Creative and analytic thinking

I recently completed an online course with a similar title, How to Think Critically and Creatively. It must be the 8th or 9th course I’ve done through New Scientist, on a variety of topics, from cosmology and quantum mechanics to immunology and sustainable living; so quite diverse subjects. I started doing them during COVID, as they helped to pass the time and stimulate the brain at the same time.
 
All these courses rely on experts in their relevant fields from various parts of the globe, so not just UK based, as you might expect. This course was no exception with just 2 experts, both from America. Denise D Cummins is described as a ‘cognitive scientist, author and elected Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science, and she’s held faculty at Yale, UC, University of Illinois and the Centre of Adaptive Behaviours at the Max Planck Institute in Berlin’. Gerard J Puccio is ‘Department Chair and Professor at the International Centre for Studies on Creativity, Buffalo State; a unique academic department that offers the world’s only Master of Science degree in creativity’.
 
I admit to being sceptical that ‘creativity’ can be taught, but that depends on what one means by creativity. If creativity means using your imagination, then yes, I think it can, because imagination is something that we all have, and it’s probably a valid comment that we don’t make enough use of it in our everyday lives. If creativity means artistic endeavour then I think that’s another topic, even though it puts imagination centre stage, so to speak.
 
I grew up in a family where one side was obviously artistic and the other side wasn’t, which strongly suggests there’s a genetic component. The other side excelled at sport, and I was rubbish at sport. However, both sides were obviously intelligent, despite a notable lack of formal education; in my parents’ case, both leaving school in their early teens. In fact, my mother did most of her schooling by correspondence, and my father left school in the midst of the great depression, shortly followed by active duty in WW2.
 
Puccio (mentioned above) argues that creativity isn’t taught in our education system because it’s too hard. Instead, he says that we teach by memorising facts and by ‘understanding’ problems. I would suggest that there is a hierarchy, where you need some basics before you can ‘graduate’ to ‘creative thinking’, and I use the term here in the way he intends it. I spent most of my working lifetime on engineering projects, with diverse and often complex elements. I need to point out that I wasn’t one of the technical experts involved, but I worked with them, in all their variety, because my job was to effectively co-ordinate all their activities towards a common goal, by providing a plan and then keeping it on the rails.
 
Engineering is all about problem solving, and I’m not sure one can do that without being creative, as well as analytical. In fact, one could argue that there is a dialectical relationship between them, but maybe I’m getting ahead of myself.
 
Back to Puccio, who introduced 2 terms I hadn’t come across before: ‘divergent’ and ‘convergent’ thinking, arguing they should be done in that order. In a nutshell, divergent thinking is brainstorming where one thinks up as many options as possible, and convergent thinking is where one narrows in on the best solution. He argues that we tend to do the second one without doing the first one. But this is related to something else that was raised in the course, which is ‘Type 1 thinking’ and ‘Type 2 thinking’.
 
Type 1 thinking is what most of us would call ‘intuition’, because basically it’s taking a cognitive shortcut to arrive at an answer to a problem, which we all do all the time, especially when time is a premium. Type 2 thinking is when we analyse the problem, which is not only time consuming but takes up brain resources that we’d prefer not to use, because we’re basically lazy, and I’m no exception. These 2 cognitive behaviours are clinically established, so it’s not pop-science.
 
However, something that was not discussed in the course, is that type 2 thinking can become type 1 thinking when we develop expertise in something, like learning a musical instrument, or writing a story, or designing a building. In other words, we develop heuristics based on our experience, which is why we sometimes jump to convergent thinking without going through the divergent part.
 
The course also dealt with ‘critical thinking’, as per its title, but I won’t dwell on that, because critical thinking arises from being analytical, and separating true expertise from bogus expertise, which is really a separate topic.
 
How does one teach these skills? I’m not a teacher, so I’m probably not best qualified to say. But I have a lot of experience in a profession that requires analytical thinking and problem-solving as part of its job description. The one thing I’ve learned from my professional life is the more I’m restrained by ‘rules’, the worse job I’ll do. I require the freedom and trust to do things my own way, and I can’t really explain that, but it’s also what I provide to others. And maybe that’s what people mean by ‘creative thinking’; we break the rules.
 
Artistic endeavour is something different again, because it requires spontaneity. But there is ‘divergent thinking’ involved, as Puccio pointed out, giving the example of Hemingway writing countless endings to Farewell to Arms, before settling on the final version. I’m reminded of the reported difference between Beethoven and Mozart, two of the greatest composers in the history of Western classical music. Beethoven would try many different versions of something (in his head and on paper) before choosing what he considered the best. He was extraordinarily prolific but he wrote only 9 symphonies and 5 piano concertos plus one violin concerto, because he workshopped them to death. Mozart, on the other hand, apparently wrote down whatever came into his head and hardly revised it. One was very analytical in their approach and the other was almost completely spontaneous.
 
I write stories and the one area where I’ve changed type 2 thinking into type 1 thinking is in creating characters – I hardly give it a thought. A character comes into my head almost fully formed, as if I just met them in the street. Over time I learn more about them and they sometimes surprise me, which is always a good thing. I once compared writing dialogue to playing jazz, because they both require spontaneity and extemporisation. Don Burrows once said you can’t teach someone to play jazz, and I’ve argued that you can’t teach someone to write dialogue.
 
Having said that, I once taught a creative writing class, and I gave the class exercises where they were forced to write dialogue, without telling them that that was the point of the exercise. In other words, I got them to teach themselves.
 
The hard part of storytelling for me is the plot, because it’s a neverending exercise in problem-solving. How did I get back to here? Analytical thinking is very hard to avoid, at least for me.
 
As I mentioned earlier, I think there is a dialectic between analytical thinking and creativity, and the best examples are not artists but genii in physics. To look at just two: Einstein and Schrodinger, because they exemplify both. But what came first: the analysis or the creativity? Well, I’m not sure it matters, because they couldn’t have done one without the other. Einstein had an epiphany (one of many) where he realised that an object in free fall didn’t experience a force, which apparently contradicted Newton. Was that analysis or creativity or both? Anyway, he not only changed how we think about gravity, he changed the way we think about the entire cosmos.
 
Schrodinger, borrowed an idea from de Broglie that particles could behave like waves and changed how we think about quantum mechanics. As Richard Feynman once said, ‘No one knows where Schrodinger’s equation comes from. It came out of Schrodinger’s head. You can’t derive it from anything we know.’