Another Science Reporter Fail: “Education and the Aging Brain”

An article today in the NY Times by Patricia Cohen summarizes some research conclusions that suggest that the way to preserve your brain into old age is to get more education.  The problem is that the main study being cited appears from the article to be what we call a ‘correlational study,’ which may prove nothing of the kind.

Correlational studies are done by rounding up a bunch of people who, say, all went to college and comparing them to people who didn’t, and then comparing their “brain fitness” test results in middle age.  These studies can be extremely valuable and, as my old grad school prof Tom Bouchard used to teach us, they are often the best way to study the really really interesting things in science, because they may provide a tremendous wealth of information.

The problem with such studies is that they can suggest, but not necessarily prove, that one thing causes another.  A mantra that all undergraduate psych students memorize is that “correlation does not equal causation.”  Just because two things tend to happen together, like education and healthier brains, doesn’t prove that the one thing caused the other.  It’s equally likely, say, that people with healthier brains were the ones who were both motivated to pursue, and who could succeed at completing, additional years of education.  (You might be more “motivated” to go to college just because for you, it’s easier.  If it’s easier, you will enjoy it more.  On the other hand, kids with reading or attention problems, say, or who just aren’t as sharp, may find it harder and more painful to study, so the thought of four more years of slogging through books and tests may seem much less pleasant for them.)

Cohen’s main lapse is in failing to explain or discuss this caveat.  What she doesn’t say is that we really don’t know if the older folks with the more resilient brains got that way because they went to college, or whether they chose and managed to get through college because they had perhaps more well-functioning or healthier brains in the first place.  If someone had set up the proper experiment fifty years ago, by randomly assigning some people to go to college and keeping others out, we might have had very different results when testing their smarts when they were older.  We might have found some difference, but maybe not the same level of difference, say, between the two groups, which might mean that big headlines about “save your brain by going to college” would have seemed overly optimistic and simplistic.

There is evidence that doing things such as going to college, particularly decades ago when fewer people did so and so admissions were more selective, did tend to require at least somewhat better probably “inborn” ability levels.  We also have evidence that late-life problems with things like Alzheimer’s might be predictable even in one’s teens.   A study of elderly nuns showed that the ones who eventually developed Alzheimer’s had, as young women applying to a religious order, a very different style of writing.  They used few or no complex sentences, for instance (the kinds with commas in them and so on; the other girls didn’t do that.)  The researchers in that study were able to do a sort of “experiment” by seeing how well reviewers could predict who would eventually develop Alzheimer’s, by simply rating the young women’s essays on whether they used “linguistically dense” sentences that had things like multiple ideas, or even just commas in them.  Turned out the predictive value of that kind of thing was weirdly high — the researchers could almost always match the eventual health outcome with the women’s writing styles from decades earlier.

While it is probably true that going to college develops a stronger brain, and there are certainly studies (some cited in her story) suggesting that mental exercise in general makes the brain healthier (though jogging probably helps more), these results are tentative and shouldn’t be overly simplified.  Almost all of the studies showing that people who study French or go to college have “better brains” are correlational; it’s as least as likely that people with better-functioning brains just enjoy using them for a wider range of mental tasks.

It’s good if readers recognize when reporters are perhaps jumping too hard on squishy findings.  Sloppy reasoning gets tedious to read over and over again. Reporters and publications know that they can attract “mindshare” with dramatic but misleading headlines, stories based on poorly done or poorly reported half-truths.  (e.g., “Air Force Still Denies Finding Alien Bodies at Area 51.”)  But this kind of bad reporting is not just misleading — it can also have negative real-world consequences.  People make poorer decisions when they are based on poor or faulty information — they change their lifestyles, adopt new diets and exercise regimens, waste blood and treasure on things that in the long run, just don’t matter.  They also may do bad things to each other based on half-truths and this kind of ignorance.

When I was in college we were assigned to read a little workbook for honing our skills at spotting false conclusions derived from research.  The earliest articles were the easiest to figure out — a piece by someone allegedly named “Pileous Lupus Swarthy” was about determining whether werewolves could be “diagnosed” based on their response to a “silver allergy” test that entailed firing a silver bullet in the brains of people suspected of being werewolves. (Since it was “well known” that werewolves are allergic to silver… well, you get the idea.)  The article concluded that the diagnostic test worked perfectly, since 100% of the test subjects who were shot in the head died, proving that they were all werewolves.

