354. How to Be Creative

There are thousands of books on the subject, but what do we actually know about creativity? In this new series, we talk to the researchers who study it as well as artists, inventors, and pathbreakers who live it every day: Ai Weiwei, James Dyson, Elvis Costello, Jennifer Egan, Rosanne Cash, Wynton Marsalis, Maira Kalman, and more. (Ep. 1 of the “How to Be Creative” series.)

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Stephen J. Dubner?

  Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by Angie. Angie has been connecting homeowners with skilled pros for over 30 years, and they've made it easier than ever to tackle home projects. Their nationwide network has experts in everything from plumbing and landscaping to roofing, remodels, and more. You can read verified reviews and request and compare quotes to find your best price. So join the millions of homeowners who use Angie to get the job done well. Download the Angie app today or visit angie.com.

• 0:38Stephen J. Dubner?

  Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by Progressive. Whoever says saving money is hard doesn't know that new customers who bundle and save with Progressive save hundreds because switching your home and auto insurance is better than cutting down on the things you love, like those iced lattes that help you get ready to face the day. So switch your home and auto to Progressive and see if you could save and keep sipping away. Get your quote today at progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company affiliates and other insurers. Not available in all states.

• 1:10Stephen J. Dubner?

  Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by PNC Bank. Boring. Great word, bad rep. Yet, time and time again, here at Freakonomics, we find that when something culture-changing happens, boring things like calculations and careful planning are usually behind it, which begs the question, why not apply it to other aspects of life, like banking, for example? Well, PNC Bank did since its inception, proving time and again that the best banking strategy isn't the exciting type, but the steady, reliable, definitely not YOLO type. PNC Bank. Brilliantly boring since 1865. Brilliantly boring since 1865 is a registered mark of the PNC Financial Services Group, Inc. PNC Bank, National Association, Member FDIC.

• 1:59Stephen J. Dubner?

  Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by ChatGPT. ChatGPT Work is a new way to work in ChatGPT. ChatGPT Work can pull info from across your apps and connect to your tools to help you create finished work. You can even automate work in ChatGPT with the Scheduled Tasks feature, and the whole time, you stay in control. Put ChatGPT to work on your most ambitious ideas and projects. Get started at chatgpt.com by selecting Work Mode, available on Plus and Pro plans.

• 2:40Stephen J. Dubner?

  What do you think when I say the word creativity? Truth be told, creativity is having a bit of a moment. There are thousands of books on the subject, many written in the past decade. It's become a corporate buzzword, right up there with innovation and disruption. It is at the center of a whole lifestyle movement: online classes and Facebook groups and real-life meetups. There are creativity coaches, of course, and gurus, offering to rearrange your life to add more creative spice. So we here at Freakonomics Radio got to thinking. With so many people spending so much time and money and energy in pursuit of this thing

• 3:20Stephen J. Dubner?

  called creativity, well, we wondered if there's anything systematic to be learned about it. What if we started by simply defining the term? We asked a bunch of academics who study creativity, as well as some artists, musicians, scientists, and inventors, how do you define creativity?

• 3:45Speaker 01

  You know, it's actually harder than one might think. Well, people use that word in lots of different ways to mean lots of different things.

• 3:52Speaker 02

  There's a huge amount of what goes under the head in creativity that just has to do with a willingness to stick to a problem and a pleasure in it.

• 4:01Speaker 03

  So, starting with nothing, having an idea, letting the idea pull you forward, getting it down, making it right. Okay, bingo, this is how we're gonna do it.

• 4:13Speaker 04

  It can't just be different for the sake of being different because that's that's the definition of madness, I guess.

• 4:19Stephen J. Dubner?

  Theresa Mobley is a psychologist and a professor emerita at the Harvard Business School. She's spent her career studying creativity, particularly in education and work settings. But I asked her, how is it even possible to empirically study something as diffuse as creativity?

• 4:36Speaker 04

  Many people have the sense that it should not be studied scientifically, that you should not try to apply science and objective thinking to the magic of creativity, that it's somehow in the spiritual realm, as you might guess. I don't take that approach. I think that it can be studied scientifically without destroying the excitement and the sense of magic about creativity.

• 5:03Stephen J. Dubner?

  For economists, the concern hasn't been about preserving the magic of creativity. They generally avoid the topic because it seems so touchy feely.

• 5:14Speaker 05

  There's sort of two questions. Why do economists care? And the answer is economists really haven't cared about creativity.

• 5:20Stephen J. Dubner?

  David Galinson is an economist at the University of Chicago, and he does care. His central research interest is the life cycles of human creativity.

• 5:29Speaker 05

  Why should they care? The single most important problem for the discipline of economics is economic growth. Why are some countries rich and others poor? And virtually all economists agree that the single most important source of economic growth in the long run, you know, what really makes a country rich, is technological change. Well, technological change is just a lot of people making discoveries. So it would seem to be a very big question. How do people make innovations?

• 6:00Stephen J. Dubner?

  Today on Freakonomics Radio, we kick off a new occasional series on creativity. What it is, where it comes from, how it can be cultivated. Along the way, we'll answer some big questions. Is it really true that creativity and mental illness go hand in hand? Does our education system really kill off creativity? How do preposterously creative people do what they do? We'll hear from the academics who study creativity and the people who live it. Musicians like Wynton Marsalis and Rosanne Cash and Elvis Costello. Artists like Ai Weiwei, Maira Kalman, the novelist Jennifer Egan and the filmmakers Marc Duplass and Seth Gordon, the astrophysicists Margaret Geller and Saul Perlmutter, inventors

• 6:44Stephen J. Dubner?

  like Jessica Matthews and James Dyson, and one of the people behind what may become a massive scientific revolution.

• 6:52Speaker 03

  As you're actually doing experiments, you realize, oh, we could do this. Oh, we could do this.

• 6:57Stephen J. Dubner?

  We'll get started right after this.

• 7:11Speaker 06

  From Stitcher and Dubner Productions, this is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything. Here's your host, Stephen Dubner.

