Steven Pinker -- How the Mind Works - Hampshire High Italian ...

Good Ideas 361The image came out of the Romantic movement two hundred yearsago and is now firmly entrenched. Creativity consultants take millions ofdollars from corporations for Dilbertesque workshops on brainstorming,lateral thinking, and flow from the right side of the brain, guaranteed toturn every manager into an Edison. Elaborate theories have been built toexplain the uncanny problem-solving power of the dreamy unconscious.Like Alfred Russel Wallace, some have concluded that there can be nonatural explanation. Mozart's manuscripts were said to have no corrections.The pieces must have come from the mind of God, who had chosento express his voice through Mozart.Unfortunately, creative people are at their most creative when writingtheir autobiographies. Historians have scrutinized their diaries,notebooks, manuscripts, and correspondence looking for signs of thetemperamental seer periodically struck by bolts from the unconscious.Alas, they have found that the creative genius is more Salieri thanAmadeus.Geniuses are wonks. The typical genius pays dues for at least tenyears before contributing anything of lasting value. (Mozart composedsymphonies at eight, but they weren't very good; his first masterworkcame in the twelfth year of his career.) During the apprenticeship,geniuses immerse themselves in their genre. They absorb tens of thousandsof problems and solutions, so no challenge is completely new andthey can draw on a vast repertoire of motifs and strategies. They keep aneye on the competition and a finger to the wind, and are either discriminatingor lucky in their choice of problems. (The unlucky ones, howevertalented, aren't remembered as geniuses.) They are mindful of theesteem of others and of their place in history. (The physicist RichardFeynman wrote two books describing how brilliant, irreverent, andadmired he was and called one of them What Do You Care What OtherPeople Think?) They work day and night, and leave us with many worksof subgenius. (Wallace spent the end of his career trying to communicatewith the dead.) Their interludes away from a problem are helpful notbecause it ferments in the unconscious but because they are exhaustedand need the rest (and possibly so they can forget blind alleys). Theydo not repress a problem but engage in "creative worrying," and theepiphany is not a masterstroke but a tweaking of an earlier attempt. Theyrevise endlessly, gradually closing in on their ideal.Geniuses, of course, may also have been dealt a genetic hand with