We'll always have parrots - popular remedies to release creativity - Light Elements - special issue: The Science of Creativity

Andrew wiles broke my heart. From the time I was a little girl, I had always meant to prove Fermat's last theorem, just as soon as I got a spare minute. But first I had a lot of French homework to get through, and then there was my cousins wedding, and I had to stay in the office late writing memos, and August is so enervating, and then Wiles went and proved the thing.

Of course, there are still a few great unsolved problems left: a Hilbert problem or two, the Goldbach conjecture, and just how many light-years-per-second is warp 9, anyway? I figured I'd better get moving before someone beat me to the punch again. But when I cleared some space on my desk and sat down with a pair of number two pencils, a legal pad, a protractor, and a Cray supercomputer, nothing happened. I sharpened the pencils. Nothing happened. I exchanged the legal pad for graph paper. I sharpened the pencils again. Nothing happened.

I was experiencing a creative block.

I called my old friend Michael Larsen, a number theorist at the University of Pennsylvania, for advice. I'm trying to prove the Goldbach conjecture, but l'm getting nowhere," I said. What should I do?"

"Have you tried studying math?" he suggested.

On the surface, it sounded like a sensible notion. However, the time factor bothered me. Figure a year to apply to graduate school, two years of graduate courses, another four to write my dissertation - that's seven years out of my life. A lot can happen in seven years. What if Wiles and his ilk prove everything left while I'm dithering around in school? There must be a quicker way.

Perhaps, I thought, a creativity specialist can help me find it. I called David Perkins, a cognitive psychologist at the Harvard Graduate School of Education with a Ph.D in mathematics. "What causes creative blocks?" I asked him.

"They can have two different sorts of causes" Perkins told me. There are causes in the person-things like anxiety, when you're afraid you might not be able to solve the problem, for instance, or displacements of motives from other areas. Sometimes people don't produce well because they're trying to escape from a situation or wreak revenge on somebody, and they do so by hurting their own performance. Anxiety can generate a self-fulfilling prophesy: people get concerned about whether they can solve the problem, and start believing they can't, and then of course they can't, and that confirms the belief. Clinicians call this a self-sealing system.

"The second kind," Perkins continued, are causes in the problem. Creative situations may cause people difficulty not because they're in any kind of a slump but because the problem is genuinely hard." He described four possible creative difficulties: "The wilderness problem, in which there are so many possibilities its hard to navigate among them and find the good ones; the plateau problem, in which you're in a certain spot and you don't know which way to go; the canyon problem, when you're going in circles within constraints you don't even recognize and you need to get out of the canyon because the real solution lies in another canyon nearby; and the oasis problem, when you're changing to a partial solution but to reach a real solution you have to abandon it."

Perkins, I thought, must have well-worn hiking boots. I saw myself lost in his landscape, somewhere beneath Dante's seventh circle of hell. Is there any way out?" I asked. Brainstorming, he told me, works wonders for canyon problems and oasis traps. For wilderness difficulties, addressing a smaller version of the problem might help. The best thing for plateau problems is studying the question you're trying to answer, thoroughly exploring all its aspects.

That sounded suspiciously like school again. I thanked Perkins quickly, before he could suggest a Ph.D program, and headed for my local spiritualist-self-help bookstore. Surely they wouldn't make me study. Can you recommend anything to help me get over a creative block?" I asked the clerk, who was dressed entirely in purple.

"The best thing is to get in touch with your inner artist, maybe contact your spirit guide," she told me earnestly.

"I meant more like a book or an audiotape."

She found several, took my money, and handed me my receipt. "Change, $4.17," it read. Attend to reality diligently. Receive all people w/kindness. Say little, do much." Good advice, I thought, but how? And shouldn't the thing practice what it preached?

Hoping the tapes would have more complete instructions, I emulated Hillary Clinton and turned to psychologist Jean Houston, or Dr. Jean Houston, as she calls herself on her book jackets. Houston gave Mrs. Clinton a bad week in June, when it was reported that she'd been encouraging the first lady to engage in imaginary dialogues with Eleanor Roosevelt and Mahatma Gandhi; critics considered these figures too wishy-washy to provide proper guidance.

Houston's sense of time is somewhat elastic. As she explains in her audiotape Awakening Creativity, In a few minutes of clock time, you'll find yourself having - oh - many minutes, hours, some of you even weeks, even months, it seems, of inner experience to explore the vast ... untapped treasures of the human psyche.... A Beethoven sonata that might ordinarily require hours of practice can be practiced in accelerated mental process in five minutes, and you would emerge from the state feeling, as if you'd been practicing for hours and show considerable improvement in play." (If only someone had told my brother and spared the family all those hours of Fur Elise!)