Which is silly, but not so much when you remember that the identical reasoning was used in the middle ages to kill thousands of women suspected of witchcraft, by binding them hand and foot and throwing them into ponds.  The “proof” they were innocent of witchcraft would be that they drowned.  ”Real” witches were the women who managed to float.  They would be burned alive.

Writing as Noticing

The art of writing is, in large measure, the art of emptying the mind. There are several ways in which this is true, and they are all important. First, and most conventionally, writing entails the creation of a clear-headed mental state — and even this is really two different things. In many cases, a “mind like clear water” is the best way to write, if we understand that to mean clearing away, or putting aside, the many, many worries and concerns and to-do items and projects and irritations and headaches that distract you, that cloud your awareness. Like they say, when you’re feeling up to your ass in alligators, it’s very hard to remember that the original purpose of being there was to drain the swamp. So for this kind of clearing, you may meditate, try to write early in the day, go to a new place like a coffee shop where you aren’t distracted by all the other stuff that stirs up cognitive dust storms in your life.

But there is also the clarity you can gain by catharsis — by finally saying, blurting, dumping onto the page (or into the ears of a therapist or friend) all your concerns and troubles and worries about your work or life, or this nagging thought about something you’ve read or seen that you want to somehow preserve, get down, get off your chest. (The image that’s right here is of a weight on your chest, something that as long as it’s there, you cannot breathe.)  This is not so much a moving away from the clutter and pain, but writing the clutter and pain away.  Getting it all down on paper (or onto your therapist’s notepad), so you can have that “there!  I feel clearer now!” experience.

So writing is sometimes about finding a clear, alligator-free space, sitting on a sunny hilltop on a pleasant day and being away from your cubicle and your bill pile and the screaming children and honking drivers, and letting your freak out on paper. And sometimes, it’s about taking all those cubicle nightmares and baby-screams and tales of idiots you’ve wanted to strangle, and writing about them, so you can finally get a bit of that clarity.

The third type of mind-clearing is perhaps the most important, and the least obvious. It’s not about finding peace and quiet just so you can write; it’s not about writing all the bad stuff down in order to find the peace and quiet. It’s a perhaps more craft-like process, in which you sit and notice what is happening down in that “clear water,” and write down what you notice.  Emptying your mind into your writing.  Just that.

How is this different from the first two ways of writing? It may first be important to say what it’s not. It’s less of a “nervous breakdown coping device” of trying to calm down or get all quiet or take enough Xanax so you can finally write. It’s also not a cathartic dumping of your turmoil-mind onto paper to get that fresh breath of “there, I said it and I’m glad!” air. Rather, the focus is on what happens when you have already managed to attain some degree of peace and quiet, when you can devote your attention to a kind of quiet awareness that “Hey! That’s a thought or experience or idea I am thinking, or on the edge of thinking, that I should capture on paper!”

It’s learning the art of sitting quietly and not being disturbed by anything for the duration of the writing session, of being observant, and taking the next, essential step of not just thinking, not just noticing what’s happening in the coffee shop or in the back yard around your hammock or on the news you’re reading — but  noticing that you have just noticed something to write about. That you can and should record this awareness, idea, observation you are having.  In short, it’s a kind of meta-awareness — awareness that you are aware, and then recording it.

Now, this seems like an obvious, even childish thing to say, but it’s really not. In fact, it may be the one distinguishing quality of a “born writer” or a self-trained writer, that it occurs to her or him to write it down. We all experience things all day long, have great thoughts, come up with witty observations or heartbreaking memories or dazzling scientific discoveries… and instantly forget them. They are lost forever — uncounted and uncountable novels, plays, poems, jokes, song lyrics, observations of nature or character or solutions to intractable problems, all gone. Most of the mind of humanity is a vast sieve through which three million years of collective experience has leaked into the sand, forever lost. Only a very, very few ever stop and write an experience or a thought down.  But almost all advancement in awareness, all expansion of the human heart and capacity for justice and compassion, all advances in science, flow from the efforts of those few.

More than anything else, the “art” of writing (or of photography, or of painting, or of being a creative scientist or inventor) is developing the skill of noticing that you are noticing something, and then capturing that awareness in words, in pictures, in laboratory notebooks. Scientists and inventors who change the world do so, most often, because they observe something and remember that observation, they value it, either as a clear, new, useful thing or as something at least worth pondering. Millions of people pick burrs from their pants and skirts and pry them from the fur of their dogs, and then just one guy starts to think about how these fibers work, and invents Velcro. A scientist comes up with a glue that doesn’t seem to work very well, and we end up with Post-it notes. A photographer sees the same, tired mother’s face that a whole nation is seeing all around them, but she turns this into a masterpiece that in one glimpse, captures forever and for all humankind the psychological impact of the Great Depression.

