DELIVER ME FROM SOMEWHERE

To celebrate the 144^th anniversary of Picasso’s birth, we present a pocket-size, commemorative, limited edition “The Business of Pleasure” road-map to the creative process…

Writing on the 26^th October, 1926, essayist W.A. Thorpe described Graham Wallas’s seminal ‘The Art Of Thought,’ published earlier that year, as ‘an enlightenment rather than a construction,’ because the work shed some light on creativity rather than attempting to nail it down into a detailed definitive process.* 

Almost a century later, and less than 500 metres away** the ground-breaking British neuroscientist Karl Friston was part of the international team that published ‘The Enlightened Room’ (2023) a kind of ‘mental sandbox’ illustrating how the neural mechanisms of creativity might operate in practice.***

Wallas divided the creative process into four (interlinked) parts:

Preparation  -  Active study, craft mastery

Pablo Picasso: “Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working.’

Bruce Springsteen: “You can’t have a creative life without a craft.”

Incubation – Subconscious reordering

Stephen King: “When I’m stuck on a story, I close the door and let the boys in the back room work …They do it better than I ever could.”

Agatha Christie: “If I stop working for a time, ideas well up again …You must leave the work alone, and it comes of itself.”

Illumination – Insight emerges

Picasso:  “I begin with an idea and then it becomes something else.”

Paul McCartney (on composing Yesterday): “It’s like tuning in on a frequency -you hear a click and the song is suddenly there.”

Verification – Testing and refinement

Claude-Michel Schönberg and Alain Boublil:  “We wrote, rewrote, and rewrote again. Les Misérables wasn’t written in one night -it was built brick by brick.”

Ernest Hemingway: “The first draft of anything is sh*t.”

The Enlightened Room model is based on Friston’s ‘Free Energy Principle’ which holds that: ‘Living systems resist a tendency to disorder by maintaining bounded uncertainty about their sensory states.’****  ‘In short: an organism has internal states (beliefs, models) and external states (environment), interacts with the world via sensory inputs and actions, and tries to stay within viable states (avoiding “surprise” and low-probability states by either changing predictions (perception) or acting on the world (action) -often called 'active inference.’ *****

So why the **ck (as Hemingway might say) would we, or any other organism, actively pursue unpredictability?

 This is the question that echoes around The Enlightened Room’s model of creativity:

1)    The inhabitant of the room, hereafter referred to Fred, is sitting in semi-darkness surrounded by light bulbs and switches

2)    Fred wants the room to be lit (obviously so he can read the latest blog from The Business of Pleasure)

3)    But the connections between the switches and lights have been scrambled

4)    So Fred has to try and work out which switch turns on what light, or in FEP terms, he must experiment and generate novel hypotheses about how the world works.

Or to put it simply, Creativity is a kind of rhythm: we explore and experiment when things feel uncertain, then pull everything together in a clear pattern when we find what works.

Where Wallas meets Friston:

WALLAS STAGE FRISTON 'ACTIVE INFERENCE' STAGE

Preparation

The thinker consciously gathers The thinker consciously gathers

information, explores the problem information, explores the problem

and defines goals and defines goals

Incubation

The problem is set aside; unconscious The system minimises free energy

processes recombine ideas or search "offline"

solution space

Illumination

Eureka! moment -sudden emergence of A Bayesian model revision sharply

a new idea or pattern of understanding reduces variational free energy

Verification

A new idea is tested, refined and validated The agent acts to test and confirm

through reasoning or experimentation its updated generative model

Whatever way you look at it, either fMRI imaging, overflowing waste paper baskets, or fist imprints on the study door and swollen knuckles, the creative process will almost always require a combination of active (conscious) effort and passive ('offline') assimilation. Of course, there may well be times when everything just gels automatically, the words, brush-strokes or harmonics weave together effortlessly, but then you notice the eight-foot tall white rabbit rattling a cocktail-shaker, the baby in the pram chomping a cigar (with piranha teeth) as Agatha Christie joins Ernest Hemmingway, Pablo Picasso and Paul McCartney in a chorus of Springsteen’s Dancing in the Dark …and wake up screaming!

DT

25 October 2025

*The Criterion, Faber and Faber, 1926, one of the most influential literary journal, founded by T.S. Elliot in 1922

**Friston’s base at University College London is a five minute stroll through Bloomsbury from the offices of Faber and Faber.

***Fountas, Z., Friston, K., & Pezzulo, G. Cultivating Creativity: Predictive Brains and the Enlightened Room. Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence, 2023.

****Karl Friston, Nature Reviews Neuroscience 2010

IMAGE:  ‘Procession of the middle king’ Benozzo Gozzoli, 1420 to 1497