On Polymathy and Creativity

After reading The Polymath I thought about how I've always approached creativity. We aren't born specialists. The brain naturally operates in a polymathic framework.

As I recall, even as recent as the mid-late 80s in my own life, people always had myriad interests. Simply being a student makes you a potentially more interesting person, or a person more capable of finding more interests than someone who didn't have or wasn’t interested in post-secondary education. Even if you learned nothing that you'd be interested in at the point you graduated from college, you would find or rediscover interests from earlier in life—the point when your learning style was still polymathic.

Some children can busy themselves and develop inner lives without being needy of attention. Home-schooling and "un-schooling" promote polymathy and I would defend that way of learning--at least as a way of being less bored. Even absent a good primary education, anyone is equipped to optimize their innate polymathy and self-learning.

Metaphoricalization

Polymaths are typically more apt to use (sometimes very oblique) metaphors at the inspiration and incubation phases. I would argue that without considering remote metaphors, the final work is less than what it could have been had metaphors not be used. It frames the work even before it's finished. (Titles and first lines for lyrics or novels can do this)

In a 1999 lecture by the late artist Ellsworth Kelly at the Nation Gallery, he cited an incident where he was stopped by the police for trespassing on private property where he saw a curved shape that caught his eye and wanted to take a picture of it. (16:05) The cop said, "I don't see anything to photograph." Kelly was probably polymathic. Polymaths usually see things that others don't because they are reacting to something already in memory. Artists use photography to nourish the idea process, as some people write in journals and sketchbooks about things they observed as a way to "recycle" memory.

Techniques for "Wiring" Creative Work

Polymathic approaches can recontextualize a seemingly mundane task to some general activity and/or Universal that make them more consilient with disparate domains.

If you were feeling bored and uninspired, you could reframe or connect your present activity to some other goal which shares a common attribute. This shifts it from an inert state to an active one. You're actually not bored, you're just not seeing the possibility in simple tasks as a way of staying mindfully engaged. For Ellsworth Kelly, that photo he wanted to take probably was based on extant knowledge or interests or was connected to something he was working on in the studio, something read in a book, and so on.

There is a broad overlap in some activities. I left out "thinking" because most activities require it. If they didn't, you'd be thinking while doing them, such as thinking (ruminating) while cleaning.

anticipating
alternating
archiving
assigning
attending
automating
beginnining
categorizing/classifying
changing
chronicaling
clarifying
cleaning
communicating
completing
composing
condesnsing
connecting
considering/reconsidering
contextualizing
cooperating
copying
deciding
delegating
describing
desiring
discovering (not exploring)
divining
economizing
elaborating
experimenting
explaining
extending
extrapolating
finding the logic in
finalizing
fortifying
generating
gleaning

grooming
grouping/organizing
hoping
inferring
interceding
interpolating
joking
listing
looking
mapping
metaphorizing
measuring
moving
narrating (creating narrative)
navigating
noticing
pacing
performing
placing
planning
practicing
praying
pretending
prototyping/drafting
questioning
rearranging
recalling
recognizing
reducing
removing
renovating
repeating
replacing
replying
restoring
revisiting
saving/caching
scheduling
separating
sequencing/ordering/sorting

straightening
socializing
symbolizing
theorizing
timing
triangulating
trying
unitizing
verifying
waiting
writing/noting/scribing/journaling