19 Apr Creation like life is by definition an unbalanced process which requires a certain degree of confinement

The biologist Pierre Joliot – grandson of Pierre and Marie Curie – sums up with topical terminology what creation means and I would be tempted to add that “the degree of confinement” being in the process of being reached, the best is probably to come …

Who has not dreamed of making creation an ambition?

The notion of creativity induces a capacity to imagine, to construct, to develop a new concept or to discover an original solution to solve a problem.

The current pandemic situation seems to be fertile ground: more than ever we all need creative ideas to overcome obstacles, provide essential services, kill boredom, stem the epidemic and more generally lay the foundations of a society. “Re-invented” of the post-crisis period.

It would be reductive to think that creativity is the prerogative of certain minds: it is at the outset, intrinsic to every human being.

You just have to observe children in the first months of life and study their behaviors as tireless explorers. Everything is curiosity, everything seems possible to them.

Subsequently, education, failures, prohibitions will limit the creative potential: a well-behaved child has learned to change what he has received. He will eventually become innovative but will have lost his “creative confidence” and will hesitate to take side roads to respond to the exceptional

There is a great deal of emotion in creativity that is often stimulated by circumstances outside the area, a transformation of known resources into new ideas.

Henri Poincarré, the mathematician, identified a path from origin to completion in four stages: preparation, incubation, illumination and verification.

Identifying the right problem is the foundation of any creative solution.

It is then necessary to “leave the classical frameworks of thought”, to depart from the functions initially assigned to things in order to find original ideas, to construct new assemblies by games of comparison, abstraction, negation.

And often an idea that comes from one brain is unlikely to be successful or to be exploited. Montaigne had expressed it in his essays on travel to extol the need to “rub and file your brains against that of aultruy”

Brainstorming has proven itself in this area and has shown the effectiveness of collective work on the condition that the group obeys clear instructions for listening and facilitating.

We could, at this level, give some credit to social networks in that everyone can easily collect a variety of knowledge and ideas to be able to claim to design the most original.

New connections between ideas and knowledge complement those between men and women to generate successful ideas.

Several examples illustrate this against the backdrop of a health crisis: in large cities, via Facebook, we have seen groups of parents exchanging ideas to create content suitable for occupying confined children, for example.

In 2020 we have witnessed the emergence of a number of start-ups all vectors of innovative solutions which suggests that the pandemic crisis is as destructive of commerce as it can prove to be the creator of resilient solutions.

Neuroscience has set out to demonstrate that creativity depends on the intensity of the connections that occur unconsciously in our brain and are supported by a control network that will make obvious the ideas corresponding to the identified concerns of the moment.

From a more “psychoanalytic” point of view for Boris Cyrulnik it is from the shadows that light is born and he probably knows better than anyone what he is talking about when he says that “lack invites creativity, loss. invites art .. ”. To sum up, and this is the title of his book: “Suns are written at night.”

Passion and creativity can go hand in hand, as long as talent is part of the equation. What could happen to a passion thwarted by the non-recognition of the expected talent? This is what the writer Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt worked on by imagining a fictionalized biography of Adolf Hitler written in parallel to an alternative invented since October 8, 1908, when he failed at the entrance to the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts *. What would have happened if he was flattered and consecrated in his creative ambitions as an artist, he had been received?

For once, it is the creative talent of the novelist that leaves us here … dreamers !!

* The Other’s Share – novel by EE Schmitt published in 2001