On Creativity...

It’s always a pleasure reading about the psychology of creativity. Everyone is creative to a degree. Art, literature, and music are the three most outward expressions of creativity but to be creative does not mean that you must belong one of the three. One need not necessarily be a part of the military to be considered a fighter. I think creativity is a rung on the ladder whose ultimate destination leads towards madness. And we have more mad, psychopathic out-of touch-with-reality politicians than we do mad artists.

I do not think however that creativity is an entity. It does not exist. I do not think there is a region in the brain which is generating a thing called ’creativity’. I believe creativity is a temporary fluidic third which emerges from the interactions between a permanent, solid first and second. The more playful and cavalier the interactions between the first and second, the more outlandish is this creativity. Moreover, I see it more as as an absence of stability than the presence of instability.

Imagine a red ball which rises upwards from the left side of the periphery of your vision, arcs through the air, and falls downwards towards the right side of the periphery of your vision. It then bobs speedily from right to left, then left to right and so on and so forth.

When you focus solely on this phenomenon, you may perceive the ball to be an entity capable of flight and intelligence (for it demonstrates independence and pattern).

But move back a few steps, expand the horizons of your vision and you see that the single red ball is in fact two red balls. And below each sphere is a hand which is either catching or throwing one ball at a time. Your watching a juggler.

This so-called independent flight is in fact the product of interactions between two hands, transmission of energy, two spheres and an invisible thing called gravity. If you want to do spectacular things with the ball, you don’t give them wings, you understand the character of hands, gravity, energy and co-ordination.

Similarly, any person sufficiently creative, though he/she (like all) does not fully comprehend the concept of creativity, will relish the darker shades, the emotionally intense states and the painful moments of their life. If on drugs they may even refuse to take them because medicines have a stabilising influence and creativity, at is core, is an instability.

Creativity differs from madness only in terms of its shade. Creativity, this ability to think outside a box, is controlled by stabilising influences. It is a delicate balance between order and chaos.

Anyone who’s knows a little bit about the European Eurofighter and admires it’s ability to perform amazing acrobatics in the air should know that it is a machine which is deliberately designed to be unstable. This is what gives it its agility. But without the presence of controls it would go ’mad’ and come hurtling down towards the ground.

The analogy of the aircraft towards sanity, stability and creativity is not far fetched. There is an observation to be made: It is easier to build stability around an unstable design that it is the other way around. It is easier for an inherently unstable man, in a stable controlled situation, to jump back into a state of instability - or of creativity. It is harder for an inherently stable man to try to attempt to become unstable. As mentioned before, creativity is more a degree of absence of stability, or relinquishing of control, than it is of bringing out or adding on instability.

Schizophrenics are a well studied group of people who can possess and imagine an amazing amount of stimulus. Their opinions can be not just out of the box (as one would imagine with a creative) but outside the room.

There is a genetic basis to schizophrenia and a subsequent chemical explanation of it too. But if schizophrenia is such a bad trait, then why does it continue to pass on through the human race. Why does the gene/s not die out? It is thought and proposed that ’creativity’ and all its shades are a very mild form of schizophrenia. Whereas schizophrenics cannot control themselves and hence maybe genetically unsuitable, a creative individual is suffering from only very mild form of the instability and hence gets to pass his genes along.

Umer M.