Table of Contents Title Page Table of Contents Copyright Acknowledgments Preface Epigraph Rethinking Thinking Schooling the Imagination Observing Imaging Abstracting Recognizing Patterns Forming Patterns Analogizing Body Thinking Empathizing Dimensional Thinking Modeling Playing Transforming Synthesizing Synthesizing Education Notes Bibliography Minds-on Resources Illustration Credits Index About the Author Copyright © 1999 by Robert and Michèle Root-Bernstein All rights reserved For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003. www.hmhbooks.com The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows: Root-Bernstein, Robert Scott. Sparks of genius : the thirteen thinking tools of the world’s most creative people / Robert and Michèle Root-Bernstein. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-395-90771-3 1. Creative thinking. I. Root-Bernstein, Michèle. II. Title. BF408 R66 2000 153.3'5—dc21 99-048005 eISBN 978-0-547-52589-1 v1.0813 “Burning the Small Dead,” by Gary Snyder, from The Back Country, copyright © 1968 by Gary Snyder. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. “1(a,” copyright © 1958, 1986, 1991 by the Trustees for the E. E. Cummings Trust, from Complete Poems: 1904–1962 by E. E. Cummings. Edited by George J. Firmage. Reprinted by permission of Liverlight Publishing Corporation. Last stanza of “Two Tramps in Mud Time” from The Poetry of Robert Frost, edited by Edward Connery Lathem. Copyright © 1936 by Robert Frost. © 1964 by Lesley Frost Ballantine, © 1969 by Henry Holt and Company, LLC. Reprinted by permission of Henry Holt and Company, LLC. Acknowledgments OVER THE LAST TWENTY YEARS many people have encouraged, influenced, and supported our exploration of the imagination and its tools for thinking. We thank all of them, and particularly Robert Gray, the late Raffi Amram, Tom Rodriguez, Diane Newman, and Steve Fraser. During the more recent writing of this book, we have been greatly helped by many persons staffing museums, libraries, associations, and publishing houses, especially Janet Hicks of the Artists Rights Society in New York. Many individuals have been generous with their materials, among them Bill Cambry, Patrick Dillon, Gerd Fischer, Nat Friedman, Steve Heidemann, Benoir Mandelbrojt, Ron Meyer, Desmond Morris, Claes Oldenburg, Roger Penrose, Vernon Reynolds, Helen Samuels, Doris Schattschneider, Todd Siler, and Ken Snelson. Among the many colleagues with whom we have discussed tools for thinking, the arts in education, and arts- sciences interactions, we wish to mention Sharon Friedler, Julian Gresser, Paul Heltne, Scott Shanklin-Peterson, and Mark Slavkin. A number of people kindly read and commented on the manuscript. Thank you, Mort and Maurine Bernstein, Alan Brody, Stephen Edelglass, Linda Caruso Haviland, Richard Kaplan, Eric Oddleifson, and Todd Siler. We appreciate your time and effort. Finally, we gratefully acknowledge close friends and family members who haven’t minded our shoptalk too much. And especially we thank our teenagers for putting up with preoccupied parents, late meals, and a continuous gloss on dinner conversation. “Empathizing,” we’d say in response to homework assignments, good books, or piano practice. “Pattern forming, body thinking, imaging.” Meredith and Brian simply rolled their eyes, good-natured to the end. Preface THIS BOOK IS ABOUT creative thinking. Creative thinking in all fields occurs preverbally, before logic or linguistics comes into play, manifesting itself through emotions, intuitions, images, and bodily feelings. The resulting ideas can be translated into one or more formal systems of communication, such as words, equations, pictures, music, or dance only after they are sufficiently developed in their prelogical forms. Regardless of the infinitely diverse details of the products of this translation (paintings, poems, theories, formulas, and so on), the process by which it is achieved is universal. Learning to think creatively in one discipline therefore opens the door to understanding creative thinking in all disciplines. Educating this universal creative imagination is the key to producing lifelong learners capable of shaping the innovations of tomorrow. Because our approach to creative thinking is integrative and transdisciplinary, we have had to unravel certain strands of disciplinary knowledge in order to posit a new fabric of unified understanding. A new synthesis is necessary, not only in order to understand thinking itself, but for pedagogical and social reasons as well. Ever-increasing specialization is clearly leading to a fragmentation of knowledge. People today have so much information and so little grasp of its origins, meanings, and uses that overall comprehension has frayed beyond repair. Even as specialized knowledge increases, communication between fields decreases. Within fields experts address larger and larger problems in smaller and smaller bits. Modern society faces a dark age in the midst of intellectual plenty, a paradox that can be resolved only by reintegrating knowledge in new ways and by training a new generation of Renaissance