Authors: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Creativity (38 page)
Making Visible the Invisible
A central theme in Salk’s life was the effort to see, and to make others see, that which is hidden. At the most obvious level, this has involved bringing to light the viral processes that caused polio. Less directly, his later attempts to assemble men and women from very different domains at his center were also directed at making the invisible visible through conversations that would bring out new ideas that could not arise in the minds of the single individuals but might emerge as a result of the interaction. This is how he described this latter form of creativity:
I find that that kind of creativity is very interesting and very exciting—when this is done interactively between two sets of minds. I can see this done in the form of a collective mind, by a group of individuals whose minds are open and creative and are able to bring forth even more interesting and more complex results. All of which leads me to the idea that we can guide this process—this is in fact part of the process of evolution, and ideas that emerge in this way are equivalent to genes that emerge in the course of time. I see that ideas are to metabiological evolution what genes are to
biological evolution.
Q: What needs to be present in the relationship to allow that kind of creativity to emerge?
A: Well, in the first place, minds have to harmonize. There’s something of a think-alike quality, an openness, a receptivity, a positive rather than a negative attitude. There’s a mutual affirmation; it comes about as kind of a consensus, a reconciliation of differences that exist when you don a new vision or perception.
Any dialogue, such as we’re having now, is of that nature. There is a tendency to draw each other out, to bring out the best or the most creative aspect of the mind, or the functioning of the mind.
In this kind of interaction each person helps the others see what they see. That’s what is needed in the world today to reconcile differences, resolve conflicts, help us each understand what our belief systems represent, how to reconcile belief and knowledge.
The Human Side of Science
Salk grew up as an overprotected son of a strong and domineering mother. She was an immigrant with little knowledge of English, but as is often the case with the mothers of creative persons she spent a tremendous amount of time with her children and expected a great deal from them. “Whatever we did was never good enough,” mused Salk. Childhood was a time of “sweet adversity,” with restricted freedom and with great expectations. The folk wisdom contained in ancient proverbs such as “God helps those who help themselves,”“The early bird catches the worm,” or “Where there’s a will there’s a
way” was also a part of his childhood, and Salk still tends to think aphoristically as a result. Like many of his creative peers, in some respects he does not think of himself as a mature adult: “I’m seventy-six now and I still feel like a child, an adolescent, as if I still have lots to do.”
Another strong influence in the early years was the Jewish biblical tradition and the dim awareness of a long line of ancestors who had survived all sorts of adversity. One of his earliest memories was of seeing the soldiers returning from World War I, in the Armistice Day parade, in 1918, when he was only four years old, and wondering what it all meant. Out of these experiences Salk developed a strong sensitivity to human suffering and an unusually heavy sense of responsibility. As a child of ten, he wanted to become a lawyer so he could be elected to Congress and make just laws.
He was deterred from these plans in part by his mother’s doubts about his ability to win arguments; but even when later he decided on a medical career it was not with the intention of becoming a physician who cared for one patient at a time but with the goal of bringing science into medicine, and so “to make it much more valuable to human beings.”
There is a strong sense of responsibility, which I’m aware that I had all my life. And it’s been said by others that I seem to have a capacity to take responsibility, to act responsibly, even against odds, even if it’s unpopular, if it seems to me important. And that I know is true.
I see much of what we’re speaking about as having been innate but also having been actively induced by circumstances, so that throughout my own life I was aware of war and disease and suffering, problems of humanity, and I think I dedicated my life to trying to make the world a better place in which to live, to improve the lot of humanity now and in the future.
This sense of responsibility and sensitivity to suffering helped Salk avoid the mechanistic specialization that many scientists tend to succumb to.
I do see myself as an artist-scientist, scientist-humanist, humanist-scientist. I guess my purpose is different from that of those who are interested in science for science’s sake. I’m interested in science as it has relevance to the human condition, so to speak. I try to understand the human side of nature and do something for it. So I have a purpose—a purpose as a humanist somehow, in some innate way. That’s why I created this place, to set up this ideal set of circumstances within which scientists would work, I hope being more creative than they would be otherwise. And in fact this
does seem to be the case, so it has not failed in a sense, it simply has not yet succeeded in that which would take a little bit longer to emerge.
Patterns of Meaning
Salk’s penchant for seeing emergent possibilities often brought him in conflict with those whose clear view of the present blinded them to the future. “Damn it all, Salk,” one of his mentors used to say, “why do you always have to do things differently from the way other people do it?” As a medical student, he kept questioning the orthodox opinions of his teachers. In a manner typical of creative individuals, he kept seeing the emperor without clothes while everyone else admired the sovereign’s fancy regalia. The basic idea that later resulted in the polio vaccine seems to have already oc
curred to Salk in the second year of medical school:
We were told in one lecture that you could immunize against tetanus by chemically treated toxins, or toxoids, and in the next lecture we were told that for immunization against virus diseases
you had to experience infection itself, you could not use a chemically treated or noninfectious virus. Well, it struck me that both statements couldn’t be true, and I asked why that was the case. I guess the reason that was given was, “because.” But then two or three years later, I had the opportunity to work on the influenza virus, and I then chose to see whether or not this was true for flu. So I didn’t use chemical treatment, I used ultraviolet light to inactivate the virus and found that you could immunize the virus that way. So that was the beginning of a demonstration that
one could kill a virus, so to speak, or render it noninfectious, dissociating infectivity and antigenicity or antigenicity and capacity to immunize. And that led to work that eventuated in the influenza vaccine, which is being used today.
