The Creative Mind

Posted on by Vincent
Wastwater showing Sca Fell which we walked up and then abseiled down

The other morning I turned on Radio 4 whilst washing the breakfast dishes and it sounded interesting, a kind of reminiscence. I’d missed the beginning and took a little while to catch on. I liked the sound of the lady though, full of fun, approachable and without false modesty. When she mentioned a former post in the Philosophy Department of Birmingham University, my listening became more personally motivated. Could it be Maggie Boden? It was!

We met once, at a weekend walking and climbing in the Lake District. I mentioned the occasion in a post published five years ago, here; but had no reason then to mention her.

We stayed at the Youth Hostel beside Wastwater, it must have been the winter of ’62/3. I imagine that Bill Cheverst, a noted climber and last of the original Telferers’ Club, would have suggested the venue; Jim Slater would have invited Dr Boden; Alan Williamson & I would have come because we were always keen for such expeditions. Of Maggie herself I remember nothing, except that she was there, and that she proposed we play Scrabble in the evening, using a set she had brought along. It was the first time I heard of the game. I wasn’t keen to play, retired early to my bunk exhausted, otherwise I might have got to know her. And I’m pretty sure she didn’t accompany us on our climb up Sca Fell. To me, there’s an unsolved mystery here: why is she such a blank in my memory? It may be that I simply felt uncomfortable with someone so beyond my league, so accomplished, whilst I was still in a crisis of adolescence, lacking a sense of personal identity, devoid of social graces. I see this now for the first time. It explains a lot. My diagnosis is confirmed by this article on Adolescence and Social Development. And you’ll see that the piece I link to above closes with these words: “Oh yes, I could be obnoxious in those days.” Enough said.

Reading this again on 1st June 2024, I see I was too hard on myself. I was what I was, that was part of life’s journey. Today I see I was too respectful. I simply didn’t like her and still don’t: as a self-satisfied person and know-it-all, not a trace of humility.

Listening to her speak on the radio, fifty-two years after our previous encounter, I was able to admire her on more equal terms, or at any rate from a position of mature serenity. I liked her poise and luminous clarity. She was being interviewed for an episode of “The Life Scientific”, which introduced her as a world expert on Artificial Intelligence. I’ve spent my working life in IT, and looked down upon AI as an oxymoronic wild-goose chase. My position was “Computers have no intelligence: they can only do what they’re told—if indeed that.”

So I bought a copy of her book The Creative Mind: myths and mechanisms, and was delighted to find it addressed to me: not personally of course, she wouldn’t remember me at all. It is addressed to someone who tends to think that inspiration, the Muse’s whisper, if you will, is at bottom one of those unfathomable mysteries, like a sense of the sacred, which I’ve touched on here in earlier posts. For her, it’s great fun to dismantle such ideas, because she does it so deftly, and here she is at the age of 78 still doing it, in her role as Research Professor at the University of Sussex. Her sense of triumph at solving puzzles is tempered by undiminished reverence for the wonders she carefully dissects. As her subject in the book is creativity, she picks a number of case histories, including Mozart, Kekulé (organic chemist famous for discovering the ring structure of benzene), Coleridge, Bach, the Impressionists, Kepler, Copernicus, Koestler, Poincaré. She picks them not just for being examples of creative genius from different fields, but also for their own views on how creativity manifests from within the heart and mind of man. This is fascinating enough, but she continually delves deeper, looking at the different kinds of explanation, different kinds of creativity, different kinds of lucky break, as in her chapter “Chance, Chaos, Randomness, Unpredictability”.

And then she brings in Artificial Intelligence, which she has clearly studied as deeply as she has poetry, music, how children learn language, all kinds of intricate lore. She doesn’t spare the reader by keeping to an overview. She takes you through detail, and sometimes gives you puzzles and exercises so that you can discover what she’s saying for yourself, not just let her words wash over you uncomprehended. So she explains how computational techniques such as parallel processing, heuristic & search-tree methods, semantic nets, neural networks can ape some of the creative processes humans perform. Genius, she avers, requires memory, connectivity, awareness of rules and readiness to break out from them into new areas of “conceptual space”. Computational models really can help. By teaching a computer the quickest way to learn English, for example, we can unravel the way young children learn their first language. First the child can only say “I go”, but then invents “I goed” instead of “I went”, and then at a later stage, more consciously understanding the rules for regular verbs, may say “I wented”. Creativity: to learn rules, then exceptions; finally to master both rules and exceptions to the point where you can take the rules to the extreme, and go beyond, to a conceptual space where new rules can be made, then broken and so on.

I haven’t got to the end yet, but there is one thing I haven’t found so far. She goes a long way to explain how creativity can occur. But why, and how, does it move us so? Is human creativity the same as Nature’s? Well of course it arises from Nature, so there must be a connection between the two. Not least of the beauty in her writing is that she opens new doors without slamming any others shut. And I can’t help comparing the significance of her research with earlier developments in understanding evolution and biology. Explanations don’t diminish the sense of wonder: they augment it.

