Synaptic Connectivity and the Creative Cycle

June 13th, 2006 Fred McVittie

Neurological maturity consists not only of the forging of new neuronal associations but also, significantly, of the ‘pruning’ of existing connections within the brain. Between early childhood and adolescence up to 50% of synapses are lost. This developmental period is also one in which forms of thinking change. Early childhood is characterised by thinking styles which incorporate plurality, intuition, play, and ‘magic’. After adolescence these styles cease to dominate and are largely replaced by the cognitive habits of linearity, causality, deduction, and logic.

These different thinking styles are also characteristic of different phases in the typical creative process. At the beginning of a process (or cycle within a process), when there is a need to identify a particular problem, construct criteria, locate resources, etc. linear logical styles are most appropriate. This mode of cognition is also most appropriate at the end of a process or cycle, when the onus is on verification, organisation (of data, of expression etc), and elaboration. During the interim phases, usually referred to as the ‘incubation’ and ‘illumination’ stages, another style of thinking is more conducive in which intuition, play, and ‘magic’ are available. This corresponds to a mode of thought particularly available prior to the ‘pruning’ of synaptic connections, a mode in which connectivity between ideas is maximised, along with a hightened and distributed sense of significance or meaningfulness across this maximal synaptic network.

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Create and Perform

October 11th, 2006 Fred McVittie

‘Performance’, in addition to signifying a particular set of cultural practices associated with entertainment, display, ritual etc, can also be understood as a moment or phase in the cycle of a creative process, and indeed all behavioral sequences. Robert Crease revealingly uses this term to indicate the actual carrying out of an experiment in the sequence of events which make up a scientific enquiry, distinguishing it from other phases in which, for example, hypotheses are developed, results analysed etc.

In terms of creativity, the moment of performance corresponds to the ‘illumination’ stage (Wallas), in which the idea or problem that is the subject of creative attention emerges from the wings of non-conscious cognition onto the stage of conscious awareness.

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Performance Creativity Consciousness

October 12th, 2006 Fred McVittie

The metaphor of performance, including the various entailments of that metaphor concerning the production and evaluation of performance, provides a structure for understanding a wide range of individual and social processes. This metaphor, whilst not overt, seems to underpin (or at least revealingly correspond to) proposed structures for the workings of;

• individual creativity
• social creative processes
• the scientific experimental method
• the functioning of human consciousness

This understanding of performance presents it as a prototypical phase not only in the production of theatrical events, but also in cycles of creative production which include the individual psychology of creativity, the public processes of creative evaluation and legitimisation, the scientific method, and the emergence of consciousness.

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Post-Performance Creativity

November 22nd, 2006 Fred McVittie

Creative processes involve a cycling through various phases, with the created ‘product’ (an idea, image, text etc) emerging onto the stage of consciousness after a period of initial research and ‘incubation’. Wallas refers to this emergence as ‘illumination’, although it is referred to differently by different theorists. In all understanding of the creative processes this illumination phase is followed by a terminal phase in which the events or products are evaluated, verified, or elaborated. This final phase in when the second draft of the novel are written, the bugs are ironed out of the invention, the experimental results are analysed.

As has been noted earlier, the creative cycle operates at a number of scales, the overall process has an arc or trajectory, and within this arc there are numerous other, smaller cycles (1). It is interesting to note that each of these smaller cycles of development has the characteristic cyclical form described above, and the entirety of a process, from initial inception through to final analysis also moves through the same phases. Constantly throughout a process, we are typically allowing small ‘illuminations’ to drive the work forward, one emergent idea forming part of the the ‘preparation’ for the next. At a larger scale, the same cycles is also present; the final ‘verification’ or ‘elaboration’ phase taking place after the object of the cycle, the created product, has emerged into the public domain and is, to that extent, a ‘finished’ product.

The fact that, at this larger scale, the final phase in the cycle exists post performance, after the apparently final illuminated moment of public display, tends to separate this phase from the preceding phases. It is common to regard any engagement with the created object after its revealing as an additional, possibly superfluous act disconnected from the rest of the creative process. In some ways this is clearly correct; from the perspective of the wider culture the artefact has been newly introduced as a discreet element into that culture and must now enter into the various cultural processes of production and consumption. Just as the individual, during the earlier phases of the creative cycle, employed the mechanism of individual thought and feeling to carry out an ongoing evaluation of their own illuminations, their own ideas, so the social organism has its own mechanisms for verifying the validity of the big idea, the ‘finished’ artifact. These processes include critique, documentation, archiving, curation, valuation, sale, collection, publication etc. Because of the fact that the artefact has now moved into this different domain these processes are typically carried out by other individuals than those involved into its original creation.

1. (It could argued that corresponding cycles also can be found at the level of individual human psychology, in which the operation of mind has this general form, with the ongoing state we call ‘consciousness’ being a standing wave of illumination preceded and anteceded by unconscious processes paralleling the other phases in the cycle).

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Performing Silence

December 22nd, 2006 Fred McVittie

The moment of ‘performance’ signals the silencing of the other voices which obtain during other phases of the creative cycle. At that moment there is no criticism, interaction, dialogue, or communicative exchange of any kind. All this comes before and after.

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A World Without Cycles

July 9th, 2007 Fred McVittie

Prior to the invasion of the Conquistadors into South America the local culture, although it was highly advanced in many ways, was a civilisation without the wheel. Actually this is not entirely true, apparently they did have toys which had wheels, and devices such as spinning tops which used the principle of the wheel, but they did not have wheeled vehicles. Let us pretend that they didn’t though. Nor, for the sake of argument, did they have roulette wheels, plate-spinning jugglers, rotating potter’s wheels, lathe’s, or indeed anything which involved the rotation of a circular object. In such a civilisation would it be possible for the concept of a ‘cycle’ to emerge as an organisational structure such as the ‘cycles’ we talk about when discussing history, industrial production, time, etc.? When ‘cycle’ is used in these ways it is a metaphor to indicate some phenomenon which repeats, which involves the constant return of a limited pattern of events, and which ‘comes around’ with the regularity of a turning wheel. Our conception of such phenomena depends upon our previous embodied familiarity with the wheels we come across in everyday life. Presumably without this familiarity and the Image Schema which we possess based on our interaction with the wheel, then this metaphor of the cycle would not be available to us.

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Creative Cycles and the Illuminated Moment

October 6th, 2007 Fred McVittie

A dominant image within most formulations of the creative process is that of the cycle. Typically, artistic production, for example, is seen as structured with a number of sequential phases, each representing a particular part of the overall process and each requiring a different set of behaviours and sensibilities on the part of the artist. These various phases, which are named differently according to the various schemata invoked, include such activities as; research, play, analysis, data collection, improvisation, experiment, hypothesis generation, measurement of efficacy, review, etc. Many (although not all) models for the creative process involve a phase, (sometimes conceptualised as an atemporal ‘moment’) at which a breakthrough occurs. This is the moment of illumination, enlightenment, and realisation. It is the stereotypical moment when the lightbulb appears above the inventor’s head and the solution dawns on the mind of the scientist. It is a moment which has entered the mythology of creativity via Archimedes bath and Kekule’s serpent. Widely criticised as a product of the romantic imagination, and often considered relatively irrelevant in the greater scheme of things, the illuminated moment of inspiration has been consigned by many to the 5% status of whimsy, drowning in the 95% flood of the Real Work of creative perspiration. This paper will attempt to recover this washed out loser from it ignominious fate and relight the lantern that has shone over most of the greatest events in human history.

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