Unlearning Creativity
There are so many things that I have found surprising while researching creativity. How creative many of my friends actually are, how easy it is to re-frame the everyday choices you make as creative choices and how I have reacted to my own up and down relationship with a consistent creative practice. One thing that hasn’t been surprising, however, is the steady flow of anecdotes, articles and academic research that say we become less creative as we age.
Study, after article, after study, after article point to a decrease in creativity from early childhood through adulthood in a majority of people. A classic study conducted by George Land and Beth Jarman on the effect of “unlearning” creativity sought to test this theory starting in the ‘60’s using a pile of paperclips.
Reflected in the graph, the researchers asked the same group of children at 5, 10, and 15 to make as many things as they could out of a pile of paperclips – testing their divergent thinking ability, a key skill in creativity.
While its something I think we all know in a way, seeing the numbers and their massive rate of decrease, especially from 5-10 (yikes!!!), leapt out of the data. One thing that might also standout, is the results for the adult population After finishing their longitudinal study with, kids, they tested almost 300K adults and at only 2% “highly creative”, leaving only the select few, disagreeable mavericks with all the creative ability.
While the data is clear is about what is happening, less solidly understood is the why behind this data and this phenomenon at large. As with many things around creativity its hard to tease out on distinct cause and effect, and especially when applied to broad trends or populations. The effect of unlearning creativity is no different, but there are some prominent theories I’ve come across and summarize as:
We’re all shaving with Occam’s Razor (phrase courtesy of Pete Holmes)
Simply put, we might just be wired to make sense of the world using the information we already know rather than finding new reasons for why something may be occurring. As this study points out, “Childhood and adolescence may, at least in part, be designed to resolve the tension between exploration and exploitation.” Evolutionarily that makes sense – it takes more energy to learn new things, and therefore as we learn more we should lean on that information. Personally, professionally and culturally it's also more likely to be advantageous to be “someone who knows” things rather than someone who’s constantly changing their mind.
The Expert Trap
There is a ironic and paradoxical connection between how much you know about something and how creative you can be. When mapped out, it generally exists as an inverted U shape. You need to be fluent enough in a medium, style or craft to be able to be able to create at all, but past a certain threshold, creativity in that area drops off. It boils down to the fact that when you’re an expert in the field, you know what works and what doesn’t, so you are more likely to“stick to the script” and operate within the bounds of your area of expertise. You lose the beginner’s mindset that allows you to be free of judgment, try new things, make novel connections, or take risks.
School sucks…the creativity out of us
School, as I experienced it at least, was a vestige of the industrial age. Sitting in neat square rows, listening, writing and doing; mostly focused on the structured intake and regurgitation of simple facts. The perfect place for creativity to die. The rigidity of the structure reduces complexity and rewards rote execution. It reinforces the logical, formal structures in our brains instead of building functions for the openness, imagination and critical thinking required for creativity. This is similarly reflected in many early job roles, where one is handed the smallest, most mundane and least critical tasks to do over and over again.
The thing missing in these theories is technology. There are studies (like this one) pointing out that kids today on the whole are less creative than they used to be, with the ease of access to entertainment and the overscheduling of modern young life pointed to as the primary drivers. Which is to say no one has to be or is even able to be bored anymore. However, these trends, like the paperclip study, precede modern devices and even home entertainment (VHS and Atari launched in ‘76 and ‘77 respectively) and speak to how we began designing modern life for efficiency and production over exploration and imagination.
Well that’s all quite bleak. The good news though, is that there are a lot of simple and largely free ways to improve creativity at any stage of life. And even better, all of the strategies have a similar theme – finding a structured way to get out of your comfort zone. While this deserves a deeper dive, things like active and intentional Play, trying out a new creative endeavor or even prioritizing a little boredom — any intentional action or practice to get a little uncomfortable can get you out of a place of complacency and stagnation.
If you have any questions, would like to chat more about creativity or any of the other topics discussed here, I’d love to hear it. Send an email or a note on LinkedIn and let’s start a conversation. Also, a few folks I’ve spoken to missed the last few posts, so I’ve also added a section below to follow along in your email inbox.
