Admittedly, Hello Kitty isn’t particularly creative on its own and neither are chainsaws. However, there is something about the combination of the two that results in a creative product. Perhaps it is the incongruity and resultant surprise of seeing the two elements together.  Hello Kitty products are girly, whimsical, and unabashedly cute. Chainsaws are manly, mechanical and unabashedly dangerous. The incongruity of seeing such disparate elements paired with each other occasions surprise. Some have said that surprise along with novelty is a reasonable definition of creativity.

I just finished reading Pride, Prejudice and Zombies and I know that surprise resulting from incongruity was one of the elements that made the book such an enjoyable read. As background, Pride and Prejudice is romance that takes place in the gentile society of Regency-era England.  Pride, Prejudice and Zombies (PPZ) is an adaptation of Pride and Prejudice that holds very closely to the original in both plot and dialog. The main difference is that England in PPZ is beset by a plague that turns people into zombies and causes the afflicted dead to rise from their graves. The other difference is that the girls of the Bennett family are well trained in the martial arts by their father and such arts are well respected by society.

The funniest moments of the book are when the author resolves the contradictions inherent in having well-born women of that era who are also well-trained in the martial arts. For example, at a dinner party with the Bennett family, the Bennetts’ cousin and guest, Mr Collins, had been praising and commending the Bennett house, its furnishings and the Bennett sisters.

“The dinner too was highly admired; and he begged to know to which of his fair cousins the excellency of its cookery was owing.

Briefly forgetting her manners, Mary grabbed her fork and leapt from her chair onto the table. Lydia, who was seated nearest her, grabbed her ankle before she could dive at Mr. Collins and, presumably, stab him about the head and neck for such an insult.”

Similarly amusing was a scene in which Elizabeth Bennet was attending a dinner party of Lady Catherine’s and was asked to perform for the other guests after supper for their entertainment. In Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth played the pianoforte and sang for the guests. In Pride, Prejudice and Zombies, Elizabeth exhibited some of the agility and strength she had developed through her martial arts training by walking around the room on her fingertips (her skirts being tied via a “modestry string” to keep her legs properly covered while she was upside down). The entertainment continued under the watchful eye of Lady Catherine who offered tips and suggestions for technique while

“Elizabeth received them with all the forbearance of civility, and, at the request of the gentlemen, remained on her fingertips till her ladyship’s carriage was ready to take them all home.”

When combining very different concepts such as zombies and Regency-era society, one is faced with contradictions that need to be resolved to make the combination work. Resolving the contradiction requires exploring the concepts being combined to find an internally consistent solution. Regency-era women were taught to be polite and to respond to perceived insults in a congenial manner. At best, they could gasp and flush when an honored guest said something implying they were so low-born as to prepare the meal for a dinner party themselves. However, if Regency-era women were trained to fight zombies, they would have acquired martial skills as well as the courage and resolution needed to wield those skills effectively. Such women would do more than gasp at an insult. They could potentially do something about it by attacking the person insulting them. It is this exploration and resolution of the disparity between concepts that leads to surprising elements in the story which, then, increases the perceived creativity of the product.

It is likely the essence of conceptual combination is the same for both Hello Kitty chainsaws and Pride, Prejudice & Zombies.  It is the differences in the complexity of the concepts and domains being compared that results in differences in perceived creativity.  This makes sense and explains why cognitive psychologists examine the processes involved in interpreting simple conceptual combinations such as “Pet Bird” to better understand how people interpret more complex combinations such as “Restaurants for Intelligent Alien Birds” (Ward, Smith & Fink, 1999).

As I discussed in a previous post, the combination of disparate ideas often results in a creative product/idea. The larger the difference (conceptual distance) between the two components of a combination, the greater the potential for a creative idea. What I didn’t discuss in that post was why the combination of divergent ideas leads to a creative idea. It is believed that one reason conceptual combination results in creative ideas is because interpreting conceptual combinations results in emergent features.

According to James Hampton, an emergent feature is a feature that is not associated with either of the constituents of a combination but emerges as a feature of the combination of those constituents. I know – too much psychology jargon – so let me explain. If I ask people to list the features of the concept of “Pet,” they will list things that are true of pets in general such as friendly, companion, furry, give love, etc. The feature “talks” probably would not show up on this list.  Similarly, if I ask people to list the features of “Birds,” they will list things that are true of birds in general such as has wings, flies, has a beak, poops on cars, eats bird seed, etc. Once again, the feature  “talks” does not usually pop up in this list. However, if I asked people to list the features of the conceptual combination Pet Birds, “talks” is now one of the more common features listed.  In this sense, it is an emergent feature because it emerges when the two concepts are combined but not when they are considered individually.

I believe that the greater complexity of the concepts being compared, the greater the chance of discovering (creating?) emergent features which then increases the creative potential of the combination. Hello Kitty and chainsaws are conceptually distant, but fairly simple concepts. Zombies and the setting of Pride and Prejudice are conceptually distant as well as being complex concepts. The surprise at seeing a cute, pink, cartoon icon being paired with a manly, dangerous, cutting tool is mainly perceptual in nature because there are few emergent features. In contrast, reading a story such as PP&J in which the author has deeply explored the two concepts to resolve disparities and integrate the elements into a coherent whole, leads to the discovery of a multitude of emergent features. For the reader, this results in multiple surprises and multiple opportunities for humor thereby increasing the perceived creativity of the product far beyond that of the Hello Kitty chainsaw.