• 7:28Stephen J. Dubner?

  Among the scholars who study creativity, there is no real consensus on who has it or even exactly what it is.

• 7:34Speaker 01

  I was just looking recently and reminded of that old fable that, you know, if you have people blindfolded looking at an elephant.

• 7:41Stephen J. Dubner?

  Charlene Nemeth is a psychology professor at UC Berkeley who studies entrepreneurs and creative scientists.

• 7:48Speaker 01

  And one of them is, you know, looking at the tail. He thinks it's a snail he's touching. If you have someone, you know, approaching it from the side, he thinks it's a wall. And it's just a reminder in a way that what you focus on, to some extent, determines how you think creativity works. And so in many ways, it's a very difficult and still, to some extent, mysterious phenomenon.

• 8:15Speaker 01

  So if you get somebody studying it in business innovation, for example, separate from studying Nobel laureates or separate from looking at it in experimental tasks, for example, in a lab. So it's very hard to compare those because they use different definitions of the end product as being creative or not.

• 8:34Stephen J. Dubner?

  But you've got to start somewhere. And that's why Theresa Amobule starts with a basic definition that's accepted within the field of psychology.

• 8:43Speaker 04

  So we identify creativity as essentially novelty that works. It has to be somehow feasible, workable, valuable, appropriate to a goal. It gets a little squishy when we're talking about the arts. You know, what does appropriate or valuable mean in the arts? But I think even there, pure novelty, just for the sake of novelty, isn't really going to do it. It has to be somehow expressive of something that the artist was trying to convey or evocative of a response that the artist was trying to evoke.

• 9:20Stephen J. Dubner?

  Novelty that works. I think that is a great starting point. What if we run that definition past a creative type? Michael Berut, for instance. Berut is a world-renowned, much-awarded graphic designer. You've seen his logos. His work is in museums. How does he like defining creativity as novelty that works?

• 9:41Speaker 07

  Yeah, I mean, there's this famous formulation by the mid-century, 20th-century designer Raymond Loewy. Designed the Lucky Strike Package and the livery of Air Force One, among other things. And he had this like four-letter formulation, M-A-Y-A, most advanced yet acceptable. And it was based on his theory that everyone has these two impulses. And one is the desire for regularity and comfort, and the other one is the quest for surprise and novelty, right? And so if you have too much regularity and comfort, you get bored. If you get too much surprise and novelty, you get overexcited, wired, and distracted,

• 10:26Speaker 07

  and exhausted. And so it's the idea that it's novelty with a purpose. That purpose is the element that actually is about, you know, expectation and expectations fulfilled. And the novelty part of it is the... Idea that those expectations might be fulfilled in a way that you haven't seen before.

• 10:53Stephen J. Dubner?

  It turns out that psychologists have come up with a way to test our ability to produce novelty that works. Sharla Nemeth again.

• 11:01Speaker 01

  It's called the uses test. And basically, if I ask you to give me all the uses you can for a brick, you could say, you know, you could build a house, you could build a factory, you know, you could build a road. And there'd be three ideas, but they're all basically building. A more creative answer would be something like, you could build a house, you could use it as a platform to hold a cup of coffee, you could use it as a missile to throw through someone's window as protest. And other tests of creativity all have that element to it. They see if the mind tends to go wide and down different routes, and that it can even make connections through circuitous ways of getting there.

• 11:39Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's one way to measure someone's degree of creative thinking. But how about studying creativity the other way around, starting with people that everyone agrees are wildly creative? That's the route chosen by Dean Simonton. He is a professor emeritus of psychology at UC Davis.

• 11:56Speaker 08

  I wanted to study creativity and genius and leadership, but I wanted to do it in a way that was different than what most psychologists did, because most psychologists, they study really college undergraduates who happen to be taking a psych one class, and they have to volunteer to participate. And those are not the people I wanted to study. And so I had to figure out a way of studying people like Michelangelo, or Beethoven, or Einstein, when I couldn't get them to come to my laboratory, particularly since most of them were deceased, which made it kind of awkward.

• 12:38Speaker 08

  So I started developing various ways of studying genius at a distance. Measuring their personality, measuring their intelligence, looking at their childhood and adolescence, the nature of their career.

• 12:54Stephen J. Dubner?

  So, did you have a pretty smooth path through academia then to become a PhD?

• 13:01Speaker 08

  Oh, no, I had a lot of times where I had to struggle. Well, I mean, for example, when I decided I wanted to study real creators and real geniuses as set of college students, I had a hell of a time trying to put together a thesis committee because not everybody thought that that was even a legitimate form of doing psychological research.

• 13:27Stephen J. Dubner?

  Because why?

• 13:28Speaker 08

  Because at that time, and it's still the case, in fact, in many ways, it's even more true, the laboratory is considered to be the acme of science. Having a lab in which you collect your data, and in the case of psychology, a lab means a place where, for the most part, you bring in college students to study. Something about 86% of all research in psychology is based on college undergraduates.

• 13:57Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's a very, very narrow cohort, not just age-wise, but also kind of background-wise and IQ-wise and all that.

• 14:03Speaker 08

  Right.

• 14:04Stephen J. Dubner?

  It's pretty homogeneous. What about just the fact that even good lab experiments, forget about all the bad ones, that it doesn't really represent the real world well enough, especially in the realm of something like psychology, but also economics, I would say. Was that a concern for you as well, or no?

• 14:21Speaker 08

  Oh, yeah, it was definitely. To me, there's a distinction that is made between what's called internal validity and external validity. And internal validity has to do with the power of making causal inferences from your research. And laboratory experiments are really, really great in internal validity. But external validity is, does it really tell you anything about what's happening in the real world? And so what often happens when you want to study something in the lab that is actually in the real world, you do a simulation, but you have no way of knowing whether or not that simulation actually represents what happens out there.

