Great achievements often take time, so a creator must have the ability to persevere until the plan is completed. But not all plans prove to be practical, and a creator must have a sense of when insufficient progress has been made for the time invested. Most relevant for our understanding of the role time plays in creativity is our perception and mental image of time, or what we might term “cognitive time.”
Cognitive time is the duration of an event. Perceived and mental images often contain a sequence of events. Each event, the time between events, and the entire sequence of events has a specific duration or chronological distance that is inherent in the mental image. We compare the chronological distance of our perceived “what is” with our imagined “what should be.” I envision that it takes 10 minutes to walk the dog, so when my son fails to return after an hour, I am worried.
The perceived passage of time is a quantity, and quantity is a property shared by all of our sensory modalities. Whether something is brighter or darker, louder or quieter, heavier or lighter, faster or slower are examples of quantified perceptions. Quantity for any sense is abstracted by our multimodal parietal lobe (Curr. Opin. Neurobiol. 2004;14: 218-24). Our conscious estimation of time is influenced by our circadian rhythms. When people are isolated in a chamber without any time cues and allowed to wake and sleep as they desire, their bodies unconsciously maintain biological rhythms, for example in body temperature fluctuation. When asked to judge the passage of time, we overestimate during periods of higher body temperature and maximal wakefulness, and underestimate during periods of lower body temperature and greater sleepiness (Physiol. Behav. 2001;72:589-93). The hour my son spent walking the dog would have seemed longer to me at 4 a.m. than at 4 p.m.
All creative plans have a time frame. We decide whether the progress gained over the time spent on a creative effort matches the chronology embedded within our envisioned action plan. How we react to the progress of our creative effort within the perceived time frame is influenced by our temperament. Dr. C. Robert Cloninger defines temperament as an unconscious property based on our automatic responses to perceived stimuli. Such responses determine whether we are driven more by the search for reward vs. the avoidance of punishment, and how well we tolerate and persist in the face of “frustrative nonreward.”
Dr. Cloninger defines four dimensions of temperament as novelty seeking (motivated by the possibility of unexpected reward), harm avoidance (happy simply to avoid punishment), reward dependence (needing praise), and persistence (“perseverance despite frustration and fatigue”). Character, he says, is driven by three dimensions: self-directedness (willpower to achieve one's own goals), cooperativeness with other individuals, and self-transcendence (the acceptance that the self is part of a universal whole). Individual differences in temperament and character define our individual personalities (Arch. Gen. Psychiatry 1987;44:573-88; Arch. Gen. Psychiatry 1993;50:975-90).
Those who are more highly motivated by the search for novelty are more likely to envision and pursue the realization of something new (what should be) than are individuals who prefer the avoidance of harm (leave well enough alone). We may be temperamentally biased to envision something better than we perceive, thus generating the motivational voltage that initiates creative behavior. Temperament determines our reactive set point; our tolerance for the status quo and for unrewarded action; how patient and perseverant we tend to be; and when it is time to alter our plan.
Of course, not every new idea is good. Character (which is based upon conscious, insight-oriented learning) allows us to regulate ourselves, our interactions with others, and our integration with more universal themes of nature and spirituality. Our ability to learn consciously that a temperament-driven gut response can be maladaptive allows us to modify our reaction consciously.
To achieve a creative goal usually requires persistence over an extended period of time, even in the absence of external encouragement. During a task in which subjects were asked to rate facial expressions, individuals with higher persistence scores performed with greater accuracy. The task had some periods that most subjects found boring. During the boring test periods, those individuals with higher persistence scores had better overall task performance and maintained activation of brain reward centers on fMRI, whereas those with lower persistence scores had poorer overall performance and deactivated those same reward regions (Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 2003;100:3479-84). If the goal of the task is itself assumed to be rewarding to the participant, reward activation during this period of boredom or frustrative nonreward may imply that the goal is more effectively maintained in the minds of those who are more persevering.