I’ve been reading through Robert Weisberg’s (1986) Creativity: Genius and Other Myths and it occured to me that “the artistic process,” “the scientific process,” and “the writing process,” all follow the same process of creative problem solving, whereby there is an “ill-defined problem” that takes modification of past experience and knowledge to solve.
Weisberg intially provides the simple example of “the candle problem” where a subject is prosented with a box of tacks, matches and a candle, with the instruction to attach the candle to the wall, with the candle able to burn properly. Using verbal protocol, where subjects speak their thoughts aloud rather than describe what they’re doing, he found that most individuals start with directly attaching the candle to the wall with the tacks or by melting the base of the candle, and the more knowledable folk who can see that there are problems to that solution begin to reason the next best alternative to fix the problem in the problem, which is to tac the box to the wall as a stand.
Another example of creative problem solving is presenting in this type of riddle:
“Dan comes home one night after work, as usual. He opens the door and steps into the living room. On the floor he sees Charlie lying dead. There is water on the floor, as well as some pieces of glass. Tom is also in the room. Dan takes one quick glance at the scene and immediately knows what happened. How did Charlie die?”
The audience or subjects then try to guess the answer by asking yes or no answers, refining their questions to elicite the information needed to understand the riddle. Those who are good at these games have experience with problems of this sort.
Both of these are ill-defined problems because they are missing information. In non-creative problem solving, the answer is straightforward from the instructutions. Creativity is involved in answering ill-defined problems such as how well the wax sticks to the wall, or how strong are the tacks, or how old Charlie is, or how to model DNA or make sense of the natural world, or how to string a tune, or what connections to draw while writing a poem, what words to choose, or what happens next in a plot, or where the light falls in composing a painting.
Despite self-reports of an “Aha!” moment, or seemingly unconscious processes, Weisburg presents evidence for how the subjective experience is not the most reliable means for determining how the creative process actually works. The main reason is that artists and scientists often make such reports after the experience has long passed and memory can be faulty as one was more attuned to the task at hand than observing the whole situation. People will also (consciously or not) lie about their creative process, for “One can be influenced by a stimulus without being able to report it” (Weisburg 1986:29). The pleasure one gets from “Aha!” may just be relsease from consiously working on a hard problem for a long time, which is physically exhausting. Despite taking a break, creative people often engage in what Olton calles “creative worrying,” which is mulling over the problem even while not working on it, not an unconsious process. Breaks may also help the brain rest before having the energy to go at it again.
Genius looks like a divine gift from nowhere if one cannot see the small steps which it evolved from. This type of divine creativity coming forth perfected at once was never observed in laboratory settings, and careful examination of biographies, notes, sketches and drafts show that it takes hard work and at least ten years of training for the skill to contribute anything of value to that given field. A creative person draws from their exeperience, from the physical and cultural world around them. There are no correllations to be found in personality traits shared by all creative people. Creative people are also not creative in every field, nor is everything they produce a piece of genius. Weisburg writes, “Since the sensibilities of societies change, so do its judgements of genius… then looking at the characteristics of an individual, in order to determine the basis for genius, must be doomed to failure.”” (Weisburg 1986:88).
Master chess-players memorize thousands of chess positions (or approx. 50 000 patterns). Mozart’s later work is more popular to his early work; he too had to learn to compose. Picasso had sketches upon sketches of plans and edits of paintings, as do poets and composers who write pieces and try to fit them together, manipulating elements to solve a problem, to engage in critical anaylsis of their work. Great artistry does not come from a vaccum or perfected in the first coming-into-being. I think this is rather like how people viewed biology before evolution and genetics.
In any case, he is not saying the romantic view should be demolished, because it really does feel like an “Aha!” or something beyond your consciousness putting the pieces together. Objectively speaking however, the genius is a myth.
The romantic view, Weisburg defines, is the genius view that creativity comes through great leaps of imagination through communication with God or inspirational Muses. The behaviourist view is that creativity is nothing special because creative products are accidental combinations of old notions or knowledge.
Weisburg’s position lies somewhere inbetween. Small steps rather than great leaps are the rule; here I quote:
“Harlow’s work indicates that insightful solutions of even seemingly simple problems depend on much experience with problems of that sort. Problems that appear to be trivially simple may only seem so because of the knowledge one brings to them. As Harlow’s work demonstrates, one should not underestimate the difficulties an inexperience problem solver confronts in a problem situation… Though someone else may solve a problem from what you consider a ‘fresh viewpoint,’ it does not mean the viewpoint was fresh from their point of view. If so, then trying to make oneself find that fresh point of view may be essentially impossible because it really means that one must transform oneself into another person, with that person’s knowledge, before one can bring a new approach to the problem. But then the viewpoint would not be fresh because one had acquired all that knowledge” (Weisburg 1986:48-69).
Creativity is ordinary, he argues, because the world changes. For example, if it was not Watson and Crick in that setting or scientific community, with that background or educational experience, working on that problem deemed to be a very important problem, and any one of those factors were changed, someone else would have discovered the two-stranded DNA helix, for they were not the only ones working on the problem. No environmental situation, perception of the situation and response to the situation will be exactly the same. Therefore it is a mistake to assume creativity is something humans do not engage with on an ordinary day-to-day basis. What we must explain then, is ordinary non-creative behaviour, when people engage in generalization and go through problem solving in a standard repetitive manner.
To summarize, Weisburg thinks creative individuals possess no extraordinary characteristics, “they do what we are all capable of doing. Because everyone can modify habitual responses to deal with novel situations, no further extraordinary capacities should be needed. Though in a given case the work and individual produces may be extraordinary, extraordinary work is not necessarily the product of extraordinary practices or the results of extraordinary personal characteristics” (Weisburg 1986:12). I think this speaks to the process of evolution being alive and well when we “create” culture, which appears extraordinary.