Creativity fundamentally comes from memorization

OP and others here are stretching the definition of “memorize” to mean “anything that leads to something being retained in memory.” I reject this idea.

The trauma of burning your hand on a hot pan creates a memory you won’t soon forget, but almost no one would understand it as an act of memorization.

Memorization to me refers to a set of cargo-culty “learning” practices wherein we believe that by using language to drill exposure to an abstract representation of a concept, that somehow we will absorb the concept itself.

We do this mainly because experts suck at empathizing with learners and fail to understand that the symbol has meaning for them but not for the learner.

It’s the difference between drilling vocabulary flashcards and actually reading, listening, or talking to someone.

Young children do not use vocab flashcards to learn their L1. They aren’t being “drilled” to learn “mama.” They have actual needs in an actual social context and attend to nuanced details of that context to make complex statistical inferences about the world, their perceptions, and their body. Mostly subconsciously.

Yes, there are specific areas where drilling can help us accelerate or catch up. Many kids seem to need explicit phonetics instruction in order to make the leap to reading words. Phonological speech interventions are often drill-like. Practicing musical scales does make you more fluent in improvisation. Drilling the mechanics of a repertoire piece frees your mind to focus on higher-order expression and interpretation. They’re valuable, they have a place.

But this is just a small slice of learning. It’s disproportionately important for passing tests (And getting hired at tech companies!), which to me is the crux of the issue.

If I had to reformulate OP’s argument to something I can get behind, it would be more about deliberate practice or “putting in the reps.” This is also often boring, and differentiates highly successful people from average performers. But it’s a broader and more purposeful set of activities than “memorization” would imply.

"a flash of inspiration connecting internalized concepts"

Well, okay, but rote memorization is neither necessary nor sufficient to internalize concepts.

One of the reasons people make fun of the author's approach to creativity is that systematic memorization fundamentally can't teach taste—so the systematic approach reeks of awkward, try-hard, low-brow, tasteless art.

More broadly, memorization doesn't help much with any sort of tacit knowledge, not just taste. I just figure taste is especially important in creative endeavors. That's definitely the case for programming! Memorization in programming gives us architecture astronauts and design-pattern soup rather than elegant code.

For what it's worth, I do think that it is useful and important to have a good mental model of what expertise is and how you can develop it. Memorization might be a component of this, but it's going to be a small component at most. I expect that realistic practice with fast feedback and expert mentorship matters far more. (If you're curious, I found the book Sources of Power by Gary Klein gave me a good way to think about how expertise works.)

At the same time, memorization has a real cost: it takes time and it's frightfully dull. For me, at least, trying to memorize something without context is not just ineffective but also totally kills any intrinsic motivation I have for whatever I'm learning. Sometimes a bit of memorization is unavoidable, but I've found that to be relatively rare. Otherwise, my time is generally better spent on some sort of practice in context.

The most striking comment was this:

> Growing up with Indian parents in California, I was exposed to both. My mom would write daily Kumon sheets out by hand for me to do, and teach me from Indian textbooks from the same grade (which were much more advanced than the US equivalents). The result was me breezing through the US school system without much thought.

Ukrainian refugees I know are finding the same things in the UK school system, where the maths is much less advanced. Philippines schools, meanwhile, have better discipline and more motivated students.

I conclude that Western public education is in a bad state, and this is a source of chronic social weakness.

I was the sort of person who did not believe in memorisation as a solution for anything. Then I tried getting really good at spaced repetition for a year (yes, it is a skill that needs to be trained for good results) and I've completely changed my mind.

Spaced repetition allows me to become proficient even in things I don't get the natural opportunity to practise daily, so that when the day comes and I need them, I have some level of knowledge already. This has happened to Kubernetes troubleshooting, statistics, PowerShell windows programming, and traffic engineering just in recent history.

I have yet to publish some of these, but I have examples from statistics:

https://two-wrongs.com/intuition-and-spaced-repetition.html

https://two-wrongs.com/inventing-fishers-exact-test.html

The latter is certainly creative in my book, although it does imply creativity within strict bounds.

