graze and prowl on land, birds that soar through the sky, organisms that thrive in hot or cold climates, at high or low altitude, in rainforests or the desert – all created from different combinations of the same four nucleotides. Millions of species have come into being on our planet, from microscopic amoeba to building-size whales, all by reorganizing precedent. In the same way, our brains innovate thanks to a small repertoire of basic operations that alter and rearrange inputs. We take the raw materials of experience and then bend, break and blend them to create new outcomes. Set loose in the human brain, the three Bs provide an unending spring of new ideas and behaviors.
Other animals show signs of creativity, but humans are the standout performers. What makes us so? As we’ve seen, our brains interpose more neurons in areas between sensory input and motor output, allowing for more abstract concepts and more pathways through the circuitry. What’s more, our exceptional sociability compels humans to constantly interact and share ideas, with the result that everyone impregnates everyone else with their mental seeds. The miracle of human creativity is not that new ideas appear out of thin air, but that we devote so much brain real estate to developing them.
OVERT AND COVERT CREATIVITY
Your brain is running its creative software under the hood all the time. Every time you exaggerate, tell a lie, make a pun, create a new dish from leftovers, surprise your partner with a gift, plan a beach vacation or think about a relationship that might have been, you’re digesting and rebuilding memories and sensations that you’ve absorbed before.
As a result of human brains stampeding around the planet and running this software for millions of years, we are surrounded by creative output. Sometimes this refashioning of the world is easy to see – when, for example, a manufacturer proclaims a new model or you hear a remix of your favorite song. But more often, in the modern world, the ceaseless repurposing of inventions, ideas and experiences isn’t readily apparent.
Take YouTube. The site revolutionized how video was shared online. But it wasn’t easy to maintain that pole position. YouTube discovered early on that if they wanted to hold on to eyeballs, the videos had to stream without interruption. It’s no fun watching a video that stalls: when that happens, users click away.15 The emergence of high definition (HD) video aggravated the problem. HD files are large and require a lot of bandwidth to stream properly. If the bandwidth gets too narrow, the bytes get backed up and the video you’re watching freezes. Unfortunately, bandwidth fluctuates; that is under the control of your internet service provider, not YouTube. So the more users chose HD videos, the more their video experience was locking up. The company’s engineers faced a seemingly insurmountable difficulty. Without the ability to directly influence the bandwidth, how could they give their viewers reliable streaming?
Their solution was surprising and clever. YouTube videos are typically stored in three resolutions: high definition, standard and low. So the engineers devised software that broke the files of different resolutions into very short clips, like beads on a necklace. As video is being streamed to your computer, other software tracks the moment-to-moment fluctuations in bandwidth and feeds your computer the resolution that will make it through. What seems to you like an uninterrupted video is actually made up of thousands of tiny clips strung together. As long as there are enough high definition clips in your stream, you don’t notice that lower resolutions – pebbles among pearls – are mixed in. All you notice is that your service got better.
To improve HD streaming, YouTube engineers spliced and mixed the videos on hand, challenging the assumption that a high picture quality had to be one 100 percent HD. But here’s the rub: you cannot see the creativity that underlies the streaming. It is undetectable.
YouTube streaming is an example of covert creativity: it is designed not to call attention to itself. It is creativity with a poker face. Across business and industry, creativity is often shielded from view, because all that matters is that a tool does its job: the video streams properly, the app updates your traffic route, the smartwatch monitors how many stairs we’ve climbed. Innovation often conceals itself.16
Exterior of the Pompidou Center in Paris, France
Consider the buildings that surround us. In most, all the technology that makes them work is hidden behind walls: the air ducts, pipes, electrical wiring, support beams and so on. The Pompidou Center in Paris turns that architectural mold inside out. The functional and structural elements are displayed on the outer facade, for the world to see. When the design is exhibited on the surface rather than concealed, the creativity is overt.
Overt creativity exposes the wires and ducts of invention; it enables us to see the internal mental processes that make innovation possible.
Across diverse cultures, the most bountiful sources of overt creativity are found in the arts. Because the arts are intended to be exhibited, they are the open-source software of innovation. Take Christian Marclay’s installation The Clock: in this twenty-four-hour-long video montage, each minute of the day is represented by scenes from movies in which that exact time appears on screen. At precisely 2:18 p.m., Denzel Washington is glancing at a clock that reads 2:18 in the thriller The Taking of Pelham 123. Over the course of the installation’s twenty-four-hour cycle, thousands of clips from films such as Body Heat, Moonraker, The Godfather, A Nightmare on Elm Street and High Noon are screened, incorporating a dizzying array of timepieces – including pocket watches, wristwatches, alarm clocks, punch clocks, grandfather clocks, and clock towers – in analog and digital, in black-and-white and color.17
What Marclay is doing is not dissimilar from the YouTube engineers: he splices existing footage into short clips and stitches them together. But while the engineers’ creativity remains hidden, Marclay enables us to observe the bones of the creative process. We can see that he has broken and blended films to make his timepiece of movies. In contrast to the YouTube engineers, he puts his dicing on display.
For tens of thousands of years, the arts have been a constant in human culture, giving us an abundance of overt creativity. In the same way that a brain scan enables us to see the brain at work, the arts allow us to study the anatomy of the creative process. So how can putting the arts and sciences side by side enable us to better understand the birth of new ideas? What does free-verse poetry have to do with the invention of DNA sequencing and digital music? How is the Sphinx related to self-repairing cement? What does hip-hop music show us about Google Translate?
For answers, we now turn to each of the three Bs.
CHAPTER 3
BENDING
In the early 1890s, the French artist Claude Monet rented a room across from Rouen Cathedral. Over the course of two years, he painted more than thirty views of the cathedral’s front entrance. Monet’s visual perspective never changed: he painted the facade over and over from the same angle. Yet in spite of this fixed scene, no two paintings were alike. Instead, Monet showed the cathedral in different lights. In one, the noon sun gave its facade a bleached pallor; in another, dusk illuminated it with red and orange hues. In representing a prototype in constantly new ways, Monet was making use of the first creative tool: bending.
Like Monet, Katsushika Hokusai took a visual icon – Japan’s Mount Fuji – and created thirty-six woodblock prints, depicting it in different seasons, from different distances, and in different visual styles.