• 15:00Speaker 08

  For example, I wanted to find out what were the social-cultural circumstances that were responsible for why in some periods you have golden ages with lots of geniuses and other times you have dark ages where it's really hard to find anybody who even knows what they're talking about, right? Yeah, how do you do that in a lab? Right, how do you do that? I wanted to look at the impact of war. I wanted to look at the impact of having role models in your field when you're growing up. I wanted to look at the impact of the political system, whether you had a lot of independent states or whether it was a big one unified empire. And those are things you just can't study in the laboratory. You just can't say, hey, imagine you're growing up in the Middle Ages and how creative do

• 15:45Speaker 08

  you feel?

• 15:48Stephen J. Dubner?

  So how did Simonton go about studying this incredible range of factors?

• 15:53Speaker 08

  Well, actually, the story goes back to elementary school, believe it or not. When I was in kindergarten, my kindergarten teacher came to our house and told my parents, I came from a working class background, in fact, my dad didn't graduate from high school. And they said, if you want your son to do well in school, you need a set of encyclopedias, world book encyclopedias, and it would really help him. And these books are designed from K through 12 and very useful for writing term papers and all that kind of stuff.

• 16:30Stephen J. Dubner?

  Those were expensive. That was a big commitment.

• 16:32Speaker 08

  Yeah, that was expensive. It was an amazing purchase for them to make. And I started browsing through them. And one thing that's characteristic of the world book is they have lots of pictures. And I saw lots of pictures of strange looking people, you know, people with beards, people with long hair, you know, people, you know, different ethnicities, periods, whatever. And I wondered, how did they get in that? How did they get there, an entry?

• 16:59Stephen J. Dubner?

  Oh.

• 17:00Speaker 08

  Why were they so important?

• 17:02Stephen J. Dubner?

  Yeah.

• 17:03Speaker 08

  Particularly since I realized my, my parents didn't have entries and my elementary school teacher didn't have entries, Mrs. Rayner. So I was always curious about just how you become eminent enough to end up in an encyclopedia or just have someone write a biography of you.

• 17:20Stephen J. Dubner?

  Was it, I don't want, envy is not the word I'm looking for. Did you want to belong to that tribe and you were trying to figure out how to get there? Or you were more curious about who were these people and where did they come from?

• 17:32Speaker 08

  Well, it was, it's a kind of a combination. I wouldn't say it was envy, but it was curiosity about how they got there. And could I be in that group, you know? Do I have what it takes?

• 17:47Stephen J. Dubner?

  And what do you have to do to get in there?

• 17:49Speaker 08

  And what, yeah, what do you have to do? Yeah. What's the process? And is it something that you can develop as well?

• 17:57Stephen J. Dubner?

  Simonton learned to pay attention to all the details in the biographies he was reading.

• 18:02Speaker 08

  And it would talk about, you know, where they came from. Sometimes it would mention their birth order. Sometimes they would, you know, talk about their education and maybe some of the struggles they, they went through and then their career. And then of course histories also have a lot of information about what's going on externally, you know, like whether or not there's any wars going on, whether or not there's a dictatorship or a democratic government. There's also information having to do with personality. Like this person was introverted, or this person was extroverted. We know, for example, that Newton had a lot of characteristics that suggests that he was a high-functioning autistic, and he was very, very introverted.

• 18:46Speaker 08

  And we can see that from his behavior, as well as having some paranoid psychosis attached.

• 18:54Stephen J. Dubner?

  All right, so let me ask you the really obvious question. When you study people like Michelangelo and Beethoven and Einstein, who I think most people would agree were pretty good at what they did, and maybe all the way up to creative genius, obvious question, what did you discover about creativity and genius? I guess, what do they have in common?

• 19:17Speaker 08

  Well, first of all, I have to say that artists and scientists are not equivalent as geniuses, but they also have things that they do share. They are all very intelligent, in a general intelligence way, not necessarily in terms of taking an IQ test, but they're very sharp. They love what they're doing. They're absolutely committed to doing what they're doing. They want to spend their whole life, you know, discovering the nature of the universe, or creating incredible paintings, you know, on the ceiling, or whatever it happens to be. And they're willing to overcome all sorts of obstacles and all sorts of struggles.

• 20:01Speaker 08

  You know, like Michelangelo, the agony and ecstasy, you know, scenario. Even though he was recognized very early as a genius, he had constant struggles, and he often had major projects terminated, like with Pope Julius II. And it's not easy to be a genius. And so all of them, whether they're scientists, or whether they're artists, have that tremendous drive and commitment and determination to keep on going, even when they're failing, and failing, and failing.

• 20:38Stephen J. Dubner?

  At this point, you may be starting to think, well, what Simonton's describing sounds an awful lot like what's known as the 10,000-hour rule of excellence.

• 20:47Speaker 08

  In our research, we call it the 10-year rule. But in any case, that is absolutely unquestionable, that you have to establish an expertise and a domain. You have to know what you're doing. You have to have the tools of the trade. Now, sometimes people enter fields where there's really not that much to learn because they're brand-new fields. So when Galileo, for example, invented his telescope and pointed to the skies and saw all these things that were not supposed to be there, there weren't supposed to be mountains on the moon, there weren't supposed to be moons circulating around Jupiter, there weren't supposed to be spots on the sun, and so forth and so on.

• 21:31Speaker 08

  He was creating a domain from scratch. So he didn't have to spend 10 years learning something that was already obsolete. He was inventing his own field.

• 21:39Stephen J. Dubner?

  So being first is always a good idea.

• 21:41Speaker 08

  Yeah, if you want to avoid all the hard work of studying, just be the first in a given domain.

• 21:46Stephen J. Dubner?

  Coming up after the break, what is the most creative thing you can think of that has nothing to do with the arts? And an important question for everyone, especially if you don't consider yourself creative.

• 22:01Speaker 04

  Should we all strive to be creative?

