"The Hidden Path to Creativity" | Stephan Schwartz | TEDxOrcasIsland

have you ever felt that you had a great idea if you could only figure out how to get it out or wondered is there some way that I can learn to express my creativity maybe you think that well you have to be a genius you have to have a very high IQ actually no you know if you start with the idea that a high IQ let's say a hundred and forty five the average world IQ is about a hundred so one hundred and forty-five would be significantly above that they're about nine million people in the world today who have IQs that high about two hundred and twenty-eight thousand babies are born every day on earth and about two hundred and ninety six of them have IQs of over a hundred and forty five so you would think there would be literally thousands of creative geniuses and yet that isn't true and the reason that isn't true is that creativity IQ may play a role but IQ is not the essential role in 40 years of doing research on this subject I've spent a lot of time looking for instance are there personality factors certain kind of personality type that might be a more creative kind of person but in fact that doesn't turn out to be true either three years of research and more money than I care to recount taught me that introverts and extroverts have different strategies for getting to the same place but it's not very helpful and so the question really is is there a path to creativity that you can learn and you can invoke it in your own life and the answer I think we find by actually going to the words of people who we think of as creative geniuses the Leonardo's the Brahms the Mozart's the Picasso's the Michelangelo's the Einsteins the Polly's the plunks and the strange thing is that when you actually do that and you read their Diaries you read contemporaneous accounts of them you read what they say in and our recorded comments that they make they all tell the same story it is a six step process and it's learning and so here it is there are these six steps and they all go through this same thing they talk about it they describe it in some detail and no matter where they are in the world no matter when they are in the world they all tell pretty much the same story and the story is this if you want to invoke your creativity about anything you first of all have to become a master of the craft that you're working in that's whether it's baking or physics you have to master the craft and the reason you have to do this is that only mastering the craft will give you the measure of discernment that you need in order to be able to properly evaluate what you're doing so first master of the craft second you must have the deep knowing that there is a solution to whatever it is you're working on you have to have a deep conviction that there is a solution and I can get it third and this is the really hard one you have to be willing to surrender all of your preconceptions and biases about how whatever it is you're doing works now this is a really tough one because research shows us that most people including by the way most scientists value their peer status more than they do facts think about that for a minute a man named Dan kahan at Yale has published two big monographs on this this issue about people who will tell you oh yes I only care about facts I'm a fact person and then some fact comes along that doesn't fit their worldview and well I believe in facts but not that fact and so the key step in this process is you must be willing to surrender your preconceptions Herbert Edwin land who invented the Polaroid process in 1961 looked back across all the hundreds of Engineers that he had employed in the Polaroid corporation over several decades trying to figure out is there something that I can identify a person who's going to be a particularly creative person and he said he finally realized that the key to it was he said I know that what I need to search for is engineers who are competent at their craft but who have the capacity to surrender the way they think in the past so that they look with fresh eyes at old data and when they can do that then the creativity occurs so you have to surrender all of your preconceptions and it's harder to do you can look at the political process that's going on now if you can bear to do that you can look at academic disputes and you see over and over again that when you really get down to it what's going on is a debate about people who find it very hard to give up old preconceptions the next step is you must have some technique of inward-looking nasarah lot of ways to do this meditation is one that is particularly beneficial and that people have easy access to but there all sorts of ways to do this Einstein says that he saw relativity after an illness he was spending the afternoon just lazing around in a canoe and he looked and suddenly he said I saw how relativity worked the French mathematician panca ray said he was walking across the street having labored to try to resolve a mathematical conundrum and suddenly he saw it it came in an instant Rene Descartes had it on the 10th of November had three dreams he was a young French officer serving in the Dutch Republican Army and was in the city of Ulm and he had been struggling with what became analytical geometry the the bridge between algebra and geometry and he went to bed climbed up it was very cold and he had one of those Russian stoves where you have a little sleeping platform and he climbed up above that and he lay down and he had three dreams and he describes these dreams in great detail and he said out of those three dreams I saw a wondrous science but it took him 18 years to figure out how to express it for other people so then we come to the aha moment and this is typically described as a period of about 10 to 20 seconds it is described as a timeless time a spaceless space it is a kind of connection with something greater than oneself in research we are now calling this non-local consciousness this aspect of consciousness which is not physiologically based this is the part of us that we seem to be looking at when we look at near-death studies this is the part that seems to play a big role in creativity Thomas Kuhn probably the leading philosopher and historian of science in the 20th century talks about this experience and he says his scientists that he talked to speak of the scales falling from their eyes of suddenly having clarity about something that they previously could not see because they had developed the ability and this is the key to the whole business the ability to hold intentioned focused awareness to attain it and sustain it that's what meditation is doing that's what in Leonardo's case he would sit on the edge of a little stream and look down at the shallow water as it played over the rocks and he would just stare at this and allow it to mesmerize him Nietzsche says he was walking around like Silva when he just suddenly got the concept that became thus spake Zarathustra over and over these people described this experience Tesla says he saw the electric motor as he was walking across the park suddenly what had been unclear became clear and he they were able to do this because they developed some technique for holding intentioned focused awareness which allows you to let that still small voice emerge into your conscious mind so that you can see it and act on it and the final part is you must be able to explicate and replicate you must be able to explain what as you have experienced and you must be able to help other people so that they can replicate it now you may not discover relativity I'm sorry to tell you that it may not be your goal to figure out some deep fundamental philosophical scientific truth but that does not mean you cannot create powerful change I'll just give you two examples there is an anonymous Chinese person from the second century BCE none of us know their name who invented ice cream how many of you know Louis lassen Louis lassen owned Louis's lunch stand in New Haven Connecticut and in 1900 he invented the hamburger in most people's lives the hamburger and ice cream plays a bigger role than relativity so you have to distinguish if your goal is to create something that will bring you fame and fortune that's really a different task than simply creating something that will produce wellness and we now stand at a period of history and the reason that I'm up here giving this talk is that we need to invoke and pull out from ourselves those insights which will allow us to make choices that will prepare us for the future because we stand at a precipice we are at a period of time quite unlike anything humanity has experienced in recorded history and there are people in this room who if they will learn and master these six steps will have insights and creative visions that will allow positive life-affirming change to happen the question is are we going to be one of those people can we do this and the answer as the research makes very clear is that we can it is not a function of intelligence principally oh there's some kinds of creative things mathematics that require high intelligence but I will tell you I had dinner one night with Richard Fineman Nobel laureate in physics one of the great minds and physics in the last half of the 20th century and he told me this story he said when he was a young college student he was really wanted to be a major physicist but he wasn't sure he had the chops and so he snuck in to the administration office at the at the University and he got a hold of his file and he opened it up and there was his IQ and it was a hundred and twenty for superior but not a hundred and forty-five he couldn't have joined Mensa Mensa the threshold is a hundred and thirty-two and yet nonetheless because he mastered those six steps he became one of the great world historical figures in physics so whatever it is you want to do whatever your call is whether it's inventing the kreisau now that's a person we owe some thanks to or the egg roll or any of a hundred other things all of which were created by people just like us who reached inside themselves and brought forth an insight which changed the world and so I leave you with this thought am I prepared to undertake this and if not me then who and if not now then when thank you you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 111,776

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, United States, Social Science, Achievement, Art, Behavior, Creativity, Intelligence, Music (topic), Writing

Id: _K4YcaU5uqU

Length: 17min 7sec (1027 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 16 2016