people to weave new syntheses for themselves. Such an intellectual enterprise requires both cognitive and educational foundations. Our project therefore has both warp and woof. We must comprehend the nature of creative thinking (the warp) if we are to devise an educational system capable of training creative thinkers (the woof). In the opening chapters we prepare the loom, discussing, first, current misunderstandings about the nature of creative thinking, then the barriers our current educational system raises to creative thinking. We weave the fabric of the book from the experiences of the century’s greatest minds, who explain how they think about thinking and how they learned how to think. People in every creative endeavor use a common set of general-purpose thinking tools in an almost infinite variety of ways. These tools reveal the nature of creative thinking itself; they make surprising connections among the sciences, arts, humanities, and technologies. At the level of creative imagination, everyone thinks alike. By restructuring our cognitive categories to emphasize the unity of creative thinking, we formulate a new conception of knowledge and, correspondingly, a new form of education. In the concluding chapters of the book, which deal with the ways in which ideas are transformed and synthesized during the creative process, we demonstrate how the warp and woof yield an integral tapestry of understanding. The final chapter suggests concrete ways in which our cognitive restructuring can be implemented through specific educational reforms. The wonder of the resulting intellectual fabric is that like real fabric, it can be transformed into an almost infinite number of things. Our new material is not, therefore, an end in itself, but the stuff from which future artists and scientists, humanists and technologists, will fashion their world. One final note: following the Notes and Bibliography is a section of Minds- On Resources that will help readers to practice and develop the thinking tools we describe in the text. This book is but a beginning. Invention presupposes imagination but should not be confused with it. For the act of invention implies the necessity of a lucky find and of achieving full realization of this find. What we imagine does not necessarily take on a concrete form and may remain in a state of virtuality, whereas invention is not conceivable apart from its actually being worked out. Thus, what concerns us here is not imagination in itself, but rather creative imagination: the faculty that helps us pass from the level of conception to the level of realization. —Igor Stravinsky, The Poetics of Music 1 Rethinking Thinking EVERYONE THINKS. But not everyone thinks equally well. For real intellectual feasts we depend on master chefs who have learned to mix and blend and savor an entire range of mental ingredients. It’s not that what they do in the kitchen is any different from what we do, they just do it better. We like to suppose master chefs were born that way, yet even the most promising individuals spend years in training. It follows that we, too, can learn the tools of the trade and thereby improve our own mental cooking. This process, however, requires us to rethink what gourmet intellection is all about. And rethinking shifts our educational focus from what to think to how to think in the most productive ways possible. Our tour of mental cookery begins in the kitchen of the mind, where ideas are marinated, stewed, braised, beaten, baked, and whipped into shape. Just as real chefs surprise us by throwing in a pinch of this and a handful of something else, the kitchens of the creative imagination are full of unexpected practices. Great ideas arise in the strangest ways and are blended from the oddest ingredients. What goes into the recipes often bears no resemblance to the finished dish. Sometimes the master mental chef can’t even explain how she knows that her dish will be tasty. She just has a gut feeling that this imagined mixture of ingredients will yield a delicious surprise. Gut feelings don’t make obvious sense. Consider, for example, the experience of young Barbara McClintock, who would later earn a Nobel Prize in genetics. One day in 1930 she stood with a group of scientists in the cornfields around Cornell University, pondering the results of a genetics experiment. The researchers had expected that half of the corn would produce sterile pollen, but less than a third of it actually had. The difference was significant, and McClintock was so disturbed that she left the cornfield and climbed the hill to her laboratory, where she could sit alone and think. Half an hour later, she “jumped up and ran down to the field. At the top of the field (everyone else was down at the bottom) I shouted, ‘Eureka, I have it! I have the answer! I know what this 30 percent sterility is.’” Her colleagues naturally said, “Prove it.” Then she found she had no idea how to explain her insight. Many decades later, McClintock said, “When you suddenly see the problem, something happens that you have the answer—before you are able to put it into