Creativity from the perspective of Flow
After reading both Flow and now Creativity: The psychology and discovery of invention by Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi, I am so inspired I want to help make this author a household name by screaming it from the rooftops. But I barely say his name and people will never spell it, so I’m left with telling people to read “Flow” and “Creativity” —which will narrow amazon down to a few hundred books and tons of puzzled faces *facepalm*.
I believe that Mihaly’s concept of Flow is very important and insightful because it can be reduced into a theoretical, almost mathematical function that represents the way a brain runs a process.
If a brain is running a skill at the theoretical limit of a 100% flow state, your consciousness has been reduced to zero, and you are essentially a biological robot.
Obviously that limit can never be achieved, but it creates a building block for conceptualizing the mind.
Once humans first broke free into consciousness, we still did the same things as before, except instead of genetic mutations, a “creative” individual would emerge and change our culture. Again, and again, and again.
But what is Creativity, and where does it live? Who even asks these types of questions? Mihaly does.
“Creativity does not happen inside people’s heads, but in the interaction between a person’s thoughts and a sociocultural context.”
OK.
The system model
The model this book uses to define creativity is a system comprised of 3 components:
Domain: Set of symbols or procedures, (aka subject or skill) that is nested in a culture.
Field: All the individuals that act as the gatekeeper to the domain (the remaining living godfathers of the Domain).
Person: The person who gets defined as the Creative one. These people hold the model of the system in their head and advance the domain past the field.
“Creativity occurs when, using the symbols of a given domain such as music, engineering, business, or mathmatics, has a new idea or sees a new pattern, and when this novelty is selected by the appropriate field for inclusion into the relevant domain”
In this model he draws a hard line between “capital-C” Creative and creative. Capital-C Creative people change a domain in a way that the following generations perceive as normal and further create atop of, and once in a blue moon one of those Creative people create a new domain.
Fundamental Domains
The top level domains in which all the rest are nested under, and when specific versions are combined they create a culture. What a beautiful idea to help structure the mind. Have you ever thought about this? I definitely haven’t. (But I love it!)
Word: Symbolic systems are one of the most fundamental creations of humans to develop our own advancement. By creating symbolic systems we made it possible “to preserve memory outside of the fragile mind”.
Life: The study of the mysteries of our universe (Life sciences, physics, etc..)
Future: The creation of new domains by manipulating existing domains, this could be regarded as the ultimate form of Creativity.
Art, dance and music are also mentioned as being the oldest domain, but he doesn’t categorize them. I think it is because they are really tools for humans to cope with the pains of consciousness, rather than tools for advancing culture. (Maybe this group should be known for harboring the ultimate forms of creativity.)
The Creative Process
He outlines the 5 steps to the Creative Process that I’d like to pull out here (I can already feel myself linking back to this article).
1. Preparation: Getting immersed in a domain you are curious about. This may happen unconsciously. If you feel it happening and you don’t know why, let it happen.
2. Incubation: This one definitely happens in the unconsciousness. Once you have learned enough about a system, you will start manipulating it below the surface. (I believe this can be fostered through activities that increase neuroplasticity.)
3. Insight: The Aha! moment, when the new idea comes to the surface. You think you JUST thought of it, but it’s been in there a while and it just broke into consciousness!
4. Evaluation: The idea starts getting shared, evaluated and explored by peers in the domain to see if it is valid and worth pursuing.
5. Elaboration: This part is the one that is seen as taking the longest (but that is probably step 1, accumulating 10,000 hours in the domain) and is when the idea begins getting built out.
In reality this can happen in a linear process like writing a book or a painting, or in a more parallel and iterative process like creating a company.
Eagleman
While I’m outlining frameworks for creativity, I’d like to reference two other great books from David Eagleman’s and the brain that are good compliments to this.
In “Runaway Species”, he points out that all creative insights are the result of Bending, Breaking or Blending of previous ideas and provides examples across domains.
In “Icognito”, he dives deep into the process that happen below the surfaces in the brain, digging deep into the incubation and insight steps. Both of these are great complimentary reads.
How I’m getting Creative
This book spoke directly to my soul because it put the words around what I am trying to do. With Gamekeepr my goal is to automate the capture and structuring of sports video and data for the masses to broadcast their skills to the world, creating the ultimate coliseum for sports entertainment.
Applying the system model to Gamekeepr helped organize the problem in my mind — and the first thing I thought about after reading the book is “how will the culture be different after Gamekeepr is real?”. Here’s what I thought of:
- Families will be able to watch their student-athletes games and highlights for entertainment no matter where they are or what sport their beautiful snowflake decided to play.
- You will be able to watch any sport at any time, giving rise to the micro-brands in sports. I can’t wait for the first producer to call himself “The Ocho” broadcasting dodgeball games.
- I want to create an infinitely scalable league system for the 300,000 soccer teams globally to be ranked and watched. Soccer deserves such a network.
- After Gamekeepr I want to work on the team that builds the robotic system that controls the climate of our planet.
Oops. I let the weird stuff out. That is all.
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This is the 16th book I read of 2018 on my track to 50
Book #15 was Turning Pro
Book #17 is The Man Who Loved Only Numbers