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 ScienceMuseum 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.