Is Creativity in our DNA?

After finishing A Handful of Dust over the weekend, I went online to learn more about the novel’s author, Evelyn Waugh.

What I found out was that Evelyn was not the only celebrated writer in his family. His father, Arthur, was one. So was Alec, his brother. Shortly before his death, his son Auberon took up the pen too.

How does this happen? How does one family produce four creative minds who all find success in a single industry?

They’re not the only ones either. Joss Whedon’s father was a television producer, his grandfather a screenwriter, and two of his half-brothers are in the industry. Closer to home there’s the Boyd family, who have contributed to the Australian art scene for well over a century.

What’s the secret? Could that be that creativity is in our DNA?

The answer, surprisingly, is yes.

In 1869, Francis Galton (a relative to Charles Darwin) wrote a book on what he termed Hereditary Genius. Galton felt that the ability to create great ideas was passed down through generations. His findings were held as true – regardless of the questionable methodology through which he discovered them – for decades to follow.

Then we started to learn more about the human brain, and soon we were able to decode its machinations. Over the last decade, that has resulted in several studies that would appear to support Galton’s theory.

The first, undertaken by a team from Cornell University’s Department of Neurology and Neuroscience, was released in 2009. What they discovered was that the size of the corpus callosum – the nerve fibres that link the hemispheres of our brain – plays a crucial part in an individual’s ability to think ‘divergently’. That is, to come up with a creative solution to the challenges before them. The smaller the corpus callosum, the easier it was for the individual to be creative.

In 2013, Helsinki University went even further. They looked to the genes for proof of hereditary genius. In the study of a subject’s ability to be creative musically, they found a particular cluster of genes in those who proved more ‘gifted’. The genes (protocadherin-α, or PCDHA, for those interested) are partially responsible for a brain’s ability to create and reorganise connections between cells.

What’s more, they found that another set of genes (glucose mutarotase genes, GALM) linked to serotonin release also played a part. Serotonin is a mood stabiliser closely associated with bipolar disorder, a mental condition already linked to creative ability. Creative leaders who have shown symptoms of bipolar include Virginia Woolf, Kurt Cobain, and Winston Churchill.

For all of this, Galton’s findings may have seem justified, but in fact, the opposite is true.

Though genetic structure certainly plays a part in the creative process, it is not a defining factor. It only makes the process easier for those fortunate enough to bear those traits.

For everyone else, it just takes work.

Just look at the likes of the Haydn brothers, two of Austria’s most influential classical composers. Their parents were a wheelwright and a cook, and neither of them could read music, let alone teach it at the time they realised their children had musical potential. It was their choice to send the children from the small town of Rohrau to a more developed part of the country in order to learn from artists who could turn that potential into something of value. If they had not made that decision, Joseph and Michael would never have made the impact they did.

It’s a different world now. What we may lack in nature, we can make up in nurture, and we can do it at any time! Gone are the days where the role we fill today is the role we resign ourselves to until death. Today, there is creative inspiration to be found everywhere.

Engage with it, learn from it, work hard to create greatness, and the rest will follow.