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قديم 09-11-2013, 09:09 AM
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تابع what is a genius?

In asking how the brain creates, Simonton quotes Karl Popper’s notion that our thought processes show the essential elements of natural selection: “our knowledge consists at every moment of those hypotheses which have shown their (comparative) fitness by survival so far in their struggle for existence; a competitive struggle which eliminates those hypotheses which are unfit.” This idea is best summarized for Simonton in the work of psychologist Donald T. Campbell. The creative mind generates vast variations of “ideational” content and continuously applies a consistent selection mechanism to these variants. Finally, just as in natural selection the best genes are retained through inheritance, so “the mental evolution that produces creative ideas requires a memory system, plus an ability to communicate the store ideas to others” — via writing for the printed page, composing for the symphony orchestra, etc. The controversial twist that Simonton insists on placing on this account is that the variational procedure, as with natural selection, becomes essentially blind: “Neither prior experiences nor current environmental circumstances will provide sufficient clues about how to restrict the range of [creative] choices, nor does there exist any rationale for assigning useful priorities to the various alternatives.” The activity of creative genius is therefore “reduced to a basically trial-and-error procedure, whether through cognitive rumination or behavioral experimentation.” What history decides are authentic acts and products of genius will only be known after the fact — which is the Kantian way of describing genius.
Simonton provides some striking quotations to support this view, such as John Dryden on beginning to write a play “when it was only a confused mass of thoughts, tumbling over one another in the dark” or Poincaré describing the initial stages of his discovery of Fuchsian functions: “Ideas rose in crowds; I felt them collide until pairs interlocked, so to speak, making stable combinations.” This shows that the creative mind is capable of generating large numbers of variations, according to Simonton, and that these variations are not under cognitive control. He also recounts some substantial statistical work showing that with genius as with mutual funds, past performance is no guarantee of future returns: a year of rich production by an artist or composer may be followed by an artistic drought, and there’s no way to tell what’s coming next. Still, if this is something like luck, it’s the fate of creative geniuses that they tend to have an awful lot of it.
The best aspects of Simonton’s discussion in these chapters are his descriptive accounts of the characteristics of genius. As remarked, creative genius is often associated with what would be regarded as high IQ. It is not high intelligence, however, that makes for creative genius, but the structure of intelligence. Highly creative people are able spontaneously to make large numbers of remote associations between separate ideas. The mind of the creative individual, an “intuitive genius,” is a better thesaurus, more interconnected, so to speak: it can run out longer lists of analogues, metaphors, and metonyms than can an analytical genius, understood as someone who does spectacular calculations only within a circumscribed domain. The latter sort of mind might popularly (perhaps wrongly) be associated with a very sharp accountant: someone who can analyze a spreadsheet but cannot see the connections in a stanza of Yeats.
These are not, Simonton insists, completely different kinds of genius, but are ideals at ends of a continuum. Nevertheless, artistic creators are “more prone to be intuitive, whereas scientific creators will tend to reside closer to the analytical end of the spectrum.” That revolutionary scientists will be more intuitive than (Kuhnian) normal scientists, seems acceptable enough, but what about also claiming, as Simonton does, that “romantic artists” will be “more intuitive than classical artists”? Here, Simonton comes up against one of the many disanalogies between science and art that crop up in his discussion and which are not adequately dealt with. Is it right to say that the classical Mozart is a “less intuitive” composer than the romantic Schumann? I think not. Science, unlike art, does not go through classic and romantic episodes — only, on some readings of its history, revolutionary and consolidation phases. There are classical and romantic artistic geniuses, but in the manner that Simonton explains the issue, it looks like the only true creative geniuses of science are the revolutionaries.
For Simonton, creative genius doesn’t just generate unusual connections, and associations, it somehow sees what is fruitful or appropriate in a domain: it is selective. There are six interrelated but distinguishable characteristics he identifies for persons who have this ability:
(1) Creative geniuses “harbor an impressive array of intellectual, cultural, and aesthetic interests.” This breadth and variety of interests gives them the content on which to draw analogies, make comparisons. It is their material. (I’d suppose that access to this material would be a differentially significant condition for outstanding creative work in different fields: teenage geniuses would be more likely to occur in music or mathematics than in philosophy or fiction.)
(2) Such individuals are “open to novel, complex, and ambiguous stimuli in their surroundings.” Openness takes their trains of thought to unexpected corners of experience.
(3) Creative geniuses are “capable of defocused attention.” I think of stories about Glenn Gould studying a score, carrying on a phone conversation, and listening to the news all at once — sounds implausible till you think back to how amazingly he could distinguish voices in a fugue. Typically, while creators are working on one problem, or are engaged in an apparently irrelevant activity, they will be carrying around with them another problem in need of a solution. Defocused attention makes creative connections more likely.
(4) Consistent with the above is a flexibility in work habits. It’s characteristic of the highly creative person to have a range of projects going simultaneously, a “network of enterprises.” Darwin was always working on several subjects simultaneously, dipping into “thirty or forty large portfolios” which he kept on labeled shelves, adding memoranda or reviewing them. This flexibility makes it possible to change course quickly and take advantage of lucky breaks and new ideas as they serendipitously present themselves.
(5) “Highly creative people are introverted.” Simonton means by this that, however affable they may be in social settings, they are given to “long hours of solitary contemplation . . . smoking a pipe in an armchair, taking a walk in the woods, engaging absentmindedly in some routine activity.” Social contact, for creative geniuses, is “subordinate to the internal ruminations of their eternally preoccupied minds.” This for Simonton explains why group problem-solving, so-called brainstorming, usually yields such dismal results compared to individual creative work.
(6) Finally, such individuals are usually “independent, autonomous, unconventional, and perhaps even iconoclastic.” They are willing to give unusual, or even preposterous, ideas a fair hearing.
To this list must be added a few more likely conditions. The foremost is productivity. Few geniuses come up with one staggering idea and then retire from the scene. In both sciences and arts, it’s characteristic of genius that it is immensely, even obsessively, productive. Quantity may not equal quality, Simonton says, nevertheless Nobel laureates publish twice as much on average as scientists good enough to make it into American Men and Women of Science. For nineteenth-century scientists, the mere length of their total bibliographies is a good predictor of how famous they will be today. Cases such as Gregor Mandel, the pioneer geneticist who published only a tiny body of work, are exceptional. This tends to extend into the arts, where the most outstanding geniuses — Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, Shakespeare and Dickens, Turner and Picasso, and the likes of Bach, Mozart, Schubert, Brahms, and Wagner — astonish in their sheer capacity to produce work. We might imagine that for each of these figures there would be hundreds who wrote, painted, or composed as much but who are unknown or discounted today: a thousand Maria Corellis for every Dickens. If I read Simonton correctly, this is unlikely: vast output is not a sufficient condition for creative genius, but it is difficult to name a creative genius who was not highly productive.