And a man or a woman, a boy or a girl, has the same kinds of thoughts that all their friends have, that everyone else in the same time and era has about the experience of being human, of struggling, of being alone or in a tormented relationship, of wondering what happens after death or why I deserved this life, but instead of merely suffering, they also write down what that life, that suffering is like. And by doing so, they create a literature, which not only records but, often, changes the very experience of being.

Hemingway & the fading of a writer’s gift

I’ve just been reading David Dobbs’ article on Hemingway… thinking about Hemingway’s despair at the end, when his words didn’t seem to work any more. And maybe it’s true — if you read some of his later things, they perhaps don’t seem as beautiful and as — he seemed to like the word “true” but that’s not quite it — so sensually and emotionally vivid, maybe… as did his best early work. I recently reread both Farewell to Arms and For Whom the Bell Tolls and I felt that the former (written much earlier in his life) was the better book, though anyone would have been proud to have written either. Personally, never could get into The Old Man and the Sea (too depressing for my temperament, maybe) but then, I did enjoy his last big work of import, Moveable Feast, and people often say that in that, he reclaimed some of his youthful skill.  (Which to a psycho-diagnostician suggests a speculation: maybe Feast worked because he was writing about himself when he was young, and so he had to become, psychologically, himself when he was young, and when he did that, a kind of “counterclockwise” time-machine effect took hold, and he literally thought more and felt more like he did as a young man?  In other words, it wasn’t that he wrote as if he were young again, but that when immersed in the memories of his earlier years in Paris, he literally became young again?)

So you want to know what happened to him, you look around you.

You see it in their eyes, the long-time alcoholics (“rummies,” as Hemingway called them and, probably with self-awareness and self-contempt, himself.) It’s not just the preoccupation with alcohol (telltale sign: you visit a new acquaintance’s home and bring a gift bottle of wine and he zeroes in on the wine, not on you), or the other things, the bad manners or the insensitivity or the rudeness that a full-blown drunken state brings. It’s something more instant that you pick up, something that if you’ve grown up around it, you recognize it from forty feet away. It’s the wet, vacant, staring quality to their gaze.

I see it in the waiting room where I do psych evals. From a bright outside, as I walk into the back door of the agency and look into the dimly lit waiting room twenty feet away, he’ll be sitting in the chair and will turn when I come in and even though my eyes haven’t adjusted to the dark room, I pick it up. Yeah, he’s the one. The referral sheet says, “screen for substance abuse problems,” and sure enough, he’s got the drunkard’s stare.  The stare that causes bar fights when an old guy is too slow to avert that wet-eyed glare when the younger, tougher, fragile-egoed but equally drunk young ‘un catches it from across the room, starts the “what’re YOU starin’ at?!” dance and God help the old guy if he doesn’t look down, defeated and cowed. But in the clinic, it merely says, yeah, be sure to ask him twice and directly about his drinking. Don’t accept “no more than anybody else” (another diagnostic sign.)   Don’t accept vague, moving you off the subject responses about why things never worked out so good and he’s 45 and unemployed for five years and never gets along with anybody or shows up just fine but the jobs just ain’t there.

It’s not belligerence, you figure out after awhile. It’s deadness. A kind of deadness not of the whole man or the whole mind, but of some faculty of alertness, of the feeling part, of something that makes emotions feel present and vivid for other people, but not for him. So when he’s staring at somebody and they glance back, the little warning twinge, the “look away now, sonny” feeling, just doesn’t flash anymore. It’s shorted out, dissolved away, somewhere in the old cranium. So he just stares.

Not that he can’t feel — he can feel plenty, depression, mainly, and thirst. But he can’t feel the subtle things, his nervous system cannot keep up so good with the signaling systems of other people. He’s half asleep when they are signalling. So instead, he stares, as if to ask, “am I missing something?”

A chronic state of being just a little bit numbed.

Everybody writes about Hemingway’s sense of losing his gift, but seldom do they write in the same paragraphs about the alcohol. The copious quantities. The multiple bottles of wine every day, and beer and hard stuff, and it was something that got more and more into his writing. Read his mid-life masterpiece, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and you see it. The drinking together, bowl after bowl of wine, it’s what they do. The highlight of the day for heroes hiding in caves.  You see it also in the younger man’s characters and stories, but then it’s the drinking of a young, strong, invulnerable-feeling body. By the time he’s writing later, that body is more vulnerable. But the thirst’s still there, a driving force.  That, and the yearning for a vividness, an aliveness, and the words to say it, that perhaps he could remember having once experienced, but not quite locate anymore.

