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Your Obligation To Be Optimistic
British Patriotism In Three Ads
Why Things Might Actually Be About To Get Better
Seven Underrated Forms of Diversity
What’s the relationship between intelligence and creativity? In a 1962 study cited in Robert Sternberg’s Handbook of Creativity, a group of high-school students of varying IQs were administered a series of exercises designed to tease out the difference. In one exercise, the students were shown a simple line-drawing of a businessman sitting in an aeroplane, and asked to imagine the story behind it. A high-IQ student gave this response:
Mr Smith is on his way home from a successful business trip. He is very happy and he is thinking about his wonderful family and how glad he will be to see them again. He can picture it, about an hour from now, his plane landing at the airport and Mrs Smith and their three children all there welcoming him again.
A high-creativity (not high-IQ) student gave this response to the same picture:
The man is flying back from Reno where he has just won a divorce from his wife. He couldn’t stand to live with her anymore, he told the judge, because she wore so much cold cream on her face at night that her head would skid across the pillow and hit him on the head. He is now contemplating skid-proof face cream.
You can’t help but wonder if this anonymous student went on to become a novelist, screenwriter or stand-up comedian. From paltry stimulus, a richly detailed story is conjured up, including that brilliantly comic image of a face skidding across a pillow. In three short sentences, the man on the plane becomes a living human character and the protagonist of a drama, set in a recognisable social milieu.
After all these years, there is little consensus among researchers on how intelligence and creativity are related. It is clear that creative people are intelligent in some way, yet the two abilities are obviously not the same. It used to be thought that above-average intelligence was a necessary-but-insufficient condition of creativity, but even that proposition seems to have little basis in evidence.
It’s a tough question to study, since both intelligence and creativity, but particularly the latter, are hard to define or measure. I’m going to take advantage of this uncertainty among the scientists and jump in with my own theory, which is that artists are highly intelligent people who know when, and how, to be stupid.
My first exhibit: this footage of Bob Dylan passing time outside a London pet shop in 1966. I’ve admired it ever since I first saw it in Martin Scorsese’s documentary No Direction Home.
It’s a vignette which lays bare one of the fundamental operations of creativity: taking elements of the familiar or mundane and remixing them into something new. Dylan is not thinking about what he’s saying, he’s just grabbing the nearest words, throwing them in the air, and seeing where they land.
After a few spins of his verbal wheel you can almost hear a new song waiting to be born, from the most unpromising of materials. It would be a stretch to call the resulting doggerel poetry but Dylan is practising a skill he used to ignite his greatest songs. He described the indelible lyrics to Like A Rolling Stone as an effusion he produced with brain switched off: a “long piece of vomit”.
Writers spin stories out of scraps, often using their own half-formed memories and subconscious associations as raw material. Robert Louis Stevenson had unusually vivid dreams and he used one as the basis of The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, which began in a nightmare from which he awoke screaming. When psychiatric patients do this, it’s called “confabulating”. During research for my 2011 book, Born Liars, I spoke to Aikaterini Fotopoulou, a psychiatrist at University College London. She told me about one of her patients, a nineteen-year- old window-fitter known as RM, who had been a passenger in a car crash which left him with damage to his brain’s frontal lobes. Six months later, RM had made a strong physical recovery but he was disoriented in time, and had become, according to friends and family, a more boastful, irritable and emotional person than before the accident.
He had also become a chronic confabulator. As far as RM was concerned, he had made a full recovery, and during rehabilitation sessions he invented long and complicated stories to explain why he was in a hospital. He told tales of implausible derring-do, in which he had responded to a call of distress from a girlfriend or family member under threat from an anonymous attacker, raced to the scene and subdued or even killed the assailant. At the end, the police arrived, surveyed the bloody aftermath, and praised him for doing what they were not able to do. It became apparent to Fotoupolou that RM’s stories of heroism were attempts to assuage deep feelings of powerlessness, by rewriting his memories of the horrific incident in which he had lost part of mind.
Crudely speaking, the brain’s frontal lobes are responsible for self-control and self-monitoring; the regulation of our thoughts and impulses. They are where we do the work of reason and of distinguishing between fantasy and reality. In patients like RM, they’re not doing the job, and the brain’s storytelling capacity is allowed to run unchecked while being covertly directed by emotional needs, those deep state agents of the mind.
In a case like RM, this is a tragic condition, but it is adjacent to the mental processes of a writer or artist generating new ideas. The difference between the artist and the psychiatric patient is that artists are able to control the point at which they relinquish control. In a small but suggestive study of jazz musicians asked to play specially designed keyboards inside a brain scanner, researchers found that the musicians effectively ‘turned off’ their own neurological self-regulation when improvising.
This is also the difference between the artist and the highly intelligent non-artist, just from the other direction. Intelligent, analytical people find it hard to stop being analytical. They can’t switch into Dylan’s pet shop mode and just see what happens. Consequently they give themselves less freedom to make random combinations of materials, or to believe in the flimsy constructions that can result.
When I asked the novelist Will Self what marks out artists from the rest of us, he recalled a remark made by the author Flannery O’Connor to the effect that writers have to be “calculatedly stupid”. Self said, “I can think of any number of people who are more perceptive than me, who are more learned and have more know-how. But what they aren’t is calculatedly stupid, in the sense that they are unable to preserve intact their ability to suspend disbelief.”
Our self-regulatory brain systems are not fully developed until well into adulthood. Note the childlike glee Dylan takes in his own verbal play. Children are, and this can’t be said enough, idiots, which is why we don’t let them cross the road by themselves, but they are also talented fabulists who have little trouble believing in their own inventions. Artists somehow keep a channel open to endlessly malleable brain of their early years. They can sink into a determined stupor at will, although even for them, this ability becomes elusive later in life. Experience and knowledge make the internal critic more confident and more censorious. Bob Dylan has observed, "As you get older, you get smarter, and that can hinder you because you try to gain control over the creative impulse.”
Stevenson’s nightmare was just the trigger: the story of Jekyll and Hyde was written “awake, and consciously”. Artists don’t just create; they shape, and the shaping usually requires a fine analytical intelligence. The production of a song or novel involves switching back and forth between these different modes of thinking, and it’s this internal cognitive diversity which distinguishes creative people. Most of us try to apply intelligence to our work; artists apply their stupidity too.
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