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Illustration: Skip
Sterling
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Having your world turned upside down sparks creative thinking
By Eric Weiner
Scan the roster of history’s intellectual and
artistic giants, and you quickly notice something remarkable: Many were
immigrants or refugees, from Victor Hugo, W.H. Auden and Vladimir Nabokov to
Nikolas Tesla, Marie Curie and Sigmund Freud. At the top of this pantheon sits
the genius’s genius: Einstein. His “miracle year” of 1905, when he published no
fewer than four groundbreaking scientific papers, occurred after he had
emigrated from Germany to Switzerland.
Lost in today’s immigration debate is this unavoidable
fact: An awful lot of brilliant minds blossomed in alien soil. That is
especially true of the U.S., a nation defined by the creative zeal of the
newcomer. Today, foreign-born residents account for only 13% of the U.S.
population but hold nearly a third of all patents and a quarter of all Nobel
Prizes awarded to Americans.
But why? What is it about the act of relocating
to distant shores—voluntarily or not—that sparks creative genius?
When pressed to explain, we usually turn to a
tidy narrative: Scruffy but determined immigrant, hungry for success, arrives
on distant shores. Immigrant works hard. Immigrant is bolstered by a supportive
family, as well as a wider network from the old country. Immigrant succeeds,
buys flashy new threads.
It is an inspiring narrative—but it is also
misleading. That fierce drive might explain why immigrants and refugees succeed
in their chosen fields, but it fails to explain their exceptional creativity.
It fails to explain their genius.
Recent research points to an intriguing
explanation. Several studies have shed light on the role of “schema violations”
in intellectual development. A schema violation occurs when our world is turned
upside-down, when temporal and spatial cues are off-kilter.
In a 2011 study led by the Dutch psychologist Simone
Ritter and published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology,
researchers asked some subjects to make breakfast in the “wrong” order and
others to perform the task in the conventional manner. Those in the first
group—the ones engaged in a schema violation—consistently demonstrated more
“cognitive flexibility,” a prerequisite for creative thinking.
This suggests that it isn’t the immigrant’s
ambition that explains her creativity but her marginality. Many immigrants
possess what the psychologist Nigel Barber calls “oblique perspective.”
Uprooted from the familiar, they see the world at an angle, and this fresh
perspective enables them to surpass the merely talented. To paraphrase the
philosopher Schopenhauer: Talent hits a target no one else can hit. Genius hits
a target no one else can see.
Freud is a classic case. As a little boy, he and
his family joined a flood of immigrants from the fringes of the
Austro-Hungarian Empire to Vienna, a city where, by 1913, less than half the
population was native-born. Freud tried to fit in. He wore lederhosen and
played a local card game called tarock, but as a Jew and an immigrant, he was
never fully accepted. He was an insider-outsider, residing far enough beyond
the mainstream to see the world through fresh eyes yet close enough to
propagate his ideas.
Marie Curie, born and raised in Poland, was
frustrated by the lack of academic opportunities in her homeland. In 1891, at
age 24, she immigrated to Paris. Life was difficult at first; she studied
during the day and tutored in the evenings. Two years later, though, she earned
a degree in physics, launching a stellar career that culminated with two Nobel
prizes.
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Exceptionally
creative people such as Marie Curie possess many traits, but their ‘openness to
experience’ is the most important. Photo:Ullstein Bild/Getty Images
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Exceptionally creative people such as Curie and
Freud possess many traits, of course, but their “openness to experience” is the
most important, says the cognitive psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman of the
University of Pennsylvania. That seems to hold for entire societies as well.
Consider a country like Japan, which has
historically been among the world’s most closed societies. Examining the long
stretch of time from 580 to 1939, Dean Simonton of the University of
California, writing in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,
compared Japan’s “extra cultural influx” (from immigration, travel abroad,
etc.) in different eras with its output in such fields as medicine, philosophy,
painting and literature. Dr. Simonton found a consistent correlation: the
greater Japan’s openness, the greater its achievements.
It isn’t necessarily new ideas from the outside
that directly drive innovation, Dr. Simonton argues. It’s simply their presence
as a goad. Some people start to see the arbitrary nature of many of their own
cultural habits and open their minds to new possibilities. Once you recognize
that there is another way of doing X or thinking about Y, all sorts of new
channels open to you, he says. “The awareness of cultural variety helps set the
mind free,” he concludes.
History bears this out. In ancient Athens,
foreigners known as metics (today we’d call them resident aliens) contributed
mightily to the city-state’s brilliance. Renaissance Florence recruited the
best and brightest from the crumbling Byzantine Empire. Even when the “extra
cultural influx” arrives uninvited, as it did in India during the British Raj,
creativity sometimes results. The intermingling of cultures sparked the “Bengal
Renaissance” of the late 19th century.
In a 2014 study published in the Creativity Research
Journal, Dr. Ritter and her colleagues found that people did not need to
participate directly in a schema violation in order to boost their own creative
thinking. Merely watching an actor perform an “upside-down” task did the trick,
provided that the participants identified with the actor. This suggests that
even non-immigrants benefit from the otherness of the newcomer.
Not all cultural collisions end happily, of
course, and not all immigrants become geniuses. The adversity that spurs some
to greatness sends others into despair. But as we wrestle with our own
immigration and refugee policies, we would be wise to view the welcome mat not
as charity but, rather, as enlightened self-interest. Once creativity is in the
air, we all breathe a more stimulating air.
—Mr. Weiner is the author of “The Geography of Genius: A Search for the World’s Most Creative Places, From Ancient Athens to Silicon Valley.”
Originally published in the Wall Street Journal
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