I think memorization gets a bad rep because you need to be acutely aware of what you're memorizing, like memorizing the sequence of an answer sheet instead of core concepts. But when done sufficiently rigorously, the foundations of memorization make room for higher-level critical thinking and reasoning.

Practice is an oft suggested solution to developing mastery, but I did like how the article framed it: creating subconscious heuristics and memory.

Is there anything substantive here?

It’s just a bunch of arbitrary unprovable assertions.

Everyone here seems to have, broadly speaking; neither a) the qualifications to knowledgeably comment of the (honestly poorly understood, afaik) function of “creativity” or b) anything more meaningful than “here is my naive personal lived experience and opinion” to contribute on the topic.

It’s just armchair psychology.

If you want to wax philosophical, by all means, but I think anyone taking “thoughtful insight” away from this article or thread is fooling themselves.

Alphazero was very creative, yet it didn't memorize a single move, it just self played. Deep blue was not creative at all, but it was the chess engine that memorized the most moves, todays chess engines are much better at chess and they don't memorize many moves at all, if you dig through their internals you wont find a lot of board states there.

So no, creativity doesn't fundamentally comes from memorization, memorization is neither sufficient to become creative nor is it a requirement. You don't memorize concepts you build models around the concepts. You wont be able to reproduce the exact descriptions of concepts but you will be able to produce something similar that means basically the same thing.

All very nice and handwavey, but then you see the user’s current venture is scammy deepfakes as a service, which is about as creatively bankrupt as it gets.

Shame about the national stereotypes as well. There is plenty of creativity in Asian countries. Just bizarre assertions all around.

"Repetitio est mater studiorum" - repetition is the mother of learning.

My creative writing professor, of all people, used to repeat this three times before every class. He was my favorite teacher at any level.

I genuinely thought creativity was something else until LLMs hit escape velocity and humbled me hard.

After that I realized that creativity wasn't some magical quality that would be hard to reproduce mechanically.

And that also made me a little sad.

This seems to resonate with my experience, although I feel myself bristling due to the baggage of the word memorization.

Although sometimes “memorization” doesn’t happen because you sit down to do it but rather that you keep using the same things over and over when solving problems that they become internalized. I find that to be a more fruitful path towards understanding that I don’t want to call memorization but it is.

Kind of shocking to see so much angst against memorization here.

Memory has been long thought to be a critical component of intelligence, with elaborate mnemonics systems developed by people to help memorize more things (see Francis Yates' The Art of Memory, and to a lesser extent her book on Giordano Bruno).

I would contend that memorizing concepts is a first step in understanding them. Also, that generally understanding concepts isn't a one and done thing, usually there's layers. Personally I found that memorizing things in math helped me immensely when years later I needed to actually understand the things I had memorized.

> The inspirational lightning bolt writers and artists experience can't happen unless they know how to write or draw.

It absolutely can happen (from my experience), but you might not be able to do anything about it. Like I have new melodies and songs pop into my head fairly often, but I'm not good enough at making music to translate those ideas into finished songs (I have made some songs with FL Studio in the past, so it's not totally impossible, but my focus has been on other things).

I also have ideas for stories fairly often too, and while I could write them, they tend to get backburnered for my game ideas, which I also have.

For me, I have plenty of creative ideas, I just don't have the energy or system built up to help me get those out there in a fast enough manner, and I likely won't ever have that, it would pretty much require other people to handle almost all the rest of the work beyond the inspiration and testing out a few things.

As an example, I've made over 60 prototypes for board game ideas in the past five years alone, but still have only gotten one of those games picked up by a publisher. If I were Reiner Knizia, all 60 of these games probably would have been released, because he's built up an engine around him (people willing to playtest all of his designs enough to be polished, and has enough of a reputation that finding publishers willing to publish most of his designs is super easy), and never has to worry about the look and feel or the manufacturing or even the theme of the game, that will all be handled by the publishers.

