Cognition and Education
How Memory Feeds Your Creativity
Creativity is not just about habits of thought, but also about expertise in a specific niche.
“It took me thirty years to do that masterpiece in thirty seconds.” — Pablo Picasso, visual artist.
One thing that makes the human mind fundamentally different from a computer is that adding new knowledge makes it easier to access and use information.
Just ask anyone who has learned several languages — they will tell you that the later ones were easier to learn than the first. The brain doesn’t get full, and it actually works faster for having more knowledge.
Creativity, too, is founded on knowledge. It’s pretty hard to play around with ideas and come up with something new if you don’t know the basic facts to begin with.
Creativity and expertise
And so, creativity can require a foundation of hard work. It’s not a coincidence that the most culturally significant creative ideas come from individuals who have years of experience, and have developed a high level of skill and expert knowledge in their field.
For example, Adam Smith was 53 years old when he wrote his classic work of economic politics, The…
