George Newman: Cognitive scientist on why creativity is more like archaeology than magic

0:00When you're generating ideas, you're only doing that, and we're going to withhold judgment, and then we're going to come back, certainly at a later time, and that's when we're going to really evaluate. If we try to engage in this evaluation process as we're generating ideas, whether that's individually or as a group, we just wind up giving up. It's not really until you let things fly that you get to the really good stuff, and so the best you can withhold that judgment and scrutiny until a later point in time.

0:30George Newman:We've all heard the mythology around great ideas, the lone genius struck by inspiration, the eureka moment in the bath or shower. But George Newman believes we've been thinking about creativity in the wrong way. George is a cognitive scientist who spent years studying where great ideas actually come from, and his research reveals something surprising. Creativity might be less like magic and more like archaeology. In his book, How Great Ideas Happen, he argues that ideas aren't just born in our brains, they're discovered through a systematic process of excavation. In our conversation, George walks us through the four stages of creative archaeology, surveying the landscape, gridding out the problem space, digging without judgment, and sifting through what you found.

1:12George Newman:He shares fascinating research on hot streaks, the pattern where creators explore widely, strike a rich vein of ideas, mine it completely, then move on. And he challenges one of Silicon Valley's most cherished beliefs, namely that ideas without execution are worthless, using evidence from a study done on quirky.com, which showed that good ideas really are worth waiting for. If you've ever felt stuck waiting for inspiration to strike or wondered whether creativity can actually be systematized without losing its magic, this conversation offers both the science and the practical steps to help you uncover your next breakthrough.

1:46George Newman:This is Design Better, where we explore creativity at the intersection of design and technology. I'm Eli Woolard. And I'm Aaron Walter. If you're hearing this, you're not currently on our premium subscriber feed. Design Better Premium subscribers enjoy weekly episodes. That's four episodes per month rather than just two. And all of them are ad-free. Plus, you'll get an invitation to our monthly AMAs with the smartest folks in design and tech. And if you subscribe at the annual level, you'll also get our toolkit, a collection of our favorite design and productivity tools like Perplexity, Miro, Read AI, and more.

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2:55We'll return to the conversation after this quick break.

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3:24George Newman, welcome to Design Better. Hey, thanks so much for having me. You've recently published a pretty interesting book, How Great Ideas Happen, and you've been studying creative process and looking at a lot of different types of creative thinkers. You describe the creative process as a form of archaeology. What do you mean by that? How is archaeology and creativity related? So I'm a cognitive scientist. You know, I've been fascinated in the creative process, where do good or great ideas come from. And there were all of these quotes, you know, from everybody ranging from, you know, Stephen King, who talked about creativity as archaeology in his stories, to Edison talking about, I've invented nothing.

4:13There's no such thing as ideas being brain born. And so you have all these creatives talking about the notion of discovery. This book kind of came out of asking a question, well, what if we take that notion seriously? And when I really sat down and started to try to map the data, like what was the data for psychology and cognitive science and these other disciplines? What was it telling us about the nature of the creative process? That, yeah, it conjured these ideas like archaeology, almost as if ideas are out there in the world. and there's a series of steps or a process that we can go through to uncover them.

4:51And so that's really how the book came about.

4:53George Newman:Is that process related at all? You're probably familiar with Rick Rubin's book on creativity. The creative act, yeah. Yeah, creative act, yeah. It's sort of his telling, we're almost like conduit for creativity and it's maybe share some parallels with your ideas of archeology, but is there any relationship there you can put your finger on? Oh yeah, I mean, I talk about Rick Rubin in my book and his process And he's got some great anecdotes of sending artists to his library and kind of choose the first word that you see. And that actually winds up being a kind of a pivotal part of the song. I think it's very complimentary.

5:29I mean, there's this general notion of creativity as discovery is certainly out there. And it actually seems to be like among working professionals, you kind of hear this a lot. What was so cool and surprising was how well that model actually fit the data. We could say, oh, well, there's actually some scientific support for this notion that maybe we should be thinking about creativity more like this active discovery rather than I'm going to go off into the woods and just an idea is going to magically appear. This is a really common thing. It pops up a lot. Bob Dylan is one that comes to mind here as an example.

