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The Production of Novelty 59

its components are the same in both cases. Nevertheless, few would deny that
the computer mouse was a creative invention. The question, how similar is this
product to its origins? is distinct from the question, did this product come about
through an act of creation?

Individuals
Creativity research and common sense emphasize differences between indi-
viduals with respect to creativity. Some individuals create more than others
and there is a natural temptation to attribute to them a higher degree of some-
thing called “creative ability.” researchers have tried to measure this supposed
ability but it is unclear what those measures are supposed to quantify: Which
property of a human mind is such that if a person has more of it, he is better
able to create? 14
There are plausible candidates. The cognitive processes involved in cre-
ative thinking might operate at different levels of effectiveness in different
individuals. For example, memory retrieval might be quicker in one brain than
in another, giving its owner an advantage in situations that require intense
use of prior knowledge. individuals certainly differ in how much information
they can keep active at any one moment of time, a quantity psychologists call
15
working memory capacity. One or more variables of this sort might singly or
jointly constitute creative ability.
This view is plagued by difficulties. First, cognitive effectiveness, unlike
a trait or ability, is not a stable attribute of an individual but is strongly
influenced by training and practice. Psychological investigations have docu-
mented that experts decide faster, recall more, hold more information in
working memory and so on than nonexperts. This increase in cognitive
16
efficiency due to training is domain-specific rather than general. That is,
the expert’s advantage holds only in his field of expertise. This contradicts
the idea that creativity is an ability because abilities are, by definition, stable
characteristics. Second, levels of effectiveness apply to noncreative think-
ing as well. Some people are better at mental arithmetic than others; some
people find it easier to memorize the lines of a play than others; and so on. if
stable individual differences in cognitive effectiveness – collectively referred
to as intelligence – were the source of differences in creativity, then mea-
sures of intelligence should correlate perfectly with measures of creativity,
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but they do not. Third, measures of cognitive effectiveness suffer from the
same difficulty as measures of the distance between products: exactly where
on the scale of effectiveness is the cutoff point that separates creative from
noncreative persons? every such point is equally arbitrary. a person who is