Imagine: How Creativity Works
Interestingly, it turns out that even when the original picture is taken away — the monkeys can no longer see the prototype — the prefrontal cells devoted to that picture continue to fire. They’re still holding on to that particular arrangement of dots, which is why working memory is a type of memory. (Scientists refer to this as RAM-like activity, since these brain cells are acting just like random-access memory in a computer.) This echo of activity lasts for only a little while, but it’s long enough to mix together thoughts, as seemingly unrelated ideas intersect. And so, after a few minutes of staring at different pictures of dots, the monkeys are able to sort the pictures into categories and determine which ones most resemble the prototype. “At a certain point, the monkeys just get it,” Miller says. “They suddenly realize that there are patterns here.” This new idea — it’s essentially an abstract rule for connecting the dots — is represented as a new circuit of neural activity in the prefrontal cortex. The brain cells have been literally altered by the breakthrough, changed by the creative connection.
While the prefrontal cortex is the source of these creative ideas, it doesn’t generate these new connections by itself. Miller has discovered that instead, the prefrontal cortex works in close collaboration with other brain areas, such as the basal ganglia and dopamine reward pathway. The process goes like this: rewarding information — and the reward can be anything from a sweet treat to a poetic metaphor — gets processed by the dopamine neurons and then sent onward to the prefrontal cortex. The thought has now entered working memory. If this new information leads to any useful conclusions — if it allows the monkey to decipher the dots, or helps a poet improve a poem — then the idea survives, a persistent link between cells. A new connection that helps solve a problem has been created.
But the process isn’t finished. That new thought is then transmitted back to its source — those pleasure-hungry dopamine cells in the midbrain — so the neurons learn from the new idea. “We call that a recursive loop,” Miller says. “It allows the system to feed on itself, so that one idea leads naturally to the next. We can then build on these connections, so that they lead to other, richer connections.” ( One of the interesting implications of Miller’s work is the importance of the primitive midbrain in the creative process. While this brain area is often disparaged — it’s seen as the primal source of rewards, not the center of epiphanies — Miller’s research demonstrates that the midbrain also plays a crucial role in helping to locate the relevant information that will help solve a problem. “The basal ganglia and these other areas are the engine behind so many higher cognitive functions,” Miller says. “They may be more primitive, but they are what grasp the pieces of the puzzle. Only then can the pieces be sent along to the prefrontal cortex, which puts the puzzle together.”) This loop of creativity illuminates the power of attention.
When each of us focuses on something, the idea enters working memory. As a result, we’re able to slowly chisel away at our creative tasks. Perhaps it’s finally finding the perfect choreography for a dance, or figuring out how to solve the architectural problem. These unprecedented thoughts are then transmitted back down the line, so that the brain modifies its own sense of what’s important. We suddenly look at reality through a slightly different lens, as the new idea is seamlessly incorporated into our perceptions. Instead of just seeing a scattering of dots, we notice the pattern; things are starting to make sense. We have stared at the world, and the world itself has changed.
2.
When Milton Glaser was sixteen, he decided to draw a portrait of his mother. “I was just sitting in front of her one night and I thought it would be fun to sketch her face,” he says. “So I got out a piece of paper and a charcoal pencil. And you know what I realized? I realized I hadn’t the faintest idea what she looked like. Her image had become fixed in my mind at the age of one or two, and it really hadn’t changed since. I was drawing a picture of a woman who no longer existed.”
But as Glaser stared at her face and then compared what he saw to the black marks on the paper, her appearance slowly came into view. He was able to draw her as she was, and not as he expected her to be. “That sketch taught me something interesting about the mind,” he says. “We’re always looking, but we never really see.” Although Glaser had looked at his mother every single day of his life, he didn’t see her until he tried to draw her. “When you draw an object, the mind becomes deeply, intensely attentive,” Glaser says. “And it’s that act of attention that allows you to really grasp something, to become fully conscious of it. That’s what I learned from my mother’s face, that drawing is really a kind of thinking.”
Milton Glaser looks like a patriarch from a Philip Roth novel. His bare head is ringed with gray hair; oversize glasses rest on the long slope of his nose. Glaser is eighty years old, but he still works in a small studio on East Thirty-Second Street in Manhattan. It’s a cluttered space, the white walls hidden by old art posters, colorful prints for 1980s rock concerts, and art books stacked ten high. Above the front door, chiseled into the glass, is the slogan of the studio: art is work.
For Glaser, the quote summarizes his creative philosophy. “There’s no such thing as a creative type,” he says. “As if creative people can just show up and make stuff up. As if it were that easy. I think people need to be reminded that creativity is a verb, a very time-consuming verb. It’s about taking an idea in your head, and transforming that idea into something real. And that’s always going to be a long and difficult process. If you’re doing it right, it’s going to feel like work.”
Glaser is a living legend in the world of graphic design, having created a number of the most iconic illustrations of the twentieth century, from the I ♥ NY ad campaign to the 1967 Bob Dylan silhouette poster. He came up with the DC Comics logo, cofounded New York magazine, and invented numerous typefaces; he’s designed the interiors of famous restaurants and is responsible for a staggering number of product labels on the supermarket shelves. In recent years, his images have entered the permanent collections of MOMA, the Smithsonian, and the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum.
