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58 Creativity

improvement on prior devices, and hence – so we are supposed to infer –
not creative. in 2003, the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine went to
two researchers, Paul C. Lauterbur at the University of illinois at Urbana-
Champaign and Sir Peter Mansfield at Nottingham University, United
Kingdom, who had figured out how to make images of the inside of a human
body with nuclear magnetic resonance (NMr). They built upon the prior
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work of raymond Damadian, a medical doctor who had built an NMr
device and proposed ways of using it in medical diagnostics, but who had
not taken the next step of analyzing the resonance signal into separate slices
through the body, the feature that makes NMr imaging such a powerful
instrument. Dr. Damadian was so incensed at not being awarded the Nobel
Prize that he tried to pressure the prize committee into changing its deci-
sion – something unheard of in Nobel Prize contexts – by arguing his case
in whole-page advertisements in major newspapers like the Washington Post
under the title, “The Shameful Wrong That Must Be righted.” in his view, the
steps taken by Lauterbur and Mansfield did not move the NMr technique
far enough beyond his own work to be creative; in the view of the Nobel
Prize committee, they did. Such controversies are intractable because every
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cutoff point is equally arbitrary.
a second difficulty with the product-oriented view is that any product
can be either creative or uncreative depending on the circumstances. a simple
example is the use of a clever metaphor or turn of phrase that already exists
as a common idiom in the language. The first time someone used the phrase,
to soar like a lead balloon it was a creative joke; the Nth time, it was not. But it
is the same utterance; the same joke; the same product. to assign it a degree
of creativity, we have to know whether it was generated de novo at the time of
speaking or recalled from memory. There can be no metric of creativity that
applies to products per se, because the creativity of a product is a function of
how it was produced.
Products do of course differ in distance to their origins. The difficulties
arise only when we try to equate that distance with degree of creativity. There
might be a modest correlation between the two, but occasionally noncreative
thinking produces something that is very different from its origins. a pile of
bricks is very different from a brick building and putting one brick on top
of another is hardly an act of creation, but repeated execution will neverthe-
less lead from one to the other. On the other hand, sometimes it requires an
act of creation to think of a minor but crucial alteration. Consider the elec-
tronic mouse. a computer with a mouse is not very different from a com-
puter without one. The operating principle of the computer and almost all of