words. It is all done subconsciously. This has happened many times to me, and I know when to take it seriously. I’m so absolutely sure. I don’t talk about it, I don’t have to tell anybody about it, I’m just sure this is it.” This feeling of knowing without being able to say how one knows is common. The French philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal is famous for his aphorism “The heart has its reasons that reason cannot know.” The great nineteenth-century mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss admitted that intuition often led him to ideas he could not immediately prove. “I have had my results for a long time; but I do not yet know how I am to arrive at them.” Claude Bernard, the founder of modern physiology, wrote that everything purposeful in scientific thinking began with feeling. “Feeling alone,” he wrote, “guides the mind.” Painter Pablo Picasso confessed to a friend, “I don’t know in advance what I am going to put on canvas any more than I decide beforehand what colors I am going to use . . . . Each time I undertake to paint a picture I have a sensation of leaping into space. I never know whether I shall fall on my feet. It is only later that I begin to estimate more exactly the effect of my work.” Composer Igor Stravinsky also found that imaginative activity began with some inexplicable appetite, some “intuitive grasp of an unknown entity already possessed but not yet intelligible.” The Latin American novelist Isabel Allende has described a similarly vague sense propelling her work: “Somehow inside me—I can say this after having written five books—I know that I know where I am going. I know that I know the end of the book even though I don’t know it. It’s so difficult to explain.” Knowing in such ambiguous, inarticulate ways raises an important question. McClintock put it this way: “It had all been done fast. The answer came, and I’d run. Now I worked it out step by step—it was an intricate series of steps—and I came out with what it was . . . . It worked out exactly as I’d diagrammed it. Now, why did I know, without having done a thing on paper? Why was I so sure that I could tell them with such excitement and just say, ‘Eureka, I solved it’?” McClintock’s query strikes at the heart of understanding creative thinking, as do the experiences of Picasso and Gauss, of composers and physiologists. Where do sudden illuminations or insights come from? How can we know things that we cannot yet say, draw, or write? How do gut feelings and intuitions function in imaginative thinking? How do we translate from feeling to word, emotion to number? Lastly, can we understand this creative imagination and, understanding it, can we exercise, train, and educate it? Philosophers and psychologists have pondered these and related questions for hundreds of years. Neurobiologists have sought the answers in the structures of the brain and the connections between nerve synapses. Full answers still elude us. But one source of insight into creative thinking has been greatly undervalued and underused: the reports of eminent thinkers, creators, and inventors themselves. Their introspective reports cannot answer all our questions about thinking, but they certainly provide important and surprising new avenues to explore. Above all, they tell us that conventional notions of thinking are at best incomplete, for they leave out nonlogical forms of thinking that can’t be verbalized. Take the testimony of physicist Albert Einstein, for instance. Most people would expect Einstein to have described himself as solving his physics problems using mathematical formulas, numbers, complex theories, and logic. In fact, a recent book by Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner, Creating Minds, portrays Einstein as the epitome of the “logico-mathematical mind.” His peers, however, knew that Einstein was relatively weak in mathematics, often needing to collaborate with mathematicians to push his work forward. In fact, Einstein wrote to one correspondent, “Do not worry about your difficulties in mathematics. I can assure you that mine are still greater.” Einstein’s mental strengths were quite different, as he revealed to his colleague Jacques Hadamard. “The words of the language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought. The psychical entities which seem to serve as elements in thought are certain signs and more or less clear images which can be ‘voluntarily’ reproduced and combined . . . . The above mentioned elements are, in my case, of visual and some of muscular type.” In a kind of thought experiment that could not be articulated, he pretended to be a photon moving at the speed of light, imagining what he saw and how he felt. Then he became a second photon and tried to imagine what he could experience of the first one. As Einstein explained to Max Wertheimer, a psychologist, he only vaguely understood where his visual and muscular thinking would take him. His “feeling of direction,” he said, was “very hard to express.” McClintock, for her part, talked about developing a “feeling for the organism” quite like Einstein’s feeling