But Glaser almost didn’t make it. In the late 1950s, when he began working on Madison Avenue, photography seemed like the ad form of the future. Although print ads had once relied on trained illustrators — they helped spin the fantasy — the industry was transitioning to staged photo ops. “People like me seemed so antiquated,” Glaser remembers. “Why draw something when you could just take a picture of it, or make a television commercial?” The camera was king; artists were out of work.
As a cofounder of Pushpin Studios, however, Glaser helped rediscover the potential of graphic design. He introduced bright neon colors and a touch of abstraction; he found a way to turn even staid commissions into conceptual works of art. Glaser knew that the most powerful images weren’t the most realistic. Instead of simply trying to represent a thing, Glaser wanted to define it. His perfect visual was more than a picture: it was a summary of associations, a map of thought. It was a picture honed by human attention.
The creative possibilities of graphic art are perfectly captured by Glaser’s most iconic design. In 1975, he accepted an intimidating assignment: create an ad campaign that would rehabilitate the image of New York City. At the time, Manhattan was falling apart. Crime was at an all-time high, and the city was almost bankrupt. “When people thought about the city, they thought about dirt and danger,” Glaser remembers. “And they wanted a little ad campaign that could somehow change all that.” There was one additional constraint: the print ad had to use the phrase I love New York.
Glaser began by experimenting with fonts, laying out the straightforward slogan in a variety of friendly typefaces. After a few weeks of work, he settled on a charming cursive, with I Love NY set against a plain white background. “I send in my proposal and it’s approved,” Glaser says. “Everybody likes it. And if I were a normal person, I’d stop thinking about the project. But I can’t. Something about it just doesn’t fee
l right.”
So Glaser continues to fixate on the design, devoting hours to a project that was supposedly finished. “I can’t get the damn problem out of my head,” he says. “And then, about a week after the first concept was approved, I’m sitting in a cab, stuck in traffic. I often carry spare pieces of paper in my pocket, and so I get the paper out and I start to draw. And I’m thinking and drawing and then I get it. I see the whole design in my head. I see the typewriter typeface and the big round red heart smack-dab in the middle. I know that this is how it should go.”
For Glaser, the I ♥ NY ad is a testament to the importance of persistence. Because he refused to stop thinking about the three-word slogan — he kept on redrawing the logo in his mind — his ideas continued to improve. And then, while stuck in the taxi, this steadfast focus led to a new design, a better design. The graphic that he imagined in rush-hour traffic has become the most widely imitated work of graphic art in the world.
This is the power of attention and working memory; it allows us to relentlessly refine our ideas, to continue thinking about our thoughts. “Design is the conscious imposition of meaningful order,” Glaser says. “That sounds grandiose, but it’s just the process of taking an idea that isn’t clear and making it a little more clear. I could tell you a bullshit story about what exactly led to the idea [of I ♥ NY], but the truth is that I don’t know. Maybe I saw a red heart out of the corner of my eye? Maybe I heard the word? But that’s the way it always works. You keep on trying to fix it, to make the design a little bit more interesting, a little bit better. And then, if you’re really stubborn and persistent and lucky, you eventually get there.”
Glaser’s impressive work ethic — his ability to stick with a problem until it surrenders — is itself a skill that took years to develop. In 1951, Glaser was an impressionable twenty-one-year-old with a Fulbright fellowship who was heading to Bologna to study etching with the painter Giorgio Morandi. At the time, Morandi was creating his natura morta paintings, a collection of still lifes that featured empty wine bottles and terra-cotta vases set against a flat gray background. The art was austere, a reflection of Morandi’s disciplined artistic process. He spent months on each canvas, trying to edge closer to the fragile reality he wanted to describe. Sometimes, Morandi would just stare at that random collection of containers and become too intimidated to paint. “I’d watch him get so focused on these incredibly tiny details,” Glaser remembers. “He’d devote weeks of his life to moving a passage of gray a quarter of an inch to the left, or smoothing out the curve of a bottle. It didn’t matter that nobody else would notice. He would notice, and that was more than enough.”
Morandi’s obsessive dedication to getting the image exactly right changed forever the way Glaser thought about creativity. His old artistic model had been Pablo Picasso — “A raging lunatic genius who wanted to devour the world,” as Glaser puts it — but his new hero was the modest Italian painter. “It was Morandi who taught me about dedication,” Glaser says. “He showed me the necessity of persistence, and that nothing good is ever easy. And that’s because we see nothing at first glance. It’s only by really thinking about something that we’re able to move ourselves into perceptions that we never knew we had the capacity for.”
The German philosopher Martin Heidegger referred to this as the unconcealing process. He argued, like Glaser, that the reality of things is naturally obscured by the clutter of the world, by all those ideas and sensations that distract the mind. The only way to see through this clutter is to rely on the knife of conscious attention, which can cut away the excess and reveal “the things themselves.”
