What is creativity, really?

Too many artists, scientists, and writers talk about their creative process as a blackbox—an ephemeral spark that’s difficult to explain and impossible to predict. But it’s not. Boden is one of the most influential cognitive scientists to think about creativity through a computational lens. Her work is rooted in the study of early AI attempts to recreate human creativity, like computer programs that could draw, tell jokes, or compose music.

In her 2003 book The Creative Mind, Boden described creativity as the ability to come up with ideas that are new, surprising, and valuable. She also classified creativity, dividing it into three types—combinatorial, exploratory, and transformational.

Combinatorial creativity: Great ideas come from unexpected but meaningful connections

This type of creativity is about creating unfamiliar combinations of familiar ideas, with the added requirement that there’s a clear conceptual link between the ideas. The resulting combination has to “make sense.”

A classic example is the literary device of analogy. Boden uses Macbeth’s description of sleep as something that "knits up the ravelled sleeve of care," noting that William Shakespeare’s analogy works because there’s an intelligible link between the ideas: Just as knitting repairs a frayed sleeve, sleep heals a restless mind.

A more recent example of combinatorial creativity are the viral memes that compare Mark Zuckerberg to a lizard, like this one:

Source: Facebook .

It became so widespread that Zuckerberg even publicly denied being a reptile during a Facebook livestream. The humor works because the analogy pulls on relevant cultural threads: a long-running conspiracy theory about elite lizard overlords, combined with the popular perception of Zuckerberg being awkward, robotic, and emotionally flat. The comparison may be silly, but it isn’t random; it works because there’s an intelligible conceptual link between the ideas.

Exploratory creativity: How to find new ideas in familiar places

Exploratory creativity is about discovering new possibilities within a conceptual space—a style of painting, a genre of music, or a branch of mathematics, for example. Each of these spaces is defined by rules, and exploratory creativity doesn’t break them. Instead, it plays within them in surprising ways. It’s about seeing new patterns in familiar places.

When Charles Dickens described Scrooge as "a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner" Boden says, “he was exploring the space of English grammar” in which “the rules of grammar allow us to use any number of adjectives before a noun.” It’s something the language always allowed, but Dickens used it in a particularly striking way.

She points out that the size of a conceptual space can vary significantly. Some spaces offer a far greater capacity for creative exploration than others. Boden explains this by comparing the simplicity of the game of tic-tac-toe with the complexity of chess. In the former, the limited rules and gameplay constrain the number of possible novel moves. In chess, however, although the number of potential moves is still finite, there is an astronomically wider range of action. And certain conceptual spaces remain open-ended: “the space for possible limericks, or sonnets, has not—and never will be exhausted.”

Transformation creativity—bending the rules until a new reality emerges

Transformational creativity goes a step beyond exploratory creativity. Instead of exploring a conceptual space, it fundamentally alters its structure by changing one of its core rules. Boden takes the example of the composer Arnold Schoenberg, who made atonal music by altering the rule that a piece of music must begin and end in the same key.

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