Flight of Creativity

The other day, someone who had read my stories told me that I was in the wrong business. According to him, I was a creative person and should find a different and more plausible recourse to my life. This set me off thinking, was I in the wrong profession or was their something more to creativity that my friend was missing?
There were two basic questions I was searching an answer for:
• What is Creativity?
• Is Creativity bound by vocational topics or is it present elsewhere too?
In this write up, I will try and answer some of these questions armed with a self created theory and more supporting information from the Internet.
Creativity is a mental process involving the generation of new ideas or concepts, or new associations between existing ideas or concepts. George Kneller has aptly put that creativity “...consists largely of re-arranging what we know in order to find out what we do not know.”
Creativity is moving knowledge and information to another level, where answers are found and reasons given to problems. It has been attributed to cognitive processes, social strictures, personality traits, and sometimes accident. Newton was hit by falling apples, to bring about gravity as a concept.
From a scientific point of view, the creative outcome has both appropriateness and originality. An alternative, more everyday conception of creativity is that it is simply the act of making something new. So can creativity be mixed with innovation?
Creativity for starters, is the act of producing new ideas and methods or actions, while innovation is the process of both generating and applying such creative ideas in some specific context. Innovation by virtue of its name includes completion of a creative thought to existence. Innovation and creativity have a reverse correlation between them. Innovation encompasses creativity, whereas creativity might not include innovation.
That brings us to the question; does one have to be intelligent to be creative? I guess not, although creative people historically have shown traits different than common. Some researchers believe that creativity is the outcome of the same cognitive processes as intelligence, and is only judged as creativity in terms of its outcome, i.e. when the outcome of cognitive processes happens to produce something novel.
Fred Balzac, in his study in 2006, said that creative innovation requires, “....co activation and communication between regions of the brain that ordinarily are not strongly connected.” He further illustrates that creative people, have three important traits –
1. They have high level of Specialized Knowledge.
2. They are capable of divergent thinking, mediated by the frontal lobe of the brain.
3. They are able to modulate neurotransmitters in the frontal lobe.
If the above traits and the language do not mean much to you, then it is perfectly okay. All Fred Balzac was trying to say was that the frontal lobe of the brain appears to be the nerve centre for creative impulses in a person. On a lighter note, it is imperative to understand creative people do not have horns protruding from their foreheads, thanks to the hyper activity of the frontal lobe.
Fred Balzac was trying to creatively solve the problem of the essence of creativity. So that brings us to creativity as a tool to problem solving. Creative problem solving requires more than just the knowledge and thinking. It is a process, where the solution is independently created rather than learned with assistance.
Creative process and thus the result, is multi-dimensional. Once solved, it seems that the solution was always visible; it was just that we had to relook at it. This mystery keeps creativity just the inch beyond the grasp of conclusive scientific investigation. Due to this mysterious reason, reliable and quantitative methods of calculating the creativity quotient have not been made.
So what are the qualitative trademarks of a creative person? As my father puts it, humility to learn is the most basic. The person has to be humble enough to put his knowledge aside and think of better ways to achieve the goal.
Let me explain this topic with an example. Planets revolve around the sun in an orbit. Sun due to its immense magnetic field attracts them. But planets do not fall into the sun. They maintain course of their orbit, due to a certain orbital velocity, which creates a force which negates the sun’s magnetism.
But if one day, a planet decided to be creative and leave its orbit and breakaway from the solar system, it would need force to cancel the sun’s magnetism. This force would be generated from a velocity, which is called the break-away velocity. The value of this break-away velocity actually would define how far the planet would be able to go. Thus, we can say, that the delta or difference between orbital and break-away velocities, defines creativity of the planet.


In our daily lives, we are like the planet, running around bound by societal, industry, or work strictures and norms. Those of us, who are content in living in defined boundaries, would continue with their orbital velocity and survive. But those of us, who say, enough is enough, and decide to do something new and stranger to fiction, are called creative. These people are sometimes referred to as dreamers, pioneers, or idiots, as per the maturity levels prevalent in the society. These people are always looking for their break-away velocity.
I had once read that most progress is made by those who hardly work than those who are hard working. On the outset, the thought is interesting and nothing more. But look at it with the light of this theory of orbital and break-away velocities in our daily lives, and you try and find the theory to be plausible.
The theory promotes radical thought as recourse to survival within strictures. And history has shown that radical thought is creativity in action. It brings a new order and thus creates new balances.
Imagine if someone would not have thought of wings for humans to fly, Wright Brothers would have invented the aero planes. And if, Turner had not thought of breaking away from the Cricketing fraternity by promoting his brand of Colorful cricket, we wouldn’t have had the high adrenaline one day matches.
Radical thought is important for growth of the mind and personality. But all this is true, if used for the good of the society. And this is where the dark lining in the otherwise sparkling white cloud of creativity comes in. It makes creativity a double edged sword. If used in negative connotation, creativity can be more lethal than any weapon. Every time a new weapon is created to protect, a new weapon comes up for destruction. So the important point is to use creativity intelligently.
But wait a minute, we started off by this vague comment by a friend on me being creative, and where have we ended up at? We have gone scientific, philosophical, and explored ambiguity in this flight of creativity. After writing all this, I sure think, that the horn on forehead theory is correct. It’s just that it is not visible to mere mortals.