Classical music says, repeats and time brew creativity.
What Can Musical Variations Teach Us About Creativity?
By Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim, NYTimes, Feb 16 2026
In the “Diabelli,” you can hear Beethoven’s music get weirder and ultimately more mystical as it goes along. What is the role of time in creativity and what do we risk to lose in the age of instant A.I. solutions?
Human beings have what’s called the serial-order effect: The longer we spend thinking about something, the wilder and more unusual our ideas tend to get.
Gen A.I. is constrained to the most statistically likely solutions. It’s fast, but it stays within a very small sphere of possibilities. Human beings go to edge cases. Time gives us the opportunity to diversify ideas and to see how well what we’ve made holds up.
One of my frustrations with creativity research is that time is often written out of the equation, because most experiments are very short. I think time is one of our greatest allies in the creative process.