Carlos García-Delgado: "Now we have cities with 20 million inhabitants and there is no way that anything interesting will come out"

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Carlos Garcia-Delgado

.

1944, Calatayud.

Doctor in Industrial Engineering and architect.

In the book

(Harp) he has poured his 30 years of research into the process for new ideas to come to our minds.

You have been studying creativity for 30 years.

How did it all start? It arose from a course at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia, from the School of Industrial Engineering.

I taught a subject called Projects.

At one point there was a meeting of the department and I pointed out that the degree program was full of mathematics subjects, thermodynamics, subjects where logical thinking is used above all, but that nobody talked about ingenuity, however, being that word that gives name to the career and the profession.

Then they asked me to develop a subject, which was called Theory of Invention, in which I explained the process of ingenuity and proposed techniques that enhance creative capacity. So creativity, is it something that can be enhanced? Obviously, like all human faculties.

It can be encouraged and it can be educated. Logical and rational thinking, is it the enemy of creativity? Not at all, it is complementary.

Creative ability, as I think I have come to demonstrate with almost mathematical formulas, is made up of two faculties: the ability to generate images, which corresponds to memory;

and consciousness, which is what controls the logical capacity.

From these two parts, one that generates images and the other that filters and controls them, creativity arises.

Memory -which is the entire physical organism, not just the brain as was believed- and consciousness form a self-regulated system, a cybernetic system, and that system is what sustains creative capacity.Numerous creators, from Homer to Mozart, have left evidence throughout history that creativity was something that came to them effortlessly,

in moments of relaxation and inactivity.

How is that? In this cybernetic system formed by memory and consciousness, the activity of one of the parts diminishes the activity of the other.

When we are asleep, only memory is acting in this cybernetic system, which generates images in an uncontrolled way, and consciousness is turned off.

And vice versa: when we wake up, memory is in control of consciousness.

What I show is that the point at which creativity is maximum is the one at which memory and consciousness share control of the system in some way. And when do those moments occur? When we are in a dream state , at times when the brain frequencies marked by an electroencephalogram are around ten cycles per second.

At that point we are very relaxed,

almost asleep, and that is when the memory acts with a certain freedom and generates images, but at the same time the consciousness is awake enough to control them, to judge the goodness of those images that the memory generates.

In the book I make the product of two curves, one concave and the other convex, one of which represents memory's ability to memorize and imagine, and the other represents consciousness's ability to judge.

And the mathematical product results in the maximum creative capacity being reached at the point where the curves intersect, which is precisely the frequency of half-sleep, 10 cycles per second.

Does that mean that maximum creativity is reached in moments of deep relaxation? That's right.

That's why Archimedes

that he was desperately trying to find the solution to the task that the king of Syracuse had given him to calculate the density of his golden crown, he was resting and taking a bath in the baths when he found the solution, and he came out naked shouting "Eureka" through the streets of Syracuse.

And the same thing happened to Newton while he rested under an apple tree.

The mathematician Henri Poincaré relates in a precise way that if he could not solve certain equations, he would go for a walk along the seashore and that is when inspiration would come to him.

I cite several examples in the book. So today's world, in which there are almost no moments of relaxed relaxation, in which we are constantly doing things, is it contrary to creativity? Without a doubt.

There will be those who disagree

but I am convinced that we are at a time when creativity is clearly on the wane.

For me, the most representative art of the 20th century is cinema, which has recently celebrated 100 years of existence.

To commemorate it, a well-known magazine carried out a survey among numerous film critics in order to make a list of the 100 best films in history.

I should play one movie a year, right?

Well, no, it turns out that 80% of the top 100 movies on that list are from the 40s, 50s and 60s. From the 70s on, the number of movies on the list starts to drop and from the year 2000 there are very few. And how can this drop in creativity be explained in terms of memory/consciousness? I believe that currently there is an excess of attention from consciousness, consciousness is always active,

we are always busy with the phone screen, with the television, with whatever, and that makes the memory not work.

Memory has always been considered as a data file, and it is still defined that way in dictionaries.

But that is a very serious error, because the data in memory is not static, as it happens in a library, in a large file or with the memory of a computer.

Human memory is precisely characterized by the fact that its data is constantly moving.

But if we don't let them move, they're not going to recombine and they're not going to produce works of creation.

Today the conscience is permanently awake, we are always aware of something, there are no moments of boredom.

And the moments of boredom are of enormous creativity, because in them the consciousness is attenuated and lets the memory produce images.

