Let Your RIG Rip

David Jones, The Aha! Moment: A Scientist’s Take on Creativity (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), 280 pages, $31.95 

Some years ago I was one of the profs in an ABC-sponsored Profs and Pints show, held (alliteratively) in a Perth pub. There were three academics and an audience of about a hundred people crammed in a room which would have comfortably held fifty, and the subject matter was “Minds and Machines”. It was great fun for everybody except those sitting near my grandson, a raucous infant who protested incessantly and had to be hauled away prematurely by my daughter.

The audience was lively and to them must go the major credit for making it a very high-quality entertainment. After a number had asked questions and made comments, all of them intelligent and many well informed, a somewhat gangling young man stood up and explained that he was not a scientist, a mathematician or an engineer. He was more the creative sort.

It says much for the tolerance of those present that he escaped with his life. In fact he was received with astonishing politeness; nobody felt like embarrassing him by pointing out that he was probably the least creative person present. I rather doubt he is a Quadrant reader, but if by chance he is, I draw to his attention this book by the Great Jones.

I must declare an interest. I have known the Great Jones since he was in the late stages of a PhD in Chemistry, and I was a first-year undergraduate reading Physics, at Imperial College in London, a long time ago. He introduced himself as the Great Jones, explaining that there were various greats in history: notably Alexander, Frederick, Llewellyn and indeed a few others. There ought, statistically, to be even more Great Joneses, since the name was so common, but there hadn’t been any up until now. He was the first. This was an irresistible introduction, and we have been friends ever since.

David’s qualifications for writing a book on creativity are impeccable. He wrote the Daedalus columns, originally published weekly in New Scientist, subsequently in Nature and the Guardian. If you don’t know these columns, you have missed something special. In addition, David was responsible for regular science shows on British and German television, some of them spectacular. Spike Milligan wrote the Goon Show scripts, which were also brilliantly creative, and he produced them at about the same rate as David, but for nothing like the same length of time, and the strain gave Spike a nervous breakdown. David has remained the same sane, kindly man for the whole time I have known him. He fizzes and sparkles like a firework, pretty much non-stop. In addition to what he regards as a pleasant frivolity (with a serious side) which earns him money in a far more congenial manner than teaching undergraduates, he has also been a perfectly respectable academic doing research, mainly in Physical Chemistry.

The Aha! Moment is intensely personal and consists of a stream of anecdotes, some from the history of science and technology, some from his own life. David describes something of what the creative experience feels like, the way in which ideas bubble up from—somewhere. Nowadays we ascribe the source to the subconscious, in earlier times it was a muse, and I can vouch for the muse model; she may have been internal, but there was no sense of ownership of the mathematics spewed out by the me who is, I suppose, currently writing these words. David refers to the source as the RIG, the Random Ideas Generator. (I call mine my Inner Child, and buy it Christmas presents. I bought it a toy robot dinosaur one year, and we set it on the neighbour’s cat to our great enjoyment, if not the cat’s. My Inner Child bought me a box of cigars, so I did rather well out of it.)

David observes that there is also some sort of censoring process involved, a process which he argues goes both ways; it restricts the information fed into the subconscious and it also restricts what comes out. There is clearly some sort of bottleneck which in uncreative people seems to choke off much of what the subconscious is thinking about.

There is a certain literature on related matters, from the recent best-selling book Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman, going back to the split-brain work of Sperry which indicated two distinct personalities, one in each cerebral hemisphere. The popular works of Sachs comes into this area of trying to understand cognitive processing generally, and the whole subject can be readily popularised because there is virtually nothing technical, or even mildly complicated, in it. David simply ignores the literature. I can’t fault him for this. Most of it is much less entertaining than The Aha! Moment and certainly no more insightful. (I found Thinking, Fast and Slow drearily vapid by comparison.) As Jim Stone has pointed out on Amazon, you would learn far more about humour from a first-rate stand-up comedian than from lengthy perusal of Freud on the subject, and you learn far more about creativity from the Great Jones than from psychologists.

Can you make uncreative people creative? Probably not. Can you make ordinary people whose creativity is constrained by the company they keep more creative? The Great Jones says yes and gives some tips.

I don’t know. The problem, it seems to me, is that the less creative individual wouldn’t be able to make much sense of the advice, and would resist following the bits he or she did grasp. David recommends solitary thinking, for example. In these days of massive groupthink and political correctness, it is clear that society doesn’t much want creativity. The social pressures are to conform so as to be predictable by the less intelligent. I see David’s tips as rather like advising people on how to be brave: the right people don’t need it and the wrong people can’t follow the instructions. But maybe that’s just me being a stodgy, uncreative old fart. See what you think.