I was reading one of my books on quotes from Napoleon, oddly enough I find them more thought-provoking that reading most philosophers. One recent one was the following: “He who can absorb the most mages into his memory is the one who has the most imagination.”
I’ve dipped here and there on the science of creativity, but this sparked a few flashbacks from previous readings. One was the book Where Good Ideas Come From by Steven Johnson (read it about five years ago so I might have some details wrong) where the author talks about the concept of Adjacent Possible. It’s explained as being a shadow future of possibilities, built up by previous steps.
The image above helps explain it. You can only access certain positions if you’re in the right circle, if you’re not, you can’t access these. It’s technically possible to put a man in the moon, we have done this, but this doesn’t mean anyone today who wishes to go to the moon can, nor that this was possible before the 20th century. It’s adjacent possible, meaning there are shadow steps that need to be accomplished before doing so.
This is a smarter way of thinking than simply throwing the blank statement that “anything is possible” as you hear so often promoted in the US (seems to be some therapeutic technique that became mainstream). Johnson explains in the book (others have done similar claims, The Medici Effect, The Nature of Technology, Mastery by Robert Greene, etc) that you can only achieve idea X if you have a foundation in Y knowledge. So creative ideas come about by being able to understand previous ones, and combine these ideas into original new ones. It’s as if memories are available components you can edit and combine into new shapes, and the more components available, the greater the possibilities.
There’s also a factor for intelligence in this. I’ve read other studies where anyone to be considered “creative” had to have an IQ of at least 120 points if I’m not mistaken. The idea was that creativity and IQ rely heavily on working memory. Working memory is the type of memory that allows you to hold multiple thoughts in your head and modify it (like counting in your head, planning a dinner party and considering budget, type of food the guests will like, who would be available from your social network, etc).
In any case, It’s fun to see Napoleon intuitively grasping concepts that are heavily being studied by moderns and hailed as revolutionary discoveries.