Risk, sacrifice, commitment, and a little ignorance.
I did this sketch for my kids when their cat, Coco, died. She arrived at the back door and didn’t quite make it through the cat-flap. My kids were both in Canada at the time and I wasn’t sure how to tell them, so I made this sketch. It seemed to me that Coco had paid the ultimate price for her curiosity. She was very inquisitive, a little stupid. Obviously, she took a risk that didn’t pay off, explored a little too far and used the very last of her 7 lives.
Curiosity is the desire to explore or learn something you don’t know and in finding out you foresee a potential reward. Curiosity and creative thinking are joined at the hip, their cousin is risk-taking. In taking a risk, you look optimistically into the future in the belief that the future outcome has more than an even chance of happening. That pretty much describes designing.
Optimism of this type may be misplaced (in Coco’s case it was fatally misplaced) or may be borne out of pure ignorance and boredom. Nevertheless, curiosity, like creativity requires optimism, risk, commitment, and (potential) reward. Curiosity is a necessary, but not sufficient, cause of creativity and creativity is inextricably linked to how we learn. So, I guess that my view of creative thinking is inextricably linked to learning.
We often link creativity with children, probably because of their playfulness (another necessary but not sufficient condition of creativity). Children are often less inhibited about the consequences of their actions (that is until we teach them differently) and are willing to explore in order to build a mental model of how their world works. In trying to understand things we reduce the uncertainty of not knowing how things work and how things happen. In other words, we begin to connect the dots (that’s partly why we tell stories). Children gradually begin to form habits and regular patterns of thinking, which reduces the need to constantly explore, play and invent and gradually diminishes their playfulness. Perhaps that’s why many creative geniuses often seem a little childish? Curiosity gets us further than a curriculum.
The reduction of uncertainty, which is a strong motivational driver, is the desire to seek out an understanding of unfamiliar and novel stimuli and to reduce risk. That might explain why, as we get older, we are less curious (and sometimes less creative). We have more memory stores and patterns of thinking that give us an explanation (internal stories) of how the world works. We, therefore, don’t “need” to explore, and risk, further disruptive explanations.
Entrepreneurs, who are often associated with risk, are not concerned so much with perfectionism but more with an idea, a vision of a future outcome, reduction of uncertainty and eventual reward. All that involves risk, an uncertain future outcome. But even if the final reward doesn’t happen, research has shown that the hope and optimism that reward will arrive are sufficient to drive them forward. And there are good neurological reasons for this.
Reward, or the anticipation of reward, play an important part in our levels of curiosity because there is a higher release of dopamine in the mesolimbic pathways (reward pathways) in our brains. This connects to our drives and motivations to learn new information to take some actions in the anticipation of future rewards.
Risk-averse people tend not to be creative or entrepreneurial. However, but that doesn’t mean that risk-takers are necessarily creative, risk-taking is a necessary but not a sufficient condition.
Take for instance creative geniuses like Pablo Picasso, Isaac Newton, Richard Feynman, and David Hockney. All of them are massive risk-takers and explorers, constantly seeking answers, changing their styles and re-inventing themselves. Their drive to keep digging deeper and re-inventing themselves may go beyond curiosity towards obsession, but it is borne out of an insatiable curiosity about how the world works and how they might understand it.
There are various theories about curiosity, but none of them seem to fill the whole picture.
Optimal Arousal Theory.
Optimal arousal theory attempts to explain our desires to seek opportunities to engage in exploratory behaviors. It suggests that one can be motivated to maintain a pleasurable sense of arousal through these types of behaviors, thereby maintaining “optimal” Arousal. Too much and we back away, to little and we seek to fill the gap. A bit like adding salt to food; too little and food can be flavorless, too much and food is inedible. It seems there is a “Goldilocks” state even for curiosity and arousal.
This ties in with Antonio Damasio’s idea in his book, “Self Comes To Mind”, that one of the key motivational drivers, both conscious and unconscious, is our need for homeostasis. He suggests that for certain actions to be achieved expeditiously and correctly, there must be an incentive so that, in certain circumstances, certain kinds of responses can be favored over others. Incentive mechanisms are necessary to achieve successful guidance of behavior. For this to happen we need 3 representations (1) the current state and (2) the desirable state and (3) a comparison of those states. The comparison of those states will also evaluate the risk (pain & pleasure and the reduction of uncertainty) attached to achieve (2) from the state (1).
Curiosity-Drive Theory.
Curiosity-Drive theory, on the other hand, explains the desire to make sense of one’s environment. This fits very well with my belief that we are insatiably driven to make or create a sense of the world we live in by stringing together events into coherent patterns. These are often stories. Both the stories we tell others, and the stories we tell ourselves.
However, I don’t think that either Optimal Arousal or Curiosity-Drive theories give the full picture. Again, they are necessary but not sufficient conditions. Risk, sacrifice, and commitment coupled with reward, pain & pleasure, begin to fill out a better picture.
In Coco’s case though, she probably acted more out of complete ignorance than any creative urge.
