Where Creativity Comes From

Tuesday, October 11th, 2016

The old adage about inventiveness is that it stems from necessity:

Based on his studies of orangutans, primatologist Carel van Schaik of the University of Zurich has come to a very different view. “When food is scarce, orangutans go into energy-saving mode. They minimize movement and focus on unappealing fall-back foods,” he observed. Their strategy in this scenario is quite the opposite of innovation, but it makes sense. “Trying something new can be risky — you can get injured or poisoned — and it requires a serious investment of time, energy and attention, while the outcome is always uncertain,” van Schaik explains.

Research on humans faced with scarcity echoes van Schaik’s orangutan findings. In 2013, Science published a study by economist Sendhil Mullainathan of Harvard University and psychologist Eldar Shafir of Princeton University describing how reminding people with a low income of their financial trouble reduced their capacity to think logically and solve problems in novel situations. A subsequent study found that Indian sugarcane farmers performed much better on the same cognitive performance test after receiving the once-a-year payment for their produce, temporarily resolving their monetary concerns. (Farmers who did not take the test previously did comparably well after getting paid, so it is unlikely that the improvement was simply the consequence of prior experience with the test.) People will do whatever it takes to survive, of course, which may occasionally lead to innovations. But as these and other studies suggest, if one’s mind is constantly occupied with urgent problems, such as finding food or shelter or paying bills, there will not be much capacity left to come up with long-term solutions to better one’s livelihood.

So where does creativity come from? Insights have come from the surprising observation that orangutans can be incredibly creative in captivity. “If food is provided for and predators are absent, they suddenly have a lot of time on their hands, free from such distractions,” van Schaik explains. Furthermore, in their highly controlled environments, exploration rarely has unpleasant consequences, and there are many unusual objects to play around with. Under such circumstances, orangutans appear to lose their usual fear of the unknown. In a study published in the American Journal of Primatology in 2015, van Schaik and his colleagues compared the response of wild and captive orangutans to a newly introduced object, a small platform in the shape of an orangutan nest. While captive orangutans approached the new object almost immediately, most wild orangutans, though habituated to the presence of humans, didn’t even go near it during several months of testing — only one eventually dared to touch it. Such fear of novelty may pose a significant obstacle to creativity: if an animal avoids approaching any new objects, innovations become rather unlikely. “So if you ask me, opportunity is the mother of invention,” van Schaik remarks.

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