Dyspraxia Awareness Week
Why Are Dyspraxic People More Creative?
Last year I wrote a rambling blog about dyspraxia, paradoxes, and creativity. Since then I’ve been thinking more precisely about what is dyspraxia’s relationship to creativity.
If you’re dyspraxic, like many neurodiverse people you’ve probably been told that you’re more creative. You may struggle with more traditionally academic subjects like maths and English, but you’ll flourish at drama. You may fail with simple everyday tasks like tying shoelaces or eating without spilling food on yourself, but you’ll run rings around your classmates when it comes to abstract art.
But is this actually true and if it is, why?
Firstly what is creativity? The education system would have us believe that creativity is something we do in the arts; drama, music, and art are places where students are creative. The purpose of school is about getting a job and because there are fewer jobs in the creative industries, creativity is less important than science and maths, therefore is given less time in the school curriculum. But this is a misguided view of what creativity actually is. Sir Ken Robinson (who sadly passed away this year) in his 2006 Ted Talk “Do schools kill creativity?” defined creativity “as the process of having original ideas that have value” and argued “more often than not comes about through the interaction of different disciplinary ways of seeing things.” If this is true then creativity happens in all facets of life not just the arts.
As a playwright this is something I return to; my best ideas for writing don’t come from reading other plays they come from newspaper articles, artists working in a different discipline, or conversations with people. My creative imagination is fuelled as much by reading non-fiction as it is by fiction, new ways of seeing the world, creating new ideas, and new ways to explore those ideas.
So if that’s what creativity is, why are dyspraxic and neurodiverse people more likely to be creative? Well, I think it has something to do with the fact the normal routes aren’t open to us. In everyday life, we are constantly coming up with ways to complete tasks neurotypical people take for granted. Malcolm Gladwell in his book, David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits and the Art of battling giants observes something similar.
Gladwell states that a large number of very successful entrepreneurs are dyslexic. Gladwell believes this is due to something psychologists call desirable difficulty. “In order to learn the things that really need to be learned we require a certain level of adversity.” Whilst dyslexia is a completely different condition from dyspraxia, both create adversity we have to overcome. Our dyspraxia creates new challenges from an early age, but these challenges force us to learn new skills, which become extremely helpful in later life.
As dyspraxics we are prone to be distracted and to daydream, or as the comedian John Cleese refers to it, ‘thinking in the open mode’. In 1991 John Cleese was invited to give a lecture on creativity. In the lecture, Cleese argued that creativity was not a specific talent but, “a way of operating”. Cleese defined two ways people approach tasks in the closed mode and the open mode.
The Closed Mode & The Open Mode
Cleese says the Closed Mode is what people are most of the time whilst at work, “We have inside us a feeling that there’s lots to be done and we have to get on with it if we’re going to get through it all. It’s a mode in which we’re very purposeful and it’s a mode in which we can get very stressed and even a bit manic, but not creative.” In contrast he says the Open Mode is, “relaxed… expansive… less purposeful mode… in which we are probably more contemplative, more inclined to humor (which always accompanies a wider perspective) and, consequently, more playful. It’s a mood in which curiosity for its own sake can operate because we’re not under pressure to get a specific thing done quickly. We can play, and that is what allows our natural creativity to surface.”
Dyspraxic people find it hard to filter out the irrelevant information surrounding them, meaning that we become easily distracted and find it hard to focus on the job at hand. In other words, we find it easier to work in the open mode, rather than the closed.
In Robinson’s talk, he tells the story of Gillian Lynne, Lynne was a dancer and choreographer who worked on Phantom of the Opera and Cats. As a child Lynne struggled at school, today she might have been diagnosed with ADHD but the condition was unknown at the time. Her parents took her to see a specialist, the specialist listened to all the problems she was having at school and then asked her parents to leave the room as he need to speak to Gillian in private, as they left the room he turned on the radio. And when he left the room he informed her mother, “Mrs. Lynne, Gillian isn’t sick, she’s a dancer. Take her to a dance school.” Neurodiverse people succeed when we lean into our way of thinking rather than trying to think like everybody else.
Obviously, not every dyspraxic person works in the arts, entertainment, and culture industry, but this is a very limited view of what creativity is. In Cleese’s lecture, he uses the example of Alexander Fleming discovering penicillin as an example of creative thinking. Creativity in the workplace has never been more important, automation is going to be a huge disruption to workforces around the globe as A.I. and machine learning will eventually replace all logical processing jobs. In 2018 the World Economic Forum listed creativity as the third most important skill needed to thrive in the workplace from 2020 onwards. In the coming decades being creative is going to play a vital role in the workplace, and it would appear dyspraxics are ideally placed to adapt to this new challenge.
It’s been 14 years since Robinson gave his talk where he argued we need to change our view on creativity. I think society at large has failed to do this, but its importance has never been more vital.
Bibliography
Sir Ken Robinson: Do Schools Kill Creativity? https://www.ted.com/talks/sir_ken_robinson_do_schools_kill_creativity?
John Cleese Creativity in Management https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=toWQ_BQF8Aw
David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits and the Art of Battling Giants by Gladwell, Malcolm, 2014, Penguin, London
