Defining Creativity

The problem we have with defining creativity is that it’s entirely abstract. It’s literally inside our heads and the only objective things we can see and touch are the products of creativity, not creativity itself. Aside from a bunch of neurons firing off in a certain order, creativity isn’t tangible.

This is perhaps why it’s so sparsely researched by philosophers, psychologists and scientists. Instead, we’ve come up with all sorts of magical mysticism like the idea of a muse or channeling a holy spirit. We’ve romanticised creativity so much that we’ve ended up with an impenetrable mystery inside our heads. We might not believe in muses or channeling God’s divine vision anymore, but we’re yet to replace these ideas with robust alternatives.

In defining creativity, we could go around in circles, discussing philosophical metaphysics but I’m not smart enough to do that and it sounds boring anyway. Perhaps we’re better off exploring creativity with the aid of our industry’s most clichéd and overused tool — a story.

I have a valid reason for this though. Stories happen to be a perfect, in fact, the perfect example of why we humans, are fundamentally hard-wired for creative thinking.

As Yuval Noah Harari noted in his phenomenal book, Sapiens, stories, or the ability to conceive and communicate fictional realities, is of immense importance to us. We can weave common myths that everyone can get behind, such as the biblical creation story or the nationalist myths of modern states. And it’s these stories that have enabled us to cooperate flexibly with thousands and even millions of complete strangers. 

We all share a belief in money, for example. We all believe that a worthless piece of polymer has the same abstract value. This means we can exchange it for real things like carrots or clothes with people we’ve never met before. It enables cooperation and trust on a scale completely unattainable without believing in the same story.

We are the only animal that has this amazing ability to be cognisant of objective things like trees and rivers as well as subjective things like nations and money. Things like nations and money are purely figments or our imaginations, but we all believe in them so it doesn’t matter that they’re not actually real. Collectively believing stories of empires, laws and religion is what allowed us to succeed and survive as the dominant species on Earth. 

Don’t think of stories in terms of classical drama with heroes on journeys of discovery. Think of them as our incredible ability to imagine things. 

When we try to define creativity and imagination, perhaps doing so via a story really is the best way.

The story I think works well is completely true and I came across it in another favourite book: Stranger Than We Can Imagine by Jon Higgs. It begins in London on the afternoon of February the 15th, 1894.

A French anarchist called Martial Bourdin left his flat on Fitzroy Street with a homemade bomb. He traveled across London to Greenwich. When he got there, he walked across Greenwich Park toward the Royal Observatory.

His bomb exploded early. Thankfully, it did no damage to anyone else or the observatory. The only damage it did was to himself. He died about 30 minutes after the explosion, leaving no explanations for his actions.

The really baffling questions were why was he heading toward the Royal Observatory in Greenwich? What point was this anarchist hoping to make by blowing it up? What did it offer as a target, for example, that Buckingham Palace or the Houses of Parliament lacked?

Both of these buildings were closer to where Bourdin lived, they had a higher profile and they symbolised the power of the state. These seem like far more appropriate targets for an anarchist. What did he see in the Royal Observatory that he felt was significant enough for him to risk his life destroying?

To answer these questions, we need to understand omphaloi.

In ancient history, there is a concept called an omphalos (another shared fiction). An omphalos is the centre of the world, or more accurately, what was culturally thought to be the centre of the world. Seen in a religious context, the omphalos was also the link between heaven and earth. It was often called the ‘navel of the world’ or the ‘world pillar’ and was represented physically by an object such as a pillar or a stone. An omphalos is a universal symbol common to almost all cultures. 

In 1894 the global omphalos was the Royal Observatory in Greenwich. 

The world was measured from a line that ran North-South through this building. Delegates from 25 countries had voted to officially accept Greenwich as the Prime Meridian. 72 percent of the world’s shipping used sea charts that listed Greenwich as zero degrees latitude, and the United States had already based its time zones on Greenwich.

Here, then, was the centre of the world, from which all time and distance were measured. It was the symbolic heart of the British Empire and its system of order and logic stretching around the globe.

This was Martial Bourdin’s target. Yes, it was purely symbolic, but he wanted to attack the clockwork order of Victorian society, right at its foundation. Mystery solved. 

But then there was this dude called Einstein. Just a few years later, he showed that we live in a stranger, more complex universe than we previously imagined. A universe where space and time are not fixed but could be stretched by mass and motion.

Relativity is a famously complex theory. It’s fundamentally counter-intuitive which makes it difficult to understand. But we do need to understand the very basics to get to the bottom of creative thinking. Which is just as well, because I only understand the very basics.

Picture yourself floating in empty space. Nothing but empty black space.

A sausage floats past you.

It may look like the sausage is moving and you’re stationary, but how could you know that’s true? There are no fixed reference points in empty black space by which to measure the sausage’s motion. Perhaps you’re moving and the sausage is stationary?

Both scenarios would look identical depending on your point of view. The story of what’s happening, therefore, is different depending on the perspective you take. The notion of whether you or the sausage is moving is entirely relative.

At school, we’re taught to plot the position of objects by drawing diagrams showing their distance from a fixed point in terms of height, length and depth. These are usually called the X, Y and Z axis, and the fixed point is often called O or the origin (the omphalos, from which all other distances are measured). With this framework, we can measure anything in space.

Relativity, however, shows us the X, Y and Z axes don’t really exist. This, and any other frame of reference, is not a feature of the real world. Depending on where you place O, both you or the sausage could be said to be in motion.

The frameworks we use to measure and understand things are just arbitrary products of our minds, which we project onto the world around us in order to understand it. Our incredible ability to conceive fictional realities at work again.

Einstein showed us that the seemingly intuitive clockwork universe that Newton described a little over 200 years earlier was actually far more fluid and abstract. The lines of longitude stretching away from Greenwich, or the steady, unrelenting march of time, don’t really exist. They’re just helpful figments of our collective imagination.

Which means Martial Bourdin was wasting his time. And his life. If he had waited just a few years, he might have realised he didn’t need a bomb at all. He just needed to understand that his target was an arbitrary fiction in the first place.

The moral of the story, aside from bombing things is pointless and dumb?

Relativity teaches us there’s no fixed way to see anything. There is always another way to approach, understand and solve any problem. And finding unique, counter-intuitive solutions to problems is basically what creativity is. 

But there’s more to it than that. When we look around us, the idea of flexible time and space is so counterintuitive it genuinely seems impossible. When we look inward, however, to the jumbled universe inside the mind, it’s clear the imagination isn’t constrained by such arbitrary rules.

Another fantastic book explains that when we imagine — that is, when we’re creative — we blend pictures, propositions, memories, real-time experiences, sounds, feelings and emotions. Our imaginations are multimedia processors that jump laterally through connotations and connections instead of vertically, through logical inference. 

Most of this activity is unconscious in the basement of our mind. But this phase is followed by a re-entry phase, where these free associations, unbound by any framework at all, are brought back to the conscious layer of the mind. Here, they are integrated into the more focused decisions of the artist or the chef or the digital advertiser.

Our brains are tangible masses of neurons, but they somehow create a place where time and space aren’t just relative, they don’t exist at all.

We like to think we can trace the route of any great idea back through logical steps of development. It certainly appears so in hindsight, but this is the illusion of a specific mental framework. 

Great ideas are actually the result of a stranger, more complex process, where abstract thoughts make surprising and beautiful connections with each other. 

This, for me, is the definition of creativity: To be creative is to express those connections.