6:07He's been asked, in fact, it was like the 80s. He'd sort of created a massive body of work and T-Bone Walker was producing him. And he's like, hey man, we need another time. There are a change in something like that. And he's like, I can't do that anymore. I connected with those things. Those things passed through me and I don't have that connection anymore. And I've heard other artists, not just musicians, but painters, people who are deeply in touch with a zeitgeist, a moment, a collection of ideas where they feel like something passes through them. And you could look at that in a very spiritual way.

6:46And I think you could also look at it in kind of like a clinical way where you just stew in that collection of ideas so deeply that the only thing that'll come out of you is some novel new creation from that soup. How do you think about that? What does the research tell us? So there's some really fascinating work here. This guy named Dashin Wang, who's at Northwestern University, and his colleagues. So they're actually taking this big data approach and looking at tens of thousands of careers across a lot of different domains. They're looking at scientists and visual artists and filmmakers and later papers, entrepreneurs.

7:26So when you abstract out, they notice this phenomenon that they call hot streaks. It's something like 90 % of people's careers. Across all of these different domains, they show this hot streaks pattern where there's this process of exploration, of kind of trial and error, of trying out a lot of different kinds of things. Where maybe it looks pretty different, like people are kind of bouncing around, and then they hit like this vein of an idea. And what becomes their most impactful work is unpacking or unearthing that vein of idea. So it's kind of a set of related projects. And then it's finite.

8:07The hot streak doesn't last forever. Once they've kind of exhausted that well of ideas, maybe they move on to the next one or maybe that's just it. And so a really, really fascinating pattern that doesn't fit this genius model at all, that looks much more like some kind of discovery, right? Oh, I found this thing and I'm going to mine it for all I can and that's it. That's some of the evidence that I talk about in the book that I think is so compelling when we think about creativity as a process of discovery.

8:36George Newman:What are some of the specific steps that you talk about in your book if you are taking this more archaeological approach to creativity? I talk about four basic steps, and that's kind of how the book is organized. The first step is surveying, which is just getting the lay of the land. And this is something that really comes about, I think, through expertise, when we're really understanding a discipline, especially learning where have other great ideas been found. And we kind of orient ourselves to those spaces. The next stage is gridding. So just like an archaeologist strings up pieces of twine to create those little rectangles and then goes through each one systematically, talk about, well, can we do the same thing with an idea space?

9:21And using the constraints of the problem, a clear idea about what you're doing and who it's for, and using that as a way to search systematically through a space. The next stage is digging, which is just get everything out of the ground that you can. And really importantly, not paying attention to, is this good or bad? Maybe there's not even any good or bad at this point. It's just stuff. It's just ideas. And then the last stage is sifting. We're now, instead of being really rah-rah optimistic in the digging stage, we're going to go back with much more scrutiny and a critical eye to say, like, well, what did we really find here?

10:02Is there something of note? So those are the big sections of surveying, gridding, digging, and sifting. that organize this creative archaeological process? So the gridding, G-R-I-D, not G-R-I-T, gridding sounds very analytical, very almost mathematical and logical. And so much of the creative process is feel and intuition. And there are a few people that we've interviewed who come to mind that have done such in-depth research. They wouldn't really call it research. to just sort of like bring close to you the things that are fascinating. Trenton Doyle Hancock, he's a painter. He's been in the Whitney Biennial.

10:45He's just very prolific. I went to grad school with him at the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia, Temple University. And so I saw how he worked on a regular basis. His studio was across the hall from mine. He would collect all these toys from Japan. He'd collect caps from bottles and laundry detergent that were colorful and plastic. And all these things came together, not in a, I'm gonna create a taxonomy to understand this, but like, I have all these things and I feel that these are disparate and yet so connected. And then we just had an interview that went live with Aaron Draplin, who is somebody who's also very prolific, collects things like matchbook covers and stickers and patches and emblems from Boy Scouts and all these different things, Americana.

