Picasso mined the raw materials that surrounded him, and by doing so he was able to bring his culture somewhere it had never been before. Excavating Picasso’s influences in no way diminishes his originality. His peers all had access to the same sources that he did. Only one lashed these influences together to create Les Demoiselles.
Just as nature modifies existing animals to create new creatures, so too the brain works from precedent. More than four hundred years ago, the French essayist Michel de Montaigne wrote, “Bees plunder the flowers here and there, but afterward they make of them honey, which is all theirs … Even so with the pieces borrowed from others; he will transform and blend them to make a work of his own.”9 Or as modern science historian Steven Johnson puts it, “We take the ideas we’ve inherited or that we’ve stumbled across, and we jigger them together into some new shape.”10
Whether inventing an iPhone, manufacturing cars, or launching modern art, creators remodel what they inherit. They absorb the world into their nervous systems and manipulate it to create possible futures. Consider graphic artist Lonni Sue Johnson, a prolific illustrator who designed covers for the New Yorker. In 2007, she suffered a nearly-fatal infection that crippled her memory.11 She survived, but found herself living in a fifteen-minute window of time, unable to recall her marriage, her divorce, or even people she’d met earlier in the day. The basin of her memories was largely emptied, and the ecosystem of her creativity dried up. She stopped painting because she could think of nothing to paint. No internal models swirled inside her head, no new ideas for the next combination of things she’d seen before. When she sat down in front of her paper, there was nothing but a blank. She needed the past to be able to create the future. She had nothing to draw upon, and therefore nothing to draw. Creativity relies on memory.
But surely there are eureka moments, when someone is suddenly struck by an idea that materializes from nowhere? Take, for example, an orthopedic surgeon named Anthony Cicoria, who in 1994 was speaking to his mother on an outdoor payphone when he was struck by a bolt of lightning. A few weeks later, he unexpectedly began composing. In subsequent years, introducing his “Lightning Sonata,” he spoke of his music as being given to him from “the other side.” If ever there were an example of creativity originating out of the thin air, this might be it: a non-musician suddenly starting to compose.
But, on closer inspection, Cicoria also turns out to rely on the raw materials around him. He recounts that, after his accident, he developed a strong desire to listen to nineteenth-century piano music. It is difficult to know what the lightning strike did to Cicoria’s brain, but it is clear that he rapidly absorbed that musical repertoire. Although Cicoria’s music is beautiful, it shares the same structure and progression as the composers he was listening to – composers such as Chopin, who preceded him by almost two centuries. Just like Lonni Sue Johnson, he required a storehouse of materials to mine. His sudden desire to compose may have come from out of the blue, but his basic creative process did not.
Many people have figuratively stood in thunderstorms, waiting for the creative lightning to strike. But creative ideas evolve from existing memories and impressions. Instead of new ideas being lit aflame by lightning bolts, they arise from the interweaving billions of microscopic sparks in the vast darkness of the brain.
HOW WE REFASHION THE WORLD
Humans are continually creative: whether the raw material is words or sounds or sights, we are food-processors into which the world is fed, and out of which something new emerges.
Our innate cognitive software, multiplied by the massive population of Homo sapiens, has produced a society with increasingly faster innovation, one that feeds upon its latest ideas. Eleven millennia transpired between the Agricultural Revolution and the Industrial Revolution. Then it only took a hundred and twenty years to get from the Industrial Revolution to the light bulb. Then merely ninety years until the moon landing. From there it was only twenty-two years until the World Wide Web, and a mere nine years later the human genome was fully sequenced.12 Historical innovation paints a clear picture: the time between major innovations is shrinking rapidly. And this is exactly what you’d expect from a brain that bootstraps, absorbing the best ideas on the planet and making them better.
In refashioning the world, Apple, NASA engineers, Ford, Coleridge and Picasso all worked from precedent. But at first blush, it might seem that they must have done so in very different ways – after all, remaking electronics, cars, poetry and paintings must surely involve vastly different kinds of mental undertakings. One might be tempted to think that creative minds use a dizzying array of methods for refashioning the world around us. But we propose a framework that divides the landscape of cognitive operations into three basic strategies: bending, breaking and blending.13 We suggest these are the primary means by which all ideas evolve.
In bending, an original is modified or twisted out of shape.
Szotynscy and Zaleski’s Krzywy Domek (‘Warped Building’) in Sopot, a Polish sea resort
In breaking, a whole is taken apart.
Yago Partal’s Defragmentados
In blending, two or more sources are merged.
Thomas Barbèy’s Oh Sheet!
Bending, breaking and blending – the three Bs – are a way of capturing the brain operations that underlie innovative thinking. Alone or in combination, these mental operations allow humans to get from the IBM Simon to an iPhone, or from native artifacts to the birth of modern art. The three Bs brought home Apollo 13 and enabled Ford’s factories. We’ll show how imagination takes flight on the wings of these cognitive mechanisms. By applying this cognitive software to everything around us, we generate an ongoing tidal wave of novel worlds.
These mental operations are basic to the way we view and understand the world. Consider our memory: it’s not like a video recording, faithfully transcribing our experiences; instead, there are distortions, shorthand and blurring together. The inputs that go in aren’t the same ones that come out, which is why we can all witness the same car accident but recall it differently, or participate in the same conversation but have a different telling of it later. Human creativity emerges from this mechanism. We bend, break and blend everything we observe, and these tools allow us to extrapolate far from the reality around us. Humans are terrible at retaining precise, detailed information, but we have just the right design to create alternative worlds.
We’ve all seen models in which the brain is presented as a map with clear territories: this region does this while that region does that. But that model ignores the most important aspect of human brains: neurons connect promiscuously, such that no brain region works alone; instead, like a society, regions work in a constant hubbub of crosstalk and negotiation and cooperation. As we’ve seen, this widespread interaction is the neurological underpinning of human creativity. Even while particular skills can be restricted to local brain regions, creativity is a whole-brain experience: it arises from the sweeping collaboration of distant neural networks.14 As a result of this vast interconnectedness, human brains apply the three Bs to a wide range of our experiences. We constantly absorb our world, crunch it up, and release new versions.
Our versatility in applying these creative strategies is a great asset, because a mind-boggling variety can result from compounding a limited number of options. Think of what nature is able to make by rearranging DNA: plants and fish that live