Page 165 - Deep Learning

148 Creativity

The fact that impasses are resolved by passing negative feedback down
through the cognitive system creates a need for persistence. Paradoxically,
a creative person is likely to try a variety of unsuccessful solutions, because
failed efforts create feedback that might eventually alter the distribution of
activation over memory and initiate restructuring of the search space. At the
significant time band, this will create a pattern of trying again and again. From
the point of an observer, the voluntary exposure to negative feedback makes
the creative person appear to have character traits like tolerance for ambiguity,
flexibility, persistence and tolerance for frustration. But psychologists find
32
that character traits are less general and less stable than common sense would
have us believe, so the patterns of behavior that give rise to these labels is bet-
ter seen as strategic instead of constant. Creative people know that repeated
33
attacks on a seemingly unsolvable problem can result in progress eventually, so
they keep at it. It does not follow that they exhibit those same characteristics
in other areas of life. The important point is that anxious avoidance of failure
should be negatively correlated with success in creative enterprises, and this
commonly noted feature of creative work follows directly from the theory of
insight as stated in Chapter 4.

Summary and Discussion
Insights are raisins in the dough of significant creative work. Some proper-
ties of the cognitive processes and mechanisms specified in the micro-theory
of individual insight events laid out in Chapter 4 scale up to the significant
time band and explain at least the following patterns and phenomena: (a) the
0.10 – 10 years’ duration of significant creative projects (accumulation of ana-
lytical work; need for multiple insights); (b) the replication of the alterations
in mode and tempo at the higher time band (impasses punch through directly;
uneven temporal clustering of impasses and insights); (c) the unpredictability
of creative work, which in turn has multiple consequences (unpredictability of
insights punches through directly); (d) the triangular correlation between exper-
tise and creative achievement (impasses are caused by the constraining effects of
prior knowledge); and (e) the impression that highly creative people have cer-
tain personality traits such as tolerance for ambiguity and frustration (need for
exposure to negative feedback). Further analysis of the cognitive mechanisms
behind insight might yield additional effects at the significant time band.
The claim is not that all properties of the processes and mechanisms pos-
tulated in the micro-theory of insight scale up to higher levels of complexity
and time. The fine details of the cognitive processes have little or no impact. For