And sometimes you think you can spot it — as the freshness goes out of his sentences. As the true petrified into Hemingwayian truthiness. A man writing as if he still felt things, but are they perhaps just the memories of the feelings of his younger self?  Emotional phantom limbs?  What the cool pebbles in the stream felt like when he was young, before the neuropathies took the vivid  and complex sensations away, leaving only wetness, and sharpness, and cold.

Writing One Good Sentence

Writing one good sentence… you sort of need to have something to write, good or bad.

But that may not be the best approach.

The best approach may be to first feel around the cracks in the wall until you can find the one that’s a door. Then, pry open the door — just enough to slip inside the dream world. Like finding a passage inside a pyramid: there are mysteries we cannot get away from because we know this is not just an ancient pile of rock, but a psychotic (to us) universe that is built into the structure (in addition to the art, writing, corpses placed inside.)  You just want to know — what is in there, of someone else’s experiences, fantasies, soul?

Just say what you find.

Real life

It’s a paradox writers have to struggle with, that much of our popular culture and especially film and stuff like thrillers are organized around superhuman characters doing impossible things… and yet, to a mature person who has struggled for decades just to get through the day, keep a job they hate going to every day, dealing with relationship struggles and the like, what’s really super-human is the ordinary.

But that’s not necessarily the most interesting stuff.

Whether it’s Prince Andre in War and Peace (lousy at marriage, good as a military follower if not leader), or James Bond (the real one, the one of the original Fleming books), ordinary people go a step at a time through danger and mystery, and that is what is really most interesting.  Children like superheroes like Transformers, who are effortlessly invulnerable. Adults enjoy regular people who do superhuman things.  (The real James Bond of the books was in pain and felt fear constantly.  That was what made him appealing to, say, a larger than life appearing President who sat in his rocking chair nursing  a chronic back pain condition while reading about him.)  Show the details of ordinary heroism.  People are tired, and scared, and alone, but do it anyway.

 

A Tool to Help A Writer’s Brain

I have been thinking a lot recently about my writing work, and how little writing I actually get done. Actually, that’s kind of part of the problem. I spend a lot of time thinking about writing — but not so much time writing. Which is, of course, one of the great failings of writers, or more accurately, of writer-wannabees.

Today I bought this very interesting software called iA Writer, which is designed to facilitate writing. What it is actually designed to do is to facilitate focus during the process of writing. It does this by giving you a very, very simple interface, and a very stripped down set of options for writing. Almost none, actually. It has a simple, one-window, no-toolbar, no-preferences interface, and this one window does basically nothing but show your words as you type. But more than that, especially if you use the thing the only way that makes sense to me (and it’s one of the only options): if you hit the option not just for a fullscreen view but for what they call “focus mode,” the software highlights the single sentence you are working on, while the rest of your text recedes into a paler, kind of grayed-out looking font.

It looks like this:

That’s it. There are no bells and whistles, and even the “bell and whistle-silencing” software competetors don’t do things as well. Because while “full screen” is a great leap forward into the backwardness of the days when we’d have to sit with a pen and a legal pad and just write, even that doesn’t quite capture how well it works to dim everything but the current sentence. (Even with a pen and legal pad, or a “full screen mode,” there is always the problem of the lines above. Lines that you can too-easily see and be distracted by, lines that can keep you thinking about them, lines which draw your eye away from the current sentence you are supposed to be working on. The string of text you should be writing right now.)

I think I understand something about why iA Writer works as well as it does. In addition to writing, as a clinical psychologist I do a lot of psychological evaluations, and in particular, what we in the biz call “neuropsychological” evaluations. Neuropsychology is the study of how our brains affect our ability to function, to get things done, to keep track of things, and so on.

One of the key things I have to measure when I do assessments is how well a person is able to control their mental activities in pursuit of whatever they are trying to accomplish. The technical term for that ability, is “executive functioning.”