Umberto Eco had already discussed this extensively in his paper “the combinatorics of creativity”.

Unfortunately, I couldn't find the English version, but it should be very easy to translate, it's only 16 pages.

http://www.umbertoeco.it/CV/Combinatoria%20della%20creativit...

A Columbia b-school professor has written a lot about this and developed a very compelling framework based on this. Bill Dugan - https://www.goodreads.com/author/list/7325584.William_Duggan.

The first two books are fantastic.

What's more is that memories are just a replaying of neuron connections activating in the brain - and when we are prompted by the world around us those connections will fire in response to the stimulus. Quite similar to how AI neural networks function - which is why I believe that AI can indeed be creative and create "new" ideas

I agree with the author, at least in my own creative experiences. However, it's more likely the case that 'creativity' is arrived at differently for everyone. I find memorization to be a comforting foundational activity that builds knowledge & confidence, which I can later express creatively.

There is deliberate practice for skill-building. There is exploratory "making" that fuels originality. There is inspiration hunting and incremental tweaking to get to creative mutation. There is high productivity that triggers eventual ingenuity. I find the article hyperbolic in its thesis and execution especially when it comes to the final hand-wavy bit about how there is more per-capita creativity in non-rote learning.

While its hard to prove or disprove without a long study to prove or disprove the author's claim, I'm willing to die on the following hills:

1. Kumon sheets are the antithesis to creativity 2. Understanding is not a form of memorization (not the rote variety anyway)

Creativity is actually defined by this transformation of finding connections between raw data that you already have to know.

Consider use cases for a rock.

Boring would be using it as a paperweight or throwing it through a window.

Novel but uncreative would be throwing it at the sun, or painting it red. Novel, but kind of useless.

But what about using a rock to play rock paper scissors? Planting it in the soil and watching it grow? That's kind of novel, by way of subverting rock's rules (it doesn't grow, unlike plants) or transforming the concept of 'rock' itself — a real rock isn't needed for rock paper scissors.

So only connections between known concepts are creative. Others might be novel, but useless.

Developing heuristics to categorize patterns and internalize concepts != memorization. If anything, it is the opposite of memorization.

Being forced to do rote exercises sometimes makes you creative. Solve a thousand trivial multiplication problems and you will spontaneously discover lots of shortcuts, patterns, intuitions that can warn you when you make a mistake and so on.

A common issue I notice when people discuss the terrible state of math education in the US is that teachers demand that you solve a problem a specific way, such as multiplying two-digit numbers by drawing base-ten blocks and applying the distributive property.

People who are good at doing multiplication in their head think the method makes perfect sense and don't know what all the fuss is about. But I believe that those people learned how to apply the distributive property "by themselves". That is, by adults forcing them to multiply two-digit numbers over and over until they developed an intuition of the distributive property by necessity.

When people who didn't go through countless drills are taught the base-ten method directly, they have a harder time understanding it. So ironically it is the students who "mindlessly" drill trivial computations over and over that are more prepared to have a "true" understanding of the distributive property, while the ones whose teachers believe drilling is for chumps and try to just explicitly show them the true distributive right away, they end up memorizing the words of the distributive property without understanding it.

I think this analysis as a bit guilty of over-fitting -- it is quite easy to rote memorize a bunch of things while having little to no understanding of what they are or how they work. Trivial examples include training a room of people to memorize a series of facts written in a language they don't speak (the fact that they have memorized doesn't at all mean they have any understanding of the content). So I would say it's not memorization per say, but meaningful exposure to a thing, the more chances you have to meaningfully interact with a thing, the higher the chance is you will learn how to manipulate it and do things with it. This is the difference between understanding and mere memorization, and the more exposure you have, the greater the chance you will start to see the patterns and understand, versus focusing your efforts on memorizing which will just lead to over-fitting and not understanding. As with NNs, so with humans.

On the other hand, episodic memory (insofar as that is distinct from "3*9=27" memorization) is built on top of creativity.