Here’s a puzzle from her book:

. . . try the following example on some friends chatting over coffee, you may find that the first person to solve it knows the least about mathematics. Engineers and physicists, for instance, usually have trouble with it (even though one might expect them to guess that there is some catch). Indeed, two world-famous mathematicians on whom I have tried it each refused repeatedly to answer, insisting that while the principle of solution is obvious the solution cannot in practice be found without either a computer or lengthy pencil-and-paper calculations.

Here it is: There are two houses, x feet apart. A twenty-foot string is suspended between two points, A and B, on the neighbouring walls of the houses. A and B are at the same height from the ground, and are high enough to allow the string to hang freely. The vertical ‘sag’ in the string (the distance between the string’s lowest point and the horizontal line joining A and B) is ten feet. What is x? That is, how far apart are the houses?
. . .
(One friend who solved this problem very quickly without pencil-and-paper—we were climbing Snowdon at the time—described himself as a ‘very bad visualizer’.)
. . .
People often say . . . that visual imagery aids creativity. So it may. But it can also prevent it.

She doesn’t provide the answer. It took me a while. Let me know when you get it.

I find myself wondering which came first: that Snowdon climb or our visit to the Southern Fells around Wastwater. I might have learned a lot from her, fifty-two years ago. As it is, I think she’s changing my life anyway, telling me stuff I wouldn’t accept from Bryan White when we argued bitterly a few years ago. Ain’t that just the way? For now I see that if there can be a science of creativity, why cannot there also be a science of how we learn, or fail to learn, right from wrong? Why can’t there be a science of how some people overcome fear with love, and others do not? And then there might actually be progress in the world, contrary to the pessimism of John Gray, in his Straw Dogs.

Ah, but there is still “Chance, Chaos, Randomness, Unpredictability”. Hope is not dead yet, and the case continues.

26 thoughts on “The Creative Mind”

  2. Excellent, especially that you overcame the apparent handicap of being a physicist. I must confess that I couldn't remember how to deal with catenaries so decided to approximate by means of Pythagoras' theorem, but couldn't get my diagram even approximately to scale. Only then did it strike me in the face.

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  3. She sounds like a PROFESSIONAL butterfly catcher. I'll have to look up that book.

    As for the puzzle, I've made only the quickest, most “common sense” guess, which I suspect may be right, since that seems to be the point of the exercise. But I haven't looked into it any further, and I haven't, God forbid, broken out the pen and paper or even a small string and a ruler yet. So I don't know if I'm right or not.

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  5. Professional (in caps) butterfly catcher – I love it, Bryan! Especially as her colleague in the Italian Dept at Birmingham, il Dottore Carsaniga, gave me the only diagnosis I ever received in that august institution: “Mr Mulder, you have a butterfly mind.”

    I take it that your second comment was to confirm your first quick commonsense guess, rather than to correct it? I should point out in self-defence that my own stumbling arrival at the solution was hindered by the professional lepidoperist's misdirection, just like a magician's, which for the sake of brevity I had to truncate.

    It rather looks as though the book has been recently republished, partially explaining said lady's appearance on the airwaves at this time; but I managed to get a second-hand copy from the States via Amazon, tastefully decorated with yellow-highlighter over much of the text, but hardback all the same. It's probably available in libraries too.

    I ought to complete my confession by mentioning I used to have a copy of Marvin Minsky’s book on AI called The Society of Mind which I rather despised and which made me despair of AI at the time (which happened to be when Boden’s book came out, around 1990). I found his style irritatingly bumptious and got rid of the book (unless it’s in a box in the attic). My main objection was rather unscientific and took the form, “Get your big clumsy boots off my sacred ground!” But I took a peek via the “look inside!/surprise me!” feature of Amazon and felt much kinder towards him today.

    As an appendix to the above post, I scanned a page out of the book, and you can see it here.

    Boden doesn’t mention Minsky at all. They may be rivals, both still going strong, he 85 & American, she 78 & as English as the Queen.

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  6. Hey, I got another puzzle for you that also involves creative thinking. I don't remember if I ever shared it over on nuclearheadache or just intended to and never got around to it. Anyway, I heard it years ago and it goes like this:

    You have six matchsticks, all the same length. You have to take these six matchsticks and arrange them in such a way to form four equalateral triagles that are all the same size.

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  7. No, my first “common sense” guess was completely wrong. I dropped you an email explaining my own stumbling arrival at the correct answer, since it couldn't be discussed openly here.

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  13. I like big skies myself. The height of the mountains is only an optical illusion if the photo inflates your expectations. The highest “mountain” in England is Sca Fell, at 3,162 ft. It's near Wastwater and I don't know if it is any of the peaks that you see. Snowdon in Wales is 3,560 ft. I've walked up both, but they offer rock climbs too.

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  14. I was snooping around in some of your recent posts (yes, snooping. I confess), and I just realized that this Dr. Boden was the same one you mentioned in the comments a few weeks back. The “P-creativity.” I was so tired that day.

