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138 Creativity

an electrical engineer. Once again, we have to explain a difference in out-
come: Why did Reis fail where Bell and Edison succeeded? According to the
analysis by Bernard Carlson and Michael E. Gorman, Reis was familiar with
the telegraph and assumed that the human voice would be transmitted the way
signals were transmitted in the telegraph: in small, discrete packages like dots
and dashes. This limited the space of designs Reis considered. In this case, the
impasse was terminal. Reis did not produce a workable device. Bell was not
constrained in this way and found a solution using undulating, continuous
electrical current instead; Edison’s telephone worked on the same principle.
A third example of the insight sequence in a complex project is the first
formulation of the periodic table of chemical elements. At the end of the 19th
century, enough elements had been identified that chemists began to suspect
they followed a system. Substances could be ordered in a sequence by their
atomic weights, but there were also qualitative similarities that begged to be
systematized. The Russian chemist Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleyev tried to
organize groups of chemical substances for the purposes of writing a textbook
for his students. As P. Strathern tells the story, Mendeleyev struggled with this
task, trying various organizations, postponing a trip, exhausting himself until
he fell asleep at his table. Upon waking, he wrote down what we now recog-
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nize as the first version of the periodic table. The history of science is dotted
with such stories. The general lesson is clear: To create, a person benefits from
failure, because failures generate the feedback that suppresses unproductive
approaches and enables the emergence of a novel solution.
The examples show that the bridge from insight problems to significant
creative projects holds up. Creatives do experience alterations in mode and
tempo; see Table 5.1 for additional self-reports of creative individuals engaged
in complex projects in art, mathematics, science and technology. In the words
of cognitive psychologists Matthew I. Isaak and Marcel A. Just: “During
design generation, the inventor often must recognize and release or reformu-
late implicitly held constraints on the nature of the invention.” In short, the
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hypotheses that impasses are caused by the activation of inappropriate prior
knowledge and that insights are caused by the feedback generated by multiple
unsuccessful solution attempts apply at high levels of complexity.
Individual examples only prove existence; they do not measure preva-
lence. I do not claim that every creative project progresses through mental
events of this sort, only that some of them do.
Nor do I claim that a single insight suffices to complete a novel device,
theory or work of art, a claim sometimes attributed to experimental psycholo-
gists by those who study creativity with biographical methods. If not one, then