Creativity enthusiasts: Birds of a feather?

Creativity has an image problem: So many people who promote it appear to be wackos.

I hope I’m not writing an autobiography here.

Whether I personally fit the description or not, I’ve discovered in the course of normal journalistic research about creativity and the brain science behind it that the subject tends to attract two kinds of people. On one side – in orderly lines – I find sober scientists and policy people for whom creativity is a skill to be deconstructed and analyzed, or a tool/asset to be fostered for its beneficial effects on education, economic activity and emotional health.  On the other side drifts and flits an aviary of colorful mystics and visionaries for whom creativity is the warm updraft beneath their ecstatic wings. To them, it’s the stuff of elaborate belief and thought systems that they want to use, either to set themselves free (probably in the desert with a supply of fingerpaints that they can smear on nearby geographic features while rapturously trance-dancing to old John Tesh tapes), or to recruit armies of followers for their motivational 12-step programs that offer the keys to self-actualization and financial success (only $79.95 for the book and 10-DVD home-instruction course, free T-shirt included!).

Then there’s Allan Snyder.

Snyder heads the Centre for the Mind at the University of Sydney in Australia. A graduate of  Harvard, MIT and the College of London, he’s also been a Guggenheim Fellow at Yale University’s School of Medicine and a Royal Society Research Fellow at Cambridge University’s Physiology Labratories. He’s hilariously laureled: winner of the 1997 Australia Prize and the 2001 Marconi International Prize for communication and information technology, a Fellow of the Royal Society of London and recipient of its Clifford Patterson Prize for contributions that benefit mankind, a scientific pioneer whose groundbreaking discoveries involve a range of fields – visual neurobiology and optical physics, communications and mind sciences – usually addressed by whole colleges of scholars. In recent years, creativity has become his particular specialty.

He’s evidently a highly respected scientist. And brilliant. But his real genius seems to be for self-promotion.

Take a look at his site. It’s crammed – even  in the video – with color pictures of all the magazines and and news shows that have covered him, pictures of himself with Sir Richard Branson, Nelson Mandela, Baz Luhrmann, Tony Blair, the founders of Google, the Dalai Lama. There’s a celebrity picture gallery, a long list of books and articles with more celebrity pictures. The video says it’s about what the Centre for the Mind does, but it’s also just a series of promotional images of Snyder. In nearly every one of them, he wears what is clearly his current trademark, a fisherman’s cap. It looks consciously eccentric.

 Snyder, right, with Tony Blair

More than a decade ago, Snyder’s studies of the effect of light on the retina, and how the brain processes the incoming images and information, got him interested in autism. Autistic people don’t process information in the same way the rest of us do; in some ways, their brains seem less functional than normal people’s, but certain rare autistic people can exhibit extraordinary, superhuman mental skills of a very specific kind. Called savants, they are the kinds of mathematical and artistic geniuses about whom movies such as “Rain Man” are made. 

What Snyder started wondering, based on both natural and injury-induced brain function, was whether these fantastic creative and mathematical skills were latent in all of us, but appeared only in a very few people because the parts of their brains that would normally block the skills weren’t working.

So Snyder tested his idea by … applying magnets to the left sides of people’s brains to see if they would temporarily become savants.

“Snyder’s ideas sound very New Age. That is why people are skeptical,” said eminent neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran, head of the Center for Brain and Cognition at the University of California-San Diego, in the February 2002 issue of Discovery. “I have a more open mind than most of my colleagues simply because I have seen [sudden-onset savant cases] happen.”        

Snyder wanted to see if the magnets would temporarily deactivate a particular brain area and so allow people to more accurately guess the number of objects in a large group.

Apparently, it worked. Since then, Snyder has been making a career out of  the idea that more of us could become what he calls creative “champions” by tapping our inner savants. He’s written a book called ”What Makes a Champion!” about the success secrets of highly accomplished people, held huge celebrity-laden “champion” events – billed as the Olympic Mind Games – before the 2000 and 2008 Olympics in Sydney and Beijing,  and become a fixture on the celebrity circuit, a one-odd-man media phenomenon touting a discovery that sounds about as believable as cold fusion. Or Uri Geller’s bent spoons.

Now, is this good or bad for creativity?

Creativity needs real champions. But while Snyder’s professional credentials ought to silence all cynics, his magical magnets and apparent self-obsession practically hand those cynics lie detectors and public-address systems.

I guess if his discovery ends up making us all geniuses, no one will care how flamboyantly shallow Snyder’s public persona seems. In the meantime, he seems to be enjoying the aviary.