Limitations and creativity

It is easy to conceptualize process of an artist or any other creative person as free-floating exploration of the space of ideas, unbonded by any constraints. Imposition of any limitations in this conception should inevitable lead to shrinking of this space of ideas. In other words, artist with more possible choices could find novel original ideas. The one who follows multiple rules or conventions reaches already known combinations and forms. That line of reasoning at first glance seems reasonable. But I would contest that, more often than not, complete opposite is the case!

The most original works and ideas that humanity reached were found when someone (or group or even generations of people) sought to explore very tight-bounded problems. I would claim that one of the most weird, the most ALIEN ideas that humankind touched were those of advanced mathematics. Think about differentiable manifolds, complex (real and imagined) spaces, groups, fields, infinite sets of various sizes, Turing machines or variety of other bonkers topics and objects on which mathematicians work these days.

For illustration, here are few examples of how limitations influence creative process in various fields:

• Mathematician follows rules of logic and given axioms, definitions or object properties to arrive into mind-bogling spaces that are impossible to imagine or even conceptualize by lay person.
• Physicist follows mathematical reasoning, experiments and empirical reality to create theories about the world that are far weirder than anything that philosophers of antiquity came up with.
• Engineer works with project goals, available resources and laws of physics to create new technology and inventions.
• Poet works with rhythm, rhyme, prosody of their language and other rules for arranging lines and stanzas to squeeze out of the language more than they would in prose work.
• Science fiction writer creates new world with different underlaying rules than in our world to depict cultures, technologies, behaviors, characters that are not possible in realist fiction.

Here comes an inevitable question though. How is it that limitations have that counterintuitive effect? I think that at the root of the answer for that is that our minds, similarly like many phenomena in the world, takes the path of the least resistance. So, even if we have theoretically boundless space of possibilities to choose from, we tend to choose the most familiar, already known, the most worked out solutions. It's hard not to. Limitations, doesn't really matter if they are self-imposed or externally imposed, force us to bend our minds into directions that we wouldn't naturally be inklined to turn to. To choose really weird directions. Sometimes so weird that it seems incredible that our ape brains could even reach such places.