Da Vinci's recipe for genius ideas - and how to use it
The method of “speculative invention” | What writers do when they write
Hello, and welcome to 60-Second Psychology.
This weekend’s post is about an unexpected source of creativity, inspired by Leonardo da Vinci.
Among the artist and inventor’s many writings is a brief note on “The Method of Awakening the Mind to a Variety of Inventions”, which involved looking for meaningful patterns in the random chaos of the world around him.
“By looking attentively at old and smeared walls, or stones and veined marble of various colours, you may fancy that you see in them several compositions, landscapes, battles, figures in quick motion, strange countenances, and dresses, with an infinity of other objects,” he writes. “By these confused lines the inventive genius is excited to new exertions.”
Leonardo describes this process as “speculative invention”. He admits that it is “trifling, almost laughable” but argues that it is “nevertheless of great utility in assisting the genius to find variety for composition”.
The observation received little attention in the – now enormous – literature on creative thinking, until a study by Antoine Bellemare-Pepin at the University of Montreal was published in 2022.
In psychological terms, the tendency to perceive meaningful images, patterns, or structures in random or ambiguous stimuli is known as pareidolia – and if you’ve ever seen faces in clouds, you’ve already experienced it. Some people tend to be far more susceptible to pareidolia than others – and Bellemare-Pepin wanted to test if those people also tend to be more creative.
To do so, he first designed a set of 360 images containing cloud-like swirls of black and white, and asked the participants to report whenever they saw something meaningful – like a face – in the random patterns.
Bellemare-Pepin then asked the participants to answer a questionnaire examining creative engagement in their day-to-day lives. This involved remembering a time when they were engaged in an artistic pursuit, and then rating on a scale of 1 (definitely not in my experience) to 5 (very much my experience) statements such as:
There was a sense of exploring what emerged in the creative process, rather than having a fixed notion of what I was trying to create.
I lost awareness of time and my physical surroundings.
And
Producing artwork is the main activity that gives meaning and purpose to my life. It forms the centre of my life.
These patterns, the researchers argue, “are the very soil in which creativity plants its root and where new ideas can grow.”
As hypothesised, the individual differences in people’s tendency to see pareidolias were strongly correlated with this measure of artistic engagement; the more likely they were to see a face, object, or scene in those random cloud-like patterns, the higher they scored on the Experience of Creativity Questionnaire.
Bellemare-Pepin and his colleagues found that a tendency to see pareidolias is also connected to the participants’ scores the Divergent Association Task (DAT), a test of verbal creativity in which one has to think of 10 words that are as far apart in meaning as possible, so that they would be very unlikely to crop up together naturally - which an algorithm then judges. The researchers behind the test argue that it measures “divergent thinking, the ability to generate diverse responses to an open-ended problem” and they have found that it reflects people’s capacity to generate original ideas in many different domains.
(I was surprised and chuffed to get a score of 89.57, which is apparently higher than 97% of the people who have completed this task – perhaps I have more creative potential than I realise. You can take the test here to see whether you do too.)
Unusually creative people, it seems, can see associations that would be invisible to the average person, and this manifests in an unusual perception of the world. Pareidolias are one manifestation of this, but you could also be connecting words, concepts, events, or musical sounds in ways that had occurred to no one else before you. These patterns, the researchers argue, “are the very soil in which creativity plants its root and where new ideas can grow.” In an email exchange a couple of years ago, Bellemare-Pepin suggested to me that it may be a narrative process: artists like da Vinci start telling a story about the scene that emerges, which develops into a whole new composition.
What writers do when they write
The idea makes intuitive sense, and reminds me of an essay by the author George Saunders, entitled “What writers really do when they write”, who used the following comparison to describe the work of a novelist.
“A guy (Stan) constructs a model railroad town in his basement. Stan acquires a small hobo, places him under a plastic railroad bridge, near that fake campfire, then notices he’s arranged his hobo into a certain posture – the hobo seems to be gazing back at the town. Why is he looking over there? At that little blue Victorian house? Stan notes a plastic woman in the window, then turns her a little, so she’s gazing out. Over at the railroad bridge, actually. Huh. Suddenly, Stan has made a love story. Oh, why can’t they be together? If only ‘Little Jack’ would just go home. To his wife. To Linda.
“What did Stan (the artist) just do? Well, first, surveying his little domain, he noticed which way his hobo was looking. Then he chose to change that little universe, by turning the plastic woman. Now, Stan didn’t exactly decide to turn her. It might be more accurate to say that it occurred to him to do so; in a split-second, with no accompanying language, except maybe a very quiet internal Yes.”
Such thinking led to Saunders’ Booker Prize-winning novel Lincoln in the Bardo, he says. “The way this pattern thrillingly completed itself? It may just be – almost surely is – a feature of the brain, the byproduct of any rigorous, iterative engagement in a thought system. But there is something wonderful in watching a figure emerge from the stone unsummoned.”
Writing about Bellemare-Pepin’s research gives me a fleeting experience of this process in action. When I look at the ambiguous image above, for instance, I see an old man, a giant perhaps, buried in the snow, looking up at a genie in a flowing dress. I can’t help but wonder how they got there. If I were a painter, or a novelist, I might start elaborating on this scene to create a fantastical fable or allegory. Unfortunately, true creativity relies on perspiration as much as inspiration; once we have our genius idea, we need the technical skills to pull it off, which is why artists like Leonardo or writers like Saunders had to put thousands of hours of practice into their craft to be able to turn a random thought into a thing of beauty.
I’m fascinated by the creative process and would love to hear your thoughts on these ideas. Share them with me on Instagram, X, LinkedIn, Bluesky, or Substack’s comments through the button below. And please do consider hitting subscribe and forwarding the post to anyone who might appreciate it.
That’s all from me. Thanks for reading and enjoy your weekend!
David x
Love this succinct piece, David. Human creativity is still so under-known despite it being the source of, well, everything. I do wonder how children would do at some of these exercises, and what they could teach even the best writers about divergent thinking.