The roots of creativity

create (v.)

"to bring into being," early 15c., from Latin creatus, past participle of creare "to make, bring forth, produce, procreate, beget, cause," related to Ceres and to crescere "arise, be born, increase, grow," from PIE root *ker- (2) "to grow." De Vaan writes that the original meaning of creare "was 'to make grow', which can still be found in older texts ...." 

There is a solid and academically researched relationship between creativity and ADHD. To me the question is more, what is creativity, how do we recognise it and what do we use it for.

Creativity is a much studied subject, though to what end is unclear (or at least varies). In the USA it is studied because of the idea that understanding who is creative and how to engender creativity in others is a valuable service to the state. Within this research there is often a nod towards the question of what creativity is but not really how it originates. It seems enough that there is convergent thinking and divergent thinking and that we can invent ways to ‘teach’ students divergent thinking while at the same time not letting them stray too far from convergent thinking.

Reading a book about creativity is like reading a book about ADHD where the writer has decided to not mention ADHD.

Seth Godin said[1] “You have two options when you have ADHD. You can figure out how to force yourself into a farmer’s world or you can figure out how to make the difficult choices to be a hunter for a living.” He was, of course, talking about Thom Hartmann’s legendary book, How to be a Hunter in a Farmer’s World and he was talking about whether you want to contort yourself into the way the world thinks you should be or whether it is possible to find a way of being in the world with your ADHD. There are of course professions and ways of making a career that lend themselves to ADHD. I first had an inkling of this when looking at my father and me and my son, who are all journalists with SCAD. My daughter gave me a clue years ago: she said she liked the idea of journalism because you get to do a different thing every day. This clearly routes around the impact of ADHD to some degree.

So while some jobs are unwelcoming or impossible for people with ADHD, some work very well, and these jobs, if we are lucky enough to find one of them, are inevitably creative jobs - and creative jobs where a certain je ne sais quoi is tolerated if not welcomed by all.

In fact, many of these roles seem to have been invented and defined by people with ADHD.

Artists

Writers

Poets

Entrepreneurs

Comedians

Filmmakers

Scientists

Coders

Politicians

Journalists

Explorers

Soldiers

Inventors

Criminals

and many more.

What do they have in common? They demand divergent thinking.

Divergent thinking is the ability to generate multiple ideas or solutions to a problem (Guilford, 1957). Divergent thinking is a mode of creative thought that’s all about breadth of ideas; exploring lots of options before you narrow them down.

The hierarchy of creativity goes: synoptic thinking, divergent thinking, convergent thinking.

The study suggests that ADHD in adults may be associated with better performance on certain types of creativity tasks, specifically, those that involve divergent thinking. On the other hand, convergent thinking may be hindered by the presence of ADHD, an effect that may be attributed to ADHD-related deficits in inhibitory control.

Of course, all of the professions listed above will contain divergent and convergent thinkers because the two sides are needed for functioning in the world, but the true creativity will come from the divergent thinkers and those divergent thinkers will be people with a degree of ADHD.

Divergent thinking springs from the drivers of ADHD, the combination of a hyperactive mind, impulsivity, distraction, perhaps some hyperfocus thrown in. The mind collects and recombines the world and something new is produced from the mix. The creator might not even realise it and the world will often reject what has been produced as incomprehensible, but new things in the world, once loosed, are impossible to return to the bottle. So the crazy mixed up artists who exist on the fringes of society (consider how and why those artists got to live on the fringes of society in the first place and who defines polite society) invent new ways of being in the world. The world first ignores them, As Ghandi never said (it was Nicholas Klein, a trade union activist in a 1918 speech), First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. And then they attack you and want to burn you. Then they steal your ideas and call them art. Then they ignore you again. Why is this? Because the product of a neurodivergent mind is divergent thinking but that product is assimilated by convergent thinkers. In fact, once something is out in the world, use of it becomes the definition of convergent thinking. Everyone who wants to be ‘creative’ uses the crazyness, it becomes normalised and consolidated, accepted as part of the rich creativity of humanity. Convergent minds then go there and claim it as their creativity.

[1] Faster than Normal podcast