Last Thursday, I went to see neurologist, author, and Cornell professor-at-large Oliver Sacks give a talk entitled “Creativity and the Brain” at the Statler. Having read and reread The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat annually since the age of eight, I had been looking forward to the talk with breath so bated that I may have been clinically dead. I wasn’t disappointed: Sacks was brilliant, he was funny, he was British. He even said “fuck” at one point, and few things bring me as much joy as hearing distinguished lecturers curse. With a British accent.

Yet I left slightly unsatisfied. You see, although Sacks spent over an hour discussing creativity, he never actually defined it. And ever since I stepped out of the Statler auditorium into the brisk night, I’ve been trying to figure out what creativity really is.

What Sacks did do was contrast creativity with virtuosity — an inflection of “virtuoso,” not “virtuous.” The difference between virtuosity and creativity is the difference between being really good at something and being innovative with it; between drawing incredibly lifelike portraits from models and painting something that doesn’t exist; between playing a difficult chaconne flawlessly and composing one’s own music.

It’s a compelling distinction, not least because it’s a relatively simple way of looking at a seemingly complex concept. Claude Levi-Strauss, the father of structuralism, theorized that binary oppositions (pairs of contrasting ideas) are the most basic form of information; you can’t understand something without understanding what it isn’t. Darkness can’t exist without light. Happiness can’t exist without sadness. Citizen Kane can’t exist without Dude, Where’s My Car?

So what’s the opposite of creativity? It can’t be virtuosity, for several reasons. The two concepts are neither complementary nor mutually exclusive. It’s possible to be uncreative and unskilled, as most pop music can attest. It’s also possible to perform proficiently while simultaneously being innovative — in fact, creativity is frequently only respected when it comes from virtuosos. Think about how much more comfortable people feel with Picasso when they discover that he could also draw lifelike portraits; the reason he gave people flounder-faces wasn’t that he couldn’t deal with the real human form.

Furthermore, it’s questionable whether it’s even possible to be a virtuoso without being creative. The example that Sacks gave of such a thing was a young autistic savant who could draw startlingly accurate and detailed pictures of architecture — but he could only draw from real life, not from imagination. The mindless reproduction of someone else’s work seemingly requires no innovation.

The emphasis is on “seemingly” in that last sentence, because any transformation that involves changing from one medium to another actually does require innovation. Drawing a three-dimensional object on two-dimensional (for all intents and purposes) paper involves what should be, when you really think about it, an impossible manipulation of space. The use of perspective in visual representation wasn’t even conceived of until around 500 B.C.

Playing an elaborate piano concerto requires the creative transformation of notes on a staff to perfectly synchronized finger movements. Writing a news article, as I discovered this past summer, isn’t just stating what happened and when; it requires the orchestration of carefully chosen words to turn an event into narrative. In fact, medium-switching isn’t even a necessary trait; any transformation that entails even the slightest change involves some amount of creativity. The only form of generation that isn’t creative is asexual reproduction.

But though humans aren’t capable of asexual reproduction (yet), we still have a leg up because other animals aren’t capable of creativity in the same sense that humans are. Animals don’t consciously transform things. They can’t, because they don’t understand symbols. They can’t internalize models of the external world. When you try to point something out to a dog, it doesn’t look in the direction you’re pointing, it stares at your hand.

The fact is, creativity isn’t necessary for survival. Organisms got on for billions of years without it, and all but one of the millions of species currently inhabiting Earth are still getting along without it. But that one species has drastically transformed the planet, because creativity endows them with that ability. They twist the world to suit their purposes, rather than the other way around; they can do this because they can think creatively, manipulate the environment symbolically and imagine things that do not yet exist.

Creativity is a uniquely human quality, and humans are unique because they are creative. Shelters are constructed. Clothes are worn. Diseases are cured. Wars are fought. Lives are saved. The environment is irreparably destroyed. It’s all so unnecessary. True, without it we’d be walking on four legs, perhaps even swimming, lacking any organized form of communication, living in the primacy of consciousness — but we’d be alive.

Which is why I propose that the opposite of creativity is utility. Playing with symbols is frivolous. Art is frivolous. Heck, even cooking food is frivolous. Used to be that if you were hungry, you would tackle a wildebeest and tear its raw flesh from its bones with your incisors. Now we muck around with frying pans and French words.

My words, too, are frivolous. Who, having read this far, will be more fit for survival? Nobody, of course, including me — but I stay up late into the night, tossing phrases around in my caffeine-addled brain whilst wiser people slumber. I pursue goals whose lofty heights I will never attain. I try, unsuccessfully, to understand the world.

Like everyone else, without realizing it, I play with symbols; not because I need to, but because I can. And because, let’s face it, raw meat is pretty gross.