The creative mind needs to wander. It gets bored with straight lines. It needs to zag where others zig; it’s restless and voraciously feeds off its surroundings. It does best with disorder, clutter, and chaos.
I find it amusing that when queried, most corporate CEOs defined creativity as the absolute, number one trait a successful CEO must have. Yet by far the majority of CEOs have desks that are pristine, radiating control and efficiency.
The question is which comes first, the creativity or the cluttered desk?
Creativity thrives on clutter. Kathleen Vohs, professor of psychological science at the University of Minnesota, lays it out in her seminal article in Psychology Science. In her research on the effect of clutter and messiness, she writes: “Volunteers who worked in the untidy room were much more creative overall, and they also produced more ‘highly creative’ ideas. In other words, they were more likely to break away from tradition, order and convention in their thinking. In a third study, those in a messy environment were more likely to select an option labeled ‘new’ over one labeled ‘classic’—further supporting the link between order and tradition, disorder and novel thinking.”
“When things are tidy, people adhere more to what’s expected of them,” Vohs says. “When things are messier, they break free from norms.”
Dr. Robert Bilder, a psychiatry and psychology professor at UCLA’s Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior points out: “The truly creative changes and the big shifts occur right at the edge of chaos.”
For educators who have embraced the notion of the tightly controlled classroom, it’s a worst-case scenario. But Bilder has a reason for this theory. He tested it by asking children what aspects of a learning environment make them feel most creative. “One of the things they found most valuable in their arts classes was the freedom not to have to seek right and wrong answers,” Bilder said. “It was that freedom to explore that led them to be increasingly engaged and allowed them to forge connections that allowed them to be more creative.”
Most readers seeing this painting by the great Spanish surrealist, Miro, would wince at the inexplicableness of it. To a linear, organized thought pattern, this is extreme chaos. But a few readers will study it, and seek to find a pattern. To do so is immensely challenging and fulfilling, opening as it does a range of unexpected, novel links and associations. Chaos enables the mind to float free of rigid rules to discover whatever there is to discover. To a creative mind, it all starts with chaos and disorder.
Neuroscientist Emily Przysinda and colleagues at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn., measured the creative aptitudes of 12 jazz improvisers, 12 classical musicians, and 12 non-musicians. Jazz improvisers scored highest on creativity. They were more attuned to the unusual and the unexpected – more so than musicians who play classical music. Classical music has rules and guidelines. Improv jazz is spontaneous; it is a response to the moment of the music, not to music sheets.
The creative mind thrives on chaos, because it is most energized when there is no established pattern. It searches to discover patterns, create patterns. It plays with objects it sees around it. It amuses itself with shapes and forms and colors, with random bits of conversation overheard in an elevator. It seeks interpretation of the body language of people in a café, leafs through antique travel postcards in secondhand shop out of curiosity as to how many ways travelers can say “wish you were here.”
It’s all random. There’s no pre-connectivity. Often no consciousness. If interrupted and asked to explain why search through century-old travel postcards, the reply would be a look of dismay, even embarrassment. It can’t be explained. It’s just a necessity. As necessary as a drink of water on a hot day.
Order is control. Chaos is well, chaos. Not exactly. Chaos is on the beginning. A leaky mind is where creativity starts coming together.
If you’ve managed to stay this far with the article, I’ll leave you with this quote to ponder from that noted German humorist, Albert Einstein: “If a cluttered desk is the sign of a cluttered mind, then what are we to think of an empty desk?”
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