for a beam of light. She got to know every one of her corn plants so intimately that when she studied their chromosomes, she could truly identify with them: “I found that the more I worked with them the bigger and bigger [they] got, and when I was really working with them I wasn’t outside, I was down there. I was part of the system. I even was able to see the internal parts of the chromosomes—actually everything was there. It surprised me because I actually felt as if I were right down there and these were my friends . . . . As you look at these things, they become part of you. And you forget yourself. The main thing about it is you forget yourself.” A similar emotional involvement played a critical role in the prelogical scientific thinking of Claude Bernard, who wrote, “Just as in other human activities, feeling releases an act by putting forth the idea which gives a motive to action.” For Wolfgang Pauli, a mathematical physicist, emotional response functioned in the place of ideas that had not yet been articulated. Within the “unconscious region of the human soul,” he wrote, “the place of clear concepts is taken by images of powerful emotional content, which are not thought, but are seen pictorially, as it were, before the mind’s eye.” Some scientists insist that thinking in feelings and mental images can be rationally manipulated. Einstein suggested “a certain connection” between “the psychical entities which seem to serve as elements in thought” and “relevant logical concepts.” Mathematician Stanislaw Ulam made the argument even more strongly. He experienced abstract mathematical notions in visual terms, so the idea of “‘an infinity of spheres or an infinity of sets’” became “a picture with such almost real objects, getting smaller, vanishing on some horizon.” Such thinking is “not in terms of words or syllogisms or signs” but in terms of some “visual algorithm” having a “sort of meta-or super-logic with its own rules.” For William Lipscomb, a Nobel laureate in chemistry and, not incidentally, a fine musician, this kind of thinking is a synthetic and aesthetic experience. In his research into the chemistry of boron he found himself thinking not only inductively and deductively but also intuitively. “I felt a focusing of intellect and emotions which was surely an aesthetic response,” he wrote. “It was followed by a flood of predictions coming from my mind as if I were a bystander watching it happen. Only later was I able to begin to formulate a systematic theory of structure, bonding and reactions for these unusual molecules . . . . Was it science? Our later tests showed it was. But the processes that I used and the responses that I felt were more like those of an artist.” Gut feelings, emotions, and imaginative images do make sense in science, but, like the meaning of a dance or a musical theme, that sense is felt rather than defined. “Intuition or mathematics?” asks inventor and science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke. “Do we use models to help us find the truth? Or do we know the truth first, and then develop the mathematics to explain it?” There is no doubt about the answer: gut feelings and intuitions, an “essential feature in productive thought,” as Einstein put it, occur well before their meaning can be expressed in words or numbers. In his own work, mathematics and formal logic were secondary steps: “Conventional words or other signs [presumably mathematical ones] have to be sought for laboriously only in a secondary stage, when the associative play already referred to is sufficiently established and can be reproduced at will.” To Wertheimer he explained, “No really productive man thinks in such a paper fashion. The way the two triple sets of axioms are contrasted in [Einstein’s physics book with collaborator Leopold Infeld] is not at all the way things happened in the process of actual thinking. This was merely a later formulation of the subject matter, just a question of how the thing could best be written. . . but in this process they [the ideas] did not grow out of any manipulation of axioms.” As he told Infeld, “No scientist thinks in formulae.” Scientists may not think in mathematical terms, but the need to express intuitive insight in a form comprehensible to others compels them, in McClintock’s words, to “work with so-called scientific methods to put it into their frame after you know.” Other scientists confirm the two-part process of intuitive, imaginative understanding followed, necessarily, by logical expression. Metallurgist Cyril Stanley Smith of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has said, “The stage of discovery was entirely sensual and mathematics was only necessary to be able to communicate with other people.” Werner Heisenberg, who formulated the uncertainty principle, wrote that “mathematics. . . played only a subordinate, secondary role” in the revolution in physics he helped to create. “Mathematics is the form in which we express our understanding of nature; but it is not the content of that understanding.” Nobel Prize–winning physicist Richard Feynman, who also saw and felt