According to
Wikipedia, the famous infinite monkey theorem
states that a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for an
infinite amount of time will, all things being equal, type out the complete
works of William Shakespeare. The theorem is, of course, preposterous since the
chimpanzee would almost certainly be paralyzed by repetitive strain injury long
before the completion of the task, and in any case we already know that it was
William Shakespeare who penned the works in question, not some hyperactive,
key-punching primate…
Despite the ludicracy of the proposal, and the reason, in
fact, why Shakespeare did not take billions of years to produce his plays and
poetry comes down to quite a simple statement: the man was a genius. When you
think about it there are only 26 letters in the alphabet and those letters can
only be combined in a limited number of ways. Why is it then that when
Shakespeare combined those 26 letters they came out not as plain prose, or gibberish or the Maastricht Treaty (but I repeat myself…) and instead came out
as:
“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”
and
“To be or not to be. That is the question.”
and
“Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears.”
There are some skills that seem defy analysis and
Shakespeare had them in spades. There is a process that allows the abstract thought that germinates in
someone’s mind to articulate itself in words that are memorable, beautiful or
poignant. And that process is called creativity and it is present more
intensely for artists, writers, and musicians. But creativity occurs not necessarily
when the writer or artist or musician comes up with new ideas, but also (and
far more usually) when they combine together things that are already known in
order to create a new entity, a song, a painting, a novel.
Not all of us are gifted in this area. Some of us find that
our comfort zone is in analyzing data, others in understanding mathematical
formulae, others in performing repetitive tasks to perfection, others in relating
well to people, and still others in leading and managing groups. The
traditional definition of the creative profession is, by and large, not for
everyone.
“Two years ago Kenneth Heilman and his team at the Department
of Neurology and Neuroscience at Cornell University discovered that the brains
of artistically creative individuals have a particular characteristic that may
enhance creativity.
“The brain is divided into two halves, or hemispheres, that
are joined by a bundle of fibers called the corpus
callosum. Writers, artists and musicians were found to have a smaller corpus callosum, which may augment their
creativity by allowing each side of their brain to develop its own specialization.”
Several studies support the possibility of a “creative gene”
existing. And often highly creative individuals have a bipolar element to their
psychological makeup. Churchill, Beethoven and Hemingway all had bipolar
tendencies that allowed them during their “up” periods to be highly creative.
The creative person, according to recent studies, experiences
an increase in
serotonin levels from creating something.
Geoffrey Hill, an
English poet who in his early days was lucky if he managed to write one poem a
week, now states that his average is one poem per day. This phenomenal level of
output would be remarkable if it weren’t for the fact that creativity is like a
drug. The will to create can often come from what amounts to an addiction to
the emotional “high” that results from writing something new, creating
something that has never been seen before.
In fact, without the addiction, many would-be writers fall
at the first fence and never get further than penning the first chapter or two
of the blockbusting novel that lies dormant within them. Individuals who are
addicted to the drug, plow on and produce novels, poetry, plays and any piece
of writing that can give them the emotional boost they crave.
For the would-be writer who is not an addict of that
creative uplift, there is a down side. It is all very well coming up with a
brilliant plot for a novel, but the actual manual labor of writing out the
dialogue, interspersing it with action, structuring the book, and generally
changing the initial thought into a piece of writing that lives and breathes is
a different matter. For the serotonin addict all the writing that goes into a
novel or a poem or even a nonfiction book feeds the habit.
For writers what is required is not just a genetic
predisposition to writing, but an enjoyment of the process itself, a certain
joy that comes from discovering that you have produced something new, a
character, a plot, a situation, a turn of phrase that has not been used before.
Yes, there may be a creative gene, but how we nurture it, use it, feed it is up
to us.
So if you think you have the creative gene, that you are
blessed with the ability to create and combine words in unique ways, that you
are enamored of the writing process itself and you would write even if there
was no monetary result, and if you are addicted to the serotonin boost that
comes from creating a new piece of writing, what are you doing about it? What
can you do that couldn’t be done by an incredibly long-lived and sore-fingered chimpanzee?
Labels: corpus callosum, creative gene, Department of Neurology and Neuroscience at Cornell University, Geoffrey Hill, Kenneth Heilman, serotonin, William Shakespeare, writing process
