Book notes Creativity in Science
Dean Keith Simonton's recent book is a tour de force, explaining the impact of publications and the number of publications produced by a given scientist as a function of that scientist's attributes. If you are looking to produce your creative output, why bother with non-emprical, qualitative advice when you don't have to? Read this book instead. Here are some of my notes. As always, assume that it is a direct quote from the book unless there are no quotes:
The ratio of high-impact work to total output in any given period neither increases nor decreases across the career course.
The ratio of citations to publications correlates -0.2 with the scientist's age at each career period, signifying that the amount of variance is virtually zero.
Great scientists sedom make a name for themselves by focusing on one extremely narrow topic throughout the course of their career. Instead, they tend to display considerable scientific versatility by dealing with a variety of critical questions.
Highly creative scientists virtually never work on just one project at a time but rather they tend to pursue several independent inquiries simultaneously.
[Nevertheless], highly creative scientists are not mere dilettantes who flit from topic to topic without rhyme or reason. On the contrary, usually perfmeating most of their work is a core set of themes, issues, perspective, or metaphors.
[Crosstalk between multiple projects] can sometimes result in unexpected solutions, progress on one project impinging on anoter project, even when the two are not viewed as being closely related.
So poor is the consensus among referees that their recommendations to accept a paper agree only about one-fifth of the time. As a consequence, most published articles should suffer rejection if resubmitted for publication. This bizarre outcome has been empirically demonstrated.
The two upward trends in the number of ideas and the number of scientists taken together imply that the production of new discoveries should become highly accelerated.
The larger the scientific community in which an individual is embedded, and the richer the cumulative body of scientific knowledge, the more impressive the creativity that can be displayed by the most prolific scientist in a given field... According to this law, as the number of scientists increases, a smaller proportion of scientists will account for half the work. In a sense, the discipline becomes more and more elitist as the field recruits more active participants.
[Of the personality traits], most significantly and consistently, creativity is positively associated with openness to experience... This inclination is also related to the creative person's capacity for defocused attention.
One inquiry found that eminent natural scientists had a 28% rate of exhibiting some mental disorder during their lifetime, which is significantly lower than the 73% rate for eminent artists and the 87% rate for eminent poets. Yet 28% exceeds the rate in the general population.
"One of the favorite maxims of my father was the distinction between the two sorts of truths, profound truths recognized by the fact that the opposite is also a profound truth, in contrast to trivialities where opposites are obviously absurd" - Neil Bohr's son
[Education can be restricted], so somehow scientific talent must pull off a balancing act between mastering a domain and being mastered by a domain.
The discovery of the most appropriate heuristic may require a meta-heuristic-namely, trial and error in the application of heuristics.
According to the chance perspective, the creative process is contingent on so many complex and interacting factors that it necessarily behaves as if it operated via a random combinatorial mechanism.