• 22:03Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's coming up. For more Freakonomics Radio, check out Freakonomics.com or subscribe to this podcast on your favorite podcast app. And if you have a great idea for a future episode, send it along to [email protected]. We'll be right back. Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by Granola. You know that moment when a meeting ends and someone says, let's circle back on this next week, and everyone nods but no one writes it down? Then next week rolls around and it's radio silence? That's why Granola exists. Granola is an AI-powered notepad built for the way real people actually meet. You take rough notes like you normally would, and in the background, Granola securely translates

• 22:47Stephen J. Dubner?

  ...inscribes the meeting, then it turns everything into clean, structured, actually useful notes when the meeting ends. And the best part, Granola works through your device's audio, which means it integrates seamlessly into the video conferencing tools you already use. No setup, no awkward bots. It's just your normal meeting with superpowers. If meetings are eating up your day, Granola is a no-brainer. You can try it totally free. Just head to granola.ai/freakonomics. That's granola.ai/freakonomics to get your time back. Try it for free at granola.ai/freakonomics.

• 23:28Stephen J. Dubner?

  Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by Zip System. Zip System building enclosures are designed as one integrated roof and wall system that makes it faster and easier to create a tight, dry building enclosure. Instead of a mix-and-match approach, all components work together as one system, eliminating the need for house wrap and felt because they keep your build protected against weather starting from day one. That means fewer steps and less opportunities for delays. Explore their family of products and learn more at zipsystem.com.

• 24:00Stephen J. Dubner?

  Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by PNC Bank. Boring. Great word, bad rep. Yet, time and time again, here at Freakonomics, we find that when something culture-changing happens, boring things like calculations and careful planning are usually behind it. Which begs the question, why not apply it to other aspects of life, like banking, for example? Well, PNC Bank did since its inception, proving time and again that the best banking strategy isn't the exciting type, but the steady, reliable, definitely not YOLO type. PNC Bank, brilliantly boring since 1865. Brilliantly boring since 1865 is a registered mark of the PNC Financial Services Group, Inc. PNC Bank, National Association, Member FDIC.

• 24:54Stephen J. Dubner?

  This is the first episode in a new recurring series about creativity, which, for empirically minded people like us, is a notoriously squishy topic. The psychologist Theresa Amobule again.

• 25:08Speaker 04

  So there are a few myths about creativity that are very popular.

• 25:14Stephen J. Dubner?

  So let's at least clear up a few myths, shall we? First off, when most of us think about creativity, we focus on the arts, music and film, visual arts, writing, and so on. Maybe you also think of a scientist or researcher in the lab, thinking up experiments to test a new hypothesis. It's all understandable, since these are people who make a living through their creativity. But Amobule thinks that view of creativity doesn't go nearly far enough.

• 25:40Speaker 04

  Creativity is possible in all realms of human activity. If we define creativity as doing something novel that works, that is valuable in some way, it's absolutely possible in everything that humans do.

• 25:54Stephen J. Dubner?

  One of my favorite examples of creative thinking outside the arts is the story of John Snow, the English doctor who is considered one of the pioneers of epidemiology. In mid-19th century London, Snow was trying to identify the source of cholera outbreaks. Many doctors thought it was spread by miasma, or bad air. Snow thought it maybe had to do with germs in the water supply. Using maps and statistics and common sense, Snow identified one pump whose contaminated water had caused nearly 200 deaths in a single outbreak of cholera. Over the ensuing centuries, Snow's breakthrough would help save countless lives, and that strikes me as a deeply creative act.

• 26:39Speaker 09

  Yeah, I think that's right. That's an example of profound creativity that isn't, quote, artistic, or artistic with an A.

• 26:49Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's a filmmaker Seth Gordon. He grew up with two social scientists as parents. Now he directs big Hollywood films and also makes lots of TV shows and smart documentaries.

• 27:01Speaker 09

  I think, actually, the most creative discipline I've ever witnessed in person is probably coding.

• 27:07Speaker 09

  Because you're creating the language that you then employ to make something happen. That is profoundly creative. And whether that's for making a game, or whether that's creating a program, or whether that's, I mean, in a way, maybe the most creative thing I'm aware of in the last 10 or 15 years is the Stuxnet virus.

• 27:31Stephen J. Dubner?

  He's referring to the computer virus generally thought to be created by American and Israeli programmers, which in 2010 attacked Iran's nuclear program.

• 27:41Speaker 09

  Like, that thing, it's unbelievable. Like, what it was, what it did and how it accomplished it, like, but I don't think anyone would call that creative in any normal sense. That's, you know, it's bad, right? But it's making something that never existed before and tricked everyone for a very long time. Like, it's amazing.

• 28:04Stephen J. Dubner?

  Creating computer code that can shut down your enemy's nuclear centrifuges? Yes, I can see how that's creative. Some people see a lot of creativity in sports. Here's Dana Joya, the poet laureate of California and former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts.

• 28:22Speaker 10

  I don't like sports, but you've got to admire the energy, creativity, innovation that goes into sports. And it's very similar to arts. You know, it's a way of focusing human energy to create these symbolic encounters, which have enormous emotional resonance, you know, to audiences. So I think it's a mistake always to talk about the arts about being about artists. The arts are also about audience. It's about community. It's about this conversation between the creator and the receiver.

• 28:55Speaker 11

  I mean, I think what, one of the things people don't understand is that every day people are creative.

• 29:02Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's the astrophysicist Margaret Geller, who, in her everyday work, helped pioneer the mapping of matter in the universe.

• 29:09Speaker 11

  You go in the kitchen to make dinner, you put a different spice in the dish. That's creative. You're planting your garden, you make a new flower arrangement. It doesn't have to be a big thing to be creative.

• 29:23Stephen J. Dubner?

  Maybe not, but some practitioners of the creative arts, the humorist John Hodgman, for instance, do draw a line.

