The July/August issue of The Atlantic offers an unusual opportunity to compare different approaches to understanding what science journalists would normally think of as their story: What is the source of creativity? Where does creativity reside? And how might we encourage it?
The magazine, which The Atlantic calls The Ideas Issue, features three articles on the nature of creativity: One by a cultural critic with an interest in psychology and psychiatry; one by a neuroscientist; and one by a group of journalists. The magazine even features three covers–one after the other on the front of the magazine–to announce the three stories.
The stories overlap. The journalism piece is an amalgam of news and science. The piece by the cultural critic draws on journalism and biography. And the neuroscience piece draws on biography and literature. But they are distinctly different, and it’s not entirely possible to reconcile them.
“For centuries, the myth of the lone genius has towered over us, its shadow obscuring the way creative work really gets done,” writes the cultural critic, Joshua Wolf Shenk. Our “cultural obsession with the individual has obscured the power of the creative pair.” The piece is an excerpt from his book, Powers of Two: Finding the Essence of Innovation in Creative Pairs. This excerpt deals with a rather well known creative pair: John Lennon and Paul McCartney.
It’s a fascinating story, although much of it is drawn from biographies and journalism written by others. Shenk retells interesting stories about the way the two composed, feeding off of each other’s lines. They were also, he reports, a rather odd couple: Paul was organized, methodical, soft-spoken, and polite. John was chaotic, sometimes inarticulate, impatient, and rude. And yet the combination of the two of them seemed to produce something else entirely, as Shenk writes:
“John needed Paul’s attention to detail and persistence,” Cynthia Lennon, John’s first wife, said. “Paul needed John’s anarchic, lateral thinking.” Paul and John seemed to be almost archetypal embodiments of order and disorder. The ancient Greeks gave form to these two sides of human nature in Apollo, who stood for the rational and the self-disciplined, and Dionysus, who represented the spontaneous and the emotional.
I am a great fan of the work of Lennon and McCartney, and I ate up the stories about how they worked. But I’m not so sure about Shenk’s central thesis. Yes, two can often be greater than one; many writers have learned that work produced with a good editor is better than anything they might have done alone. I’ve had that experience myself. But have we closed our eyes to the power of two, as Shenk proposes? I’m not sure. Lennon and McCartney are not even the only songwriters to demonstrate the power of two. I think we recognize it in Rodgers and Hart, George and Ira Gershwin, and Bacharach and David–even in Gerry Goffin and Carole King.
Shenk is a perceptive critic and writes beautifully, however, and he is worth your time even if you don’t entirely accept his thesis. And if you’re a Beatles fan, the end of the excerpt will break your heart. Shenk reports that in interviews and on stage, John and Paul had each, separately, made remarks suggesting they might get together again. They seemed at least to be removing possible barriers to further collaboration. But of course John’s murder on Dec. 8, 1980 put a tragic end to that.
The neuroscience article was written by Nancy C. Andreasen, the chair of the department of psychiatry at the University of Iowa, a distinguished scientist who is often in the news. She is a rather unusual person herself–she earned a Ph.D. in renaissance literature before dropping out to attend medical school and become a scientist. As she explains:
I’d written about the poet John Donne was accepted for publication by Princeton University Press. Instead of feeling elated, I felt almost ashamed and self-indulgent. Who would this book help? What if I channeled the effort and energy I’d invested in it into a career that might save people’s lives? Within a month, I made the decision to become a research scientist, perhaps a medical doctor. I entered the University of Iowa’s medical school, in a class that included only five other women, and began working with patients suffering from schizophrenia and mood disorders. I was drawn to psychiatry because at its core is the most interesting and complex organ in the human body: the brain.
She has devoted much of her research to the link between mental illness and creativity, and she has done it by studying the most creative and accomplished people she would find–including Kurt Vonnegut, George Lucas, the mathematician William Thurston, Jane Smiley, and a smattering of Nobel laureates she doesn’t name.
She first looked at the link between creativity and IQ and found there wasn’t one–or not much of one. Creative people are smart, but not among those with the very highest IQs. She quickly found extensive links, however, between creativity and mental illness. James Joyce, the author of, among other things, “near-psychotic neologisms” in Finnegan’s Wake, had a son with schizophrenia and was himself “on the schizophrenia spectrum,” she writes. Einstein had a son with schizophrenia and “himself displayed some of the social and personal ineptitudes that can characterize the illness.”
In one of her earlier studies, she determined that 80 percent of her writer-subjects had had a mood disturbance at some point in their lives, compared to only 30 percent in the control group. And she eventually came to the conclusion that creative people are “better at recognizing relationships, making associations and connections, and seeing things in an original way—seeing things that others cannot see.”
Andreasen, like Shenk, draws on biography and literature to help make her case, partly because the science comes so slowly. Her current study, aimed at discovering how creative people forge links, has so far enrolled only 13 subjects and 13 controls. But her approach is distinctly different from Shenk’s. She’s looking for insight and understanding on brain scans; he’s looking for them through a critic’s lens.
These two articles are packaged with a series of short pieces by journalists that briefly describe examples of creativity. Here we dispense with biography and literature and focus on news. Among those who appear here are the film director Richard Linklater; Isabelle Olsson, the lead designer of Google Glass; Beyoncé, the illustrator Wendy MacNaughton; and a landscape-architecture firm in Singapore.
These brief journalistic outings don’t carry anywhere near the heft of the Andreasen and Shenk pieces, but they remind us that creativity is more common than we might think. Whether Beyoncé should appear in the same package with Lennon and McCartney is a debate I’ll leave to someone else, but the briefs remind us that creativity didn’t die with Lennon, Joyce or Einstein.
The Atlantic’s stories are themselves a study of different approaches to the creative exploration of creativity. I’d like to say that the three approaches here combine to form a whole great than the parts, but I’m not sure they fit together quite that well. All the same, the stories are fascinating, and a reminder that even crafting a blog post or a spot news story allows at least a little opportunity for creativity, too–if we choose to take it.
-Paul Raeburn
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