“The urge to destroy is also a creative urge!”—Pablo Picasso
THE FUNDAMENTALS
Creativity is fundamental to being human. Our brains are wired to create. Our imagination feeds our curiosity, driving us to invent, design, improve and create. It is at the essence of who we are. A major part of our humanity that stands out from other organisms comes from the fraction of our DNA that fuels our creativity. That’s where the magic happens; our complex language, our artistic expressions, our architectural marvels, our scientific discoveries, our shared beliefs and values, our medical breakthroughs, our technological advancements. Strip each of those away and we’re left naked in a world where the 2% genetic separation between humans and chimps would blur into obscurity.
We celebrate this beauty in people like Beyoncé, Elon Musk, Kobe Bryant, and Albert Einstein, who are famous for their jaw-dropping creative feats. This norm makes most people believe that creativity is limited to proclaimed geniuses. That’s a myth. Creativity is not exclusive to any single person. Visionary thinking isn’t tied to your skills, status, location, gender, race, or age. Having a powerful imagination is innate. We just have to choose to embrace it.
IMAGINATION
Oliver Sacks pioneered research on how creative connections are made in the brain. He spent his life learning “how the theater of the mind can be generated by the machinery of the brain.” He discovered human brains are wired for imagination by tracking his patients.
Oliver encountered a mysterious mental phenomenon. His patients were blind, yet they were still able to see visual hallucinations. Somehow, they saw things using their mind even though they couldn’t see from their eyes.
He tracked his patient’s brain activity during their hallucinations. This led to exciting discoveries about how imagination works. When they hallucinated simple shapes, the part of the brain that recognizes patterns lit up. Another brain area responsible for remembering faces activated when they hallucinated people. When the area responsible for eyes and teeth activated, the hallucinations showed deformed people. Another area triggered hallucinations of buildings and landscapes. Another area lit up when they saw cartoons.
Oliver Sacks liked to say we see with our eyes, but we also see with our brains. Imagination is when we see with our brains. The human brain constantly fires off images in our heads regardless of what’s right in front of our eyes. That’s the visionary power of our natural human brain. It’s wired to imagine worlds. This is the starting point of every creative journey, an idea so vivid our brain processes and perceives it indistinguishable from reality.
CONNECTEDNESS
Our innate ability to shift between “what exists” and “what could exist” exponentially advanced the human race. This caliber of creativity separates us from other species. Our ancestors collaborated to tackle problems life threw at us. We evaded predators, tamed fire, passed down storytelling, crafted tools, and created vaccines.
Mark Twain said, “There are no original ideas.” Nearly a century later, Oliver Sacks’ research also defined human creativity as people imitating the world around them. His stance was that we filter those imitations through various mental models and layers. Over time, the images, experiences, and inspirations we absorbed sink into our subconscious. Then long after we’ve forgotten the source of our inspiration, we use them to imagine new possibilities. Most of our ideas come from these forgotten sparks, inspiring connections stowed deep in our mind and faded by time.