The debate over the nature of creativity is an old one: Is creative talent, be it novelistic, musical, or artistic, something that you’re born with, or is it something that anyone, with practice and dedication, can acquire? Anecdotally, the first option presents a strong case. The Waugh family produced three generations of novelists: Arthur, then Alec and Evelyn, then Auberon (Evelyn’s son). From the affair between H. G. Wells and Rebecca West came the novelist Anthony West. There are the Dumases (Alexandre, père and fils), the Rosettis (Gabriele and children Christina and Dante Gabriel), the Brontës (Emily, Charlotte, and Anne), the Jameses (Henry and William), the Amises (Kingsley and Martin), the Millers (Arthur and Rebecca)—the list continues to the present. The amount of artistic talent that often spans generations has caused many researchers to wonder if there isn’t something heritable about creativity.
To Francis Galton, a nineteenth-century polymath and psychologist, the frequency with which talent passed through families was more than mere a coincidence. When Galton was in his forties, he began to reflect on his life—King Edward’s School, Cambridge, stints at the Royal Geographic Society and the British Association for the Advancement of Science. Not only had he associated with many talented, intelligent people, he realized, but those individuals were often related to others who shared their propensities and skills. “Thinking over the dispositions and achievements of my contemporaries at school, at college, and in after life, [I] was surprised to find how frequently ability seemed to go by descent,” Galton wrote, in the introduction to the 1869 volume “Hereditary Genius.” (Galton himself was the half-cousin of Charles Darwin.) The title of his work heralded his main conclusion: that some individuals had “an ability that was exceptionally high, and at the same time inborn,” and that it was this hereditary genius, rather than a combination of traits or factors, that led to true creative achievement. “It follows that the men who achieve eminence, and those who are naturally capable, are, to a large extent, identical,” Galton wrote.
Galton decided to test his observations in a more empirical fashion. Leafing through reference books, he identified about four hundred eminent and talented individuals. He broke them down by category—statesmen, for instance, and men of science—and proceeded to conduct a detailed historical search on each one, to determine whether any of his relatives had been as successful in a similar field. As he went from profession to profession, Galton found remarkable consistency. More than half of the prose writers, and more than forty per cent of the poets, were directly related to other literary greats. Musicians and painters, too, came out at high levels (twenty and fifty per cent, respectively). “I think no one doubts that artistic talent is, in some degree, hereditary,” Galton concluded.
Despite his observations’ lack of methodological sophistication, Galton’s findings proved extremely sticky. As Baptiste Barbot, the director of the Individual Differences in Development Lab at Pace University and a researcher at Yale’s Child Study Center, points out, Galton’s view held sway well into the twentieth century. “For a very long time, creativity was perceived as genius,” Barbot told me. “It was a view that some people are creative, and some aren’t. It’s a gift.”
As the science has evolved, however, it’s become clear that that view is far too simplistic, not only because most nature-nurture debates are now seen as moot (the conclusion, nearly always, is that both play a role) but because we no longer perceive creative ability as some monolithic entity. “We now consider creativity as a general ability,” Barbot said. “Everyone is creative. We’re just creative to a different degree.” After a decade of research, Barbot has discovered that, if we are to understand the hereditary and environmental nature of creativity, we need to think of creativity as a constellation of factors that come together in the right way, at the right moment—“maybe a bit of intelligence, some associative thinking, some divergent thinking, and then some personality traits, like the tendency to take risks, your motivation, and your specific interests.” he said. “These factors are partly genetically based, and, of course, partly environmental.”
How, then, do you even begin to study the links? Last year, he attempted to answer that question by reviewing the literature on genetics and creativity. When he examined all the studies that had looked at the hereditary nature of creative thought, he found that the most successful work—the work that had been replicated over time—didn’t set out to study creative ability as such. Instead, confirming Barbot’s thinking, it looked at skills that we know to be associated with creativity, breaking the process down into its component parts. Rather than a trait, Barbot concluded, creativity was a “synergistic interaction among a cluster of more fundamental characteristics.”
Keeping with Barbot’s approach, when Martin Reuter, a psychologist at Justus-Liebig University of Giessen, in Germany, tried to identify genes that could be linked specifically to creative ability, he pursued the facets of behavior and ability that he had previously found to be related to creative thought, like our drive to seek out rewards and pleasurable experiences, which can be measured by the Affective Neuroscience Personality Scale. When Reuter administered a batch of creativity tests to a group of German students, then tested their DNA for three of the genetic variations associated with “seek”-related behaviors, he found that two of the variations also had a significant effect on creativity. The students whose DNA had one of the variants scored higher on verbal creativity, while those who possessed another showed higher scores on figural creativity (the flexible production of ideas) and numeric creativity. Reuter wasn’t identifying a creativity gene as such—it was just a constellation of factors that, under the right circumstances, could come together in the right way. (Three years later, a team from the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences strengthened his conclusions, finding a link between a similar genetic variation and verbal and numeric creativity.)
In 2009, Szabolcs Kéri, a psychiatrist and physiologist at Semmelweis University specializing in psychiatric disorders, was exploring a seemingly unrelated puzzle: why severe mental disorders that had a significant genetic basis persisted in the gene pool. Part of the answer, he found, was that some of those same mutations carried a highly positive trait as well: high creative ability. When he tested a specific polymorphism, or mutation, that was associated with a heightened risk of psychosis, he found that its carriers were also far more creative. They scored higher on all the measures of creativity that Kéri tested: originality, flexibility in thinking, and verbal fluency. He speculated that creativity and psychosis share an important feature: reduced cognitive inhibition, or a lower threshold for entertaining alternative thoughts and realities. (The neuroscientist and psychiatrist Nancy Andreasen wouldn’t be surprised by his results. She has spent her career tracking families in which creative talent is accompanied by a history of depression and mental illness. Galton, too, albeit in characteristically less politically correct fashion, noted, “I have been surprised at finding how often insanity or idiocy has appeared among the near relatives of exceptionally able men.”)
This year, two of Barbot’s collaborators, the Yale University psychologists Mei Tan and Elena Grigorenko, went a step further: they looked not only at underlying factors of creative talent but at one particular skill: creative writing. To see whether creative ability in a specific domain was passed on in families, they asked close to five hundred families (just over thirteen hundred individuals over all) to take a commonly used test of creative writing: compose a short story in response to a proposed title. Children would see names like “Were I an Elephant,” adolescents would receive something like “A Time Machine for an Hour,” and adults would tackle topics such as “The World from an Insect’s Point of View.” Once an individual completed the story, two independent researchers would score it on originality, plot development, and sophistication. When Tan and Grigorenko analyzed the results, they found that creative-writing ability was both strongly familial (shared within families but not necessarily genetically based; for instance, spouses often share creative proclivities) and heritable (resulting from genetic variation, i.e., shared by parents with their children). The heritability held even when the researchers took measures of intelligence and the nature of the family environment into account.
It seems clear, then, that at least some of the components of creative talent are passed down within families. And yet, take the Dumases. Dumas père’s son may have been a renowned writer, but his own mother was the daughter of an innkeeper, his father a military man (albeit an extraordinary one). Kingsley Amis may have fathered Martin, but his own father was a mustard manufacturer’s clerk; prior to Kingsley, neither maternal nor paternal line seemed to lean in any particularly literary or artistic direction. Arthur Miller’s daughter may have followed in her father’s footsteps, but his own parents, Polish immigrants, were in the clothing-manufacturing business. And that creativity, too, had to come from somewhere.
