How an idea is born
Intelligence, creativity, genius in the age of distraction
By Alberto Oliverio
Creativity is an inborn or acquired capacity? What differentiates the artistic genius of Picasso or Mozart from the ability to look at the real word with fresh eyes of Darwin and Kepler? It is possible to develop a creative mind or to boost the creativity of a person or of a team in order to heighten their innovatory and adaptive capacities? This book offers a complete landscape of the different aspects of creativity: its biological and cultural roots, the characteristics of creative personalities, neural and perceptive mechanisms involved in the production of innovative ideas.
From the case histories of personalities such as Galileo Galilei, Ludwig van Beethoven, Marcel Proust or Sigmund Freud we understand that geniality is partly inborn, partly method and discipline: we can expand it and, most of all, train it in order to bypass the distractions that keep our mind continuously busy in a word crowded by stimuli. As a matter of fact, we live in the “age of distraction” since the surrounding word is characterized by frequent changes and by an excess of confusing stimuli. Thus, it is more and more necessary to develop an ability to focus on a problem, to select critical information, to associate mental images and concepts. In order to cope in an innovative way with new problems it is necessary to learn to look at the surrounding world from different points of view, to spot the analogies that link together different realms, to preserve child curiosity until the adult age.
In How an idea is born creativity is pictured from different points of view: its natural and cultural roots, personality, brain characteristics of creative individuals. Another way of looking at this mental function is to analyse creative “systems” or groups, such as the Bloomsbury circle at the time of Virginia Woolf, or the environments of successful scientists and inventors. But also: what is at the root of the longevity of some organizations and companies such as Swedish Stora (700 years old), Mitsubishi (3 centuries), Dupont de Nemours (2 centuries)? On the contrary, what makes a system, such as Medicean Florence decline after a long period of creativity? Answering these questions is not an easy matter: however, each of us may benefit from a better knowledge of creative processes, from a “metacognitive” approach.
Creative choices are involved in every facet of our working life since we live in years in which organizational or institutional survival depends on their ability to cope with novelties in a plastic and innovative way. Today, not only our world is characterized by continuous, quick changes, by a rapid obsolescence of products, technologies and productive strategies, but also by an excess of disturbing stimuli. Brain studies indicate that we are able to concentrate for a short time and that our ability to pay attention sets the limits of multitasking. The frontal cortex manages our attentive processes in conditions in which stimuli are not crowded and their timing respects our biological nature: under these circumstances our brain is able to select relevant stimuli and information and to associate key images and concepts. The role of mental images and analogies represents a salient tract of creativity: thus, it is a central feature of this book that also suggests a few techniques to increase our ability to act in a creative way.
モーツァルトやピカソ、ガリレオなどの“天才”が持つ優れた創造力の秘密とは何か？ 脳科学を専門とする著者が「創造力は訓練により鍛えられる」という前提に立ち、その深遠なる力の源泉をあらゆる角度から分析。創造力の生物学的・文化的なルーツや創造性に富む人物に見られる特徴、独創的なアイデアを生む脳の認知メカニズムなどを明らかにする。情報過剰の時代に複雑な問題解決を求められる現代人の“創造力”を刺激する一冊。立読（PDF）
아직도 당신의 머리는 선택받지 못한 아이디어들로 가득 차 있는가!
복잡성의 시대, 우리는 하루에도 수만 개의 아이디어를 흘리고 있다. 천재들처럼 떠오르는 생각들을 머릿속 코드에 따라 분류해 놓았다가, 필요할 때 적절히 조합해 쓸 수 있다면 어떨까? 수백 권의 저서를 펴낸 정신분석학의 대가 올리베리오 교수가 오랜 연구의 정수를 모아 『크리에이티브 웨이』를 펴냈다. 저자는 이 책을 통해 멀티태스킹 시대를 앞서가는 천재들의 창의력 코드를 간결하고도 명확하게 짚어 주며, 다양한 시각자료와 유용한 테스트들을 수록하여 실질적인 창의력 향상 방법을 구체적으로 제시한다