Those moments are disappearing and that is why creativity is also diminishing.

Current pedagogy does not prioritize memory, it is often said that currently it makes no sense to learn things by heart.

Does that also affect creativity? It seems to me a tremendous mistake that memory is not promoted.

I don't know why, education in reason and logical thinking, which is of course very important, is opposed to memorization, when there is no reason for incompatibility.

A memory that is not well supplied will never be creative.

Before, children learned, for example, a sonnet by Quevedo, and that is very important, because the sounds of the words and the way of linking one with another somehow remained in the child's subconscious and then it helped him to write better." No one has taught me

Nightmares are the clear demonstration that there is a mechanism in our memory that works on its own, because nobody wants to be kept awake by images that are extremely uncomfortable and in no way would they want to.

But memory, when it acts outside of consciousness, is capable of generating images that not even one would be able to imagine consciously.

The sensation that the creative has, when he is able to be in that intermediate situation of consciousness in which memory has enough freedom to generate images, is that he limits himself with his conscious part to seeing them and receiving them like a barrage. And why? why for 25 centuries the creative process has remained surrounded by unknowns? Because of two very serious errors, both referring to memory.

For 25 centuries we have believed that memory was a static archive,

and we have already seen that it was not true.

And further we have believed that knowledge was only the conscious knowledge of man.

That is to say: the fact that a bird knows how to fly was not part of the classical epistemologies, from Plato to Kant and Hegel, who consider that animals are idiotic beings who know nothing.

And it's not like that, they know a lot of things.

The animal part of man, which is the non-conscious part, is enormous and also knows how to do many things, from digesting food to collecting oxygen from the air. Has the Judeo-Christian philosophy prevented delving into the keys to the creative process? ?Judeo-Christian philosophy extols effort.

And it is true that, to be creative, a prior effort is needed to learn techniques and memorize them, but ideas, creativity,

they arise precisely when one relaxes and disconnects the consciousness.

In that sense, it is the opposite of everything we have been taught, we have been educated in that effort is the engine of everything.

We have suffered from a series of prejudices and commonplaces in thought that have prevented us from explaining the creative act.

I believe that we are now at the point of being able to explain it, thanks to the keys given to us by several Nobel laureate scientists such as Konrad Lorenz, John Eccles and Ilya Prigogine. In his book he offers several strategies to park active consciousness and enhance creativity, to get that alpha state of mind where ideas flow.

One is an ancient technique that consists of making the vocal cords vibrate, emitting a meaningless purr.

How does it work? It is an ancient technique that has been used since ancient times in countries such as India or China.

What happens is that modern, enlightened man from the time of the progress of the industrial revolution despises all previous knowledge.

Every time we make the vocal cords vibrate it is to emit words, so we have a reflex mechanism that relates the vibration of the vocal cords to the image of the word being pronounced.

If I say "ship", I automatically imagine a ship.

But if I vibrate the vocal cords with a meaningless sound, like "ummm", automatically the consciousness looks for the meaning, doesn't find it and then disconnects from the process. Sentences also produce a similar effect, don't they? Yes,

because in the end it is about making the vocal cords vibrate without meaning.

If I say "God save you, Mary" or "Allah is powerful" I am repeating something routinely, without paying attention to its meaning, which immediately enters a state of disconnection from consciousness that leaves memory free to combine data.

Another technique that he mentions in his book is the Almotasín method, which takes its name from the story by Borges.

What does it consist of?Borges invented a character who was a false writer, he unloaded his conscience, leaving the authorship of a story in the hands of Almotasín, in the same way that someone who prays unloads his conscience because he leaves it in the hands of Almotasín. of God.

It is the same process.

Borges eliminated the tension produced by his conscience by pretending that it was not he who was writing but Almotasín.

That allowed him to relax and write a perfect story. How do you see the future of creativity? As we have already mentioned, we live in a time when consciousness is permanently active because its attention is constantly demanded, and that inevitably makes us less creative, sorry to say.

Think for example of classical Greece, where in total they did not reach a million people, and see what happened.

Now we have cities with 20 million inhabitants and there is no way that anything interesting will come out.

Would it be good if schools had a subject that explained what creativity is and the keys to being creative? Without a doubt, for me it should be an important subject.

All education is still weighed down by the idea that logic must rule.

We are still obsessed with the world of logos,

of rational logic and ideas is enough to educate people.

We are so platonic that it is possible to obtain the title of architect without ever having touched a brick with your hands.

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