Focus on TUSD - April/May 2008

Let Your Thoughts Flow
Creative personalities have contrasting traits at the same time
In 1975, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (Chick-SENT-me-high-ee), then a young professor of psychology at the University of Chicago, wrote eloquently in exploring a single topic: Man's enjoyment of life. In his first book, Beyond Boredom and Anxiety (San Francisco, 1975), he concluded that Man is happiest when he is most creative.

In 1990, Csikszentmihalyi coined a new phrase for this exalted state. He called it "flow" (Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, New York, 1990). Simply put, "flow" is that special state of intense but relaxed concentration in which humans feel that they can do no wrong. Whether it is an office worker suggesting a new way of improving business or Beethoven composing his Eroica Symphony, Man is at his best when engaged in creativity. No other activity can begin to compare.

In 1996, Csikszentmihalyi wrote his most extended study on the topic, Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention (New York, Harper Collins). What makes this book more intriguing than any of the many other pop psychology "think pieces" on the same topic is his extensive interviewing of creative individuals in the late 20th century.  Those whom he canvasses include such iconic figures as Mortimer Adler, the philosopher, Jack Anderson, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, Freeman Dyson, the physicist, Nadine Gordimer, the South African writer and 1991 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Anthony Hecht, the poet and Pulitzer Prize winner, Oscar Peterson, the famed jazz pianist, Linus Pauling, the renowned Nobel Prize winner in chemistry (1954), and many others.

With such a stellar line-up of interviewees, the results cannot help but be fascinating. Perhaps most interesting of all is the chapter on the "creative personality." What Csikszentmihalyi discovers is that highly creative personalities almost invariably embrace radically contrasting traits--often, it seems, at the same time. Aggressiveness and shyness, outspokenness and reticence, rebellion and submission, and a desire for visibility with a subsequent yearning for monastic seclusion--these all seem to be embodied by the same intensively creative individuals.

As an example, one can think of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the so-called father of the atomic bomb, who displayed several contradictory traits--nuclear physicist and classical literature scholar, celebrity and recluse, bomb-builder and pacifist, desert-lover and cosmopolitan. One can only speculate about such unknowable figures as Shakespeare whose dazzling range of characters amazes us to this day. One can only wonder how one individual could create an Othello, a Desdemona, an Iago, and a Cassio all in one play.

Certainly, creativity is not a minor issue to be relegated to the sidelines of our educational system today. Csikszentmihalyi's explorations of creativity raise some important but difficult questions: What role should creativity play in the education of our children? How do we recognize creativity?; How should we encourage it? Should it be harnessed and "directed"?; Or should it be given free rein and allowed to breathe? How can we permit creativity to flourish within the confines of the classroom? And perhaps the biggest question of all: What are the implications if creativity is stifled, if it is subdued in the interests of focusing on test scores, class control, and structure? These questions are not addressed in Csikszentmihalyi's seminal study. But they are implied. The answer, it appears, lies in those who read his book.

-- By Robert Padilla
Executive Director, Educational Enrichment Foundation

Photos in the April issue by Jes Ruvalcaba of Communications & Media Relations, unless otherwise noted.

The deadline to submit material for the May Focus is Friday, May 16. The Focus will be published Tuesday, May 27. Email submissions to Chyrl Hill Lander or Sharon Dunham in the Communications & Media Relations Department or use the online Tip Sheet.