The vast majority of what we consider "memories" are the creative brain doing an on-the-fly story generation, massaged until it "seems right" and serviced plus a big dollop of emotional confidence.

I hear with llm/chatGPT people don't have to blog anymore, but rather the generated plausible-sounding well-structured nonsense flows like an open sewer onto the web.

1. Creativity in a commercial context once stolen/cloned through back-channels accrues value, and manifests as several competitive campaigns

2. New disruptive ideas are usually shelved until the IP/patents expire. No one wants to go through the sometimes impossible licensing process

3. Emerging technology is usually degraded in the rush for IP assets by established firms i.e. large firms dump billions on ridiculous concepts out of fear of market fragmentation

4. Startups do not usually have cash to burn on speculative IP. Thus, real cutting-edge experimental technology is sometimes never made public for numerous reasons.

Creativity:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUVix0STUqo

Best of luck, =3

I disagree with elements of this article, but enjoyed reading it. True creatives do not subvert norms consciously or with an acute awareness as part of this article suggests, I agree they need to be exposed to the norms to generate their own interpretation, but I don’t believe that true creativity is a conscious exercise.

I agree and feel likewise the author's comments on the above about memorization, but I realized - A higher framework

and is as below, https://rajivkapur.com/3-pillars-of-vedantic-practices/

You have to know things to be reasonably creative but there is a point where memorizing more stifles creativity. Memorization is often very passive and is fundamentally different from searching for new ways of doing things. It's hard to make sweeping statements like this because there are different modes of memory and different modes of creativity.

There is a lot of memory involved in being creative, but I think setting out to memorize things is a bad way to be creative. You have to practice being creative. In doing so, you will naturally remember a lot of stuff like what works, what doesn't, and most importantly which types of things you ought to memorize. For example if you're programming you will find it useful to remember the syntax of your languages. If you're writing you'll find it useful to remember styles and vocabulary. And so on...

Good discussion on this article. I went to a Vampire Weekend concert last night and they used the 45 minute encore to play covers that were requested by the audience. They got through about 10 songs (a verse or two and chorus), everything from Talking Heads, to Creed, Sublime, Beastie Boys, and Prince and Bob Dylan (the concert was in Minneapolis, so they probably rehearsed the last two). So basically the band knew/memorized the tune for hundreds/thousands of songs from the past couple decades and the singer knew/memorized the words. So I think that this example supports the authors premise that creativity comes from some form of memorization.

Regarding Asian cultures and memorization, there is a recent change that has to be pointed out. The role of memorization classically was to aid manana/contemplation after shravana/hearing-the-teaching. The stage of manana is a kind of inquiry where you raise questions and clarify them or see how the teaching applies to various situations in your life(Like learning a principle in physics and solving problems based on the principle). In the case of poetic works the inner-feeling/bhaava sinks into you allowing one to access blissful states.

However, in the modern context, this has been transformed into memorizing arcane lists/tables, on which one is graded without any further manana.

That thesis is way, too oversimplified and a bit misleading. It could lead you to think the real source of creativity is how much you store, facts or patterns. Put Wikipedia on a computer with a pile of heuristics (eg How to Solve It). Then, it will be more creative than humans in no time. Yet, humans with virtually no knowledge are more creative.

My first study of creativity was Cracking Creativity by Michalko. Skimming its tools, I noticed all of them were about changing how one looks at a problem or connects its pieces. Another work told me geniuses are defined by what they forget or ignore more than what they memorize. The two ideas combined into my working approach.

When I did CompSci research, I would look through the papers for the concepts they reported on. High level ones, core prerequisites, and techniques in how they are combined. From there, I could enumerate variations on each. Then, just keep combining them in straight-forward or random ways. Eventually, something emerges.

Likewise, prior work on creativity and A.I. showed reasoning by analogy was huge in humans. We find patterns in one domain that we generalize to look for patterns in another domain. Then, there’s some process of knowing when to try one or not.

These processes so far are extracting a tiny amount of information, filtering most of it, identifying heuristics in a domain, and heuristics across domains. Also, letting the mind just soak on things to do whatever it does in the middle of the night. These are collectively creativity.