11:34He does categorize these things. It's all intuition. I wonder where does intuition fit into this, trusting one's instincts without having to articulate the system? I'm really glad you asked that because one of the disclaimers I give even at the beginning of that section is this might sound like, oh, God. But that's certainly not the way that I work and that there's a lot of room for that process to still be intuitive and under the hood. There's lots and lots of cognitive processing that is happening below awareness. And what I argue in those chapters is that even though maybe it doesn't seem explicitly, like consciously, that we're engaging in a systematic process, that our brains kind of naturally want to do that.

12:24They want to make sense and make order and move through the conceptual space. I mean, you can look at lots and lots of careers that are like this, but like Mondrian, how he drifted around with a lot of different styles. And then, you know, he hits on his iconic form, which is, you know, these primary colors and these black and white squares. And then he just iterates on that endlessly for 20 years. I don't think he had in mind, like, I've got to go A1 to A2 to A3. But intuitively, he's moving through that process. And I think when, as artists or musicians or authors, when we assemble a bunch of things that inspire us, we are still forming that intuitive appreciation of a structure and what are these deeper veins of commonality that connect all of these different things.

13:12And then part of our unconscious mind starts to wander through that space and find, like, are there these nodes of resonance? Are these things that actually connect? Fiction authors, a lot of them frequently report this idea of stories writing themselves. I think what's going on there is you start to form these very complicated, elaborate, almost matrices. It's like a map in your brain. Yeah, exactly, that are kind of unconscious. And you've got, well, okay, I've got my setting, and I've got my stories, and I've got the psychology, the characters. And all those things start to interact, and then there become a finite number of ways that things can go.

13:49And it almost starts to feel deterministic or automatic. So that structure isn't make sure you finish all your vegetables. It's more trying to describe what's happening perhaps at a deeper levels in our mental processing that we might not have direct access to. Your archaeology metaphor kind of rings true to me because this idea of gritting the things off, of following this intuition, of drawing the interesting things to you and just going deeper into them, to me, as someone who has a creative background and has been around a lot of different types of creative people, they all have this obsession with being specific.

14:31It's like a specific thing. So if you play a musical instrument like guitar, you're very specific about the type of guitar, the sound, the tone that you can get. And any major musician, they have that in common. Artists, like being very specific about color. Most people don't pay attention this closely. But that is what creative people do, is that they pay attention with more dedication and devotion than mere mortals. That kind of idea comes up for me in a couple of different ways. I talk about this notion of close looking, which is exactly that. That's what an archeologist does. Yeah, exactly.

15:13So it's like attending to the landscape, attending to the environment around us, with a lot of focus, with a lot of attention to all of those little details. I think the other thing that cues for me is this notion of like a kernel of an idea. And when we do get that spark, these really good or even great ideas, a lot of times they're self-contained. They have these elements, even though it's a small gesture. Because it's so specific, it has that kind of structure. And then what the creative process becomes is a lot of unpacking that structure and say, okay, well, where does that structure take me?

15:50So I think specificity is super important to that process. And some really, really fascinating work with visual artists, actually. A psychologist named Mahalichik Mahaya went to Art Institute of Chicago. So they had the artists there, the students, engage in this free drawing task. It was a single drawing task. And then they're like noting, you know, how do they approach the task? They did an extensive debrief, a few hours with each artist afterwards. Then they just waited. The first check-in was eight years. And then the next check-in was like at 17 years. and just looked at the careers of all of these artists.

16:25And what they found is these artists that had kind of allowed problems to emerge from the still life itself to say like, oh, okay, well, I found the negative space between objects really, really interesting. Or I found the relationship between these two objects really interesting. And so kind of allowed these problems to bubble up. The researchers called the problem finders. Those were the artists that were actually really successful later on. It wasn't the folks that came in with a preconceived notion of what they wanted to do or the kind of drawing they wanted to make.

16:59George Newman:We had John Cleese on a number of years ago, and he talked about that study as well in relation to the little book he wrote on creativity, which is fun. So one of the examples that you give about sifting, I believe, is around Paul Simon and Graceland. And that's one of my favorite albums. I have it on the shelf here behind me, the vinyl. And there's a great story that he tells about making the song Graceland. We'll link to that. There's a YouTube of it. You know, it's clear that there are kind of multiple sources of inspiration. He was collaborating with these South African musicians. How did the sifting process help him develop that song and album?

