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Creative Insight Writ Large 145

(a) Time scale t
Rate of Insight
progress
+ Search Impasse

M

– Time
0 10 90 100

(b) Time scale 10t
Rate of
progress
+

M
– Time

0 50 100
Figure 5.3. Rate of progress when insight sequences are unevenly distributed over
time. Panel (b) shows the same process as Panel (a), but at an order of magnitude lower
temporal resolution.

the creative process. Conclusions of this type are unwarranted because the
observed average variations might be caused by random clumping of insight
sequences of higher or lower severity of impasses and by a coarse-grained rec-
ord of the overall process such as would be produced by, for example, an analy-
sis of the creative person’s notebooks and by successive views of the creative
product, common methods in the study of significant creative projects.
In short, the existence of impasses, the fact that there is no mechanism to
distribute them evenly in time and the fact that the severity of an impasse –
the time it takes to resolve it – is a random variable conspire to ensure that
creative processes will exhibit alterations in mode and tempo at the significant
time band. When biographers and historians ask why a creator made much or
little progress during such-and-such a period of his life, they might be asking
a misconstrued question. To the extent that the quantitative variations in rate
of progress reflect the massively contingent clustering of insight events, they
do not have a cause or an explanation, at least not the type of explanation that
biographers and historians seek.