Exuberance fuels creativity – book review

“Life could be so sweet on the sunny side of the street.”
– McHugh/Fields –

I think it’s safe to say most people would rather be happy than unhappy. You feel better when you’re happy. There is also another reason why I prefer it: I produce more and my work is better. It’s also a lot easier to do. Kay Redfield Jamison’s book, Exuberance: The Passion for Life, explains why this is so.

I’ve always had a fascination for the two states, happy and unhappy, partly due to the fact my work is so much better when I feel good.

Jamison’s previous books had focused on the negative side of the mind: suicide and manic depressive disorders. As she points out, studies of the brain often focus on disorders. In this book, she wanted to take a look at the positive side of things. As the dust jacket says, this book is, “… an exploration of exuberance and how it fuels our most important creative and scientific achievements.”

Snowflakes

She covers a lot of ground and I would not call this a casual read. She goes into some detail, including the history of studies and findings, and it may be tough slogging if you are not caught up in the subject matter. She gives many examples of exuberance, including Theodore Roosevelt of whom one friend said life was the, “unpacking of endless Christmas stockings.”

My favourite example, however, is Wilson ‘Snowflake’ Bentley (1865 – 1931), a man who caught and photographed over 5,000 snowflakes in his life. That must have been some love of snowflakes.

Think about what he had to do. First, how do you catch a snowflake? How do you know when to go out and catch one? Even if you know and can manage it, how do you photograph it? This wasn’t an era of digital cameras. How do you do it over a lifetime?

I repeat, that must have been some love of snowflakes.

It was. As Jamison points out, when she looked at the journals he kept she was struck by the language. In one paper, he uses the words beauty and beautiful almost 40 times in nine pages. He uses words like marvelous, exquisite, wonderful and exceptional.

Exuberance is a book that looks at passions such as Bentley’s and tries to get a grasp on what it means. I suspect, from what I read, that the 10,000 hours that Malcolm Gladwell discusses in Outliers: The Story Of Success, is a product of what Jamison is calling exuberance.

Play

Some of the interesting aspects Jamison looks at have to do with personalities, childhood, and play. For example, she looks at studies of animals and people that look at the function of play in our development. It appears (to me) that the more we (adults) try to control play with rules, the less well children develop.

Play, in animals and humans, appears to be how we learn survival and social skills in childhood. Unstructured play involves a degree of roughhousing, generally something we frown upon because, “someone might get hurt.” It’s true we might; but it’s also true that without it we don’t learn the skills to take care of ourselves physically and socially.

Play is also about learning to think laterally or, put another way, imaginatively. Creatively. Rules (structure) remove the necessity for imagination.

The absence of unstructured play has a negative impact on cognitive development.

Personality

Equally fascinating is her look at personality. She refers to a number of studies of infants and small children where they distinguish those that are exuberant and those that are cautious and how these early traits carry over into adulthood.

It essentially comes down to this: the exuberant are more fascinated with novelty – trying new things. They are just plain curious. The cautious are not. They are wary, less curious and more inclined to behaviors that will please others – a kind of preventative defensive approach.

It relates to creativity, as the former are curious and more likely to look at new approaches, while the latter are more inclined to go the other way, looking at what they feel is expected.

But exuberance in this case isn’t a bubbly personality. She refers to one psychologist (Ellen Winner) who says of “exuberant” children, “From an early age … these children find things that interest them and they throw themselves into these domains.”

She goes on to tell of an eight year old that created hundreds of paper soldiers of various countries and rank (learned by reading) and, once finished, created hundreds of zoo animals and cages for them.

That to me sounds like the beginnings of 10,000 hours.

Recommended

I found no chapter of Exuberance, no paragraph for that matter, that didn’t have me pausing and thinking and wondering.

In a chapter titled, “The Champagne of Moods,” she specifically addresses the brain and what a positive mood does. She writes of dopamine, the various brain areas with names that are so hard to pronounce, and looks into how and why a positive mindset leads to more and better creative work and problem solving.

I recommend this book if, like me, you find this kind of topic fascinating, though it can be tough going in places. However, as others have mentioned, Jamison’s enthusiasm for her subject is also a great example of the subject: exuberance. I felt it as I read the book.

In the book, Jamison refers to a Snoopy from the Peanuts cartoon, and quotes him saying, “To those of us with real understanding, dancing is the only pure art form…. To live is to dance, to dance is to live.”

In her own way, Kay Redfield Jamison dances in Exuberance.

Related posts:

1. Good Book – Pragmatic Thinking & Learning
2. R.I.P. Steve Jobs, Creativity Enabler