This mental process — the act of unconcealing — has been an essential tool for Glaser. He relies on the solvent of working memory to turn difficult assignments into resonant images that precisely convey the necessary set of associations. This helps explain why Glaser has no defining style. He isn’t a minimalist or a maxi-malist, a realist or a cartoonist. (“I distrust styles,” he says. “To have a style is to be trapped.”) Instead, Glaser treats each assignment as a unique problem with its own requirements and constraints. He doesn’t know what the answer will look like or what kind of image it will require. That’s why he needs to think about it.
Consider the Brooklyn Brewery project. In 1987, Milton Glaser was approached by Steve Hindy and Tom Potter, two businessmen and beer aficionados interested in reviving the great tradition of Brooklyn brewing. They asked Glaser to design a logo for their new company that would somehow capture the spirit of the bor-ough. “Their first idea was to use the Brooklyn Bridge or to call the beer the Brooklyn Eagle,” Glaser remembers. “And that could have worked; that’s clever enough. But I told them, ‘Why settle for only a small piece of Brooklyn when you can own the whole place?’ ”
And so Glaser meditated for days on Brooklyn and craft beer. The first part of the solution arrived when Glaser misremembered the baseball cap of the Brooklyn Dodgers. He drew a wide, arcing B that he thought was the team’s logo. (The Dodgers actually used a staid, blocky font; Glaser had embellished the letter in his memory.) “It didn’t matter that the logo wasn’t accurate,” he says. “It felt like it was from baseball. It really made you think of the Dodgers.”
But Glaser knew that something was missing; the logo was incomplete. “And so I’m racking my brain, because I’ve got to give the design a European feel,” he says. “It’s got to feel like an import beer with a distinguished history, not another Budweiser.” After weeks of market research, analyzing all the beer bottles he could find, Glaser settled on a simple frame of white dots on a green background with the big B in the center. “I can’t tell you why that logo works,” he says. “I can’t explain how it came to me. But I just kept on playing with the design until I found what I needed.” (When Glaser first showed the founders of the Brooklyn Brewery his proposed logo, they were mostly disappointed. “The greatly anticipated logo was a shock,” remembers Steve Hindy. “There was no Brooklyn Bridge. There was no soaring eagle. It was just a B.” Glaser told the businessmen to give the image a chance, to “put it on the counter of the kitchen and live with it for a while.” After a few days, says Hindy, the brilliance of the design began to sink in. “The B evoked the nostalgia of the Dodgers while being a fresh symbol of Brooklyn . . . It looked like the logo of a company that had been in business for decades.”)
This is Glaser’s fundamental method: he thinks until he can think no more, until his attention gives out or his solution is unconcealed. Of course, such a process is only possible because those cells in the prefrontal cortex can cling to ideas, allowing one to focus on abstractions like beer logos and the meaning of Brooklyn. The logo itself is a visual hybrid, a literal overlapping of ideas.
There is the cursive B that makes us think of baseball, but there is also the cosmopolitan background echoing the labels of old European beers. Once these distinct visuals collided in his working memory, Glaser knew that his problem was solved: he’d found a pretty image that conjured up the ideas he needed to convey. And it fit on a beer bottle.
3.
The lesson of W. H. Auden and Milton Glaser is that working memory is an essential tool of the imagination. Sometimes, all we need to do is pay attention, to think until the necessary thoughts intersect. The progress will be slow, but the answer will gradually reveal itself, like a poem emerging from the edits. As Nietzsche observed in his 1878 book Human, All Too Human:
Artists have a vested interest in our believing in the flash of revelation, the so-called inspiration . . . shining down from heavens as a ray of grace. In reality, the imagination of the good artist or thinker produces continuously good, mediocre, or bad things, but his judgment, trained and sharpened to a fine point, rejects, selects, connects . . . All great artists and thinkers are great workers, indefatigable not only in inventing, but also in rejecting, sifting, transforming, ordering.
To illustrate his point, Nietzsche described Beethoven’s musical notebooks, which documented the comp
oser’s painstaking process of refining his melodies. It wasn’t uncommon for Beethoven to experiment with seventy different versions of a phrase before settling on the final one. “I make many changes, and reject and try again, until I am satisfied,” the composer remarked to a friend. In other words, even Beethoven — the cliché of artistic genius — needed to constantly refine his ideas, to struggle with his music until the beauty shone through.
Although this mental talent is an essential part of the creative process, there is nothing easy or pleasant about it. It isn’t fun re-fining a musical motif, or cutting a favorite line, or throwing away a sketch. In fact, there is evidence suggesting that the ability to relentlessly focus on a creative problem can actually make us mis-erable. Aristotle was there first, stating in the fourth century b.c. that “all men who have attained excellence in philosophy, in poetry, in art and in politics, even Socrates and Plato, had a melancholic habitus; indeed some suffered even from melancholic disease.” This belief was revived during the Renaissance, leading Milton to exclaim, in his poem “Il Penseroso”: “Hail divinest melancholy / whose saintly visage is too bright / to hit the sense of human sight.” The Romantic poets took the veneration of sadness to its logical extreme and described suffering as a prerequisite for the literary life. As Keats wrote, “Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?”