This is the preface to Sudden Genius: The Gradual Path to Creative Breakthroughs, which Oxford University Press are scheduled to publish in September 2010.

 

 

PREFACE: MEETINGS WITH REMARKABLE CREATORS

 

One of the most admired scientists of the last century, Linus Pauling, was once asked a question by a student. This was back in the 1930s, two or three decades before Pauling would win two Nobel prizes, one for chemistry, the other for peace. “Dr Pauling, how do you have so many good ideas?” Pauling thought for a moment and replied: “Well, David, I have a lot of ideas and throw away the bad ones.”

 

True enough for Pauling, no doubt. But of course his disarming answer begs more questions. Where do ideas come from? Why do some people have many more of them than others? How do you distinguish the good ideas from the bad? Most intriguing of all, perhaps, why do the best ideas often strike the mind with suddenness, apparently in a flash? These questions are the subject of this book, which tries to understand exceptional creativity—‘genius’—in both scientists and artists by following the trail that led ten individuals from childhood to the achievement of a famous creative breakthrough as an adult. They are: the painter Leonardo da Vinci (The Last Supper, 1498), the architect Christopher Wren (St Paul’s Cathedral, 1675), the composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (The Marriage of Figaro, 1786), the archaeologist Jean-François Champollion (decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs, 1822), the biologist Charles Darwin (natural selection, 1859), the chemist Marie Curie (discovery of radium, 1898), the physicist Albert Einstein (special relativity, 1905), the writer Virginia Woolf (Mrs Dalloway, 1925), the photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson (The Decisive Moment, 1952), and the film-maker Satyajit Ray (Pather Panchali, 1955).

 

Creativity is protean: it takes many forms. It is also amorphous: the forms are not easily defined. Hence the fact that ‘creative’ is today so ubiquitous an adjective—among scientists and artists of all types, but also among stage performers, sports celebrities, politicians, business leaders, advertising executives, and even lawyers and accountants. A dubious new phrase, the ‘creative industries’, has gained currency. The word’s overuse provokes justified suspicion. With a book about creativity, a reader has more than the usual need to know where the author is coming from. Let me therefore explain, quite briefly, my personal involvement with the study of creativity.

 

How the creative process works in both science and art has long interested me professionally. During two decades of research and writing as an author and biographer, academic, journalist, and literary editor based in London (at The Times Higher Education Supplement), I have come to know personally a variety of exceptionally creative individuals from different cultures. They range from Nobel prize-winning scientists like the physicists Philip W. Anderson and Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar to artists such as Cartier-Bresson, the film director Lindsay Anderson, and the writers Arthur C. Clarke and V. S. Naipaul.

 

Each of these people is considered a star in his particular domain, be it physics, photography, cinema, or literature. Domain specialisation has been the norm among the highly creative over the centuries—as in the case of, say, Curie and Darwin, Mozart and Woolf. Yet, a significant minority of exceptional creators have worked in more than one domain, epitomised by Leonardo da Vinci and, more recently, Lewis Carroll, the writer of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, who was also a photographer and professional mathematician. Clarke, for example, as well as being the writer of 2001: A Space Odyssey, was a noteworthy scientist (he conceived the communications satellite in 1945); Lindsay Anderson, as well as being the director of the film If…., was a leading theatre director and literary critic; Cartier-Bresson, as well as being the photographer of The Decisive Moment, exhibited and published a considerable body of drawings and paintings. Such ‘doubly gifted’ versatility is, it seems, a potentially revealing and somewhat under-appreciated facet of exceptional creativity.

 

By far the most versatile creator I have known was Satyajit Ray, the Bengali film-maker who was the subject of my first biography, Satyajit Ray: The Inner Eye. After training as a painter and graphic designer, Ray directed more than 30 features beginning with the Apu Trilogy in the 1950s, at least ten of which are generally regarded as classics; they won him an Oscar for lifetime achievement before his death in 1992. For these films Ray wrote the screenplays solo, cast every actor personally, designed his own sets and costumes, operated the camera, edited each frame, composed his own music (including some extremely popular songs), and even drew his own posters. In addition, he was a successful book and magazine illustrator, and a bestselling novelist in Bengali. Another very versatile artist in film, the Japanese director Akira Kurosawa, was moved to say: “Not to have seen the cinema of Ray means existing in the world without seeing the sun or the moon.”

