Now I’m stumped. I have no idea where creativity comes from, much less what it is. This has to be one of the advantages of having a big, complex brain. Birds have tiny brains and are hard-wired for certain behaviors–nest building, food gathering, reproduction, defense–but they aren’t very creative. Creativity suggests coming up with new ideas, new forms, new plans, thinking outside the box, and not just doing things the same old way because that’s the way you learned them in the first place. Creativity also suggests innovation and novelty, thinking up new ways to do old things. Yet, creativity also means coming up with completely new and iconoclastic ways of seeing the world, being a rebel, not accepting things the way they are, promoting anarchy and fueling revolution. If it were not for creativity, for example, we would still be writing on stone tablets and sleeping under bear rugs. Creativity is linked intimately with progress. Often creativity is met with a certain amount of push-back because humans often become complacent and comfortable doing a thing just one way. We are inherently disorderly creatures, however, and are almost always open to doing things differently if it makes our lives better. All of that said, I still don’t know why we are creative. Perhaps creativity is a behavior which made our species more adaptable to changing conditions, giving us a greater chance of surviving into the next generation. All those people who were not creative, died out long ago, so being creative is a pro-survival characteristic that is hard-wired into our genetic structure: big creative brains equal species success. I’m sure that my analysis would not hold up in a neuroscience conference, but I am probably not too far from the truth. Creative people are great problem solvers, can readily recognize abstract patterns, and are fueled by more and greater sensorial inputs. The more that goes into the brain, more comes out. I suspect that all humans are very creative if we just let ourselves be creative. Yet, turning off the internal auditors and censors is just impossible for many people who fear making a fool of themselves or who fear they have nothing to share. I suspect that if encouraged, all people can be creative. All cultures, whether they are prehistoric rupestre cave cultures or contemporary urban graffiti taggers, fight to express the creativity that hums in the frontal lobe of the brain. Writers write, painters paint, inventors invent, sculptors sculpt, thinkers think and so on to the next generation that starts all over again with the crayons and finger paints. Tragically, somewhere along the line, someone tells the child that they cannot draw, or paint, or sing, or write poetry, and a nasty sword chops the head off of creativity. Conform, says the world, conform. Well, I guess I stopped listening to that voice a long time ago.