• 29:31Speaker 03

  You know, I would make a small distinction. It's sort of the distinction between being a stand-up comic versus being an actor. You know, when you are cooking, you're following a recipe. When you're acting, you're following a script and direction. Those are arts, to be sure, but they're interpretive arts rather than purely creative arts, where you are solely or in collaboration responsible for creating something out of nothing. You know, developing a recipe or inventing a new kind of Afghan pattern or whatever it is. If you're following a direction, right, that is an interpretive art of which many people become craft people and masters of, and it's a beautiful thing. You know, it's just enjoyable in and of itself.

• 30:16Stephen J. Dubner?

  It may be enjoyable, but as Hodgman sees it, true creativity occupies a higher realm. Theresa Amobule takes a more inclusive approach.

• 30:27Speaker 04

  One of my favorite things to do when I'm talking to managers is say, okay, everyone, where do you most want creativity in your organizations? They yell out R and D, marketing, advertising. Ah, great, great, great, great. Okay. So is there anywhere in your organization where you do not want creativity? Somebody will yell out accounting, and then everybody laughs. And of course, people say, well, you know, you think of creative accounting, and you think of Enron, you know, you think of all these examples of cooking the books. Yeah, yeah, right. That's funny. And yes, we want to avoid that kind of creative accounting, but is, and then I ask them, is

• 31:11Speaker 04

  it true that you don't want people in your accounting department to think about what they do creatively, ever? And then I give the example of my colleague, Robert Kaplan, coming up with activity-based costing many years ago, and how that was a true creative breakthrough in accounting.

• 31:29Stephen J. Dubner?

  But in a time when everyone is encouraged to be creative, are there downsides to that? Especially if there's not enough attention to go around?

• 31:37Speaker 08

  Can I give you one example?

• 31:39Stephen J. Dubner?

  Dean Simonton again at UC Davis.

• 31:41Speaker 08

  Well, this just happened recently, and it happened near where I live, so it's even more prominent. We had someone who, you know, walked into the YouTube headquarters and started shooting people up because she thought that they were stifling her creativity.

• 32:02Speaker 08

  That she had some creativity, you know, via video uploads that was not reaching the largest possible audience. I have never seen any of her videos and you have to know Farsi to understand, I think, most of them. But the point is, is that she thought it was worth killing people because her creativity is being stifled. I think she would have been better off just becoming an accountant or something, rather than trying to be creative. And I think there's the other issue here. We, we live in a society where we're inundated with creativity. It's so easy to put yourself up there. You can start your own blog, you

• 32:45Speaker 08

  know? You can upload your paintings. You can upload your music. You can do all that. In earlier times, you had gatekeepers. You actually had to have a patron who was willing to pay for your, the marble for your sculpture.

• 32:59Stephen J. Dubner?

  So you sound like you're, for the most part, not in favor of this total democratization of creativity.

• 33:08Speaker 08

  I don't, I don't really care. But I mean, if, if, if someone, if someone is happy being a Sunday afternoon painter, by all means, do it. Just don't give it to your relatives. And force them to find some spot in the living room to hang it up.

• 33:35Stephen J. Dubner?

  You know, when I hear that phrase, creative genius, and we do hear it a lot, it goes, it goes, it goes together. I sometimes wonder if it's a little bit of an unfortunate pairing in that people who are not geniuses don't feel they have the permission therefore to be creative.

• 33:54Speaker 08

  Well, creativity and genius are separate topics. And there are many examples of geniuses.

• 34:02Speaker 08

  Who were not particularly creative. And of course, on the other side, there's a lot of creative people out there, a lot of creativity. There are people who are just phenomenally witty in conversations at parties. There are people who can put together an amazing recipe from just random scraps of stuff available in the pantry. And that all counts as creativity.

• 34:31Stephen J. Dubner?

  Right. If you personally had to pick that you could only be good at one, would you be very creative or a genius?

• 34:39Speaker 08

  I would probably pick being creative because I think being creative is much more fun than just being a mere genius. You know, what do you do as a mere genius? Kind of wallow in your geniushood?

• 34:56Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's not to say the genius doesn't exist or that certified geniuses haven't come up with some pretty amazing things.

• 35:03Speaker 12

  Well, I do think that there's certain geniuses that truly can make mental leaps the rest of us can't.

• 35:11Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's Walter Isaacson, who teaches history at Tulane and has written several bestselling biographies of big, big thinkers.

• 35:18Speaker 12

  That could be the way Einstein understood after a while that time is relative depending on your state of motion. This is something no physicist had ever even really thought of. But likewise, you can have a genius just in ordinary things. When Steve Jobs figured out the iPod and how to have it be a simple, sleek, personal product that would put a thousand songs in your pocket in its own small way, that was a leap of genius as well.

• 35:48Stephen J. Dubner?

  On the other hand, there are some people widely considered to be creative geniuses. Hello, I'm Elvis Costello, and you're listening to Freakonomics Radio. A songwriter, for instance, whose melodies and lyrics are practically beyond belief. That's a pretty good compliment.

• 36:16Stephen J. Dubner?

  I think everyone who knows your music, including me, would consider you an extraordinarily creative person. You're the kind of person that people use the phrase "creative genius" on.

• 36:28Speaker 13

  That's really crazy. It's... I think of myself, if I think of... I don't really think in terms of definition, like a name tag. But if you actually ask me, I say, "I was a worker of a kind. I work at what I do." And then there might be moments of inspiration that visit you unexpectedly.

• 36:51Stephen J. Dubner?

  Can you give an example?

• 36:53Speaker 13

  Well, any song arriving is a mysterious sort of thing. I mean, it can be, it can range from carrying around a phrase in a notebook for four years before it joins up with some other thoughts, or, you know, a line of melody that seems to bring it to life.

• 37:14Speaker 13

  And allows you to kind of, you know, to represent something that you want to share with people. Or a song can just appear, the whole thing, the words and music, time stops and...

• 37:24Stephen J. Dubner?

  Really? That's happening?

• 37:25Speaker 13

  Yeah, it's... Oh, yeah.

• 37:33Stephen J. Dubner?

