Week 9 Post 1 - Where Do Ideas Come From?
Henry Romain
Today I will research the very foundation of creativity, the formation of new ideas. Where do ideas come from?
- Biologically, certain parts of the brain become active when producing original ideas. "For the answer to be original, an additional region worked in collaboration with the associative region -- the administrative control region. A more "conservative" region related to social norms and rules. The researchers also found that the stronger the connection, i.e., the better these regions work together in parallel -- the greater the level of originality of the answer"(S1).
- Seemingly innovative people commonly credit their ideas to prior ideas in history but applied in a different way. "Across the spectrum of human activities, prior art propels the creative process. Consider the early automobile industry. Before 1908, building a new car was laborious. Each vehicle was custom built, with different parts assembled in different places and then painstakingly brought together. But Henry Ford came up with a critical innovation: he streamlined the entire process, putting the manufacture and assembly under one roof... His assembly line changed the way the cars were built: “Rather than keeping the work on assembly stands and moving the men past it, the assembly line kept the men still and moved the work.” Thanks to these innovations, cars drove off the factory floor at an unprecedented rate. An enormous new industry was born. But Ford’s idea of the assembly line had a long genealogy... Cigarette factories of the previous century had sped up production using continuous flow production – moving the assembly through an orderly sequence of steps. Ford saw the genius in this, and followed suit. And the assembly line itself was something Ford learned about from the Chicago meatpacking industry. Ford later said, “I invented nothing new. I simply assembled into a car the discoveries of other men behind whom were centuries of work”" (S2).
- Is creativity just a process of rearranging prior knowledge? "Just as nature modifies existing animals to create new creatures, so too the brain works from precedent. More than 400 years ago, the French essayist Michel de Montaigne wrote, “Bees plunder the flowers here and there, but afterward they make of them honey, which is all theirs … Even so with the pieces borrowed from others; he will transform and blend them to make a work of his own.” Or as modern science historian Steven Johnson puts it, “We take the ideas we’ve inherited or that we’ve stumbled across, and we jigger them together into some new shape”"(S2).
- Without memories of ideas we have seen before, one cannot come up with ideas on their own. "Graphic artist Lonni Sue Johnson, a prolific illustrator who made covers for the New Yorker. In 2007, she suffered a nearly fatal infection that crippled her memory. She survived, but found herself living in a fifteen-minute window of time, unable to recall her marriage, her divorce, or even people she’d met earlier in the day. The basin of her memories was largely emptied, and the ecosystem of her creativity dried up. She stopped painting because she could think of nothing to paint. No internal models swirled inside her head, no new ideas for the next combination of things she’d seen before. When she sat down in front of her paper, there was nothing but a blank. She needed the past to be able to create the future. She had nothing to draw upon, and therefore nothing to draw. Creativity relies on memory"(S2).
Sources:
1. How does our brain form creative and original ideas? (https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/11/151119104105.htm)
2. Where Do New Ideas Come From? (https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/where-do-new-ideas-come-from-180965202/)
Today I will research the very foundation of creativity, the formation of new ideas. Where do ideas come from?
- Biologically, certain parts of the brain become active when producing original ideas. "For the answer to be original, an additional region worked in collaboration with the associative region -- the administrative control region. A more "conservative" region related to social norms and rules. The researchers also found that the stronger the connection, i.e., the better these regions work together in parallel -- the greater the level of originality of the answer"(S1).
- Seemingly innovative people commonly credit their ideas to prior ideas in history but applied in a different way. "Across the spectrum of human activities, prior art propels the creative process. Consider the early automobile industry. Before 1908, building a new car was laborious. Each vehicle was custom built, with different parts assembled in different places and then painstakingly brought together. But Henry Ford came up with a critical innovation: he streamlined the entire process, putting the manufacture and assembly under one roof... His assembly line changed the way the cars were built: “Rather than keeping the work on assembly stands and moving the men past it, the assembly line kept the men still and moved the work.” Thanks to these innovations, cars drove off the factory floor at an unprecedented rate. An enormous new industry was born. But Ford’s idea of the assembly line had a long genealogy... Cigarette factories of the previous century had sped up production using continuous flow production – moving the assembly through an orderly sequence of steps. Ford saw the genius in this, and followed suit. And the assembly line itself was something Ford learned about from the Chicago meatpacking industry. Ford later said, “I invented nothing new. I simply assembled into a car the discoveries of other men behind whom were centuries of work”" (S2).
- Is creativity just a process of rearranging prior knowledge? "Just as nature modifies existing animals to create new creatures, so too the brain works from precedent. More than 400 years ago, the French essayist Michel de Montaigne wrote, “Bees plunder the flowers here and there, but afterward they make of them honey, which is all theirs … Even so with the pieces borrowed from others; he will transform and blend them to make a work of his own.” Or as modern science historian Steven Johnson puts it, “We take the ideas we’ve inherited or that we’ve stumbled across, and we jigger them together into some new shape”"(S2).
- Without memories of ideas we have seen before, one cannot come up with ideas on their own. "Graphic artist Lonni Sue Johnson, a prolific illustrator who made covers for the New Yorker. In 2007, she suffered a nearly fatal infection that crippled her memory. She survived, but found herself living in a fifteen-minute window of time, unable to recall her marriage, her divorce, or even people she’d met earlier in the day. The basin of her memories was largely emptied, and the ecosystem of her creativity dried up. She stopped painting because she could think of nothing to paint. No internal models swirled inside her head, no new ideas for the next combination of things she’d seen before. When she sat down in front of her paper, there was nothing but a blank. She needed the past to be able to create the future. She had nothing to draw upon, and therefore nothing to draw. Creativity relies on memory"(S2).
Sources:
1. How does our brain form creative and original ideas? (https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/11/151119104105.htm)
2. Where Do New Ideas Come From? (https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/where-do-new-ideas-come-from-180965202/)
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