Encefalus

Out of the Box: Scientific American.

The above link comes from an article published in Scientific American Mind. It has a conversation around three individuals: Julia Cameron, an awarded poet, film-maker and playwright, Robert Epstein, who is a psychologist and has worked in Scientific American Mind and Psychology Today, and John Houtz who is a psychology professor at Fordham University. The interviewer is Mariette DiChristina. The subject is creativity.

The conversation revolves around a lot of topics. I have made five points that I want to discuss. 

• 1)Everyone can be creative
• 2)Strategies to productivity
• 3)Correlation between getting ideas out of you all the time and getting one of them right and connection to probability theory.
• 4)Maddness and out of the box thinking
• 5)School and IQ hinder creativity

The first thing that the article tells us is that everyone can be creative. Some strategies we can use to bolster our creativity are the following:

1) Emerge yourself into your everyday activities, thus absorbing every stimulus possible. Cameron mentions that during a writer’s block she woke up in the morning and wrote three pages about things that came to her head. That helped her get past her writer’s block.

2) Try to think all the time of new things. Capture them so you can use them.

"Otto Loewi won a Nobel Prize for work based on an idea about cell biology that he almost failed to capture. He had the idea in his sleep, woke up and scribbled the idea on a pad but found the next morning that he couldn’t read his notes or remember the idea. When the idea turned up in his dreams the following night, he used a better capturing technique: he put on his pants and went straight to his lab! "

3) Broaden your horizons. With larger horizons, more ideas can arrive

4) Surround yourself with interesting things and people.

5) Challenge yourself continuously with new problems.

You can challenge yourself with something simpler than that

The writers make a division between little c (little ideas) and big C (the ideas that change the world). While most people believe that quality and quantity are two different things, in creativity they are connected. And this, because if you have a lot of ideas, some of these will eventually (and hopefully ) fall into the big C category. This can be supported by probability theory, since continuous trials bring the variable close to a certain probability, which (we hope) is greater than 0%, thus helping you to succeed. Or, more simply, if you throw a lot of arrows some ought to hit the mark . Thus, creativity should be a continuous hunt for new ideas. Of course, try not to get so many ideas that you sabotage yourself . Exercise self-discipline as well.

However, new ideas meet some problems. First they meet social inertia and social criticism. The authors encourage us to work through criticism, to avoid rejection and to surround ourselves with supportive people. We can also exploit strategies like writing our ideas which help us avoid criticism alltogether. Other choices include talking about our ideas to a few trusted friends who can provide valuable criticism or trying to visualize getting through the whole procedure. Of course, the most important aspect of all is to be self-confident.

All great people have met rejection and shunning at one point or another in their lives. People are not good with new ideas. Societies just have a tendency to equilibrate themselves to some kind of social homeostasis. This has lead to the conception of great scientists and artists as "mad" or "insane". These are simply stereotypes that discourage people from reaching their creative potential.

Unlocking your creative potential can make you look like this guy

Of course, school plays an important role in the whole procedure. Children are creative by nature, since they are not bound by our rules or knowledge about the world. School, however, hinders creativity. We teach children not to ask silly questions. We don’t allow them to daydream. We obsess over standardized tests and IQ scores. We give problems that have only one solution, instead of problems that could have no or limitless solutions. Therefore, our creativity is blocked by the educational system and the restrictions it imposes on our minds.

Also, concerning school and social rejection, groups can sometimes hinder creativity as well. And that because group dynamics influence individual creativity. Usually, the most dominant person’s opinion is the one to be accepted. In addition, groups tend to shape each person’s opinion to a middle ground amongst the opinions of different members. This means that if a person has a bad idea, this could become better, but if one has a really great idea, this could be extinguished. So, group work may not always be the best choice. Invividual work should be taken into account, too.

This is not the road to creativity

Concerning the paragraphs about school take a look at this article Children Educate Themselves III: The Wisdom of Hunter-Gatherers at Psychology Today. It speaks about hunter-gatherer societies where the children educate themselves. They don’t engage in any work, until late teens and they spend their childhood playing. They learn most things from direct observation. Maybe, a few of those ideas could be incorporated into our educational system in order to bolster creativity, instead of blocking it. Our virtues seem to be mostly centered around how to induce karōshi on our children, than helping their talents to grow.

To close this article, we shall offer in our further reading session some resources about general brain health. A creative mind first needs a healthy brain so we will give you some information to keep you occupied and well-going.

Further Reading:

This entry was posted on Friday, August 8th, 2008 at 3:29 pm and is filed under Cognitive. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.