In his book The Act of Creation, Arthur Koestler says we laugh when one idea, or frame of reference, sits next to a second, which doesn’t initially seem to make sense in the context of the first. So here’s a joke: Lady Astor supposedly said to Winston Churchill, ‘If you were my husband, I’d put poison in your tea.’ He replied, ‘If you were my wife, I’d drink it.’
Why is this funny? Well, clearly no one wants to be murdered. But when we gear-shift to suicide as a welcome escape from poor old Lady Astor, it becomes funny.
This slamming together of two unexpected frames, where the latter is surprising and causes you to reconsider the former, is called a paraprosdokian (from the Greek ‘against expectation’). Paraprosdokians are what the rest of us might call ‘dad jokes’. Like Stephen Colbert’s: ‘If I am reading this graph correctly – I’d be very surprised.’ And Groucho Marx’s: ‘I’ve had a perfectly wonderful evening, but this wasn’t it.’
Koestler’s The Act of Creation looks beyond comedy to art and science. Creativity in these disciplines, he thought, is also about exploring the relationship between two unrelated ideas. He calls this ‘bisociation’. For him, creativity is the bisociation of two self-contained but incompatible frames of reference. In short, a dad joke.
IT’S HARDER THAN EVER TO BE CREATIVE TODAY
But it is not as simple as that. We’ve become really bad at bisociation. Creativity may be higher on the cultural agenda, and it might be a key skill for the future, but the truth is, it is now harder to be creative.
Why is this? Today, we simply don’t have the bandwidth to be creative. Our technology both overwhelms and distracts us. Every 24 hours people are bombarded with the equivalent of 34 gigabytes of information – that amount would overload a laptop within a week.3 We can’t calmly absorb all this information and metabolize it into beautiful creative thought.
Digital overload is making us act like Dug, the talking dog in Pixar’s movie Up. Every few moments, he interrupts himself mid-speech, ears pricked, nose quivering and shouts, ‘SQUIRREL!’ Dug is all of us, except our squirrels are tweet storms; siren calls from abandoned, half-filled online shopping carts; the jerk of the leash when we are tagged in a photo.
So we’re too distracted to be creative. But even if we manage to focus, our own creativity – our ability to bisociate – is under threat from algorithms. When Amazon nudges us to buy a similar book to the one we’ve just clicked on, when Netflix cues up yet another film ‘with a strong female lead’, when social media echo chambers only feed us news that is palatable to us, we’re being pigeon-holed. We’re being funnelled down a narrow path. Instead of the quirky, interesting people we imagine ourselves to be, we’re becoming self-fulfilling prophecies, living in a bland monoculture. All of this amounts to a navel-gazing outlook (or in-look) which keeps us thinking in the ways we have always thought. We are stuck in a monotonous spin-cycle of our own experience, which is a profoundly uncreative place to be.
THE STATE OF PERMA-DISTRACTION
Gloria Mark studies digital distraction at the University of California. She has found that it takes about 23 minutes to return to the original task after an interruption. So that quick minute spent on Twitter or Facebook isn’t just 60 seconds. It’s 24 minutes down the drain.4
‘Everyone thinks they are right all the time about everything,’ innovation strategist Faris Yakob told me. ‘We can’t see anyone else’s point of view with clarity. We assume they are idiots and racists. It’s got to the point where I can’t emotionally understand a position that is different from mine. I tend to like reading books about history and politics, but I’m forcing myself to read more fiction. Reading fiction helps you develop empathy and understand better where people you disagree with are coming from.’
We also bristle at any opinion that differs from our own. Ian Martin, writer on political comedy The Thick of It, called Twitter a ‘shrieking tunnel of fuck’. In the midst of this polarized battleground it is harder than ever to find common ground, to flex our positions and move forward. Without respect for another’s perspectives or empathy for their experiences, we can’t make connections, bisociate and progress our thinking. Remember, the dictionary definition tells us creativity is: ‘the use of imagination or original ideas to create something’. Ouch. Cultural zombies can’t be creative, can they? Shrieking trolls won’t open their imagination, will they? How can we escape our ‘tunnel of fuck’ and find the fuel for empathy and inventiveness?
STEREOTYPING + CREATIVITY
Evidence suggests that lack of empathy for others is indeed a block to creativity. A 2012 study by Tel Aviv University found that people who ‘believe that racial groups have fixed underlying essences’ did not do as well in creative tests as those who saw racial categories as ‘arbitrary and malleable’. So those who pigeonhole racial groups have ‘a habitual closed-mindedness that . . . hampers creativity’, the study authors wrote.5
BECOMING T-SHAPED
The creative industries are always on the hunt for what they call ‘T-shaped’ people. The vertical bit of the T – the I – is depth of experience in a specific subject. The horizontal bit of the T is a broader range of experience across subjects, which encompasses the capacity to peek over the top of parapets, to collaborate, to find links between different disciplines. Essentially, the horizontal bit of the T is the knack of Koestler’s bisociation. So this magical T-shaped human combines the vertical skill of rigour and the horizontal skill of empathy.
But it’s really hard to be T-shaped these days. The vertical is being fuelled, meaning we are being made more I-shaped by the algorithms that feed us more and more of what we already know. But the horizontal – empathy – needs our active attention. Cross-pollination requires us to break out of our echo chambers, broaden our horizons and open our hearts and minds to the new.
‘Notice things, be curious, talk to people, figure out new ways of doing things.’
Travel is one way to do this. Remember both Darwin and Wallace were committed explorers. Faris Yakob and his wife Rosie are nomadic creatives who travel around the world working for their consultancy Genius Steals. Travel is very important to them. Faris told me: ‘Habituation makes you blind. It turns your brain off.’ Rosie says travel turns it back on again. ‘There’s a discomfort to being in new places,’ she explains. ‘It means you need to notice and be curious. The more you travel and the stranger the situations you are in, the more likely you are to expand your surface area and serendipitous things might happen.’
It’s not enough to simply go on holiday. Two weeks on a sun lounger in Majorca won’t cut the creative mustard. You have to do what Rosie talked about: notice things, be curious, talk to people, figure out new ways of doing things.
Not all of us can afford the luxury of travelling in order to boost creativity, of course. But many of us can at the very least get out of the workplace and go for a walk. Research from Creative Equals, an organization that champions diversity in the creative industries, shows that just 9 per cent of people have their best ideas in the office. Fans of the walking meeting include Arianna Huffington, Mark Zuckerberg and Barack Obama.
The first reason to go for a walk is that we need to move more. We’re living in sedentary times, sitting on average, for 9.3 hours per day, longer
