Creativity And Chaos
Terresa Cherrie
In my experience as a creativity educator, fear of chaos presents one of the biggest barriers to becoming more creative in the workplace. Non-creative types especially need to embrace chaos, and not run away from it. Chaos is part of the creative process, and you miss out if you avoid it.
Throughout the history of the universe, changes have been ongoing. Common cyclic themes include birth/death, construction/destruction, order/disorder, and evolution/devolution. Space and time needed for identifiable change vary.
For Earth and life on it, when the process is slow enough to allow for adaptations along the way, such as a bird changing its beak shape, the changes appear to proceed smoothly, and there is less urgent stress on the systems involved. When the change is catastrophic, such as a volcanic eruption, adaptation must happen afterward, often under desperate conditions. Implicit in these changes are roles for creativity and chaos. 1
One way to describe change is that creativity is continuously in the process of birthing new ordered forms, and within that process, there are temporary periods of apparent disorder required. Another way to describe change is that chaos is necessary first so that creativity will then have separated components available to choose from to connect into new ordered forms. Either way, creativity and chaos seem to be intimately related.
In our current times, it seems that chaos is often the prevailing condition. Has chaos captured creativity to use it for creating more chaos? I sometimes feel it has, such as when I learn about climate change effects, masses of suffering refugees, brutal terrorism, widespread corruption, and other states of disorder.
I regard creativity as an essence of existence that assists in the evolution of the universe. It is ever-present and ready to participate in the generation of novel forms. As humans, we can express new forms through words, material works of art, dance movements, designs of new physical objects, and so much more.
Creativity is like a silent guide originating from our unconscious. We need only the intent of listening to her to bring her designs into our conscious awareness. Once there, we have choices whether and how to bring something new into being.
There are more options for new connections when there are more parts available from which to choose. Frustration or dissatisfaction can be feelings evoked by old patterns being broken into more parts. If we try to hold on to parts that must break away, it is likely to be futile.
When I sense the chaos being promoted by the intentional corruption, cruelty, or greed of others, I find myself feeling broken in both mind and heart. Piles of misdeeds, lies, and ugliness remain to rot in plain sight. Some part of me rises up to take action without knowing what action to take.
With this belief, I reflect on the nature of creativity and what it offers. Rather than weep over the chaotic dismantling of what brought me comfort in the past, I can choose to see all the broken parts as pieces to be connected into new forms, easier to do once they are already broken into smaller units. One might interpret this as going to a dump to pick up trash pieces to create a house with new ways to conserve energy or to save space. Maybe so, but I also think of piles of discarded ideas, philosophies, standards of relationships, roles of groups of people, ways of treating Earth, and so on. Forms that were effective at one time in history may now need to be recreated into forms prescient to a new, emerging era.
If I am confused now by the potential loss of my previous way of life, if I am anxious about the ruthless destruction of my preferred surroundings, if I am fearful of dictators setting brutal rules, there is still something no one can take away from me, even in the midst of chaotic times. I will always have the inherent freedom to choose from whatever material or ideological remains are available. I will always have what still resides in my mind and heart to create what renews my inner way of life. I will always be able to send an intention to my unconscious for creativity to play with until its answer rises into my consciousness for me to enact.
1 Chaos has different meanings for physics, common use, or Greek mythology. I use it here in the general sense of local disorder and, when capitalized, as a state of being of energy/matter within the universe. Creativity is capitalized to indicate it as a universal driving force toward order.
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Perhaps one of my favorite examples of creating from chaos is Stanislav Krawczyk (@standarkart on Instagram). Born with a degenerative eye condition and cerebral palsy, most of his young life was spent inside of Ukrainian hospitals. At the age of 13, he decided dark art was the perfect way to express his life - the pain, emotion, frustrations associated with his conditions and upbringing. Instead of letting the chaos define his being, he has parlayed this extreme set of circumstances into a career selling his artwork in Los Angeles.
Chaos allows us to explore other avenues, ways that are often not considered when everything's going according to plan. When a constant is taken away, how do we find new ways to achieve better (different, even) results?
So, can educators help their students become more creative? Some teachers are moving in that direction, loosening the rules, giving students choice, celebrating ideas and behaviors that challenge the status quo, but without a drastic reimagining of the structures within which educators work, true creativity could be hard to find in school.
Fifty years ago, Sarnoff Mednick defined the process of creative thinking as "the forming of associative elements into new combinations which either meet specific requirements or are in some way useful.
They found that the greater the semantic distance of the noun-verb pairs, the higher the levels of creative cognition, story writing ability, openness to experience, and creative achievement. Interestingly, they also found a relationship between semantic distance and traditional measures of "convergent thinking", such as IQ and working memory. This suggests that creative thinking doesn't just involve combining distant associations, but also requires consciously accessing the associations. This is where cognitive control--the ability to control thought and action--comes into play.
Why would IQ be related to creative cognition? Paul Silvia and Emily Nusbaum found that the link between IQ and the creativity of responses was related to "executive switching"-- the ability to flexibly shift between different mental categories. Additionally, Benedek and colleagues found that IQ was also related to updating: the ability to monitor incoming information and quickly revise the contents of working memory based on the goals of the task.
Interestingly, IQ was not related to inhibition (the suppression of dominant but irrelevant response tendencies), even though both updating and inhibition were related to the creativity of responses on a creative cognition task (e.g., "What can be used for speedy travel?"). Also, note that in the Beaty and colleagues study, associative ability was associated with creative idea production even after taking into account IQ and memory retrieval ability.
Therefore, while controlled cognition is important, creative cognition is more than merely cognitive control. This has important implications for assessing and developing creative ability in students. It also has implications for the creative process.
Scott Barry Kaufman is a humanistic psychologist exploring the depths of human potential. He has taught courses on intelligence, creativity and well-being at Columbia University, N.Y.U., the University of Pennsylvania, and elsewhere. He hosts the Psychology Podcast and is author and/or editor of nine books, including Transcend: The New Science of Self-Actualization, Wired to Create: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Creative Mind (with Carolyn Gregoire), and Ungifted: Intelligence Redefined. Find out more at In 2015 he was named one of "50 groundbreaking scientists who are changing the way we see the world" by Business Insider. He wrote the extremely popular Beautiful Minds blog for Scientific American for close to a decade. Follow him on X.
Scientific American is part of Springer Nature, which owns or has commercial relations with thousands of scientific publications (many of them can be found at www.springernature.com/us). Scientific American maintains a strict policy of editorial independence in reporting developments in science to our readers.
Fifty years ago, Sarnoff Mednick defined the process of creative thinking as \\"the forming of associative elements into new combinations which either meet specific requirements or are in some way useful.
They found that the greater the semantic distance of the noun-verb pairs, the higher the levels of creative cognition, story writing ability, openness to experience, and creative achievement. Interestingly, they also found a relationship between semantic distance and traditional measures of \\"convergent thinking\\", such as IQ and working memory. This suggests that creative thinking doesn't just involve combining distant associations, but also requires consciously accessing the associations. This is where cognitive control--the ability to control thought and action--comes into play.
Why would IQ be related to creative cognition? Paul Silvia and Emily Nusbaum found that the link between IQ and the creativity of responses was related to \\"executive switching\\"-- the ability to flexibly shift between different mental categories. Additionally, Benedek and colleagues found that IQ was also related to updating: the ability to monitor incoming information and quickly revise the contents of working memory based on the goals of the task.
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