Isaac Asimov on creativity

[cynicist]

Here's a 1959 essay of his which was recently uncovered, on what helps stimulate creativity. Thoughts?

 

http://www.technologyreview.com/view/531911/isaac-asimov-mulls-how-do-people-get-new-ideas/

[luxfelix]

The portion about permissiveness in public, in particular, reminds me of the improv process:

 

The basic challenge of improv is to perform, without pre-planned choreography or script, before an audience in real-time; this is not dissimilar to working in any creative field with respect to needing to be "creative on demand". 

 

I recognize the ease and relaxation prerequisite as expressed in improv terms as "yes, and..." where players in a scene need to be in agreement to foster trust; they've got to trust that they will survive the roller-coaster ride together.

 

And stepping out onto the stage kinda feels like the initial ascent, climbing higher and higher...

 

I've found that the audience wants to go on that ride with you, they want to experience the feelings of weightlessness and the exhilarating rush of speeding through the unknown, the new -- but can they trust that the ride won't give them whiplash?

 

The familiar is easier to trust, but they came to experience something new. Luckily for us, everything familiar is new because we are new, and we will make connections that we did not recognize previously.

 

If you've ever watched old cartoons and found pretty adult jokes in them, then you'll know what I'm talking about here, and I can connect this back to the portion of the essay about how Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace were not the only ones with their common backgrounds, but they were the ones to come up with evolution/natural selection because they made new connections with old dots.

 

-- Ride the same roller-coaster with your eyes closed this time and its a new experience! --

 

Related to public permissiveness is personal permissiveness; there was a recent Stefan Molyneux video about how we need to be in the moment to create (reflection comes later), and that applies with improv as well.

 

Another concept in improv is called "the master mind" or "the beast" where the players in a scene, fully trusting and listening ("in tune") with one another, will gain a heightened kinetic awareness as well as developing an underlying theme in seemingly unrelated scenes/dramatic beats. (If one of the players tries to force a connection, it breaks the group cohesion and can lead to unsatisfying performances, etc.)

 

It is a risk to enter into a scene and trust that it will work out (creative work in general deals with subjectivity for judgments of value/cultural capital), so the portion at the end suggesting payment for physical indexes (reports, time summaries, etc.) rather than the brainstorming sessions themselves makes sense as an attempt to remove the stress of payment from creative sessions.