Wired to Create: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Creative Mind

As Bradbury explained in a 1974 interview, “The intellect is a great danger to creativity . . . because you begin to rationalize and make up reasons for things, instead of staying with your own basic truth—who you are, what you are, what you want to be.”

Far from being an indicator of negative personality traits or mental illness, the capacity for solitude may be a sign of emotional maturity and healthy psychological development.

The creative act is a process that often unfolds in solitary reflection, and indeed, the portrait of any artist is often one of solitude. The trope of the reclusive writer and the introverted artist stems from a significant truth of creativity: In order to make art, we must find the space to become intimate with our own minds.

Research conducted by Scott, in collaboration with the world’s largest showerhead supplier, Hansgrohe, found that 72 percent of people around the globe report experiencing new ideas in the shower.

Turning our attention away from the external world and tuning in to the world within—dreams, fantasies, stories, personal narratives, and feelings—not only builds a sense of meaning and hope, as Lennon’s anthem suggests, but also allows us to tap into our deepest wellsprings of creativity.

Of course, mind wandering can be costly when it comes at the wrong time, especially in regard to things like reading comprehension, sustained attention, memory, and academic performance.9 The inability to control your attention when the task at hand requires it often leads to frustration, just as the tendency to get wrapped up in distracting negati

But as two prominent psychologists recently noted, “Not all minds who wander are lost”—in fact, the mind’s wandering is vital to imagination and creative thought.

He writes, “If you want to become significantly better at anything, you have to fall in love with the process of doing it. You have to fall in love with building the identity of someone who does the work.”39

To nourish and sustain motivation toward a creative goal, we must not only fall in love with a dream of our future self, as Torrance says, but also love the process of becoming that person—including all the unglamorous, everyday hard work.