Are Creative People Born That Way?

Creativity is, that, to me, is one of the more interesting aspects of being a human being. So our ability to create things and our desire to create things. In a way, that's also along the same lines, right, because you're getting rewarded for it. Well, probably, yeah, so I mean all these things are, as a child is developing and growing up and passing through different kinds of situations in life. I think a lot of stuff happens kind of randomly, you know, so the child may do something that someone views as creative. And so, as you said, the child is rewarded for that. So then that allows them to figure out, you know, explore kind of how they did that and maybe continue to do it. But other people may simply have minds that go in that direction on their own where, as we talked about earlier, their thoughts are able to jump across conceptual categories and sort of transcend those categories into new, completely new ideas and so forth. And I don't think we know how the brain does that at all. That's a very good question for the future, but it's not something we have a great deal of understanding of now. I mean, there could be an area of research on it that I just don't know about. It's a big field. But I certainly don't know the answer to how creativity comes about. Well, it's interesting, too. Creativity has a reward system built in for the person who creates, even without recognition from others, there's some fundamentally satisfying feeling of creating something. That's fun. Yeah. Why do you think that is? Well novelty is rewarding, not reinforcing. And certainly creativity is novelty. It's like anything that is novel that you do has a kind of, you know, charge effect to it, I would think. Yeah, I mean, it's people like you who study this stuff, to me, are so important because most of us are just banging into walls, just trying to figure out why we do what we do. And to have an ability to understand the scientific explanations for the various things that are at play, it's so critical because you can kind of like, not necessarily stop the process, but at least be aware of it while it's going down. Is that part of what you wanted to do when you were writing? Well, I want to thank you for crediting me for that. But a lot of what we've been talking about, we've just been having a conversation. My work is rather limited and all. I don't work on creativity and all these things. But you work on the way the mind works. I work on, yeah, I mean, I think about how the mind works, but I work on how the brain detects and responds to danger. So that allows me to go back to my early work on consciousness and to bring it in and layer it on top of all that other stuff. But yeah, it's, you know, I get tremendous value out of sitting there writing and, because when you start a book, in my case, I think this is probably true of many people, you don't have no idea how you're going to get to the end. You know, you have a beginning and you just see where it goes. So this idea of writing a proposal that lays out the whole thing to me doesn't work because you just don't know where it's going. And the fun part is getting to the end.