  I'll leave it up to you to decide whether Elvis Costello belongs on the creative genius list. In any case, there's one characteristic that we almost universally associate with such people, that they're tortured. Either they burn so bright that they flame out early and die young, or they spend long lives racked by schizophrenia or depression, or at least garden variety neurosis. Maybe the most famous, most defining example of this is Vincent Van Gogh, with his nervous breakdowns and self-mutilation and eventual suicide.

• 38:12Stephen J. Dubner?

  Dean Simonton has looked at the incidence of mental illness in creative types through the ages. And there is a correlation between creativity and mental illness, but it depends on the kind of creativity you're talking about.

• 38:26Speaker 08

  There's a relationship between how much constraint the creative genius has to operate under and their tendency towards mental illness. A scientist operates under a lot of constraints. A scientist has to come up with theories that are consisting with the facts. It has to be logically coherent. It has to fit in with what previous scientists have been doing and so forth. And in our culture, artists don't operate that way, particularly since the Romantic period. Anything goes. But there are, in times and places, where the arts have extremely high constraints imposed on them.

• 39:09Speaker 08

  Japanese haiku, for example, is a very, very constrained form. You have a certain number of syllables to work with. You also have a certain number of themes that are considered to be more appropriate for haiku. So what's interesting is that as you get into domains that are very, very constrained, mental illness tends to be very rare. And then if you go into more and more unconstrained forms of expression, then you also do it at risk of having more mental illness, as well as having all sorts of horrible experiences in childhood or adolescence. And there's a study published on this, where you can

• 39:53Speaker 08

  compare Nobel Prizes in Physics with Nobel Prizes in Literature, and they're not cut from the same cloth at all.

• 40:01Stephen J. Dubner?

  Yeah, I think if you look at American winners in literature, most of them are alcoholics, right?

• 40:06Speaker 08

  Yeah, alcoholics. They often dropped out of school. They had tremendous ups and downs in their education, if they even finished a formal education. Whereas the physicists came from perfect family backgrounds, professional families. Nothing happened. Nobody died.

• 40:31Stephen J. Dubner?

  Excellence in physics is building within a domain that must be mastered first, and that requires a certain set of resources and skills and ability to color within the lines, yes?

• 40:41Speaker 08

  Right, and you're expected to stay within the box, because the box actually defines what is science.

• 40:49Stephen J. Dubner?

  So interesting.

• 40:50Speaker 08

  I mean, I published an article in Nature a few years ago, but they wrote their own title, and they made it deliberately provocative. They said, "After Einstein, genius is extinct." Whoa. And immediately, I got inundated with all sorts of mail, emails mostly, from people. Some who agreed with me.

• 41:14Stephen J. Dubner?

  And did you take credit for writing the headline in those cases where they agreed?

• 41:18Speaker 08

  Yeah, right, exactly. But others wrote and said, "What about me?" You know? And they said, "I'm a genius, and I'm after Einstein. In fact, I've actually disproven everything that Einstein got credit for, and I'm still waiting to get my Nobel Prize." And they'll publish this stuff on the web, usually their own personal website, and you look at it, and it violates all the constraints of science. I mean, a basic thing is, you have to obey high school algebra, for example. I know that seems, you know, really obsessive, but you have to obey high school algebra.

• 41:57Stephen J. Dubner?

  Well, I mean, we're laughing about it, but on the other hand, in language, let's say, right? You can break language, you can go way outside the bounds of formal English or any other language, and it can be considered poetry, but I see that science is a different ballpark.

• 42:12Speaker 08

  Right. And in the case of poetry, it's actually kind of astonishing how far you can push the edge.

• 42:22Speaker 14

  Vacuo sacerdote aere morsus.

• 42:25Speaker 08

  You know, like Ezra Pound, for example.

• 42:26Speaker 14

  Turned from the ophor par jacmar the straight head, Messalina.

• 42:33Speaker 08

  You know, really pushing the edge of intelligibility.

• 42:40Stephen J. Dubner?

  Simonton looked at the prevalence of mental illness in different types of creative people. Visual artists and writers were on the high end of the scale, with poets the most pronounced. Eighty-seven percent of them experienced some kind of mental disorder. How does that compare to the general population? According to one widely accepted study, around 46% of Americans experienced some sort of mental disorder during their lifetimes. So artists and writers are considerably higher than average, but Simonton found that scientists have a considerably lower tendency for mental disorder, only around 28%. And if you include all creative types in the tally, Simonton found that they have lower rates of

• 43:24Stephen J. Dubner?

  mental illness than non-creative people. Creative behavior is, in fact, often a marker for good mental health. So if you're looking for some magic formula for the relationship between creativity and mental illness.

• 43:37Speaker 12

  I don't think there's one formula for that.

• 43:41Stephen J. Dubner?

  Walter Isaacson again.

• 43:42Speaker 12

  You know, Ben Franklin was a happy, well-adjusted kid, even though he was a runaway from his brother who tried to keep him as an apprentice. Leonardo da Vinci was pretty tortured, you know, had all sorts of manic periods of his life where he was both depressed and delayed it. Somebody like Einstein, deeply focused. Steve Jobs had both demons and angels inside of his head. So I don't think you can make one blanket pattern to say creative people have some special, you know, mental challenges or abilities.

• 44:32Stephen J. Dubner?

  Let's go back to Vincent Van Gogh, who's arguably the model of the tortured artist. There have been many posthumous attempts to diagnose Van Gogh. Among the theories are manic depression, schizophrenia, and epilepsy.

• 44:45Stephen J. Dubner?

  Many people, when they look at the fantastic swirls and the vibrant yellows and blues in Van Gogh's Starry Night, they see a picture of madness itself. But what if the arrow is moving in the opposite direction? Consider this: Van Gogh was in and out of hospitals during the final years of his life. It's very likely that his doctors treated his epilepsy with digitalis, an extract of the foxglove plant. He even made a painting of one of his doctors posing with sprigs of foxglove. Well, one of the side effects of digitalis? The color yellow overwhelms other shades, and swirly halos can appear around objects.

• 45:29Stephen J. Dubner?

