Mastery: The Path to Creativity

I came across a tweet from John Vervaeke on the need to disrupt your normal patterns of thought lest you become locked into a particular way of thinking. I disagree.

99. Mastery: The Path to Creativity

There is a lot of energy expended these days to promote this things called “creativity.” From a very young age children are encouraged to be expressive. Being free from the constraints of others so that you can give outlet to your inner vision without hesitation or fear is seen as the height of authenticity. We are encouraged to break down the barriers that constrain us and keep us hemmed in. Free thinking is the goal. A recent tweet from John Vervaeke came across my feed, typical of this kind of thinking for adults:

He is correct that your brain is incredible at pattern recognition. This is a feature, though, not a bug. Vervaeke speaks about the “problem” of getting “trapped” in a particular way of thinking. I put these words in quotes because these are not necessarily bad things. In fact, they are a good thing. They are the foundation for something called “mastery.” I would agree with John that in certain contexts and situations getting locked into a particular way of thinking can become a bad, even dangerous and destructive thing. But those situations only arise because you have become really good at something and it works for you, until it doesn’t, and you need to adapt to new circumstances but can’t. But until those circumstances are thrust upon you, there is far more benefit in recognizing patterns and developing deeply ingrained knowledge, skills and abilities.

Once you understand some more about how our brains work, the physiology of “mind,” this idea that we have to be “pattern disrupters,” from all that I have learned, becomes suspect. When we are born, our brains are not yet fully developed. The structure of our brain at a cellular level actually grows and develops in response to our learning. We build brain structure around language, skills, habits, memories. The brain is not like a computer chip or a hard drive. As you learn and repeat things, both good and bad, our brain architecture becomes more efficient at doing those things. This is why you practice your golf swing until it becomes second nature and you don’t have to think about it. For anyone who has tried to golf while thinking about doing every aspect of the swing correctly, it doesn’t go well. This goes for all kinds of activities from things like language, to fine motor skills, to athletic abilities, to intellectual pursuits. As you do them, you build your brain around those activities so that they demand less conscious thought. At the cellular level, you build not only the nerve architecture, but also a thing called myelin sheathes around the nerves that aid in speeding up and making nerve activity more efficient.

The more that you practice things, the more that your brain structure gets built around doing these things, the faster, easier and more natural, second nature they become.

Imagine a world where every time you encountered something, or were required to do a task, that you had no memory, no collection of patterns, no structure built up to provide a foundation for you through which to understand the world or act within it. Complete openness would meaning understanding nothing and being able to do nothing. You would be paralyzed by constantly have to relearn everything all the time. Every skill would be new to you all the time. The world would flow over you in a disordered and chaotic flow of sensations. To make sense of the world you have to see patterns, filter out some inputs in favour of others. You have to be able to see and recognize threats and dangers. You need pattern recognition to able to protect yourself, feed yourself, sustain yourself bodily, socially, mentally, intellectually, and emotionally. Patterns are vital and necessary. And you have to have a developed enough brain that these patterns are recognized instantly, often pre-consciously. You step back from an oncoming car instinctually. Your hand pulls back from a hot stove element instinctually. You don’t even think about it. But all of this has to be learned and your brain has to build around this knowledge and it needs to be efficient and quick in the recognition of these patterns. Your life often depends upon it.

Your brain builds itself around these patterns, increasing nerve density and the thickness of the myelin sheathe. It is this development of the myelin sheathe that makes our thinking and habits more efficient. Because of this architecture, because you are not expending energy on basic pattern recognition or the basics of a skill, it allows you your brain, and your mind with it, to focus on higher order aspects of the activity. It can even allow you to be doing one thing while thinking of something else.

The downside of this is that these myelin sheathes, once grown by our brain, don’t ungrow. Their deterioration is what causes a number of neurological diseases. What this means is that change is hard, especially when it comes to bad habits. You have literally built your brain around the activity and the reward structure that this harmful activity generates. As you give yourself over to bad habits and practice them, you actually make the doing of them more efficient and natural for your brain such that not doing them seems unnatural. Your sins and bad habits, if you practice them enough, become you on easy mode. They take no effort because you have practiced them so much and made them a part of you. The doing of them becomes pre-conscious. This is why you can find yourself picking up your phone and scrolling mindlessly without purpose. You have so trained yourself to do this such that you have wired your brain to just instinctively pick up the phone and scroll. People who say that you are not your sins have no idea what they are talking about. You are your sins because you have built your mind around them. This is who you are. You have practiced them and made them a part of you, even if they are just habits of mind like lust, greed, anger, envy, jealously, pride or so forth. You are your sins, even if they are “merely” of the mind.