The creation and curation of all things worthy: Inspiration as vital force in persons and cultures

Inspiration is an epistemic-motivational episode in which an individual is awoken to what is valuable and imbued with the spirit to express this understanding. In this article, I tell the story of my research program on inspiration. I begin by describing the origin of my research program as a corrective to the emphasis on personal agency in the motivation literature. I then review work on foundational issues of conceptualization, typology, methodology, and construct validation. Next I review research on the role of inspiration in the creative process. Inspiration is a response to, not a source of, creative ideas. Its function is to motivate transmission (e.g., actualization) of an idea in the form of a tangible product. Inventors prone to inspiration receive more patents, and inspired writers are more creative, productive, and efficient. Next I situate inspiration within a broader cultural-evolutionary context. Inspiration is infectious, such that inspired writers inspire their readers. Processes of transmission and contagion suggest that the core significance of inspiration lies in its procultural function. Inspiration, I argue, is a genetically evolved adaptation that catalyzes and guides cultural evolution by compelling selective retention of cultural wisdom in the form of cultural artifacts (e.g., scripture, poetry, inventions, actualized selves), thereby making the species more adaptable to local and changing environments. Finally, I discuss benefits to well-being. Inspiration marks moments of peak functioning that integrate the hedonic well-being of the primitive creature, the eudaimonic well-being of the social creature, and the self-transcendent well-being of the cultural creature.