This suggests that those wishing to get the most bang for their buck using conceptual combination should combine complex, conceptually distant concepts and fully explore the combination. If care is taken to resolve incongruities between the concepts in an internally consistent fashion, then the emergent features that are discovered (created?) in the process should increase the perceived creativity of the final product.

Frank was attending my class that semester so that he could teach it while I was on sabbatical the next semester. After this discussion, he sent me pictures of bento lunches as an example of how normal individuals were being creative in the lunches they bring to work.

No brown bags for these people!

Not even the fallback of quirky lunchboxes for the more creative and individualistic of these individuals.

Bento lunches have taken the brown bag lunch to a whole new level.

I had put off posting this topic but its time has come! The interwebs are swarming with bento posts!

You can’t use StumbleUpon for more than a few links without finding bento pictures.

There are cute bentos:

There are beautifully artistic bentos

There are bento lunches for the computer geek

And for the gamers.

A creativity researcher of my acquaintance with severe and extensive food allergies started making herself bento lunches to make her limited menu more palatable and posted the results on Facebook.

Bento websites are proliferating.

Just Bento will show you how to make a bento style lunch out of most types of food

The LiveJournal community BentoLunch allows bento fans to share their bento experiments.

Bento Box is one bento fan’s efforts to teach others about bento – what it is, its history, how to make it….

Even comic artists are commenting on the fad. The last few posts of the web comic “Real Life Comics” centers around bento lunches.

At the beginning of this post, I noted that the discussion of bento lunches arose out of a discussion about psychological creativity. I think the value of psychological creativity does not get the respect that it deserves. Even the names used to describe it (e.g., “mundane creativity” “small-c creativity”) denote something of less value than “Historical creativity” or “Big C creativity.”

A lot of people obtain great pleasure out of being creative in small ways in their life. True, a beautiful and creative bento box may not change the world, but if it brightens up our day and the days of those around us, it is something worthy of value and praise.

As stated by noted creativity researcher Mihaly Csikszentmihaly states in his book “Flow and the Psychology of Science and Invention”:

“Even though personal creativity may not lead to fame and fortune, is can do something that from the individual’s point of view is even more important: make day-to-day experience more vivid, more enjoyable, more rewarding. When we live creatively, boredom is banished and every moment holds the promise of a fresh discovery.”

“When discussing how computer science and interest in artificial intelligence contributed to the cognitive approach of creativity, we talked about the Turning test. What is the Turning test and how is the concept of the Turing test relevant to the study of creativity? (Hint: Eliza, GPS, and AARON)”

The students had a problem with this question. Even after multiple explanations and further hints, they still had a problem. Finally, I relented and gave them the answer to the question (and did not include this question on the final exam).

What follows is my answer with some modifications to serve the purpose of this post and make it more accessible to a broader audience.

“When Computer Science first became a discipline, computer scientists were examining problem solving and, in the process, started considering what it means to be intelligent.

Why?

One of the reasons was because computer computation involves a physical symbol system just as human computation/thinking involves a physical symbol system. If the output of a human symbol system can be said to be “intelligent” then it logically followed that the output of a computer symbol system also has the potential to be intelligent.

This logical inference was further supported when the computer scientists successfully created computer programs that could play chess and chess is something that intelligent people play. In fact, the subdiscipline of artificial intelligence is all about making computers or machines intelligent or at least behave intelligently.

But what is “intelligence”?

Alan Turing suggested what is now known as the Turing Test as an operational definition of intelligence. In its essence, the proposal is that if a human interacts with a computer and thinks they are interacting with a human, then the computer could be said to be behaving intelligently. The means by which the computer does so is irrelevant by this definition. After all, we aren’t entirely sure how HUMANS manage to behave intelligently.

I believe that the question of whether or not computers can behave intelligently is, at heart, the same question as whether or not computers can behave creatively.

Let us say that a computer creates something novel such as an original painting (which AARON can do) or proves a mathematical theorem (which GPS could do).  A human (who doesn’t know that a computer created this new thing) views the product and is asked if the product is creative. If they say that it is creative, even if they say it is only a little creative, can’t the computer be said to have passed the creativity version of the Turing test? Does it matter HOW the computer creates something new? After all, we don’t know how we do it.”

As I said earlier, the students had problems with this question even though we had discussed this issue in depth at several points during the semester.

I believe that one of the reasons they had problems with this question and my answer to the question is that ALL the students in the class vigorously denied the potential for creativity in the computer program.

When it was pointed out to them that they thought the output of the program (in their case, a painting created by AARON) was creative when they thought it was a human that created the painting, their response was that the computer wasn’t creative. Rather, it was the person who had written the program that resulted in the painting who was creative.

I pointed out that the programmer in question did not actually tell the computer what to create. He only supplied the computer with background knowledge about form, design, composition, etc. and the computer used that information to create a novel product. I then argued that this is exactly how humans develop novel products.

In response, the students fell back on the argument that when humans create, they do so intentionally and consciously. The computer did not know what it was doing, THEREFORE, it was not being creative.

I think it is a beautiful thing that the students in the classroom fall back on the equivalent of Searle’s Chinese Room argument to refute the hypothesis that computers can be creative. That they do this with no prior knowledge of the Chinese Room argument or a full understanding of the premises underlying the Turing Test is also pretty special.  According to Searle’s Chinese Room argument, it suggests they have not provided an intelligent response to the claim that computers can create.