PhilosophTea: On the origins of creativity and imagination

Where Does an Idea Come From?
Nobody has ever had a thought made of nothing. Every song, theory, recipe and joke is assembled from pieces that were already lying around — and yet we keep describing creativity as if it arrived from somewhere else entirely: a muse, a gift, a spark, a flash.
This session takes the question seriously. Where did the human capacity to imagine things that don't exist actually come from, and what is it doing when it works? We'll move between the deep-time version of the question — imagination as an evolutionary development, roughly as central to our lineage as tool-making — and the close-up version: what's happening in a single mind at the moment something new appears.
Some of what we'll put on the table:

• Is creativity a talent some people have, or a mode anyone can enter?
• If every new idea is a recombination of old ones, what makes some recombinations feel like revelations and others like noise?
• Why do so many accounts of creativity rely on anecdotes about famous men, and what does the research actually show?
• Does imagination belong to individuals at all, or to groups, conversations and cultures?

No preparation is required and no expertise is expected. Come with an example of something you made, or something that struck you as inventive, and we'll work outward from there.

***

Recommended resources — all entirely optional
Books

• The Creative Act — Rick Rubin. A practitioner writing in aphorisms, no science at all. Either exactly what you want or unbearable.
• Explaining Creativity — R. Keith Sawyer. The survey of what creativity research has actually measured, and where the field disagrees with itself.
• Creativity — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Built on interviews with around ninety people working at a high level; proposes creativity as a system of person, domain and field rather than a property of a brain.
• Surfaces and Essences — Douglas Hofstadter & Emmanuel Sander. Analogy-making as the engine of all thought, not just the creative kind.
• The Way We Think — Gilles Fauconnier & Mark Turner. The academic source of "conceptual blending." Dry, but this is where most popular accounts quietly borrow from.

If you'd rather watch than read

• Agustín Fuentes, Dream It, Be It: How Imagination and Creativity Reshaped Human Evolution — begins around 22:10 in this block. Argues that meaning, imagination and hope belong in the human evolutionary story alongside bones, genes and ecologies.
• Douglas Hofstadter, Analogy as the Core of Cognition (Stanford, 2006) — the lecture behind Surfaces and Essences. Analogy-making as the perception of shared essence between two things, and the claim that this isn't a special intellectual achievement but the ordinary machinery of all thought. The densest item here; also the one that will generate the most discussion.
• Anthony Brandt, The Runaway Species — the composer half of the Brandt/Eagleman pair on bending, breaking and blending, with musical examples worked through properly.
• John Cleese, Creativity in Management (1991) — about 36 minutes, delivered in London in January 1991 and still the most quoted talk on the subject. His claim: creativity isn't a talent and has nothing to do with IQ; it's a mode you can deliberately enter. The natural companion to Rubin, and the easiest thing to argue with in a group.
• Polly Wiessner, Imagining Society: The Art of Firelight Stories — from the CARTA symposium on imagination and human origins. Her fieldwork on what people talk about after dark versus during daylight hours. Short, vivid, and the best single answer to "why would imagination have evolved at all."

***

When: Sep 17th, 6-8pm
Where: Cafe CU
Language: English
Cost: Free — Curious Minds Bonn is volunteer-run