Volume 1: a Dissertation, the Creative Leap: the Science and Philosophy of Creativity
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VOLUME 1: A DISSERTATION, THE CREATIVE LEAP: THE SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY OF CREATIVITY. by STEPHEN SEWELL B.Sc. Volume One of two Volumes submitted in fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Arts (D.Arts) School of Letters, Art and Media Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences The University of Sydney June 2017 CERTIFICATE OF AUTHORSHIP/ORIGINALITY I certify that the work in this thesis has not previously been submitted for a degree nor has it been submitted as part of requirements for a degree except as fully acknowledged within the text. I also certify that the thesis has been written by me. Any help that I have received in my research work and the preparation of the thesis itself has been acknowledged. In addition, I certify that all information sources and literature used are indicated in the thesis. SIGNED BY CANDIDATE Acknowledgments I would like to acknowledge my supervisors, Dr. David Brooks and Dr. Sue Woolfe, whose unstinting work and generous support have not only made this thesis possible, but a pleasure. TABLE OF CONTENTS VOLUME ONE: THE DISSERTATION, THE CREATIVE LEAP: THE SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY OF CREATIVITY Abstract 1 Introduction 2 Chapter 1: The Lull - What Is It? 6 Chapter 2: The Lull - Does It Work? 25 Chapter 3: The Lull - How Does It Work? 38 Chapter 4 - The Neuroscience of Creativity 49 Conclusion 66 1 ABSTRACT The mystery of creative thinking, and creativity itself, has long fascinated human beings, and not only those of us, namely artists, who have taken it upon themselves to bring something new and original into the world and who consequently find themselves struggling through the dark and forbidding landscape of the creative process. This struggle is a well known trope of popular culture, but as the economy of modern societies becomes increasingly dominated by the need for innovation, the questions of what creativity is and how it can be stimulated have become more pressing. For a number of decades now various kinds of scientific investigation have attempted, with some limited success, to define and analyse creativity, while the earlier psychoanalytic approaches, first sketched by Freud, have been eschewed as no more than unscientific speculations. This dissertation is an attempt to build a case that some of the confusion relating to creativity, and consciousness in general, stems from unresolved philosophical questions arising from the bifurcation of European thought after Descartes’ announcement of the Cogito, and that a more productive research program might arise, and indeed is beginning to arise by putting aside the animus between what is currently described as science and the work of Freudian inspired thinkers such as Jacques Lacan. All this I consider in the context of a process, developed by Dr. Sue Woolfe, and called by her “the Lull,” which she teaches to student writers so that they can wilfully invoke for themselves the creative state. While this technique and its teaching is not unique in providing a model of creativity with practical applications,1 by looking at the Lull and its effectiveness I hope to show that a rapprochement between contemporary neuroscience and Freudian- inspired thinkers is not only possible, but necessary if we are to give a fuller description of creativity, this most vital element in human consciousness. 1 The Geneplore Model (GENerate and exPLORE), for example, or Amabile’s Componential Model, both of which offer practical guidance to the development of creativity. 2 Introduction This dissertation, like Dr. Sue Woolfe’s The Mystery of the Cleaning Lady (2007), began as a practical exercise, an attempt by a writer to understand his process after many years of practicing it, and a few of teaching it. Central to that practice was and remains a respect for and fascination with the unconscious. While, as the writer in question, my understanding of that protean term has shifted over time, from the kind of pseudo-Jungian psychic jungle of the dark instincts popular in psychological dramas of the 1960s, to what is today something perhaps less threatening but more mysterious and curiously intimate, an unconscious continually at work shaping and disrupting my language, it has remained my aim to understand and map its contours in order to harness the creative energy which I believe finds its source there. In the past, I accepted in general terms the Freudian view according to which the sexual energy of an organism, called by Freud the “libido,” is repressed and sublimated in human beings in all sorts of productive and unproductive ways (Freud, “General Introduction” 55), and that art, and consequently creative writing, is one of them. More recently, I have moved to a slightly different point of view, one informed by French theorist and psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, which gives considerably more emphasis to writing and language than Sigmund Freud did. It proposes that writers such