Memorization is a building block of, but different from, creativity. The proof is how we’ve long had memory and reasoning in systems but they sucked at creativity. Recently, systems are extrapolating enough to be more creative but are hallucinating nonsense they definitely didn’t remember. So, they’re orthogonal.

“Creativity comes to those who have internalized the patterns of their art -- they can see the connection or novelty because it's all in their head.”

Edit: I’ll also add that, for planning and creativity, many of us use a deliberate, trial-and-error process that takes time. We don’t just “see” it from something we internalized. We work toward it using the creative process. We usually do see it when it’s finished, though.

The acts of the mind, where in it exerts its power over simple ideas, are chiefly these three:

1. Combining several simple ideas into one compound one, and thus all complex ideas are made.

2. The second is bringing two ideas, whether simple or complex, together, and setting them by one another so as to take a view of them at once, without uniting them into one, by which it gets all its ideas of relations.

3. The third is separating them from all other ideas that accompany them in their real existence: this is called abstraction, and thus all its general ideas are made.

John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690)

It’s not memorizing, it’s actually knowing and understanding the utility of different concepts. When you learn of a problem in a new field, you go through your bucket of tools and modify one to fit the new problem.

I'm not in anyway an expert, so I googled what some research says. Here's an interesting meta-analysis (https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13423-023-02303-4). Memory and creativity are a lot more complex than I realized. There are different types of each, and it seems like they interact in complex ways. Here's the findings from the abstract:

> We found a small but significant (r = .19) correlation between memory and creative cognition. Among semantic, episodic, working, and short-term memory, all correlations were significant, but semantic memory – particularly verbal fluency, the ability to strategically retrieve information from long-term memory – was found to drive this relationship. Further, working memory capacity was found to be more strongly related to convergent than divergent creative thinking. We also found that within visual creativity, the relationship with visual memory was greater than that of verbal memory, but within verbal creativity, the relationship with verbal memory was greater than that of visual memory. Finally, the memory- creativity correlation was larger for children compared to young adults despite no impact of age on the overall effect size. These results yield three key conclusions: (1) semantic memory supports both verbal and nonverbal creative thinking, (2) working memory supports convergent creative thinking, and (3) the cognitive control of memory is central to performance on creative thinking tasks.

So some memory seems to be correlated with convergent creativity, which according to wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convergent_thinking) is "the ability to give the 'correct' answer to questions that do not require novel ideas, for instance on standardized multiple-choice tests for intelligence." It sounds like there's less correlation with divergent creativity, which (again from wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divergent_thinking)) is "a thought process used to generate creative ideas by exploring many possible solutions."

But my real takeaway is that people here seem to have strong (emotional?) opinions on "memorization vs creativity: which is better", but few people seemed to bother reading page 1 google results on the topic. So I like to think that bothering to do some cursory research beats both. :)

I see it like this: after I have seen some colors and a ball I can then imagine a ball in any of those colors.

In other words, everything I have experienced and memorized becomes this pool of resources I can imagine from. More I have seen, more combinations I can imagine.

Then I understand how traveling actually broadens my view. It’s not just some nice phrase but hard reality.

Also this means maybe anything we can imagine we can also create. Because whatever I can imagine I can also plot a path from here to there, imagine all the steps in-between.

You may as well say that creativity comes from writing. Because obviously all of the most creative writers write. And the writings of creative non-writers are entirely absent.

I agree with the conclusions of the article. A concert pianist can only add his/her creativity to the piece if he/she totally internalized the piece.

The category is not the thing categorised.

Just because you can put things into boxes does not mean that everything belongs in a box. Whatever essential element you seek to create, whether or not it is concrete or abstract, can simply be put forward as a target of memorisation, without pausing to think about whether you can truly memorise it.

E.g. a heuristic for determining the best heuristic. Simple, just memorise it, right?

"Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That's because they were able to connect experiences they've had and synthesize new things." - Steve Jobs

Something I noticed from being raised by Indian parents while going through the US school system

And again after learning how to acquire new skills quickly

I will disagree. Creativity comes from applying acquired knowledge (that's where memorization comes into account) in new contexts.

I think this is right, and one implication is that 99.9% of the self-help content you passively consume on the internet will have no impact on your life, because (barring deliberate learning / repetition), you won't remember it in the high-leverage moments when it might have made a difference.

This claim makes little sense because it fails to distinguish between memory and memorization. I memorize almost nothing, but I remember the broad strokes of a lot of things. This allows me to be creative.

In a way, memorization is a severe risk: if you memorized something before it changed, for example, your creativity may not mean much.

This is like saying that programming competence comes from breathing air.

Creativity (measured by Openness in the Big Five) is a fundamental personality component that cannot be altered, in the same way that your working memory and IQ cant be altered (unsurprisingly they are closely related)

Related discussion: Variability, not repetition, is the key to mastery - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33354355

Creativity is probably some combination of memorization + randomization.

I heard this idea recently: creativity needs shallow knowledge over a vast range of concepts. It’s probably not “just” that, but I can see how the vast range helps.

Did this author read a single book on creativity? Or did he just make everything up?

Being creative is simply knowing what you want, knowing where you are and is the process of making choices along the way to get there. The point at which your creation comes to life is fuzzy, but this is the underlying process. As for what rules/patterns/etc that you follow to arrive where you want to go: the whole point is not presubscribe to any of these. Sometimes you draw from a known way. Sometimes you come up with an entirely knew way to take a step. The point is simply to make choices that bring you closer to what you want to make.

> A DJ can't mashup two songs unless they're familiar with both

As someone who’s DJ’d at a pretty high level I can tell you this is nonsense.

And to prove the point, here’s a mix I did recently [1] with brand new records that I’d just received in the post and had never played before or even listened to (other than the samples on the online store).

I used to take unlistened records to gigs and play them for the first time, live, in front of a crowd. Simply because I enjoyed the creative process of ‘making it work’.

Creativity for me isn’t “writing down heuristics on best DJ transitions” — I haven’t once considered that. It sounds, to me, to be the exact opposite approach to fostering creativity. Creativity for me comes out of play. It grows over time. It’s feeling and emotion, not memory.

I stopped reading after that. Especially as I am someone with a terrible memory but am also very creative in a number of fields.

[1] https://on.soundcloud.com/xZ28hvv5ieV9RnTU7

Some minds get a lot done with a lot of memorization and some minds get a lot done with seeing commonalities and creating simplifying abstraction. We need all sorts of minds.

Wow, what a load of rubbish. I hate this kind of reductive, formulaic view of creativity. I think true creativity expands what is possible – so some kind of awareness of the current state of things is important, but rote memorisation has no real part in it.

The idea that memorisation leads to creativity is actually very misleading - especially the assumption that what you are learning is 'true'. It just means you are more aware of the restrictions and existing work in a field - often the most exciting work comes from the excitement and slight naivety of exploring something new - 'beginner's mind'. Kids are very creative, partly because their model of the world is not fully established.

> breaking down the humor patterns of comedians and memes

This guy does sound funny but I doubt he can write a joke

"Seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees."

- Paul Valery, famously quoted by Robert Irwin

When I want to come across as spontaneous I plan ahead what I'm going to say.

We recently described this to a parent of one of our students as:

Understanding -> Remembering -> Applying

If you don't understand the basics of a concept, and you're talking about memory, its probably just rote memorization. Students generally find this tedious, and since it's shallow its very hard to retain and connect to disparate but parallel ideas from other fields (roots of creativity).

But, most schools and students stop there. They hear 'memory' or 'memorizing' as only rote memory. Step 2 is critical if you want to get to higher levels of learning. As you said in the essay - "Creativity comes to those who have internalized the patterns of their art". At www.sticky.study this is what we focus on. It's fast 2D memory palaces + spaced repetition.