things intuitively, noted, “In certain problems that I have done, it was necessary to continue the development of the picture as the method, before the mathematics could really be done.” So much for the myth that scientists think more logically than others. To think creatively is first to feel. The desire to understand must be whipped together with sensual and emotional feelings and blended with intellect to yield imaginative insight. Indeed, the intimate connections between thinking, emotions, and feelings are the subject of a startling book called Descartes’ Error (1994), which revisits the famous philosopher’s separation of mind (and thinking) from body (and being or feeling) more than three hundred years ago. The author, neurologist Antonio Damasio, finds that neurological patients whose emotional affect is grossly altered due to strokes, accidents, or tumors lose the ability to make rational plans. Because they are unable to become emotionally involved in their decisions, they fail to make good ones. Our feelings—our intuitions—are not impediments to rational thinking, they form its origin and bases. For Damasio, body and mind, emotion and intellect are inseparable. We agree. Not only do scientists feel their way toward logical ideas, but creative thinking and expression in every discipline are born of intuition and emotion. For many people this may come as something of a surprise. Cognitive scientists such as Herb Simon and Noam Chomsky define thinking only as the logical procedures of induction and deduction or the rules of linguistics. Even Howard Gardner, who promotes the notion of more diverse ways of thinking in Creating Minds and Frames of Mind, argues that the thinking of creative people is best categorized by the one mode in which they express themselves. For Gardner and his colleagues, scientists such as Einstein, McClintock, and Feynman are logico-mathematical thinkers; poets and writers are characterized as highly verbal thinkers; dancers as kinesthetic thinkers; artists as mainly visual thinkers; psychologists as intrapersonal thinkers; and politicians as interpersonal thinkers. All of these characterizations seem to make sense, just as it seems to make sense that a baker will use yeast to make bread. But soda breads and flat breads are made without yeast, and yeast can be used to make many other foods, including beer and Grape-Nuts cereal. No single ingredient determines the outcome of a recipe, either in cooking or thinking. Characterizing individuals by a single element in their mental processes is as misleading as describing Einstein as—primarily—a logico-mathematical thinker. Artists, for example, draw only partially upon visual stimuli. Emotions, kinesthetic feelings, philosophy, life itself, are other sources of artistic ideas. Painter Susan Rothenberg describes her process of painting as “really visceral . . . . I’m very aware of my body in space—shoulders, frontal positions. I have a body language that is difficult to explain. A lot of my work is about body orientation, both in the making of the work and in the sensing of space, comparing it to my own physical orientation.” Sculptor Anne Truitt also feels her art in her body. In describing her apprenticeship, she writes: It was not my eyes or my mind that learned. It was my body. I fell in love with the process of art, and I’ve never fallen out of it. I even loved the discomforts. At first my arms ached and trembled for an hour or so after carving stone; I remember sitting on the bus on the way home and feeling them shake uncontrollably. My blouse size increased by one as my shoulders broadened with muscle. My whole center of gravity changed. I learned to move from a center of strength and balance just below my navel. From this place, I could lift stones and I could touch the surface of clay as lightly as a butterfly’s wing. Similarly, painter Bridget Riley describes her paintings as “intimate dialogue[s] between my total being and the visual agents which constitute the medium . . . . I have always tried to realize visual and emotional energies simultaneously from the medium. My paintings are, of course, concerned with generating visual sensations, but certainly not to the exclusion of emotion. One of my aims is that these two responses shall be experienced as one and the same.” Picasso, Gardner’s prototype of the “visual thinker,” clearly would have concurred. He believed that all sensation, all forms of knowing, are interconnected: “All the arts are the same: you can write a picture in words just as you can paint sensations in a poem. ‘Blue’—what does ‘blue’ mean? There are thousands of sensations that we call ‘blue.’ You can speak of the blue of a packet of Gauloises and in that case you can talk of the Gauloise blue of eyes, or on the contrary, just as they do in a Paris restaurant, you can talk of a steak being blue when you mean red.” Those who look at pictures and do not feel these (or other) associations miss the point. The mixture of feelings and sensations is what gives rise to the painting in the first place. Because most artistic ideas begin nonvisually, artists also experience the process of translation that Einstein, McClintock, and others have described. Josef Albers may have expressed this process most succinctly when he wrote that art is “the discrepancy between physical fact and psychic effect. . . [a] visual formulation of our reaction to life.” Sculptor Louise Bourgeois says, “I contemplate. . . for a long time. Then I try to express what I have to say, how I am going to translate what I have to say to it. I try to translate my problem into stone.” Max Bill describes the object of art in similarly sweeping terms, as “the expression of the human spirit . . . . Abstract ideas which previously existed only in the mind are made visible in a concrete form.” Paintings and drawings are “the instruments of this realization [by means of] color, space, light, movement.” Georgia O’Keeffe wrote, “I long ago came to the conclusion that even if I could put down accurately the thing I saw and enjoyed, it would not give the observer the kind of feeling it gave me. I had to create an equivalent for what I felt about what I was looking at—not copy it.” Thus the images of art are no more a direct reflection of the feelings, concepts, and sensations from which they arose than are a scientist’s formulas direct expressions of his thoughts. All public languages are forms of translation. Even those who express themselves in words find that they rarely think in words or generate their ideas in words. The poet e. e. cummings, for one, challenged the assumption that poets are essentially wordsmiths manipulating the rules of grammar, syntax, and semantics. “The artist,” he wrote, “is not a man who describes but a man who FEELS.” Gary Snyder, also a poet, has expanded on that theme, saying that to write he must “revisualize it all . . . . I’ll replay the whole experience again in my mind. I’ll forget all about what’s on the page and get in contact with the preverbal level behind it, and then by an effort of reexperiencing, recall, visualization, revisualization, I’ll live through the whole thing again and try to see it more clearly.” Stephen Spender provided an almost identical description of his own creative process: The poet, above all else, is a person who never forgets certain senseimpressions, which he has experienced and which he can re-live again and again as though with all their original freshness . . . . It therefore is not surprising that although I have no memory for telephone numbers, addresses, faces and where I may have put this morning’s correspondence, I have a perfect memory for the sensation of certain experiences which are crystallized for me around certain associations. I could demonstrate this from my own life by the overwhelming nature of associations which, suddenly aroused, have carried me back so completely into the past, particularly into my childhood, that I have lost all sense of the present time and place. The crafting of imaginary worlds, in both cummings’s and Spender’s cases, took more than a mastery of language; it took an ability to relive sense impressions almost at will. Other writers have said much the same. Robert Frost called his poetry a process of “carrying out some intention more felt than thought . . . . I’ve often been quoted: ‘No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise for the reader.’” The American novelist and short-story writer Dorothy Canfield Fisher also needed to experience what she wrote in order to write well. “I have,” she said, “intense visualizations of scenes . . . . Personally, although I never used as material any events in my own intimate life, I can write nothing if I cannot achieve these very definite, very complete visualizations of the scenes; which means that I can write nothing at all about places, people or phases of life which I do not intimately know, down to the last detail.” Isabel Allende, too, plans her books “in a very organic way. Books don’t happen in my mind, they happen somewhere in my belly . . . . I don’t know what I’m going to write about because it has not yet made the trip from the belly to the mind. It is somewhere hidden in a very somber and secret place where I don’t have any access yet. It is something that I’ve been feeling but which has no shape, no name, no tone, no voice.” At first the impulse, the vision, the feeling, is unspoken. But in the end it must come to words. Once the poet or writer has relived inspiring or troubling images and feelings, the problem is the same one shared by scientists and artists: how to translate these internal feelings into an external language other people can experience. Fisher described her “presumption” in trying “to translate into words. . . sacred living human feeling.” T. S. Eliot, Howard Gardner’s exemplar of a “verbal thinker,” almost quoted O’Keeffe: “With a poem you can say, ‘I got my feeling into words for myself. I now have the equivalent in words for that much of what I have felt.’” Gary Snyder has stated, “The first step is the rhythmic measure, the second step is a set of preverbal visual images which move to the rhythmic measure, and the third step is embodying it in words.”