 

Ray once volunteered to me the following concise reflection on creativity in general. “This whole business of creation, of the ideas that come in a flash, cannot be explained by science. It cannot. I don’t know what can explain it but I know that the best ideas come at moments when you’re not even thinking of it. It’s a very private thing really.”

 

Ray’s remark stayed with me as I wrote four more biographies of other versatile individuals. One was again in the arts, a biography of Asia’s first Nobel laureate, Rabindranath Tagore: The Myriad-Minded Man, describing a poet and novelist who was also an adored song composer and a remarkable painter. Another was in the sciences, Einstein: A Hundred Years of Relativity, published in 2005, the centenary of Einstein’s ‘miraculous year’ of scientific breakthroughs. My last two biographies were of lesser-known but brilliant English figures who crossed the art/science divide in making their breakthroughs.

 

The Man Who Deciphered Linear B told the story of the mid-20th-century decipherment of Europe’s earliest readable writing—Linear B, a script of the Minoan civilisation of Crete—by Michael Ventris. He was a brilliant polyglot who is revered by archaeologists and codebreakers alike. Yet Ventris’s professional training lay in architecture, not linguistics or archaeology. The BBC television programme based on this book was appropriately entitled A Very English Genius.

 

The Last Man Who Knew Everything narrated the life and work of Thomas Young, an 18th-century child prodigy in languages and an adult polymath. Best known as a physicist for his experimental proof of the wave theory of light in 1801, which Einstein compared in importance to Isaac Newton’s optical experiments, Young also deciphered the Rosetta Stone. Yet, he trained and practised professionally as a London hospital physician, not as a physicist or Egyptologist. “Young probably had a wider range of creative learning than any other Englishman in history,” according to a Science Museum exhibition arranged for his birth bicentenary in 1973.

 

In both cases—Ventris and Young—their decipherment breakthroughs depended on their knowledge of disparate domains, which their scholarly rivals did not have. Their best ideas arose from their versatility. As an architect, Ventris had trained himself to marshal and analyse large bodies of information and visual data. He did the same with the 3500-year-old Linear B clay tablets from Crete. After long and intensive scrutiny and several false starts, involving some bad ideas that had to be discarded, Ventris at last recognised order in the disorder of the ancient signs in 1952. Then he made an inspired guess about the language spoken by the Minoan scribes—pre-Homeric Greek—which demonstrably corresponded with the patterns in the signs. Young, as a physicist and physician, applied comparable analytical powers to the Rosetta Stone and various Egyptian hieroglyphic inscriptions. His breakthrough came around 1815, again after intensive study and some mistakes, when Young guessed how one of the oval hieroglyphic cartouches in the Rosetta Stone spelt the name of the Egyptian king, Ptolemy, in phonetic symbols like an alphabet. Suddenly, sounds could be associated with particular hieroglyphs, and the language of the pharaohs began to speak. Young’s pioneering work triggered the decipherment of the entire Egyptian hieroglyphic system by Jean-François Champollion in 1822-24.

 

With all of my biographical subjects—Ray, Tagore, Einstein, Ventris, and Young—I became fascinated by the breadth, as well as the depth, of the knowledge feeding their breakthroughs. Despite the diversity of their professional backgrounds, spanning cinema, languages and literature, archaeology, architecture, physics, and medicine, I began to see that the five breakthroughs had key elements in common. While I agree with Ray that the most creative ideas appear to come unexpectedly out of nowhere, I am convinced they are not as unpredictable as they seem, and that science can shed light on the act of creation. Detailed study of breakthroughs, and the lives of those who make them, will never be able to explain Ray’s “very private” mystery of exceptional scientific and artistic creativity in full. Probably, we would be disappointed if it could. But as this book will show, it can reveal much about the sources, ingredients, and patterns of genius.