“Executive functioning” includes things like the ability to make a basic (or more complex) plan, whether it’s planning a menu or your route to work, a sketch of a novel or a term paper, or a plan for a new corporation. This includes the ability to identify your goals, to think about the steps to reaching those goals, and the proper sequence for accomplishing those steps. This even includes your ability to use time itself as a tool: to remember that the pasta takes eight minutes to cook but the sauce should simmer for an hour, so you start which one first? Executive functioning also refers to the ability to remember and keep track of what you are doing while you carry out that plan (whether that means remembering where you are on the interstate or whether you put the salt into the pasta water yet.) Finally, it refers to your ability to control your own attention span, your motor behavior (whether that’s fingers on a keyboard — computer or piano — or tracking where your eyes move while driving — scanning for pedestrians behind cars? or looking at your radio dial or the text message on your cell phone?)

Putting this all together (which is the whole point), a person whose executive functioning skills are working fairly well can decide what they want to do, figure out how to do it, make themselves actually start doing the things they’ve decided on, and then persist, monitor their actions and processes and emotions, evaluate their progress, remember where they are and what they’ve done, and recognize when they are finished. This all requires, above all, a great deal of ability to focus, and to focus in a very particular way: not focusing just on the big dreams, not being derailed by a million buzzing distractions, but staying focused on the precise action you should be doing right at this particular moment. Whether it’s researching a book and so reading an article, one paragraph at a time, or watching the instruments as you land the 747, or thinking about the way this particular sentence is coming together under your pen or on your screen, executive functioning is really about doing this…single…thing…you’re…doing…right…now.

Which brings us back to the really cool way iA Writer works. What it really provides is a kind of prosthetic for a writer’s executive functioning. Just like a cane or a walker when you need them to keep a knee from popping out (or Ritalin for ADD, maybe?), iA Writer helps strengthen (or compensate for weaknesses in) a writer’s ability to stay focused on the most important part of writing: a particular sentence. One sentence at a time.

This is huge. I frankly have been surprised how huge. I mean, this is the first piece of writing I’ve done with this thing, and it feels like I’ve just popped some kind of performance-enhancing pharmaceutical and am ready for my all night session of writing that term paper or dissertation.

Combined with another favorite tool, a self-timing app for my Mac called Pomodoro, I have found what may be a very nice writing environment. (And I also can just use MacSpeech Dictate, when typing is less helpful than just talking. I wonder if MacSpeech will also work with iA Writer? Hmm…)

Time will tell if this really works as well as my first pass suggests it may. But if so, iA Writer may be a real boon to getting moving a bit better and faster in one’s work as a writer.

“Social intelligence” — a key skill for writers

On my other blog I’ve posted a piece on the ways writers can make use of the skills of social intelligence in creating characters and universes.  I won’t repeat it here (here’s the link).  It’s based on the article that just came out in the latest edition of The Writer, also by yours truly.

That is all.

If John Grisham wrote “The Association”

Recently, psychologists have been shocked to learn that we have been misled for many years by our main professional organization, the American Psychological Association.  I count myself among the swindled.

For nearly a quarter of a century, psychologists in clinical practice who were seeking to maintain their membership in the APA have been charged an additional fee, generally amounting to about half the basic membership rate, to support “professional practice advocacy.”  (The latter supposedly helps practitioners have some kind of “advocates” among the lobbyist-infested halls of Congress, etc.)  The main point being, whether or not you wanted to support that lobbying, or could comfortably afford it (our profession not being as lucrative as, say, psychiatry, or selling Mary Kay products), you were told that this was a “mandatory” part of your annual dues.  Since membership in our professional organization is supposedly a good thing, and even sometimes a job requirement (such as when we teach in APA approved graduate programs), we had no alternative but to pay this fee.  Nearly $150 or so a year, added to our dues.

Well, as Gomer Pyle used to say, “sur-praaaze, sur-praaze, sur-PRAAZE!”  As the result of a recent accidental discovery by a curious member, we find that this fee was never actually required for membership in the APA. Rather, it bought us an additional membership in a separate organization, something called the  “APA Practice Organization.”  Supposedly a lobbying group that has worked hard to make sure that… well, I have no idea what they actually do.  But as a non-card carrying member for nearly 25 years (because nobody issued cards, you see — or letters, or even decals to stick on our bumpers), I can state that nobody ever informed us that the vig was really to buy us a membership in this organization.  Nor that the only thing that was truly “mandatory” about the fee was that you had to pay it to be a member of the APAPO — not the APA.

I’ve had years when not having had to pony up an extra C-note and a half would have been helpful.  More to the point, I find myself  resenting that the same organization against which we had to mount protests to make stop supporting the prisoner torture of the Bush administration, has been lying to its members about what, exactly, it took to stay a member.  Essentially, from everything we are hearing, we’ve been deliberately overcharged and (I don’t know what other word to apply here) defrauded for a quarter of a century.  To the tune, collectively, of millions of dollars.