And then when I had an opportunity to work on polio, I just evoked the same idea and attempted to see what could be done there, and it proved to be successful. Since then, of course, all of the genetic engineering and the other things that are done to parts of the virus are continuations of this principle. And so I tend to look for patterns. I recognize patterns that become integrated and synthesized and I see meaning, and it’s the interpretation of meaning, of what I see in these patterns.
Despite his successes, Salk continued to encounter obstacles in everything he attempted to do; his research on cancer, autoimmune disease, and multiple sclerosis brought him into conflict with various bureaucracies and with peers who saw things differently. “And it was just a matter of persisting and tending to prevail and finding ways around the obstacles.”
Salk’s best ideas often come to him at night when he suddenly wakes up and after about five minutes of visualizing problems he had thought about the day before he begins “to see an unfolding, as if a poem or a painting or a story or a concept begins to take form.” Sometimes when such associations of ideas begin to occur in his mind, Salk claims to feel a palpable physiological response which indicates to him that the right side of the brain has become active. At this point he either falls into a deep sleep, or he sits up in bed, turns on the light, and writes down the thoughts that ha
ve occurred to him, for three quarters of an hour to an hour. In this fashion, he has “accumulated a considerable amount of material over the last several
years that I’m now beginning to work with, to try to understand or see the themes that have come forth this way.”
This tendency to take one’s dreams and hunches seriously and to see patterns where others see meaningless confusion is clearly one of the most important traits that separates creative individuals from otherwise equally competent peers. Of course, this fluidity of thought results in something creative only if one has already internalized the rules of a domain. Otherwise, chances are that the dreams will dissolve by morning. And even the most original ideas have little chance to make a difference without the persistence to convince others of their rightness, and without a good
dose of luck. Jonas Salk has been blessed once by everything turning out right.
These biologists—Wilson, Klein, and Salk—have led very different lives and contributed to their domain by different means. Yet they share strong similarities, some of which are common to creative individuals across a broad spectrum of disciplines.
All three remember childhoods that were in some way troubling, or even “dysfunctional.” One never knew his father, the others never mentioned theirs throughout the interview. All three, however, remember very strong, demanding, or emotionally dependent mothers. Each one felt early on the support of the beliefs and values of a cherished tradition, whether of the American South or of Judaism. None of them was a particularly brilliant student; in fact, school left positive memories with none of them. For Wilson and Klein, the best learning during adolescence occurred in peer groups and the Boy
Scouts.
In line with everything else we know about the creative personality, all three men show the complexity we are led to expect. They are selfless and egocentric at the same time, eager to cooperate yet insistent on being in control. They call themselves workaholics, are extremely perseverant, and stubborn when thwarted. They have all taken risks and have defied the dogmas of their fields. At the same time, none is content staying within the limits of his specialization; each is open to a great variety of experiences in art, music, and literature.
In fact, while all three started their careers as specialists in narrow fields—the study of ants, the growth of cancer cells, the control of the polio virus—now that they are past sixty they all see themselves as primarily synthesizers. Their main goal is to connect their special
ized knowledge with other domains, or indeed with the evolutionary process itself. How they try to accomplish this synthesis, however, differs quite substantially. Although they all paid attention to developments outside their fields and tried to link their work with other disciplines, Salk seems to do so mostly in terms of intuitive, analogical leaps between widely different processes in the arts and the sciences; Wilson tries to achieve precise “collinearity” between specific biological and cultural processes; and Klein connects biological knowledge that usually proceeds independently, su
ch as virology, genetics, and oncology.
There are also obvious differences in the men’s careers. Wilson claims to have known by age six that he was going to become a naturalist; Klein ended up in medicine by default, and was already twenty-two when his interest in cellular pathology caught fire; Salk remembers a generalized wish to help people, but becoming a physician was the second-best choice. Friends and mentors played a very central role in the career of all three, but the kind and the timing of these relationships varied quite a bit.
So far, however, these conclusions could apply just as well to creative individuals in other domains. Is there then no unique component to creativity in biology? Could these three persons have been just as creative if they had become writers, lawyers, physicists, or musicians? Or did they have some trait that attracted them to this specific domain?
It is very difficult to answer these questions with any confidence, but there seems to be something common to these three men that one finds less often in other professions. Over and over, they mention the strong
responsibility
they feel toward other people and the living world in general. Of course, it is possible that a concern for others is the result of having been a life scientist for so many years instead of the reason for entering the profession. Yet Salk claims to have been sorry for the GIs returning from war when he was only four years old. Klein recently visited the
village house in the foothills of the Carpathians where he lived with his mother as a child, and as he stepped on the porch he was overwhelmed by the anxiety he used to feel as he tiptoed across the same porch when he was six years old, petrified at the thought of waking his mother who was napping inside—just one of a continuous stream of events in which he had felt that the well-being of others depended on him. Perhaps this kind
of guilt, of being burdened with everyone’s welfare, is one of the early experiences that predisposes a young person to a career in the life sciences.
But there are indubitably other reasons. All of them enjoy the thrill of venturing into new areas of knowledge; they compare what they do to the work of a detective or an explorer. Wilson describes his professional work as “dodging bullets”; when he talks about his research Klein uses the metaphor of driving a big truck on a slippery road. There is no doubt that the domain of biology offers endless opportunities for flow to those who venture to push back its boundaries. Perhaps it is this combination of empathy with the living world and a predilection for risk and adventure that leads to a
creative involvement with the life sciences.