as myself are enjoying our “sinthome,” his spin on “symptom” (Luke 15), and have a peculiarly liberating relationship with our “jouissance,” a Lacanian term roughly similar to Freud’s libido (Lacan, “Ethics in Psychoanalysis”). But before I take the plunge into that particularly dark pool, let me consider a concept central to Woolfe’s account of creativity, namely “defocused attention” (Woolfe 89). Creativity has fascinated human beings at least since the Renaissance,2 and its godlike quality is attested by the almost mystical vocabulary associated with it: artists 2 See, for example, Albert & Runco. But this interest is not as venerable as one might think. The ancient Greeks, for example, used the words “techne” (τέχνη) for what we would now call art, this meaning “the making of things according to rules.” Our word “inspiration,” is a Middle English word dating from 1300 and tracing itself back to the Latin in-spirare “to breathe”. The concept of creativity as we know it today is really a rather recent development. See, for example, Tatarkiewicz. 3 are “inspired,” filled with “genius” or “spirit,” or perhaps visited by a muse under whose influence they are able to “create”—a term itself suggesting the conjuring of worlds from nothing. Its mysterious quality is emphasised by its close relationship with dreaming and trance-like states, and there is a general sense in which creativity is regarded as belonging to certain gifted or perhaps mad people, but not other, more ordinary mortals.3 It was only in the nineteenth century, however, with the rise of psychology as a science, that creativity began to be studied and analysed in a more rigorous way, leading to the breakthroughs of American psychologist J.P. Guilford, who began to devise tests in the 1950s aimed at doing the apparently impossible, namely bringing the muse to earth, as it were, and measuring creativity (Haggbloom 139–152). This pioneering work was developed further by Ellis Paul Torrance, resulting in the now standard Torrance Test (Runco 361), which has been used extensively in the United States to assess the creativity of schoolchildren since the mid 1960s, with some fascinating results and disturbing trends (Kim 2011). In the course of the rise of this burgeoning area of creativity studies, a distinction began to be made between what were termed “convergent” and “divergent” thinking strategies; convergent thinking referring to focused, problem-solving thought processes, and divergent to a more diffuse thought process resulting in multiple perspectives and alternative solutions to perhaps ill-defined problems, considered by Guilford to be the more creative (Guilford 1950 444), though this relationship was subsequently shown to be more complex and nuanced than Guilford appreciated (Baer 2011). The role of word association in these tests was a clue missed by most working writers interested in what they were actually doing when they were writing. Yet, in 1997, doctoral candidate Christopher David Stevens interviewed novelist Sue Woolfe for his thesis (subsequently titled Crooked Paths to Insight: The Pragmatics of Loose and Tight Construing), dealing with the creative process, telling her about American psychologist Colin Martindale’s work. Intrigued, Woolfe, who was struggling with the problematics of her own creativity, followed up, finding to her delight that the scientist was indeed talking about something she felt true from her own experience. Writing of an earlier 3 With this assertion being the particular target of some more recent studies of Creativity. See for example Attridge (2004), Carter (2004) and Pope (2005), who all emphasise the social nature of creativity. Pope’s Foucauldian influenced analysis, and his familiarity with Lacan, has been especially helpful to my own understanding of the issues surrounding creativity. 4 experiment relating the attentional state of the subject to the number of word associations (or “nodes”) that could be made to a trigger word provided by the experimenter, Martindale wrote that focused, concentrated attention produced fewer word associations than a more defocused, relaxed state: “When attention is focused, the word will strongly activate only a few other nodes. Thus, the associative hierarchy will be steep...When attention is less focused, more nodes will be activated to a lesser degree. Thus, the associative hierarchy will be relatively flat” (qtd in Smith, Ward, and Finke 257). Recounting this experience in her subsequent book, The Mystery of the Cleaning Lady, Woolfe describes this as the beginning of a process that would lead her not only to a deeper appreciation of what she was doing when she wrote, but also to a way of teaching that most elusive thing, artistic creativity itself (Woolfe 91). Formerly dismissed as the inaccessible realm of inspiration and genius, and so occluded by the craft elements of writing—which can be easily taught—creativity , at least insofar as the working writer is concerned, and is vitally concerned, for example, in times of crisis called the “creative block,” is beginning to reveal its secrets and the ways in which it can be encouraged and destroyed.