Only if you have understanding + remembering can you get to step 3 - applying what you learn reliably at relevant moments in your life. This is the gold standard that schools claim they desire - analysis, synthesis, application, broad transfer, and creativity. You can't reach master efficiently if you lose 80% of all you read or learn.

This is better : https://www.interaliamag.org/articles/margaret-boden-creativ...

Then a hard drive without processing is very creative? False.

I think the more precise term used by educators is “fluency”

Friendly reminder: This blog post represents a software engineer's personal opinion on creativity, upvoted here by fellow software engineers.

No studies are cited. The assertions are corroborated by the author's personal experience.

Take its claims with a grain of salt.

Disagree. Best technique is no technique.

My phone book is super creative.

One would argue it’s the opposite as people with memory problems have less imprint of old and more creative new ideas.

A lot of debate in the comments about the definition of "memorization"; this is just semantics and misses the point. Creativity is aided by 1) exposure to a wide variety of existing ideas, 2) deep understanding and integration of those ideas, 3) recombination of those ideas.

Superficial exposure to existing ideas alone won't get you there, and neither will isolated deep reflection. You need both.

so imagine from playing a guitar and you get famous and people ask you "who were your influences ?"

and i assumed that they mean "when you were more horrible at the guitar than you are now whose songs did you learn to play on your guitar ?"

and that can be the same with writing as a trick one can write out an other author's work often until there is actual influence on vocabulary and style.

Then you take that and make up new stuff using the that new musical or lyrical style or collective style.

until someone shows up and does something so outside of the paradigm and yet still sublime that a new source of derivation exists.

wash. rinse. wipe hands on pants.

When you don't understand, the teacher is the answer.

When you understand, everything is your teacher.

I don't believe the word 'memorize' can be replaced for the word 'understanding'

Does creativity involves understanding?

Perhaps.

z

I would argue that creativity is a tendency and fundamental property of an individual’s brain, rather than a skill that can be taught or learned.

Creativity does require a context, such as creating a piece of art, music or solving a problem, and then in order to make any meaningful contribution to that problem or piece of art, one needs to have enough knowledge to draw from.

This knowledge can be 1) exact, such as specific rendering techniques in the context of building a 3D renderer or scales for improvisation on piano.

Or it can be 2) informal, increasingly rich mental models.

For example, I have been improvising on piano for a long time, and I have a largely informal mental model of music theory that I draw from during improvisation of what would sound good and interesting and what wouldn’t.

In another instance, I’m building software, and I have a growing mental model of how computers work, from the hardware (CPU, GPU, instruction sets) to the software (drivers, operating systems, networking), and how specific programs have been written (web browsers, game engines, databases, certain libraries).

The same goes for specific domains I wish to build software for (e.g. AEC / architecture industry), for which I am also forming a well of knowledge of what kind of companies, organizations and individuals collaborate and how information flows between them, e.g. via specific file formats, standards or protocols.

These mental models and exact knowledge, are a prerequisite for creativity.

But the creativity itself is the tendency of my brain to then, in a specific context, associate and draw from these different mental models and this breadth of knowledge to come up with a piece of output.

This can be building a specific feature in software, or coming up with a novel chord progression and melody.

So creativity is not about knowledge, but about creating.

Creating is inherently hard to formalize, as one has to have a mental model far larger and deeper than what can be written down or communicated via text.

In addition, by attempting to formalize the mental model, one loses the impreciseness, fluidity and depth that enables venturing beyond reproduction.

This mental model of how to create is what comes from practicing. By playing the piano year in year out and trying out different things, one learns to create good music.

By programming for years, one learns to write beautiful software.

What defines good or beautiful, and how one achieves that is what creativity is. It is a taste. It is exactly that what goes beyond memorization and mere knowledge. It is not taught, it is learned by doing. It is the application of knowledge, and the internalization of years of practice.

TLDR:

Creativity is a tendency of an individual. Knowledge is a prerequisite, but creativity is about applying it. This requires a mental model that comes from years of practice.