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88 Creativity

of analytical thinking that is sufficiently complete and detailed to serve as a
context for the explanation of insight events.

FRAMING THE PROBLEM OF INSIGHT
To study insight, researchers need a technique that allows them to reliably
produce such events. Historical and biographical studies of the Edisons, the
Einsteins and the Michelangelos of human history are limited by the fact that
there are only a few of them and their appearance is unrelated to the inves-
tigator’s needs. We cannot whistle up a creative genius whenever a hypoth-
esis about creativity is ready to be tested. In addition, the historical records
of great achievements seldom allow us to follow the thought processes at fine
enough a temporal grain. If a scientist writes in his laboratory notebook three
times a week, and a new idea forms in the course of a few minutes, then that
notebook is too blunt an instrument with which to grab hold of the creative
act. It is possible but impractical for an observer to follow the activities in,
for example, a chemical laboratory for a year or a decade, in the hope that a
Lavoisier or a Pauling will emerge in that place during that time. Another
3
problem is that field studies of creative projects do not allow the psychologist
to study creativity under systematically varied conditions, a powerful investi-
gatory technique.
The alternative is to conduct experiments. I use the word broadly to refer
to any study in which the researcher deliberately arranges for certain events to
take place for the purpose of observing them. To conduct an experiment on cre-
ativity is to ask a person to solve some problem that requires a novel response
under conditions that allow his behavior to be recorded for later analysis. The
key step in conducting such an experiment is to choose a suitable problem.

The Case Against Insight Problems
The Gestalt psychologists, whose approach to insight was discussed in Chapter
3, had a knack for identifying problems that intuitively seem like good tools
for eliciting creative insights in ordinary people. These problems tend to share
the following features: (a) They can be stated concisely. The given materials
encompass only a few simple objects, if any at all. The task instructions and
the goal can be summarized in a handful of sentences. (b) The solutions, once
thought of, take only a few seconds to complete, and they consist of no more
than a handful of actions or inferences. They require no exotic skills but only
actions that any normal adult is familiar with, such as drawing a line on a piece