  So it may be that Van Gogh's paintings were more influenced by the cure than the disease. Or maybe not. It's impossible to know, in part because our understanding of the mind has changed so much since then. Some recent research suggests that highly creative people often have what's called cognitive disinhibition. Basically, they lack the filter that keeps you from getting sensory overload just by walking down the street, which means they're constantly being pinged by random stimuli. In theory, this could help you notice things that most people ignore. Cognitive disinhibition, not surprisingly, is also associated with mental illnesses like schizophrenia.

• 46:12Stephen J. Dubner?

  So it would seem that the line between pathology and creativity, at least in some cases, can be quite fine.

• 46:19Speaker 15

  There are a lot of parallels between fiction writing and being schizophrenic.

• 46:25Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's Jennifer Egan.

• 46:27Speaker 15

  And I'm a novelist and a journalist.

• 46:29Stephen J. Dubner?

  Egan won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for her 2010 novel, A Visit from the Goon Squad. Her brother Graham was an artist who had schizophrenia and died by suicide in 2016.

• 46:40Speaker 15

  He heard voices all the time. But it wasn't the way I hear voices, although he would, you know, he was a very funny guy.

• 46:50Stephen J. Dubner?

  He joked with you that you got paid for it, and he was tormented by it.

• 46:53Speaker 15

  Exactly. I mean-- So, you know, he heard voices intrusively as if there were a radio on in his head and it really kept him from being able to concentrate. His voices would speak to him in very cruel ways and that made it very hard for him to function. I mean, it's, it's, it just boggles the mind to think about what that would really be like day in and day out. He was sort of like in his own private war all the time and you could really see it. I mean, he looked like he'd just come back from a tour of Iraq. He was drawn and he would be exhausted. So, in that way, you know, I don't have any of that to deal with.

• 47:32Speaker 15

  I feel so lucky that my brain mostly seems to work as it should. Talk about a gift. I mean, a lot of people don't have that.

• 47:43Stephen J. Dubner?

  Do you feel that the kind of cliche throughout history of, you know, the tortured artists, the mentally tortured artists, do you think it's overblown?

• 47:49Speaker 15

  I don't know. I, I, I guess it's probably not. I mean, it's easy to romanticize that vision, but that, that romantic picture comes from somewhere. And, you know, I mean, I am lucky enough to be on a fairly even keel, but I've also had a lot of therapy. I mean, we have advantages now in terms of mental health that people didn't have 100 years ago, or really even 50 years ago. I mean, even now, honestly, if my brother were a young man now, becoming symptomatic for the first time, he would have options that he didn't have then. And so maybe, maybe artists don't have to live that way now, in the way that they did.

• 48:31Stephen J. Dubner?

  A lot of people worry that if they need treatment, including medication, a lot of creative people worry that it will, you know, quote, "kill their creativity, change their creativity, change the way they think about things."

• 48:46Speaker 15

  Well, I would tend to think that it's the opposite, that the craziness is actually getting in the way of the creativity more than fueling it. I mean, in my brother's case, it was so stark. I mean, he was stark, raving mad without medication, absolutely out of his mind. And with medication, he still heard voices all the time, but he basically understood that they weren't real. So for him, it was the choice between having some kind of a life and having absolutely no life. So I guess I really resist the romanticization of mental illness. You know, Virginia Woolf on medication, if I had to guess, and of course, I have no way of knowing, would have

• 49:29Speaker 15

  done all the wonderful things she did and not committed suicide and been able to do more.

• 49:38Stephen J. Dubner?

  So, one thing we can say about creativity is that the connection between it and mental illness is far more nuanced than the stereotype, as is the case with most stereotypes. But what about the more general stereotype of the highly creative person? Essentially, the idea that they are a select few. The idea that perhaps they're simply born that way, and that we muggles should content ourselves with admiring their output, perhaps envying it a bit, but that we should generally just keep out of their way. Is that really the best way to think about creativity? Or should we all strive to be creative? That's a question we put to everyone we've been interviewing

• 50:21Stephen J. Dubner?

  for this series. Here's Theresa Amabule, who's spent her career studying the topic.

• 50:26Speaker 04

  Should we all strive to be creative? Yes, we should, because doing things differently in ways that work is the only way that human progress happens.

• 50:39Stephen J. Dubner?

  All right, then. Who's not in favor of human progress? Which means that all of us, in our way, on some dimension, have reason to sharpen our creative abilities. So how do we do this?

• 50:53Stephen J. Dubner?

  That will be one of the preoccupations of this series, but don't expect easy answers.

• 50:58Speaker 08

  Too many people want a one-size-fits-all. What do I need to do to be creative? And I'm afraid there's no one-size-fits-all.

• 51:09Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's Dean Simonton, and here's Walter Isaacson.

• 51:12Speaker 12

  I do resist the type of books that say, Seven Easy Lessons to Being Creative, or The 14 Secrets to Innovative Leadership. I don't think you can distill everything into a list like that, which is why it's useful to read the biographies of different people.

• 51:30Stephen J. Dubner?

  Let's put aside for the moment that Isaacson has written biographies of people like Benjamin Franklin, and Steve Jobs, and Leonardo da Vinci. I don't think he's just trying to sell more books here.

• 51:41Speaker 12

  The leadership skills of a Benjamin Franklin came from bringing people together, finding common ground, and being very civil in his discourse when he tried to create compromises necessary to make the Constitution. That was very different from the leadership style of a Steve Jobs, who drove people crazy, but also drove them to do things they didn't know they'd be able to do. So I think it's useful to look at different creative leaders, and then, after you've done so, look inside yourself and to say, I'm better off being more like Ben Franklin, or better off being more like Leonardo da Vinci, trying to mix art and science. Or I'm better off being like Steve Jobs,

• 52:26Speaker 12

  driving a team crazy, but driving them to do things they didn't know they could do. And you can understand your own skills by comparing them to what great innovators and creative people have done in the past.

