Love and imagination, the secret ingredients of scientific creativity
A 2025 year-end reflection
Around this time every year, for the past few years, I sit down to write a newsletter post to commemorate the end of the year. Usually, I choose a theme such as gratitude, or I quote or write a poem. This year, as I sit at my desk, looking out the window into an ink-dark night, I decided to craft the theme of this end-of-year letter around an unusual collision of concepts: love and imagination.
The collision of love and imagination I intend to discuss is unusual because it occurs within the context of something vital to science, communication. Communication is more important than ever. Science is a creative process, but unlike many forms of ‘creative’ work, such as writing, in science, we don’t necessarily equate the creative process with communication. Communication occurs after something has been created. You communicate your results. However, there is a deeper way of looking at communication that brings it directly into the heart of the scientific creative process.
If you are a scientist, your next breakthrough may depend less on your isolated brilliance and more on how courageously you communicate with others.
A deeper view of creativity and communicaton
Maria Popova writes the Marginalian newsletter, which started out as a letter to a small group of friends where she would relate some of the ideas she found in old books she was reading. It has since blown up into a newsletter with a major following. The success of the Marginalian is because Popova tends to find interesting ways to connect the content of old books with the here and now.
In one of her newsletters, Popova connects the thoughts of three great thinkers to build the case for the art of unselfish understanding. She makes the case for what I like to think of as full-bodied communication.
She makes a connection between language and experience by relating the words of Hannah Arendt: “An experience makes its appearance only when it is being said, and unless it is said it is, so to speak, non-existent.” Science that is not talked about does not exist. More importantly scientific ideas that are not talked about don’t exist either.
Moving beyond the epistemologically obvious connection between language and existence she then quotes the physicist David Bohm on the paradox of communication:
“If we are to live in harmony with ourselves and with nature, we need to be able to communicate freely in a creative movement in which no one permanently holds to or otherwise defends his own ideas.”
Scientists often vigorously defend their ideas, creating paradigms that ossify an entire field in one way of thinking. It is therefore an imperative of innovation to have precisely the type of creative movements Bohm is talking about. What I have witnessed time and time again is that creative ideas and creative solutions to problems only happen when Bohm’s type of communication dominates.
The third and perhaps the most important aspect of communication that is important for the active of creativity is listening. Popova goes on to list out Erich Fromm’s six rules of listening:
The basic rule for practicing this art is the complete concentration of the listener.
Nothing of importance must be on his mind; he must be optimally free from anxiety as well as from greed.
He must possess a freely-working imagination which is sufficiently concrete to be expressed in words.
He must be endowed with a capacity for empathy with another person and strong enough to feel the experience of the other as if it were his own.
The condition for such empathy is a crucial facet of the capacity for love. To understand another means to love him — not in the erotic sense but in the sense of reaching out to him and of overcoming the fear of losing oneself.
Understanding and loving are inseparable. If they are separate, it is a cerebral process and the door to essential understanding remains closed.
In my experience, a freely working imagination allows for the divergent thought that is the first step in any creative process. However, divergent thinking is necessary but not sufficient.
Fromm’s point about overcoming the fear of losing oneself is an interesting fear to consider. We are often concerned about fear of failure or fear of the unknown, but fear of losing oneself is not a fear that I often consider. This is the fear that drives the need to get your point across and also drives you to think about how you are going to say what you want to say when you should be listening to what others are saying.
I was recently in a consortium meeting when one of the scientists who has led the field for decades turned to me during a presentation and said, “There are a lot of really good people in this consortium.” It made me wonder if his ability to lose himself in the presentations and the success of others was the secret ingredient of his own success. As Fromm put it, loving and essential understanding are inseparable.
In my experience, this is something I have learned is important to possess when facilitating a dialogue, whether in the context of developing a proposal or solving a problem. The imagination comes in when you have had discussions and you have listened well to everyone, so that you can connect what was being said in an unexpected way, or you can link what was being said to a current trend or a vision of the future. All of these require imagination and a bit of knowledge.
This is why I do not understand the people who say that facilitators should not have knowledge of the field they are facilitating, or should be somehow outside of the content part of the creative process that is happening in a meeting. In that case, the facilitator is reduced to someone who is just helping the group decide when it is time to take a break. You cannot even really understand the moods or subtexts of the dynamics between people if you don’t have some knowledge of the field and make use of it.
The important point is to understand communication not as a one-way broadcast and more than a flat exchange of ideas or updates. True communication is a dialogic process that is an act of creativity that is made up of love and imagination.
Having the courage to lose oneself opens the door to the convergence of ideas and thought.
Love and imagination to be thankful for 2025.
Here are some examples of how full-bodied communication showed up in my own year.
Our oldest daughter is now in her second year of studying biomedical sciences at the University of Leuven. She is already learning about the inexorable bond between science and communication, although in the more traditional way of writing an abstract or giving a presentation.
Our middle daughter continues her dance career. As part of a duet, she made it to the Youth American Grand Prix in Tampa, Florida. Dance is full-bodied communication. Below is a video her dance group made for me. You can also see an outdoor version on our website.
Our son plays the central defender for his football team. He used not to talk to the other players during the match, but is now intensely focused on the evolution of a match and communicates with his fellow defenders to organise a super-strong defence.
In the proposals and projects we have been working on, there have been lots of developments. Over the past few weeks, I attended three consortium meetings. Both the project imSAVAR and T2EVOLVE had their final consortium meeting. Even though I have been involved all along in both projects, seeing the results all put together over the course of a couple of days has been a communication extravaganza that illustrates all the love and imagination that have gone into these two projects. The most important news is that both consortia will continue to work together in the recently launched T2EVOLVE association. I plan to write about some of the more remarkable achievements of these projects in 2026, so sign up if you want to read more about these projects.
The INTERCEPT consortium has now reached its one-year mark. It is a really impressive team that has a real chance to truly transform the field of Crohn’s disease with a paradigm shift towards identifying at-risk individuals and intervening with treatment to prevent them from ever developing Crohn’s Disease. This is certainly a project you should follow.
A New Year’s resolution to spread love and imagination in the service of helping those who are suffering from disease.
Make it a point to build up your courage to lose yourself in a discussion by:
Recognising the fear of losing ourselves in a discussion that we all have
Understanding that fear will always be there, but losing ourselves by listening deeply is imperative for making meaningful breakthroughs. What you do in the face of fear is what matters.
Think about the problem you can solve by leveraging the combined creativity of a group - what impact do you want to have? Could you achieve that on your own?
Deploy some practical tactics
Always ask questions.
Repeat back what others are saying.
Build up a steel man case - argue the side of someone who an opposing view before you make your own perspective known.
If you are leading or joining a consortium, designing spaces where people can safely ‘lose themselves’ in each other’s ideas is not a luxury; it is a core innovation strategy.
One way to do this is to develop ‘tiny projects’, projects that don’t require lots of additional resources and that can be used to pilot or test an idea. Tiny projects are laboratories for full‑bodied communication: they force you to ask, listen, and build together at low stakes.
I would like to invite anyone reading this to consider making 2026 the start of a journey towards achieving major breakthroughs, beginning with consortium design and creative communication. I would love to be your guide.
May your 2026 be full of conversations so loving and imaginative that unexpected science becomes possible.