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  15. In response, I had to snoop into some of my own comments, and then was rather surprised to discover the one you refer to foreshadowing the present post in more detail than I remember writing, and your response expressing enthusiasm for the idea of P-creativity. Indeed, there is a school of thought going back at least to Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Émile, ou de l'éducation), which prizes Maggie’s P-creativity as the true learning, and showing via fictional narrative that the role of a teacher is to lead the child to the point where it is ready to make its own wonderful discoveries and not just be told them, spoiling the surprise, so to speak. Which reminds me to mention Hickory Wind’s new blog “A New Alcuin”, a teacher’s occasional thoughts on what’s wrong with teaching in the West.

    If you continue to snoop in this fashion, I shall have to reward you with an omnibus edition of Wayfarer's Notes, in e-book form complete with edited comments. Alas, that project has not been kept up to date, and I think the inclusion of comments as well as the posts themselves was a sub-project which got abandoned somewhere. It's a posthumous task for a devoted grandchild, maybe . . .

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  17. I'm so glad, thanks for the links. One cannot help comparing the two artists. Bazza, in his online gallery, comes out very well indeed, the sunny softness and good humour of his compositions, the excellent taste; set against the tortured grandeur of van Gogh's vision, as displayed in that particular picture. I envy your facility with water-colour.

    There are treasures in your blog indeed.

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  18. I haven't turned my vizualising tendencies to the houses and string puzzle; I'll leave that for the delectation of others.

    some of the sciences you wish for, Vincent do exist. The little ponder of how people learn is a very greatly researched area, especially in mainstream eduction and in a wider context in social sciences, medical sciences, with quantum sciences now coming into the equation.

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  19. One thing I noticed in my snooping — and I'm amazed that it never caught my attention before — is that you seem to have a very hit & miss policy on capitalization of your post titles. Either that, or you're following some sort of Byzantine protocols that I'm unfamiliar with.

    At any rate, working some comments into the ebook sounds like a swell (if now unfortunately defunct) idea. You posts always stimulate interesting and lively discussions. But I can see how it would be a horrendous task to try to corral all that material and try to organize it into something manageable. Can't blame you on that.

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  20. There are some byzantine protocols involved, but they are exercised in a hit-and-miss manner. If the title reflects the title of a book, I would italicize it and capitalize the major words, not the little ones such as “of the”.

    I do have some old e-book drafts with comments in but they are superseded both in the selection of pieces and in revisions to the text. It was also a problem to select the most amusing and/or relevant comments. I didn't want to slight anyone by editing out their comments. Current laziness & lack of time points towards leaving all such work to posterity and a posthumous editor, in the manner of Fernando Pessoa, though I would not rank my writings anywhere near his.

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  21. ZACL, I don’t blame you for giving the house and string puzzle a miss. There are more satisfying ways to pass one’s time.

    Your other remark on sciences is most timely. I got up in the night on a last attempt to finish a sequel post to this one, with the title “A different science”, or possibly “A Different Science”. I’d spent days tinkering with it, using the last two paras of this post as a springboard for a creative leap, the invention of a new science which would look exclusively at subjective perceptions. This has been done of course in the 20th century, via the Society for Psychical Research & much besides. Mine would be very different, and would be introduced with some quotes from the last para of Maggie Boden’s book. My earlier drafts had been enthusiastic, expanding on the hint expressed above that through its influence “there might actually be progress in the world”, and “hope is not dead yet”.

    But in the night I saw it differently, and decided it should end on a sceptical note. I was just going through a final draft when I saw that the text had been mangled; some edits had reverted to an earlier state and newly-inserted paragraphs had gone irretrievably missing.

    With an immediate sense of relief I accepted the hand of fate which sealed the doom of this latest idea to save the world. I shall leave the scientists to their equations, their social, medical, educational & quantum specialities; and stick to wand’ring lonely as a cloud, o’er hill and dell.

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  24. i wish there was some romantic angle to it, just a small momentary sparkle may be. we could have weaved it into a nice short story. difference between creativity and objectivity is that, creative people takes whatever they want to take from an incident and the rest they cook up themselves, a wholly unrealiable bunch but people who can bend space time and events at will

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  26. Ah Ghetu, you are always the sharp-eyed reader. Let me try to dig up some excuses for these shortcomings.

    1) Since I used real names, it would not be gentlemanly to weave a retrospective sparkle of romance into into a true tale, especially as I wrote to the person concerned to point her to it & ask if she remembered the encounter.

    2) Yes, the title doesn't have any noticeable connection with the final content, after all the editing that took place in between. The title was meant to point out

    a) that the post's author was an idiot in those days, and it took all the intervening years for him to be somewhat less of an idiot;

    b) that the encounter with a real live philosopher all that time ago has only just acquired personal significance for me, in terms of what she has to say, and its relevance to themes I was planning to expand on – and still might.

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