Cross-Cultural Inspiration

The comments below appeared in the newsletter of A Network for Grateful Living:

“More often than not, history takes us by surprise. In 1865, chemist Friedrich August Kekulé discovered the structure of the benzene molecule – the foundation for fields like molecular biology and pharmacology – when he dozed by the fireplace and saw in his mind’s eye atoms “turning like snakes” with one snake grabbing its own tail.

In 1946, Mother Teresa was riding a train from Calcutta to Darjeeling when she received an interior inspiration to help the poor while living amongst them.

In 1935, Mr. Bill Wilson and Dr. Bob Smith, both admitted alcoholics, met for what they intended to be a few minutes in the Gate Lodge of the Seiberling estate in Akron, Ohio. Their meeting lasted for hours and became the basis for Alcoholics Anonymous (A.A.), a movement which has changed millions of lives for the better.”

Do these examples represent inspiration, a voice from without making it through the clutter? Or are they merely the result of enough pondering about a subject to make a solution inevitable?

Dan Ariely, a professor of behavioral economics at Duke, weighs in on the subject of motivation and inspiration in an editorial piece for the New York Times on November 20. He asks the timely question, “’What’s the Value of a Big Bonus?’” [1]

Ariely presents research that suggests that Campbell’s postulate about inspiration (see posting of February 10) is true. In controlled tests, Ariely first used small, medium and large bonuses and incentives for subjects to do well in tasks that demanded attention, memory, concentration and creativity. The most striking result was that while those offered small or medium bonuses performed at the same level, those offered the larger bonuses “did worse than the other two groups across all the tasks.”

The researchers replicated the study at MIT, this time testing the impact of the bonus performance of cognitive skill tasks and mechanical skills tasks. Aha! As long as the task was purely mechanical, the bonus worked to accelerate performance. But when cognitive skill was involved, the higher bonus actually resulted in worse performance.

To complete the logical cycle, Ariely then tested the impact of social pressure on cognitive skill performance. Again, the “bonus” of social approval actually was counter-productive. Apparently, social pressure “has the same effect that money has” — even though subjects want to perform better when they are scrutinized, they don’t.

Conclusions? One would be that incentives that are only self-serving actually have an adverse affect on cognitive performance. If so, what kind of incentive would actually contribute to better performance?

Send your opinion!

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[1] Ariely, Dan. “What’s the Value of a Big Bonus?” New York Times, November 20, 2008, Op-Ed.

Ask any school kid …motivation is an offering of incentive to accomplish a task. He or she can be motivated, either with a carrot or a stick, to finish a paper or do extra work for extra credit.  Ask an office worker or an executive …he or she can be motivated by a bonus to perform more or different tasks or to accomplish given results.

Unlike “motivation,” “inspiration” is a force which moves us to act in unpredictable and extraordinary ways, generally on our own. In Pathways to Bliss, Joseph Campbell makes an observation about Abraham Maslow’s psychological hierarchy of needs, commenting that the values represented by the model — survival, security, personal relationship, prestige and self-actualization — are exactly the values that mythology transcends. Inspiration is a calling to become intrinsically better than we are with no apparent personal objective reward.

The implication of this statement is that while the values of Maslow’s psychological hierarchy might motivate our normal daily activity, we are inspired by something else. In Campbell’s view that something else is a mythology, or a story that creates a context of meaning.

Even the referents of the two words are different. “Motivation’s” definitions include words like “prompt,” “spur” and “induce.” These terms indicate an urging by another, using an outside identifiable and objective stimulus, a characteristic consistent with our general understanding of the term.

“Inspiration,” however, has a much more complex set of referents; there are at least three distinct etymological foundations. The Latin derivation is ispiratio, (to blow into or upon, to breathe into). A second tracing is from the Greek spiriing or spiration, meaning “God-breathed,” the product of the creative breath of God, also close to the meaning that Dante referred to in the early fourteenth century — inspirazione — referring to suggestion, or prompting, but specifically by god. Again, these referents comply with our general experience of the term.

The word “inspiration” can be used to describe any part of the chain that results in an uncommon occurrence or an action taken that is beyond the pale of ordinary motivation. It can apply to the object that the subject encounters—a piece of art or an action taken. It can apply to the individual who is the author or stimulator, or it can apply to the reaction itself.

In January of 2007, we sponsored a Forum on Cross-Cultural Inspiration in San Francisco, and advertised for papers for six months before the convening. There were few, only one on point, and this by a professor of design at the University of Dubai. Still, the Forum was attended by all invitees from the worlds of business and academe. The dialogue was vital and interesting.

The variety in etymological references, the limited academic response to the Forum’s call for research and the substantive level of interest point to something about the nature of both the word and the experience of inspiration. Inspiration has a mystical quality, not yielding to the parlance of any given field of objective study. In Plato’s world, inspiration was sourced in the Gods or the muses; to Jung, Freud and other depth psychologists it is an outpouring of the unconscious mind; to brain scientists, a biological occurrence and to mythologists it is borne of the very story of our existence and survival.  We feel it; we don’t need a contract or incentive to prompt action.

Just what is Inspiration anyway?

[1] Campbell, Joseph. Pathways to Bliss. Novato, CA: New World, 2004 pp. 89.

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