Creativity Read Free Page A

definitely should try to enhance. But to do so well it is necessary first to understand Creativity—and that is what this book tries to accomplish.
    A TTENTION AND C REATIVITY
    Creativity, at least as I deal with it in this book, is a process by which a symbolic domain in the culture is changed. New songs, new ideas, new machines are what creativity is about. But because these changes do not happen automatically as in biological evolution, it is necessary to consider the price we must pay for creativity to occur. It takes effort to change traditions. For example, memes must be learned before they can be changed: A musician must learn the musical tradition, the notation system, the way instruments are played before she can think of writing a new song; before an inventor can improve on airplane design he has to learn physics, aerodynamics, and why birds don’t fall out of the sky.
    If we want to learn anything, we must pay attention to the information to be learned. And attention is a limited resource: There is just so much information we can process at any given time. Exactly how much we don’t know, but it is clear that, for instance, we cannot learn physics and music at the same time. Nor can we learn well while we do the other things that need to be done and require attention, like taking a shower, dressing, cooking breakfast, driving a car, talking to our spouse, and so forth. The point is, a great deal of our limited supply of attention is committed to the tasks of surviving from one day to the next. Over an entire lifetime, the amount of attention left over for learning a symbolic domain—such as music or physics—is a fraction of this already small amount.
    Some important consequences follow logically from these simple premises. To achieve creativity in an existing domain, there must be surplus attention available. This is why such centers of creativity as Greece in the fifth century B.C., Florence in the fifteenth century, and Paris in the nineteenth century tended to be places where wealth allowed individuals to learn and to experiment above and beyond what was necessary for survival. It also seems true that centers of creativity tend to be at the intersection of different cultures, where beliefs, lifestyles, and knowledge mingle and allow individuals to see new combinations of ideas with greater ease. In cultures that are uniform and rigid, it takes a greater investment of attention to achieve new ways of thinking. In other words, creativity is more likely in places where new ideas require less effort to be perceived.
    As cultures evolve, it becomes increasingly difficult to master more than one domain of knowledge. Nobody knows who the last Renaissance man really was, but sometime after Leonardo da Vinci it became impossible to learn enough about all of the arts and the sciences to be an expert in more than a small fraction of them. Domains have split into subdomains, and a mathematician who has mastered algebra may not know much about number theory, combinatorix, topology—and vice versa. Whereas in the past an artist typically painted, sculpted, cast gold, and designed buildings, now allof these special skills tend to be acquired by different people.
    Therefore, it follows that as culture evolves, specialized knowledge will be favored over generalized knowledge. To see why this must be so, let us assume that there are three persons, one who studies physics, one who studies music, and one who studies both. Other things being equal, the person who studies both music and physics will have to split his or her attention between two symbolic domains, while the other two can focus theirs exclusively on a single domain. Consequently, the two specialized individuals can learn their domains in greater depth, and their expertise will be preferred over that of the generalist. With time, specialists are bound to take over leadership and control of the various institutions of culture.
    Of course, this trend toward