American Scientist

Six decades after the British novelist and chemist C.P. Snow famously decried the “gulf of mutual incomprehension” between the sciences and the humanities, the chasm often seems larger than ever. Science has grown more technically demanding over the years, even as the shared public experience of art and culture has fragmented. Snow himself may have unwittingly contributed to the sense of division, with his commentary on “the two cultures” echoing on in the modern cliché of left-brain versus right-brain thinking. All too often, people casually accept the notion that the arts and the sciences really do inhabit two distinct worlds, operating according to separate rules and working toward divergent goals.

That division has always been more about perception than reality, however. The sciences and the arts could never truly be far apart, given that they are both creative endeavors born from human curiosity, imagination, and desire. And as the articles in this special issue of American Scientist make abundantly clear, the connections between the two sides runs much deeper than that.

The cognitive processes responsible for creativity are much the same regardless of whether it is creativity in the arts or in the sciences, for instance, so techniques for boosting creativity benefit both. Innovations in robotics and artificial intelligence have inspired new aesthetics in dance and in visual art; magic tricks and musical performances have led to a deeper understanding of the workings of the brain. Studies in psychology and neurobiology are helping to locate the origins of creativity in the brain, and lessons from the arts help guide those studies. The interplay between the two cultures is endless and self-reinforcing.

Although the specific discoveries are new, the overall message is anything but. It bears repeating all the same, because the stereotypes remain so persistent: The sciences and the humanities are not in conflict with each other. They are complementary explorations of curiosity and imagination. American Scientist has a long tradition of investigating the playful interplay between the two sides. Below, we have assembled a selection of previously published print and online articles that emerged from those investigations. Collectively, they tell a story not of two cultures but of one, stronger when both aspects of creativity are engaged together.