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Where does Creativity come from❓🤔

Where does Creativity come from❓🤔
Click here to get the book: The Mathematician's Mind: The Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field

I. Originality & The A-ha! Moment

The process of inventing or producing new and creative ideas has not been well understood in spite of the many advances made by researchers.

In fact, even after a great deal of investigation and discussion, Einstein could not satisfactorily explain in clear terms as to what led him to his ideas on gravitation. Of course, it is almost universally accepted that all eureka moments in the inventive lives of individuals have been preceded hours and hours of intense intellectual effort. I cannot think of any major idea in the history of mankind that has been revealed or created in an effortless fashion or through a glorious flash without any labour.

I am reminded of a letter of despair that the distinguished Harvard mathematician Oscar Zariski wrote his wife when-after enormous effort-he found himself at a dead end in his efforts to solve a particular mathematical problem. Upon reading that letter anyone who may not be aware of Zariski's stature can easily carry the impression that he was some incompetent novice attempting to be creative at mathematics.

The point that I am trying to reiterate is that it is almost certain that any process of invention requires the brain to grapple with the problem or issue at hand through intense effort. Whether this is a sure-fire recipe for success may not be true but it is certainly a necessary condition.

If this necessary condition is assumed to be in place what are the next parts of the process that lead to creativity? Therein lies the catch. Some parts of this are not understood at all and some parts of the creative processes are very poorly understood.

There are many pitfalls here when it comes to the issue of true originality. I remember the words of the eminent Stanford mathematician-Yitzhak Katznelson when he was writing his classic tome 'An Introduction Harmonic Analysis'. During the course of putting down on paper the proof of a well known theorem he found himself crafting in near effortless manner a very elegant proof that seemed absolutely original to him and he was quite pleased with himself. However, sometime later he recalled that the exact same proof had actually been passed on to him by the distinguished Swedish mathematician Lennart Carleson over a cup of coffee some months ago.

This also reminds me of the now classic issue of the former Beatle George Harrison who composed the music for his hit song-My Sweet Lord-that he released in the 70's. He was taken to court for essentially copying the music from another musician. The judge ruled that the music had indeed been copied but he also ruled that Harrison had been misled by his subconscious into believing that he had created the music.

The gifted English mathematician John Edensor Littlewood-who had collaborated with Ramanujan and G. H. Hardy-had said that in his personal experience he had found that to be able to produce something original such as solving a challenging mathematical problem it was important to grapple intensely with the problem and then to let it be for a while. Invariably, as stated by him, he would find that the solution would almost present itself after a couple of days. His surmise was that his subconscious mind would take over the effort of tackling the problem while his conscious mind was taking a break. This phenomenon has been observed by many mathematicians. Of course, in spite of all these insights neither Littlewood nor Hardy could ever satisfactorily explain as to how Srinivas Ramanujan could produce those profound ideas of his. It goes without saying that Ramanujan himself, very often, did not have a clue as to how he had thought of those ideas.

II. Creativity, interrupted.

Let me also add that understanding creativity can be a very tricky business. This can be gauged by an episode as narrated by Littlewood. It so happened that there was a Cambridge don who claimed that he would often get very profound ideas in his dreams but upon getting up in the mornings he would fail to recall them. Littlewood then suggested that he keep paper and pen by his bedside and make it a point to get up at once from his dream and jot the ideas down. The don tried this and after jotting down the thoughts he went back to sleep. Upon waking in the morning, he read what he had scribbled. It ran like this: ' Higamus, hogamus, men are polygamous; hogamous, higamous, women are monogamous.' Littlewood says that it wasn't too bad as it did have form as well as content.

No discussion on creativity can ignore the well known incident of the creation of Coleridge's immortal rendering of the Ballad of Kubla Khan. As the story goes, Coleridge went into a trance and began to effortlessly craft the beautiful poem. Unfortunately, this sublime act of creativity was rudely interrupted when Coleridge's insurance agent came calling. The upshot was that Coleridge could never complete the poem.

III. Experiments with Creativity

One must also factor into this discussion the importance of the role of experimentation in the process of creativity. For instance, even the redoubtable genius Ramanujan did indeed derive many of his creative insights through his phenomenal ability to mentally-and also in writing-compile staggering amounts of empirical data. My personal conviction is that such empirical compiling is what must have led him to the discovery of the statement of the Prime Number Theorem. Yet, gaining an insight through manual handling of such large amounts of data could only be accomplished by someone like Ramanujan or Gauss. I am certain that Mendel must have been led to his laws on genetics through experimental and empirical compilation of data with somewhat similar insights.

The creation or visualisation of Mendel's laws are just as beautiful and important as any other idea. This would also be true of the phenomenally tedious and painful compilation of empirical data on planetary motion by Tycho Brahe and Kepler, before Kepler managed to visualise and give to the world the enormously important laws of planetary motion. I am also convinced that Newton could take a sort of leap of faith while creating his Law of Gravitation because of the empirical data that was available through his experiments with light and the inverse square law. Of course there were other important ingredients in the process as well.

In discussions on creativity, it will not be out of place to recount the episode as rendered by Mahatma Gandhi. The Mahatma has recorded that the exact moment that the idea of issuing a nationwide strike call came to him in Chennai in the early hour of dawn as he lay awake in bed. Of course, this manifestation was preceded by enormous struggle and thought in Gandhiji's mind for several days. This idea changed the course of India's independence movement. It galvanised and brought the entire nation into the satyagraha movement. The rest is history.


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