for innovative ideas. Rather than a push-button response, the neural chatter is like parliamentary debate.8 Everyone joins in the discussion. Coalitions form. When a strong consensus emerges, an idea may rise to conscious awareness, but what can feel like a sudden realization actually depends on extensive internal debate. Most importantly, the next time we ask the same question, the answer might be different. We wouldn’t expect bees to enchant their queen with A Thousand and One Nights of stories; instead, it would just be the same night over and over, because their brains follow identical pathways each time. Thanks to our improvisatory neural architecture, we can weave tales and remodel everything around us.
Humans live inside a competition between automated behavior, which reflects habits, and mediated behavior, which defeats them. Should the brain streamline a neural network for efficiency, or arborize it for flexibility? We depend on being able to do both. Automated behavior gives us expertise: when the sculptor chisels, the architect builds a model or the scientist conducts an experiment, practiced dexterity helps to make new outcomes possible. If we can’t execute our new ideas, we struggle to bring them to life. But automated behavior can’t innovate. Mediated behavior is how we generate novelty. It is the neurological basis of creativity. As Arthur Koestler said, “Creativity is the breaking of habits through originality.” Or as inventor Charles Kettering put it, “Get off Route 35.”
SIMULATING THE FUTURE(S)
The giant number of brain cells interposed between stimulus and action is a critical contributor to the massive creativity of our species. It is what allows us to consider possibilities beyond what is right in front of us. And that’s a large part of the magic of human brains: we relentlessly simulate what-ifs.
In fact, this is one of the key businesses of intelligent brains: the simulation of possible futures.9 Should I nod in agreement, or tell the boss that it’s a dumb idea? What would surprise my spouse for our anniversary? Will I enjoy Chinese or Italian or Mexican for dinner tonight? If I get the job, should I live in a home in the Valley or an apartment in the city? We can’t test every conceivable action to understand the outcomes, so we run simulations internally. All but one of those scenarios won’t actually happen – or maybe none of them will – but by preparing ourselves for the alternatives, we’re able to more flexibly respond to the future. This sensitivity marks the major change that allowed us to become cognitively modern humans. We are masters at generating alternative realities, taking what is and transforming it into a panoply of what-ifs.
We are drawn to future simulations early in life: pretend play is a universal feature of human development.10 A child’s mind swirls with visions of becoming President, hibernating on the way to Mars, heroically somersaulting during a firefight. Pretend play enables children to envision new possibilities and gain knowledge about their surroundings.
As we grow up, we simulate the future each time we consider alternatives or wonder what might happen if we choose a different path. Whenever we buy a house, pick a college, ponder a potential mate, or invest in the stock market, we accept that most of what we consider may be wrong or may never occur. Expectant parents ask, “Will it be a boy or a girl?” Not yet sure, they discuss alternatives for names, clothing, decor and toys. Penguins, horses, koalas, and giraffes all produce single offspring, but none is known to brood over this question the way humans do.
Thinking about what-ifs is so rooted in our daily experience that it’s easy to overlook what an imaginative exercise it is. We endlessly speculate on what might have been, and language is designed to make it easy for us to download our simulations to one another.11 If you had come to the party, you would have had fun. If you’d taken this job, you’d be rich by now – but unhappy. If the manager had swapped pitchers, the team would have won the game. Hope is a form of creative speculation: we imagine the world as we wish it to be rather than as it is. Without realizing it, we spend a great portion of our lives in the realm of the hypothetical.12
Simulating futures comes with the benefits of safety: we try out moves in our minds before trying them out in the world. As the philosopher Karl Popper said, our capacity to simulate possible futures “allows our hypotheses to die in our stead.” We run a simulation of the future (what would happen if I stepped off this cliff?) and adjust our future behavior (take a step backward).
But more than keeping ourselves alive, we use these mental tools to flesh out worlds that don’t exist. These alternative realities are the vast plains from which our imaginations reap their harvest. What-ifs put Einstein in an elevator in deep space in order to understand time. What-ifs carried Jonathan Swift to islands of lumbering giants and teeny Lilliputians. What-ifs led Philip K. Dick to a world in which the Nazis had won the Second World War. What-ifs conveyed Shakespeare into the mind of Julius Caesar. What-ifs transported Alfred Wegener to a time when the continents were fused. What-ifs allowed Darwin to witness the origin of species. Our gift for simulation paves new roads for us to travel. The business magnate Richard Branson has started more than one hundred companies, including a spaceline that will fly civilians beyond Earth’s atmosphere. To what does he attribute his knack for entrepreneurship? His ability to imagine possible futures.
And there’s one more factor that turns on the turbobooster of creativity, something that lives beyond your brain. Other people’s brains.
CREATIVITY IS SOCIALLY ENHANCED
F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway were young impoverished friends in Paris. The young Robert Rauschenberg had romantic relationships with painters Cy Twombly and Jasper Johns in his twenties, before any of them were famous. The twenty-year-old Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein during a summer spent with fellow writers Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron. Why do creators gravitate toward one another?
A reigning misconception suggests that creative artists function best when they turn their backs on the world. In her 1972 essay “The Myth of the Isolated Artist,” author Joyce Carol Oates addressed this: “The exclusion of the artist from a general community is mythical … The artist is a perfectly normal and socially functioning individual, though the romantic tradition would have him as tragically eccentric.”13
A context in which no one cares, no one pays attention, no one offers support or encouragement is a worst-case scenario for an aspiring creative. The go-it-alone artist, chronically cut off from his or her peers, is a mythical creature. Creativity is an inherently social act.
Few figures epitomize the lone artist more than Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh. He lived in the shadows of the artistic establishment and sold few paintings in his lifetime. But a close look at his life tells a story of someone engaged with his peers. He corresponded with many young artists in letters filled with shoptalk and unvarnished critiques of other painters. When he received his first good review, he sent a cypress tree to the critic as a present. He and Paul Gauguin made plans at one point to build an artist colony in the tropics. So why do people still say that Van Gogh was a splendid isolationist? Because it feeds into a satisfying story about the fountainhead of his genius. But the story is a myth. Neither a misfit nor a loner, he was an active participant in his time.14
And the social network doesn’t just apply to artists: it applies to all branches of creative invention. E.O. Wilson wrote that “the great scientist who works for himself in a hidden laboratory does not exist.”15 Although many scientists might like to believe they work in ingenious solitude, they in fact operate in a vast web of interdependency. Even the problems they take to be important are influenced by the larger creative community. Isaac Newton, arguably the greatest mind of his time, spent much of his life trying to master alchemy, as that was a prevalent preoccupation in his era.
We’re exquisitely social creatures. We labor without pause to surprise each other. Imagine that each time your friend asked you what you did today, you
