Creativity

Have you ever thought about your creativity? Perhaps you've even caught yourself blaming a mental block on your age? Whether this excuse has any validity can be read here!

An American company investigated the characteristic features of inventors. They wanted to determine how many inventions individual inventors had made at certain age levels. Of course, there was no one under the age of 18, as technical employees were usually hired at the age of 18–22. Since it took a few years for them to "get established," they were around thirty years old when they started submitting reports about inventions to the patent department. Among older employees, the number of submitted inventions then declined sharply. The study found that most inventions were made between the ages of thirty and forty, and the creativity of employees significantly decreases thereafter.

Finally, someone pointed out that the results of the study were based solely on the number of submitted reports about inventions. It is now known that young people have many creative impulses, but they are not as good at critically filtering them.

The most creative period in human life is probably the time between the ages of two and four, when we learn all the things we need to survive in the world as human beings. During this time, we develop from a baby into a fully functioning human. Many attributes of youth are necessary for a person to successfully dedicate themselves to creative ideas. One example of this is optimism. In contrast, young people are less concerned with assessing and filtering their ideas.

Someone once said: "Russel Varian (the inventor of the klystron) has a new idea every moment, and some of them are good." You cannot produce ideas and critically examine them in the first phase at the same time. So, in a second study, all submitted inventions that were truly good were considered. The first finding was consistent with the one in the first statistic: There was no inventor younger than eighteen or twenty years old. The results still indicated that the creativity of employees significantly decreased in advanced age. At that time, it was believed that this was a realistic result.

However, the investigating company was not satisfied with this result either. Many patent applications are recognized but never lead to practical evaluation. So, they decided to examine the most valuable inventions of the company and determine how old the creators were at the time of the invention. This time, a usable result was achieved: The age curve of individuals with usable patents was significantly more elongated than that of previous studies.

Thus, it was decided to conduct one last study. Now it was said: "We want to not only deal with patents but also include paintings and musical compositions." They wanted to look outside the company as well and apply the same criteria that were used in the analysis of usable patents.

That last study found that significant musical compositions were created at the age of ten and that there were inventions from eighty-year-olds. It turned out that there was no specific correlation between age and creativity. The curve was almost a straight line overall – an indication that the ability to achieve significant accomplishments does not depend on a specific age.

The crucial statement from the first studies is that young people usually do not filter their ideas. A sixty-year-old submits fewer patent applications because he knows better what matters. He knows quite well which ideas will lead to nothing, and therefore he filters them out from the start. The thirty-year-old submits more ideas because his mind is constantly active and because he does not yet have the necessary filters.

That new ideas constantly emerge in the mind of a young person is perfectly fine. Young people often resemble the "Russell variant": They have a new idea every moment, and occasionally, one of them is a good one.

Both the investigating company and the authors of the American Constitution believed that creative activity is something special. They thought that the activity of the inventor differs from the type of activity required to guide people in performing a specific task or to run a business.

The question remains: "What is the act of inventing, actually? Does the activity of inventing differ from the mental activity required to think about what to have for dinner?"