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Creative Insight Writ Large 141

What is the upper boundary? Howard E. Gruber reports an unpublished
diary study by the psychologist Herbert Crovitz that produced an estimate of
two to three insights per week over multiple years. Gruber estimated, based
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on his analysis of Charles Darwin’s notebooks, that Darwin might have had
as many as two or three insights per day. If we consider that each of these
creators worked on their problems for months or even years, the number of
insights behind their accomplishments is in the hundreds. An open ques-
tion is whether the upper boundary is set by the finite lifetime of human
beings or by some limit on the number of insights that can be integrated into
a novelty.
In short, there is no magic number of insight events, nor do we know that
the number of insights measures the importance or novelty of an invention or
a discovery, although this is a possibility that might reward attention. But the
claim that the insight theory applies to significant creative projects should not
be confused with the obviously inaccurate claim that such a project requires
only a single insight. The important conclusion is that creativity scales across
complexity through the accumulation of multiple insights, not via some differ-
ent or unknown cognitive mechanism or mysterious “creative ability.”

Scaling Across Time
How long do significant creative projects last? Picasso worked on Guernica for
approximately six weeks, from May 1 to mid-June, 1937, and on Les Demoiselles
d’Avignon just under a year, from the autumn of 1906 to July, 1907. 19, 20 Watson
and Crick worked for almost two years to identify the double helix structure
of the DNA molecule, counting the work as having begun when Watson and
Crick met in the fall of 1951 and ending with their first publication on April 25,
1953. Charles Darwin opened a notebook labeled the “Transmutation of spe-
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cies” in July, 1837, and stated the theory of natural selection in his notebooks
a year later, in late fall of 1838; empirical work and deliberate postponing fol-
lowed until the Origin of Species was finally published in 1859. The invention
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of the airplane took the Wright Brothers more than three years, from 1899,
when they began practical work on the problem, to the flight at Kitty Hawk
on December 17, 1903, that most historians of technology regard as the birth of
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controlled, heavier than air flight. The brothers then spent a couple of years
improving the details of their design. Antoine Lavoisier worked on the oxygen
theory of combustion for at least three years, beginning no earlier than 1774
and publishing it for the first time in 1777; the mature theory did not appear
until 1783. Hillier spent approximately seven years, from late 1937 through
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