What Separates Man From Beast? Creativity

Humans design skyscrapers, compose operas, and write sonnets. That makes us different than — indeed, superior to — the rest of the animals on the planet. No other species, whatever wonderful traits it might boast, is even in the same league when it comes to creativity. Sorry, ducks.

Making sense of that superiority is at the core of a new book, The Runaway Species: How Human Creativity Remakes the World (Catapult), by David Eagleman and Anthony Brandt. Mr. Eagleman is a neuroscientist at Stanford University, and Mr. Brandt is a professor of music at Rice University. A few years ago, Mr. Brandt, who is also a composer, approached Mr. Eagleman, who is also a fiction writer, about working together on a project.

That collaboration produced an oratorio, titled “Maternity,” by Mr. Brandt based on a short story, “The Founding Mothers,” by Mr. Eagleman. “Working together led to a continuing dialogue about creativity,” they write in the book. “We’d both been studying it from our own perspectives.”

They combined those perspectives, and the result is a book that’s not exactly a manual for how to be more creative, but rather an exploration of the connection between disparate types of creativity, along with an argument for the importance of blending ideas, breaking with tradition, and taking risks in search of breakthroughs. They spoke with The Chronicle about their collaboration, their failures, and how standardized testing and smartphones are affecting kids.

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You’re both academics, and you’re also both artists, so you’re doing creative work within the academic realm and also outside it — fiction, composing music, and so on. How do you think about those dual roles?

Brandt: I remember David once talking about how scientists are storytellers. They’re making a proposition about how the world works, and then they test to see if that’s an accurate story. He said he wished scientists realized they were storytellers. I’m in music, but I’m very interested in cognition, so we could have conversations with each other to really understand where we were coming from.

Eagleman: From the beginning, our idea was to bounce back and forth between the arts and the sciences to demonstrate that the basic operations going on underneath the hood are exactly the same. You’re taking in data from the world and smushing it up and refashioning it into something new.

You write that creativity “becomes stifled in deference to proficiencies that are more easily measured.” Are you concerned that we’re not doing enough to cultivate creativity in children?

Brandt: Yes, it was one of our motivations for writing the book. There is definitely a place for measurable things, and rote tasks, but to not have creativity nurtured in school makes no sense to us.

Eagleman: Tony and I both have kids, and we watch how schools work, and it’s easy for them to drift toward just measuring on standardized tests, and that’s a real shame.

One example you write about comes from a class where students draw an apple at the beginning of the semester, and then again at the end of the semester, after they’ve absorbed a variety of styles and skills — and the difference between what they draw is remarkable.

Brandt: Part of our approach was to show that there are measurable ways of evaluating someone’s creativity. So if the goal is to proliferate options and come up with five, and the student only comes up with two, then they didn’t complete the assignment. Or if the goal is to go different distances from the source material, and they stay too close to it, you can reasonably critique them. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a free-for-all or totally subjective.

I’m curious about your collaboration on this book. That in itself is a creative project. How did you actually write it together?

Brandt: When David was in town we would meet every weekend and work at his dining-room table. We had this rule that if both of us didn’t go, “This is good,” we didn’t debate or argue, it just went. And it made working together so comfortable. In a sense, we wrote every word together. One or the other of us would provide the drywall, and then we would paint it into text. A lot of it was curating the samples to find the right things to make the argument at the appropriate time.

This isn’t really a self-help book, though there are tips that people who want to be more creative could glean from it. You guys were more interested in thinking about the nature of creativity on, as the title says, a species level, right?

Eagleman: Our goal in writing the book was to look at what it is about the human brain that makes us different from the rest of all our nearest neighbors in the animal kingdom. We’ve built this civilization, whereas our closest cousins are living exactly as they did a million years ago. What are the slight algorithmic differences that have made one species be able to go off the planet, build the internet, and so on? We wanted not to make it in the realm of self-help, but one can’t read it without realizing ways to benefit one’s own creativity.

Brandt: You have to figure out for yourself what habits are going to work for you. Often methods wear off, and you have to stay nimble in your thinking, and try it out different ways. Too often creativity books end up being simplistic — paint your wall blue, or stand on your head. That may have a short-term benefit, but we wanted something where you can keep coming back to the principles.

It’s common for artists and other creative people to try a lot of things, most of which don’t go very well, deal with those setbacks, and move on. You guys invented a phrase — “idea flings” — which is a nice way to make failure sound less depressing.

Brandt: We wanted to be honest about the risk. We didn’t want to just tell happy stories. Or to say, “Read this book and you’ll be Van Gogh.” Because that isn’t how it works. It’s about having the right balance, and also seeing people reach the finish line.

Do you have any personal experiences you’d like to share about your own idea flings?

Eagleman: Do you want the whole list or just the top three? I started a start-up in Houston that didn’t go anywhere. I wrote my first novel, polished it a thousand times, and it’s still sitting under my bed, because it’s juvenilia.

Brandt: As a modern composer, that’s part of the story of your life. There are these weird feelings when you put so much effort into a piece, and the performance doesn’t live up to what the piece could be. Or even if it’s a great performance, but it just doesn’t reach people. I’ve certainly had plenty of those experiences.

I was talking to someone recently who argued that the internet makes people less creative, that once upon a time it seemed closer to a blank canvas, but now it’s ruled by corporations that put creativity inside a box. Do you buy that?

Eagleman: I happen to be a cyberoptimist. I don’t think the internet is diminishing our capabilities from the point of view of creativity. It gives kids every opportunity to be creative. You can find stuff in a way that you couldn’t before. The amount of input that a kid can get now is incredible.

And we are vessels of our space and time. It’s not corporations posting stuff on the net, it’s each other. I have a suspicion that the next generation is going to be much smarter than we are, simply because they’re carrying around the world in a rectangle in their pockets.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Tom Bartlett is a senior writer who covers science and other things. Follow him on Twitter @tebartl.