This post originally appeared as a guest post on Christian Meesters‘ FediScience blog, hosted by the Fediscience network, the social network for scientists on Mastodon.
Creative thinking is essential for developing insightful conclusions. Yet, as scientists, we’re often not actively trained in the divergent thinking skills needed for this. Hence, why Discussion writing is so hard. With practice, prior knowledge, and a mindful inner critic, we can foster creativity and make that Discussion easier to write.
Science needs creativity. Think of Charles Darwin, whose creative thinking led to the discovery of the evolution theory, or Alfred Wegener, who proposed the theory of continental drift.
Of course, those are grandiose examples, and the real discoveries were much more incremental than often portrayed. Nevertheless, without creativity, it would be impossible to develop exciting new hypotheses to test. We would only be able to deduce and falsify existing ones. New knowledge requires us to be creative and come up with insights that weren’t there before.
Photo by RhondaK via Unsplash
Divergent thinking
In scientific writing, we can think of creativity in terms of divergent thinking, association, and inductive reasoning. The latter is a form of formal logic, and in this book chapter cognitive scientist Stevan Hamad points out that inductive reasoning should only be considered creative if the conclusion that’s formed is not too trivial, “in the way ‘this apple is round, that apple is round, therefore all apples are round’ is trivial”.
Divergent thinking is the opposite of convergent thinking, in which we deduct a logical statement that can be tested and falsified based on existing knowledge. Instead of this clear, straightforward reasoning, divergent thinking is more fuzzy. It’s the type of thinking we use to solve problems. In terms of scientific writing, we can consider divergent thinking as connecting research results to existing literature (or in the case of literature reviews, by connecting multiple sources of existing literature in new ways).
Too much logic?
Scientists are highly trained in convergent thinking, but not so much in its divergent counterpart. In this 2019 article, researchers Johannes Lehman and Bill Gaskins called for a better approach to creativity in science, and in this 2014 PNAS article biologist Marten Scheffer argued for more associate thinking in our scientific practice.
Perhaps this lack of practice with divergent thinking explains why Discussion writing can be so hard. Drawing interesting conclusions requires divergent thinking: connecting your results to the existing literature. This can feel quite counterintuitive when you’ve trained for years to avoid making statements that are not absolutely true.
1. Practice creativity
So how to be more creative? The good news is: creativity has been studied very, very widely. There are countless ideas and strategies to foster your creativity, ranging from practice (ten bad ideas are better than one good one), setting restrictions (allow yourself only 5 minutes to write), to taking breaks.
However, creativity is an elusive beast. There is no one formula that guarantees creative success. What’s more, different things work for different brains. My advice? Understand how creativity shows up for you. In other words, do research! Read about the many ways people use to be creative, and then try them out to see what works for you.
2. Dial down the inner critic
Aside from being elusive, creativity can also be a bit… shy. It’s that sweet, silly, sensitive part of your mind that comes up with wild, over-the-top ideas, sometimes horrible, sometimes world-changing. It’s a fantastic idea-generating machine, but easily shut down by another part of our mind: the inner critic.
The inner critic tries to poke holes in every idea your happy idea generator comes up with. Often successfully, because most ideas are bad. Quite sad for the idea generator, right? Chances are it might eventually give up (enter writer’s block).
Hence, to be creative, we need to dial down criticism. That’s hard, especially as a scientist trained to critique. But not impossible. Be mindful, and tell your inner critic to take a break when you’re trying to be creative and coming up with outlandish explanations for your latest experiment results. Don’t worry, there’s plenty of time for criticism later on.
3. Build your knowledge
Besides practice and compassion, scientific creativity requires prior knowledge. Scheffer points out in his article that without pre-existing knowledge, there simply aren’t any ideas to connect. This probably explains why it’s hard to come up with interesting conclusions when you’re new to a discipline (i.e. starting a PhD) – your brain is less loaded with pre-existing knowledge on related subtopics.
So, to be creative in science, you need to load your brain with lots of ideas. Read literature, watch videos, attend seminars, and of course, talk to other researchers. Don’t limit yourself to your own discipline. There are often seemingly unrelated fields of research that study similar processes (e.g. the study of waves in acoustics and oceanography), use the same research methods (e.g. the use mathematical models of gas particles in animal movement), or study the same topic from a different angle (e.g. the study of human health in medicine and sociology).
Creativity is essential for science
Without creativity and the divergent thinking that accompanies it, we would be far-fetched to make any useful meaning out of the results we find. Fostering creativity in your work takes practice, prior knowledge, and compassion. It’s hard work, but a great way to come up with insightful conclusions, and make that Discussion section just a bit easier to write.