:

It’s too early to determine conclusively why U.S. creativity scores are declining. One likely culprit is the number of hours kids now spend in front of the TV and playing videogames rather than engaging in creative activities. Another is the lack of creativity development in our schools. In effect, it’s left to the luck of the draw who becomes creative: there’s no concerted effort to nurture the creativity of all children.

I think there’s more to it than that.

Fear and its equally evil sister, conformity, are the culprits.

Over the last while, political correctness has threatened, cajoled and belligerently permeated everything in society, working its way into school and home. The altruistic idea of cultural relativism - the belief that everything is equal, including ambition and talent - is flattening the world once again and distorting reality.

Technology is helping. It’s enabled all arts – from design, to music, to film making - to be democratized. This mass access has hood winked people into believing that art and ideas can come from anyone. That there’s no such thing as a ‘big idea’ anymore. That nothing is original. That “genius steals.” And that the crowd is better than the individual.

The equality and validity of anybody and everybody’s ideas is promised without anybody having to possess a modicum of talent, or learn and practice to acquire skills, or be genuinely curious, or mature through the accumulation of knowledge.

Presto! Everybody is instantly creative because society says so.

But, societal conformity isn’t just wrong. The whole concept of creative equality is wrong. From the Newsweek article:

A fine example of this emerged in January of this year, with release of a study by University of Western Ontario neuroscientist Daniel Ansari and Harvard’s Aaron Berkowitz, who studies music cognition. They put Dartmouth music majors and nonmusicians in an fMRI scanner, giving participants a one-handed fiber-optic keyboard to play melodies on. Sometimes melodies were rehearsed; other times they were creatively improvised. During improvisation, the highly trained music majors used their brains in a way the nonmusicians could not: they deactivated their right-temporoparietal junction. Normally, the r-TPJ reads incoming stimuli, sorting the stream for relevance. By turning that off, the musicians blocked out all distraction. They hit an extra gear of concentration, allowing them to work with the notes and create music spontaneously.

But the conformists march on, regardless of the consequences. And even though the necessity of creativity should be undisputed.

A recent IBM poll of 1,500 CEOs identified creativity as the No.1 “leadership competency” of the future. I’d argue it’s always been that way, whether through the invention of the wheel, the light bulb, Martin Luther's famous speech, or the Apple computer.

Advertising and other professionally creative disciplines are now being abused by things like crowd sourcing, where ideas are bought and traded for a few hundred dollars. Where it’s less likely that truly great ideas can be produced because the ‘contestants’ do not have access to the client and the marketing information, just a brief. Where qualifications, passion and experience play no part. Where mostly non-creative people judge and decide what is creative and therefore effective.

I’ve always believed that creative people have soldered abnormal connections in their brains that serve to quickly unravel mysteries and discover solutions to problems. These connections don’t come without curiosity, ambition, hard work and years of practice.

For example, the way I go about solving a problem is to immerse myself in all the facts and relevant information and then walk away for days, or as long as I can. Leaving the problem in the back of my brain to more-or-less solve itself. Afterwards, I focus on the possibilities - writing them down for further exploration, or rejection.

This isn’t a left-brain, right-brain approach. It’s a whole brain approach as the article goes on to illustrate:

When you try to solve a problem, you begin by concentrating on obvious facts and familiar solutions, to see if the answer lies there. This is a mostly left-brain stage of attack. If the answer doesn’t come, the right and left hemispheres of the brain activate together. Neural networks on the right side scan remote memories that could be vaguely relevant. A wide range of distant information that is normally tuned out becomes available to the left hemisphere, which searches for unseen patterns, alternative meanings, and high-level abstractions.

Having glimpsed such a connection, the left brain must quickly lock in on it before it escapes. The attention system must radically reverse gears, going from defocused attention to extremely focused attention. In a flash, the brain pulls together these disparate shreds of thought and binds them into a new single idea that enters consciousness. This is the “aha!” moment of insight, often followed by a spark of pleasure as the brain recognizes the novelty of what it’s come up with.

Now the brain must evaluate the idea it just generated. Is it worth pursuing? Creativity requires constant shifting, blender pulses of both divergent thinking and convergent thinking, to combine new information with old and forgotten ideas. Highly creative people are very good at marshaling their brains into bilateral mode, and the more creative they are, the more they dual-activate.

