What makes highly creative people different from the rest of us? In the
1960s, psychologist and creativity researcher Frank X. Barron set about finding
out. Barron conducted a series of experiments on some of his generation’s most
renowned thinkers in an attempt to isolate the unique spark of creative genius.
In a historic study, Barron invited a group of high-profile creators—including
writers Truman Capote, William Carlos Williams, and Frank O’Connor, along with
leading architects, scientists, entrepreneurs, and mathematicians—to spend
several days living in a former frat house on the University of California at
Berkeley campus. The participants spent time getting to know one another, being
observed by researchers, and completing evaluations of their lives, work, and
personalities, including tests that aimed to look for signs of mental illness
and indicators of creative thinking. Barron found that, contrary to
conventional thought at the time, intelligence had only a modest role in
creative thinking. IQ alone could not explain the creative spark.
Instead, the study showed that creativity is informed by a whole host of
intellectual, emotional, motivational and moral characteristics. The common
traits that people across all creative fields seemed to have in common were an
openness to one’s inner life; a preference for complexity and ambiguity; an
unusually high tolerance for disorder and disarray; the ability to extract
order from chaos; independence; unconventionality; and a willingness to take
risks. Describing this hodgepodge of traits, Barron wrote that the creative
genius was both more primitive and more cultured, more destructive and more
constructive, occasionally crazier and yet adamantly saner, than the average
person. This new way of thinking about creative genius gave rise to some
fascinating—and perplexing—contradictions. In a subsequent study of creative
writers, Barron and Donald MacKinnon found that the average writer was in the
top 15% of the general population on all measures of psychopathology. But
strangely enough, they also found that creative writers scored extremely high
on all measures of psychological health.
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