I have heard there is at least one class action suit simmering about this, and if so, count me in.  I want my money back, with interest, and then some.  Not because I’m opposed to some kind of professional “lobbying” or whatever, but because I’m opposed to an organization that purports to stand for, and even to take on itself the mantle of being the arbiter of what is ethical behavior by psychologists, then turning around and pulling stunts like this.  And “aw, gee, it was a mistake” won’t cut it.  If we did this to our patients, we’d have the APA Ethics cops all over us like a cheap suit.  (The bulky kind, not the kind that is too tight and splits when you bend down to pick up a quarter.)

I’ve wondered about sending a little note off to someone.  Like, say, the US Dept of Justice.  Of course, those are the same guys who won’t prosecute war criminals, not “well placed” ones, anyway.  But so you see the problem.  Institutions seem to be kind of unreliable these days.  Especially when it comes to good old fashioned institutional boat-rocking — the kind of rocking that our 20-somethings expected Obama to do, the kind that they blame the “boomers” for having not done, little realizing that they’re now living through exactly the kind of things we did, when our hopes for a better, more empathic, more ecological, more, I guess, Swedish society were trampled on by the Reaganauts (the Tea-Partiers of the 1980s.)

At times like this one turns for solace to fiction.  So I find myself imagining …. (screen goes hazy here… harp music trills…)

It’s Tom Cruise in “The Firm.”   And it’s late in the flick, the scene where he shows up in the clinic where there’s  a bunch of us psychologists, thuggish folks all.  All with our foamy bats which we are about to use to pound on him, for the same cathartic reason, whatever it is, we’ve been chasing the kid all through the film. (Go watch the movie.)  So now we’ve got him cornered, right here in our little clinic… but instead of quaking in fear and begging that we not “interpret the transference” all over his sorry ass, he opens his briefcase.

The Time It Takes

I’m up early, ostensibly to meditate and write something, you know, writerly, before plunging into the heap of unwritten psych evals on my desk.  As usual, one of the little nagging thoughts calling from some dark crevice of my mind is the “you’re not getting your novel done fast enough!”  (And from the other dark corner, a kind of comic defense attorney alternative voice yells back, “He doesn’t know what to say yet!  Lay off!”

So it was at least a bit of balm on the guiltsore to find this paragraph in a post on Amazon about their best books list for 2010:

One pattern that emerges among the top books on our list is how many of them took a long time to get written, for one reason or another. If we, as people say, live in an age of instant gratification and infatuation with youth (the jury’s out yet), these books are noteworthy for how much they gained from patience and persistence. And perspective too. Skloot, as she mentioned in an interview with our cohorts at Omnivoracious, was fascinated with the story of Henrietta Lacks since she heard a bit of her story in high school, and she spent over a decade gaining the trust of Henrietta’s family and, with their help, unearthing her story. It took over three decades before Karl Marlantes could finally transform his experiences in Vietnam into the finished art of Matterhorn. And Patti Smith’s memoir of her young friendship with Robert Mapplethorpe is so charming in part because of the way her wide-eyed youth exists so easily within the woman she’s become 40 years later. Even Michael Lewis’s Big Short, a book about the way we live now, didn’t come in the first big wave of books about the crash.

Now I feel better.  Just a bit.

“Where Good Ideas Come From” (book review)

One of the most important, and least-well appreciated, facts about creativity is that it seldom happens in a vacuum.  We imagine that a “creative genius” is someone whose ideas come out of thin air.  We may even feel cheated if we discover that the “genius’s” clever bit of writing or new gizmo was actually an adaptation of something that already existed.  (For instance, people have sometimes criticized Benjamin Franklin’s “Poor Richard’s Almanack”  because he “just” adapted his witty aphorisms from ancient philosophers, the Bible, etc.)  And yet, new ideas are generally based on some kind of adaptation, borrowing, or accidental meshing of older ones.  If “creative” people are good at anything, they are mostly good at collecting and playing with old ideas, parts, and observations, and in the process articulating something that seems “new.”

Steven Johnson’s new book, Where Good Ideas Come From, is the best book on creativity I’ve ever read.  He provides a kind of catalog of creative processes that goes far beyond the ancient theories of the mystics and the psychoanalysts and contemporary psychological researchers and writers on creativity.  (As a species, psychologists are socialized to suppress their creativity, so that’s perhaps not surprising.)