Creativity Through Connectivity
Photo by Hunter Harritt on Unsplash
Successful thinking results in insight that is sometimes described as a “lightbulb moment.” It is viewed as something akin to a writer’s muse which comes —if it comes at all—on its own terms.
You can learn how to think deeply, but the process is not a checklist nor a linear stepwise-process. Learning to think comes through the cultivation of dispositions which become priorities. Thinking at the root is a quest for patterns and tellingly our brains are extraordinary at detecting and creating patterns.
Patterns fall into two broad categories: concepts and connections. Concepts are perceived regularities in objects or events. Concepts are anchored to a large number of additional concepts through connective linkages that spell out the nature of the relationship between each pair of concepts. This blog and the accompanying podcast are the first salvo this season of guidance about how to excel in the creative connection-making that lies at the heart of lightbulb moments.
Here is an approximate transcript of the podcast Creativity Through Connectivity:
In the last two podcasts I’ve emphasized our individual formation of the patterns that we call concepts. Concepts aren’t the only patterns, however. Concepts are always linked to other concepts through an elaborate network of connections formed by recognizing even more patterns.
The human brain has the ideal architecture to form detailed conceptual frameworks. Our brains have about 100 billion neurons, which is about the same as the number of stars in the Milky Way. Each neuron connects with other neurons through ten thousand synapses. This means the human brain has 10e15 synaptic connections—that’s a thousand trillion synapses!
The extraordinary power of connection-making led Steve Jobs to famously declare “Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it, they just saw something.”
Join me today as we zero in on the kind of seeing that leads to transformative connection-making.
We are in that season of the year variously called autumn, fall, or pumpkin season. If you’re into all things pumpkin, you might be interested in knowing that saving your jack-o-lantern to make a pumpkin pie is sure to disappoint. Perhaps you noticed when you cleaned out the seeds on the interior of your pumpkin how stringy and fibrous the flesh is. That’s not what you want in a pie. Pumpkin flesh is also watery with nary a hint of sweetness. But you protest, I love pumpkin pie and it has none of the flaws you describe. I agree, but the reason is that no one makes pies from jack-o-lantern pumpkins—at least not more than once.
Baked pumpkin treats come almost exclusively from canned pumpkin and Libby’s which makes over 80% of the canned pumpkin in the U.S. has their own proprietary cultivar of the Dickinson pumpkin which is tan on the outside. There was a viral rumor on Facebook 5-6 years back and repeated often since then that canned pumpkin was a blend of squashes and not pumpkin at all.
Image by Kristy Marett from Pixabay
Sorting through this will require both concepts and connections. The concept of a pumpkin is fraught because there is not universal agreement about how to define the category. Your pattern that envisions orange spheres is not binding. In fact, you’ve probably increasingly noticed pumpkin-like items, some even white showing up alongside orange traditional pumpkins. Not all these pretenders can be written off as gourds.
Image by Ally White from Pixabay
Pumpkins are classified in the botanical genus Cucurbita. This genus contains a variety of fruits—yes pumpkins are fruits—including cantaloupe, cucumbers, and squash. Cucurbita moschata includes butternut squash as well as the Dickinson pumpkin of canned pumpkin fame. Most botanists would put this kind of pumpkin in quotes maintaining that only Cucurbita pepo which includes standard field pumpkins should be called pumpkins.
Since 1957 the FDA has allowed squash with certain properties to be canned and labeled as pumpkin. Dickinson pumpkin might really be a squash and the FDA would be OK with the pumpkin label.
Did you notice the need to branch out from the concept of a pumpkin to try to resolve this? Properties such as the color and firmness of the flesh, the lack of stringiness, sweetness, etc. need to be invoked and these are all additional concepts. The pumpkin concept is not an encyclopedia entry containing everything there is to say about pumpkins. Our concepts recognize a minimal set of invariant attributes. We link them to other concepts to develop them in specific ways.
When we link a concept with another concept, we specify the relationship between the two. Linked concepts form propositions. The linkage may indicate hierarchy. Fruit is a higher-level concept (that is it is more inclusive) than squash or pumpkin. There are many kinds of fruit. Our mental linkage may be simple, i.e., any plant that is sweet is a fruit. But that won’t withstand scrutiny. Sugar cane and sugar beets both contain lots of sugar, yet both are vegetables. The core concept of a fruit is a plant that produces a ripened ovary that contains seeds. An apple would be a good example. Ovary, ripening, and seeds are all concepts that link with and serve to specify the concept of a fruit. All true fruits, meet these criteria. These commonalities link avocados and apples, strawberries, and squash to fruit regardless of how egregiously this violates our “common-sense” categories.
Precision in thinking mandates that we do not settle for common-sense categories. We must be open to questions that challenge our existing categories. The stronger the linkage between concepts the more powerful the resulting proposition will be as a tool of thinking. The most powerful propositions are those where the linkage invokes causality. I call these principles and I’ll set aside one of the remaining podcasts this season to explore them.
I need to be clear that it is the process of forming (and questioning) propositions that makes them durable. We have been conditioned educationally to think of learning as collecting information for recall. Collecting propositions is not knowledge and it does not require understanding. It is only through an intentional pursuit of patterns both through concept formation and concept connection that understanding is generated.
The habit of mind that actively seeks connections often finds helpful analogies in unexpected places. The mind that says “this is in some senses like that” demonstrates its cognitive health by leaving no stone unturned. There are more stones to turn when we have Explorer’s Mind as I detailed in the early podcasts this season.
Steve Jobs emphasized both deep understanding and broad experience in the design process. Here he is in 1996: “To design something really well, you have to get it. … It takes a passionate commitment to really thoroughly understand something, chew it up, not just quickly swallow it. Most people don't take the time to do that.” Parenthetically the passion to pursue thorough understanding is the essence of deep learning. I think that’s your commitment and it’s why you listen to this podcast.