17:32What I argue in the book is that what was so specific to that recording process for Graceland was he recorded all of this material in South Africa and then he comes back to the U.S. And then now he's trying to make sense of all of this recorded material and turn it into songs. But he was really looking for what he could take away and what he could subtract. And that being the really difficult part of the creative process, I think just something that doesn't naturally occur to us. And there's some fascinating research that shows, actually, that we have a tough time creating by subtracting. I think part of his excellence in making that album was the ability to look at all of this recorded material.

18:17And, you know, like there's the famous quote of seeing the form within the marble. I think a similar kind of idea of seeing the form and structure of a song within these hours and hours of tape and then being able to unearth that and allow that to emerge. So sifting because it's sometimes difficult to know what we should take away. There's a tendency certainly to want to leave everything in, you know, and include too much. And so it really requires a very fine ear and a keen sense for how to do that. You make the argument in the book that creativity is not a magical act. We've already talked about the notion of it being archaeological.

18:56And if you're an archaeologist, you can wake up in the morning, go do some work, get some lunch, go do some more work, and go home. Artists, I think the romantic notion is this obsessive who kind of suffers until they finally have this light bulb moment and they discover something wonderful, magical, special. What have you learned about just putting in the time and trusting a process? Are there examples that you've seen of creative thinkers who have been successful with that? It wound up being almost everybody, you know, when I was thinking about historical cases and examples, almost across the board, every kind of creative.

19:44And that's ranging from visual artists to musicians to authors to scientists are talking about it just being a process of doing the same thing kind of day in and day out and chipping away. And then with luck, okay, I'm going to turn on to a vein of ideas. one of the examples I talk about early on in the book is Jackson Pollock. He kind of struggled a lot in his life and bounced around with different kinds of art making and then moves out to Long Island. And then there is where his drip technique crystallizes. But it only lasts for a short amount of time, about three years, kind of the body of most of his drip paintings were produced.

20:23And so example of this kind of hot streaks thing that we were talking about. And then he abandons that and goes on to other stuff. And so thinking about that very much as a process of exploration, what actually physicists have found who have analyzed those drip paintings is that, you know, it's not just splatters, you know, that he's just throwing it around willy-nilly, that there's actually this kind of deep structure there that actually mimics fractal patterns in natural tree branching formations, but that over time, even those drip paintings were becoming more aligned with that structure. So in the earlier paintings, it's about 20 % coherence.

21:01And by the later paintings, it's like 90 % are conforming to this much deeper, richer mathematical structure. And so as a process of coming out of iterating on the same idea, doing it again and again and again, and clearly he had kind of tapped into something much deeper.

21:17George Newman:We were talking before we started recording that a large portion of our audience are in the design or product design world. and if they happen to be on a team that's maybe feeling a bit stuck, do you have any exercises they might try or something you could suggest to sort of break them out of that rut? If you come to mind, so there's actually a bunch of exercises in the book at the end of each chapter. One is just really simple, is just fill up a Post-it notepad full of ideas and commit yourself to doing that. I think there's something like 200 Post-it notes in a pack, which just seems like really daunting.

21:50I'm going to iterate on this until I hit it. But what the research actually shows is that not only do we not run out of ideas, those ideas that we generate later on tend to be some of the more successful ones. So talk about this as kind of pushing past the creative cliff or that we believe that there's a creative cliff and using the post-it notes as a way to get past it. One of the other things I talk about is just kind of switching up the power structure or the dynamic. So a friend of mine, Adam Galinsky, who's a professor, was noticing that his students were reluctant to suggest ideas. And so it was just as simple as like switching chairs with them.

22:28And then when they sat in the big professor chair, suddenly like everything was kind of unlocked. But I think when we do that, actually, for the people leading the meeting, it's a really nice opportunity that they can be more in a brainstorming, collaborative role. and for the folks that are maybe feeling not as powerful in those situations. Even just occupying those spaces can be a cue to be more forceful with their ideas. Another big theme that I really talk about a lot is separating the digging from the sifting stage. And so...

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