• 52:40Stephen J. Dubner?

  All right, that makes sense. Given the vagaries of our topic, it also makes sense to address it both systematically and individually, interviewing creativity scholars, as well as lots of creatives themselves. Sound good?

• 52:56Speaker 08

  I mean, that would be too intriguing an opportunity not to say yes.

• 53:00Stephen J. Dubner?

  As these episodes unspool, we'll hear how artists come up with their ideas.

• 53:05Speaker 08

  There are some people who... They're only creative in the morning. There's others that can only work late at night after everybody's gone to bed. There's others that have a cue, like Schiller, who had to have the smell of rotten apples. And so when he felt like being creative, he'd pull out a rotten apple.

• 53:28Stephen J. Dubner?

  We'll explore failure, of course. The inevitability, the usefulness, the anxiety.

• 53:34Speaker 05

  It is a constant struggle with a very clear feeling that I am out of gas every day, every day.

• 53:44Stephen J. Dubner?

  You'll hear what it feels like to be in the moment of a scientific discovery.

• 53:49Speaker 11

  It's a kind of thrill that you never forget.

• 53:53Stephen J. Dubner?

  We'll explore the cold, practical realities of being creative for a living. So you kind of sit together, you make a plan, you make a business plan, and you go for it or you don't. And don't forget, creativity is not always a solo project. Sometimes you have to play nice with others.

• 54:09Speaker 05

  I'm listening to the bass, the drums are playing, they're playing at two different times. The drums is in six, the bass is in four. They're interacting with me.

• 54:20Stephen J. Dubner?

  So where should we start?

• 54:22Speaker 05

  I mean, Ai Weiwei is a giant.

• 54:25Stephen J. Dubner?

  That, again, is David Galinson, the rare economist who studies art and creativity.

• 54:30Speaker 05

  Ai Weiwei is not only the most important painter in the world, he's the most important person in art. I mean, because he's done something that the painting hasn't done really since Guernica and really since the 19th century. I mean, you know, for centuries, painters made an important contribution to public life. Ai Weiwei has changed the world. I mean, Andy Warhol, I always say, would have given his eye teeth to be arrested by the government for his art. But there's no way that could happen in our system. Ai Weiwei has, you know, with his art, he has, you know, made a contribution to political discourse. This is, I mean, this is a unique person in art almost in the last 100 years.

• 55:15Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay, Professor Galinson, it's a deal. The Chinese-born artist and activist Ai Weiwei now lives in Berlin, and we go there to speak with him.

• 55:24Speaker 16

  My name is Ai Weiwei. I'm 61 years old. I was born 1957 in Beijing, China.

• 55:33Speaker 16

  But the year I was born, my father was exiled.

• 55:37Stephen J. Dubner?

  Weiwei grew up in a prison camp, his family having been declared enemies of the state. How does that kind of upbringing influence the creative spirit? Coming up next time on Freakonomics Radio, we'll get into the origin stories of our creatives. What are the early conditions that predict creative output? How well are schools equipped to encourage kids' creativity? And what can parents do to encourage creativity?

• 56:04Speaker 01

  Did you say that's a small topic?

• 56:06Stephen J. Dubner?

  Yeah.

• 56:06Speaker 01

  Oh, my God. That's an epic. I think that's the epic topic. There's no bigger topic than the family.

• 56:14Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's next time on Freakonomics Radio.

• 56:19Stephen J. Dubner?

  Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Dubner Productions. This episode was produced by Stephanie Tam and Matt Fraschica with help from Harry Huggins. Our staff also includes Alison Kreglo, Greg Rippon, Greg Rosalsky, and Zach Lipinski. Our theme song is "Mr. Fortune" by The Hitchhikers. All the other music was composed by Luis Guerra. You can subscribe to Freakonomics Radio on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. The entire archive is available on the Stitcher app or at Freakonomics.com, where we also publish transcripts and show notes and much more. If you want the entire archive ad-free, plus lots of bonus episodes, go to StitcherPremium.com/Freakonomics. We can also be found on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn,

• 57:02Stephen J. Dubner?

  or via email at [email protected]. Freakonomics Radio also plays on most of your better NPR stations, so check your local station for details. As always, thanks for listening.

• 57:23Speaker 06

  Stitcher.

• 57:29Stephen J. Dubner?

  Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by Ozempic. Innovation happens through rethinking what's possible. And when it comes to GLP-1s, Ozempic pill does just that. Learn more about Ozempic semaglutide tablets, 4 in 9mg, by calling 1-833-OZEMPIC or visit Ozempic.com to view the medication guide and ask your doctor what's possible with FDA-approved Ozempic pill.

• 58:00Stephen J. Dubner?

  Freakonomics Radio is sponsored by Southern Company. The world and its energy needs are always changing. Southern Company's commitment to meeting this demand stays the same. That's because Southern Company believes energy is more than a utility. It's what powers possibilities. So they are looking ahead and investing $80 billion in infrastructure upgrades and are committed to fueling growth in ways that benefit all customers so that reliable and affordable energy is accessible for generations to come. Go to southerncompany.com to learn more. Southern Company, building the future of energy.

• 58:38Speaker 17

  Sometimes a little treat is your daily dose of joy. With the new Hershey's Creme Bars, you'll discover your new happy place. It's classic Hershey's Milk Chocolate, layered with rich salted caramel or afogato creme. Bite into a more textured, more flavorful sweet treat worth talking about. Try the new Hershey's Salted Caramel or Afogato Creme Bars wherever you shop for snacks and choose happiness with every bite.

• 59:06Speaker 18

  This episode is brought to you by Charles Schwab. Is there a right time to sell a stock? Are you taking the right risks with your portfolio? Financial decisions can be tricky, and often, your own cognitive and emotional biases can lead you astray. Financial Decoder, an original podcast from Charles Schwab, can help. Join host Mark Reapy as he offers practical solutions to help overcome the cognitive and emotional biases that may affect your investing decisions. Listen at schwab.com/financialdecoder.