Finally, I’m not saying that everybody can’t participate in adding to ideas and making them better. It’s just the hatching, nurturing, design, aesthetics, steering and judgment of ideas where I don’t think everybody is, or can be equal.

Lets not confuse amateurs, hobbyists and tinkerers (in other words ‘the crowd’) with talented professionals. Else we’re all doomed to mediocrity.

Agree, or disagree? I’d love to hear your thoughts and comments.

Salvador Dali out for a stroll with his pet anteater.

BBC News has an article comparing creativity and schizophrenia, drawing a conclusion they are essentially the result of the same problem.

Brain scans reveal striking similarities in the thought pathways of highly creative people and those with schizophrenia.

Both groups lack important receptors used to filter and direct thought.

It could be this uninhibited processing that allows creative people to "think outside the box", say experts from Sweden's Karolinska Institute.

In some people, it leads to mental illness.

But rather than a clear division, experts suspect a continuum, with some people having psychotic traits but few negative symptoms.

I know a number of creative people that suffer from bipolar disorder, some bordering on schizophrenia, so these findings unfortunately make sense.

It's also no secret that some of history's greatest creative minds have had mental disorders.

Associate Professor Fredrik Ullen believes his findings could help explain why.

He looked at the brain's dopamine (D2) receptor genes which experts believe govern divergent thought.

He found highly creative people who did well on tests of divergent thought had a lower than expected density of D2 receptors in the thalamus - as do people with schizophrenia.

The thalamus serves as a relay centre, filtering information before it reaches areas of the cortex, which is responsible, amongst other things, for cognition and reasoning.

The professor believes this is what's behind the "creative spark." It's essentially a barrage of unfiltered information running rampant through the mind.

This explains why creative people can see connections in order to solve problems that ordinary people miss.

UK psychologist and member of the British Psychological Society Mark Millard said the overlap with mental illness might explain the motivation and determination creative people share.

"Creativity is uncomfortable. It is their dissatisfaction with the present that drives them on to make changes.

"Creative people, like those with psychotic illnesses, tend to see the world differently to most. It's like looking at a shattered mirror. They see the world in a fractured way.

"There is no sense of conventional limitations and you can see this in their work. Take Salvador Dali, for example. He certainly saw the world differently and behaved in a way that some people perceived as very odd."

But is it really a mental disorder? Highly creative people tend to reject society's norms, restrictions and conventions and because of that are often driven to making the world a better and more interesting place. However, society often perceives those that don't conform as mentally ill. What do you think?

reveries.com says this about Elgin Park:

Elgin Park, exists only on Flickr -- and in the mind of Michael Paul Smith, reports Jim Koscs in the New York Times (3/14/10). Elgin Park, in reality, "is an imaginary ... steel-mill town where the calendar is frozen at 1964." Michael created Elgin Park by combining his love of "1/24-scale diecast" cars and trucks with "his skills at architectural model-making and photography, along with his love for detail." He has built about a dozen scale models of circa 1964 houses and buildings, and accessorized them with his collection of some 300 die-cast cars and trucks.

Michael then photographs his models outdoors, using mother earth as his backdrop and father sky for lighting. The result is so stunning that his creations attract upwards of 750,000 pageviews per day, totaling some 20 million views on Flickr since January (images). The result is so good that some accuse Michael of using Photoshop, but he says he's used Photoshop only to make some of the images look older. He finds his outdoor sets in and around his hometown of Winchester, Mass., but says his inspiration is actually his boyhood home of Sewickley, Pa., "a real steel-mill town a few miles north of Pittsburgh."

All I say is, unbelievable work.

                     

Click here to download:

A_Miniature_Town_That_Defines_.zip (1224 KB)

I've been reading more than a few recent articles on plagiarism in advertising. In the business of creativity, it's always been a dark corner. There are cases that give pause and raise eyebrows, often in the end doing little for the credibility of either the accuser or the accused. There are also cases where what appears to be plagiarism is actually honest coincidence.

Blame it on the zeitgeist.

Many creative people claim that after allowing a problem to tumble around in the back of their head, an idea comes forward, as if snatched out of the air. If that's the case, the same thought can be 'snatched out of the air' by more than one person, or agency - even half way around the world. In this era of instant information, we're more likely to see a lot of people making the same connections and creating the same solutions at the same time.

'There's nothing new under the sun,' seems more true today than ever.

Check here and here for recent articles on the topic.

What are your thoughts on this?