Creativity by Elkhonon Goldberg

Author:Elkhonon Goldberg
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2017-01-13T05:00:00+00:00

FIGURE 7.5 Deeply indented vs. shallow network connectivity. (A) Deeply indented connectivity is more articulated in the cortex of the left hemisphere. (B) Shallow connectivity is more articulated in the cortex of the right hemisphere.

Reproduced with permission from The New Executive Brain, Oxford University Press, 2009.

The intricate relationship between the deliberate hyperfrontal and wandering hypofrontal states in the creative process is implicitly recounted in the famous anecdotes about the moments of creative epiphany with which the history of science abounds: Archimedes discovering buoyancy while taking a bath, or Newton discovering gravity by watching a falling apple. None of these moments would have happened had these great minds not been ruminating about these subjects all along. Albert Einstein is closer to us in time, and explicit accounts exist about his spending long hours thinking through his problems systematically before the moments of epiphany appeared as if out of nowhere. At the turn of the twentieth century, Jacques Hadamard approached a number of leading physicists of the time, Einstein among them, with a questionnaire aiming to capture the nature of their creative process. Below are the excerpts from Einstein’s response.

My dear Colleague,

In the following, I am trying to answer in brief your questions as well as I am able. I am not satisfied myself with these answers and I am willing to answer more questions if you believe this could be of any advantage for the very interesting and difficult work you have undertaken

(A) The words or the language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought. The psychical entities which seem to serve as elements in thought are certain signs and more or less clear images which can be “voluntarily” reproduced and combined. There is, of course, a certain connection between those elements and relevant logical concepts. It is also clear that the desire to arrive finally at logically connected concepts is the emotional basis of this rather vague play with the above-mentioned elements. But taken from a psychological viewpoint, this combinatory play seems to be the essential feature in productive thought—before there is any connection with logical construction in words or other kinds of signs which can be communicated to others.

(B) The above mentioned elements are, in my case, of visual and some of muscular type. Conventional words or other signs have to be sought for laboriously only in a secondary stage when the mentioned associative play is sufficiently established and can be reproduced at will.

(C) According to what has been said, the play with the mentioned elements is aimed to be analogous to certain logical connections one is searching for.

(D) Visual and motor. In a stage when words intervene at all, they are in my case purely auditive, but they interfere only in a secondary stage as already mentioned.

(E) It seems to me what you call full consciousness is a limit case which can never be fully accomplished. This seems to me connected with the fact called the narrowness of consciousness (Enge des Bewusstseins).

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