Relentless Creativity
What makes creative people different? Is it something in the brain, or in the genes? Is it a special kind of education, or some formative experience that the rest of us missed out on? Is it a connection to the divine, or some inner spiritual force?
None of these is what makes creative people different, because they are not different. All people are creative, whether they exercise their abilities or not.
Even more than things like falling in love, being disappointed, fulfilling a dream, experiencing a loss — more than all of these things, the creative insight is truly universal in human experience. Everyone who isn’t born with a congenital limitation of some kind will know what it’s like to be creative, if they live past their first couple years.
This is a matter of basic developmental physiology. The human brain starts off at birth with about a hundred billion neurons, virtually all of the neurons it will ever have. But those neurons are relatively loosely connected: each one has roughly 2500 synapses with other neurons, but in the first decade of life that number soars to 15,000. Learning is a process of creating new connections among the brain’s neurons in physical space — they reach out to touch each other. When we learn, we develop our brains’ abilities to make new associations among stored experiences, and that makes it possible for us to think new…
