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Combinatorial Creativity and
the Myth of Originality
The power of the synthesizing mind and the building
blocks of combinatorial creativity
By Maria Popova
SMITHSONIAN.COM
JUNE 6, 2012
411401982339
41 14 1 98 0 339
Celebrated creators have always known the power of the synthesizing mind. Illustration by Ikon Images
/ Corbis
Editor’s Note: The Innovations blog welcomes this “guest post” by Maria Popova,
creator of the Brain Pickings blog.
There is a curious cultural disconnect between our mythology of spontaneous ideation –
the Eureka! moment, the stroke of genius, the proverbial light bulb – and how “new”
ideas actually take shape, amalgamated into existence by the combinatorial nature of
creativity. To create is to combine existing bits of insight, knowledge, ideas, and
memories into new material and new interpretations of the world, to connect the
seemingly dissociated, to see patterns where others see chaos.
Celebrated creators – artists, writers, scientists, inventors – have always known the
power of the synthesizing mind and have advocated for embracing the building blocks of
combinatorial creativity. “Stuff your head with more different things from various
fields,” Ray Bradbury encouraged students in a 2001 address. “You should stay alert for
the moment when a number of things are just ready to collide with one another,” Brian
Eno advised. “Creativity is just connecting things,” Steve Jobs proclaimed.
“Science,” Darwin recognized, “consists in grouping facts so that general laws or
conclusions may be drawn from them.” “Substantially all ideas are second-hand,” Mark
Twain observed, “consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources,
and daily use by the garnerer with a pride and satisfaction born of the superstition that
he originated them.”
Scientific advances in our understanding of the brain can corroborate this. In his
book, Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain, neuroscientist David Eagleman distills
the unconscious processing that takes place as we come up with an idea we call our own:
“When an idea is served up from behind the scenes, the neural circuitry has been
working on the problems for hours or days or years, consolidating information and
trying out new combinations. But you merely take credit without further wonderment
at the vast, hidden political machinery behind the scenes.”
Great scientists can speak to this empirically. Legendary French mathematician Henri
Poincaré once described how he arrived at the discovery of a class of Fuchsian
functions: “Ideas rose in crowds; I felt them collide until pairs interlocked, so to speak,
making a stable combination.”
Yet, no matter how much we know about the brain and the inner workings of creativity,
the creative process itself will never be easy. Its most frustrating reality is that this crux
of combinatorial creation – that magic moment when ideas click together and “make a
stable combination” – cannot be forced. In fact, the more we consciously dwell on a
problem that requires an innovative solution, the more likely we are to corner ourselves
into the nooks of the familiar, entrenched in habitual patterns of thought that lead
where they always have.
We can, however, optimize our minds for combinatorial creativity – by enriching our
mental pool of resources with diverse, eclectic, cross-disciplinary pieces which to fuse
together into new combinations. For creativity, after all, is a lot like LEGO – if we only
have a few bricks of one shape, size, and color, what we build would end up dreadfully
drab and uniform; but if we equip ourselves with a bag of colorful bricks of various
shapes and sizes, the imaginative temples we build might appear to an onlooker to have
been inspired by “a ray of grace,” yet we need only look to our bag of LEGOs to be
reminded from whence they came.
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* Popora: "Combinatorial Creativity and the Myth of
-Myth. there is no such thing (as originality
Combinatorial combine to make something by
putting things together
& you can make new things by putting
together old things
,