Jobs continues his thought: “Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That's because they were able to connect experiences they've had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they've had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people.
Unfortunately, that's too rare a commodity.”
Broad experience and being thoughtful about those experiences are key to creativity in any kind of problem-solving. Analogies import understanding from one area and bring it to bear on a very different area. Let’s take something called the Central Dogma of Molecular Biology which lays out the functional relationship between DNA and Protein.
Most people know that DNA is code. It is the code that specifies the physical attributes of any living system. With that starting point, consider another type of code—an architect’s plans which specify the structural attributes of a house.
If we were to copy the architect’s plans verbatim, that would be what cells do with their code in preparation for cell division so that each of the two offspring cells have their own copy of the entire code. How do cells produce full copies of their codes? Through a process called replication. Replication in general use refers to making a full and exact copy of something.
If we go to the building site where the house designed by the architect is going to be erected, we find various subcontractors executing parts of the overall plan. They need only part of the plan. We call these blueprints. There is one for the site grading, another for the foundation, separate blueprints for plumbing or electrical, etc.
The cell does this as well. It produces a copy of a gene or two at a time. These copies are not DNA, but a related molecule called RNA (specifically messenger RNA) that lasts only long enough for the code to be used. The process of limited copying is called transcription. Transcription in a courtroom is an account of what was admissible into evidence, usually in the form of text.
The cell has machinery that builds a protein from what the messenger RNA specified. This process is called translation because proteins are constructed from different building blocks than RNA. We use the term translation when we move the message from one language to another. In the building analogy the blueprints are turned into the specified physical structure consisting of concrete, metal, wood, etc. It is here that the code is turned into a functional reality.
So, the order in the Central Dogma of Molecular Biology is DNA to RNA to Protein and the processes in order of execution are replication, transcription, translation. Students are tempted to memorize these basics instead of taking the time to create the requisite network of linked concepts. Memorizing propositions like these leaves them without the knowledge foundation necessary to understand molecular biology.
Metaphor and simile are commonly used to illuminate a narrative or an argument in a compact fashion. You probably recognize that parables (often defined as an earthly story with a heavenly meaning) are a type of analogy used regularly by Jesus.
The relationship between concepts through linkage with other concepts has been likened by Joseph Novak (the father of concept mapping) to the relationship between individual atoms linked to other atoms in a molecule. The propositional linkages would then correspond to chemical bonds. (Novak, Learning, Creating, and Using Knowledge, 2nd ed. p. 45) Propositions are built one linkage at a time as the individual explores concepts with plausible relationships. Some of these related concepts can be suggested as logical inferences and validated or invalidated using deductive logic. These would take the form of if P then Q where P is a hypothetical contention and Q is the conclusion. In our earlier pumpkin example this could look like “If standard field pumpkin flesh (aka jack-o-lantern pumpkins) is the ingredient used in pumpkin pie, then you can harvest this flesh and use it to make a tasty pumpkin pie.” If you ever try this (I have), you will find it is not true. The resulting pie suffers from many defects among which is that it is insipid!
Inferences are tools of creative exploration of your conceptual space. They are the means through which you find a home for your concepts. I call this process negotiation. Negotiation inherently involves give-and-take. In conceptual negotiation I explore whether a relationship exists between two concepts and, if so, what the nature of that relationship is. There are many types of relationships within propositions, so this is decidedly nonlinear and there is no helpful checklist to exhaust. It is the “creative scrabbling” or “imaginative casting about” that epistemologist Esther Meek characterized as the invariable prelude to an “aha” moment. (A Little Manual for Knowing, p. 53)
Scrabbling involves looking for clues. Clues may be pointers, but clues may also be red herrings. Clues are often small things that may be nothing; but then again, they may enable the moment of insight. They may be decisive in cracking the case. One thing is certain: the more clues you collect and evaluate the more likely you are to see the relationships that form powerful propositions. This is what Steve Jobs meant when he fingered creativity as due to having more experiences. But Jobs also said that creativity involves thorough understanding of an idea and that takes time. Surely thorough understanding is not less than securing the logical home for an idea by constructing its crucial connections.
One helpful arena for clues is visualization. The human brain is heavily invested in visualization, and this includes the ability to generate visual models as hypotheticals. The German organic chemist August Kekulé claimed he visualized the ring structure of benzene after dreaming of a snake eating its tail back in 1865. Ring structures were a conceptual breakthrough for organic chemistry and many have been discovered to be reality.
I taught molecular biology for decades and I encouraged my students to study the accurately crafted figures in the text to probe their own understanding. These detailed figures and the animations which followed over the years proved invaluable to students in exploring logical causative relationships within cellular machines. Students were not accustomed to analyzing illustrations but tended to view them as a way to spice up the verbal flow of the text or a means of reducing the number of sentences necessary to develop an idea. To emphasize the power of visualization, my teaching methodology consisted of using detailed illustrations as slides and asking students questions in class that required them to make inferences from the drawings or animations. Reasoning from a well-crafted illustration opened their minds.
To use a common parallel, think of an item that you’ve purchased that euphemistically says, “some assembly required.” Perhaps this is a piece of Ikea furniture like a desk. I know some people freeze when they see the instructions and some even hire someone else to assemble it. Imagine what it would be like, however, if there were no diagrams, only text and numbered packages of pieces and fasteners. The job of assembly would be exponentially more difficult without a visual aid!
Life itself is the ultimate cognitive aid. Physical items occur in a context. Their physicality means they are three dimensional and present all sorts of sensory information to process in proscribing the concept and linking it to your existing concepts. You are embedded in opportunities to forge connections that lead to insight.