Imagine That!

Can Women Be Creative Scientists? The Dangers of Testing for Creative Ability

Michele and Robert Root-Bernstein — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 00:53:54 +0000

Is creativity an inborn personality trait or a set of learned skills? The answer determines whether we test for intrinsic talent or teach creative skills. Current research on screening for scientific creativity suggests why getting the answer right is critical to the future of women in science.

Many psychologists treat creativity as a fixed personality trait. Some people have the "genes" or the "brain wiring" or whatever to be creative, and some don't. Assuming that creativity is hard-wired, numerous researchers have attempted to develop tests that screen for and identify that trait among younger and younger children. The problem with most of these tests is that they are never validated in terms of whether children or youth with ‘high potential' for creativity actually exhibit more creativity in their adult lives or work than do children or youth with ‘low potential'. In fact, many tests for creativity are based on so-called ‘divergent' or ‘lateral' thinking exercises that are known to correlate very poorly or not at all with real-life creativity. In general, we think such tests are junk.

Some tests for creativity, however, do correlate well with real-life performance. So what's the problem? Whether predictive or not, the tests themselves tell us nothing about the origins or foundations of the creative potential they spot. We believe there is a danger that these predictive tests could be misused to strengthen the case for treating creativity as a personality trait, rather than a set of learnable skills. Why does this matter? Consider the implications of a forthcoming paper by David Lubinski and Camilla Benbow (see Holden, 2009). In our opinion it provides an interesting test case of direct relevance to our social understanding of whether or not women have what it takes to be creative scientists and engineers.

Let us begin by making it very clear that it is not the purpose of Lubinski or Benbow to argue that women can't be excellent scientists or engineers. They certainly do not draw this conclusion in their research. But their forthcoming paper on testing for scientific creativity is going to feed this ugly issue whether they want it to or not.

So let's look at what Lubinski and Benbow have found. For several decades, they have been studying students who achieve extremely high scores (e.g., greater than 700 on the verbal or math section) on the SAT by the time they are 13 years old (Lubinski, 2009). Their previous studies have shown weak correlations between such precocious SAT scores and later success in a science or technology field. They also found, however, that although they had a significant group of women who achieved such amazing scores, almost none of them went into science, mathematics, or technology, period. The vast majority of these women chose law and medicine instead (Lubinski & Benbow, 2006). Lubinski and Benbow subsequently found one reason (Holden, 2009): High scores on visual thinking tests are far more predictive of successful science careers, important publications, and obtaining patents than SAT scores, but women, as a group, tend to score significantly more poorly on visual thinking tests than men. Perhaps this lack of a necessary skill causes them to avoid science and technology careers.

(As an example of a visual imaging test take a look at the figures here. Can each of these objects be rotated to fit perfectly into one another?)

You can see where this might lead (and again, we stress that this is NOT where Lubinski and Benbow go, nor is it where we believe we, as a society, should be going!). If one interprets visual thinking ability as being an intrinsic mental trait, and if one acknowledges that visual thinking ability is highly correlated with scientific and technological creativity and success, then it follows logically that women are not, as a group, mentally equipped to succeed in science and technology. This is, in fact, the proposition that got Lawrence Summers fired as President of Harvard University not too long ago. It's a hot-button issue.

The fallacy of such propositions is the assumption that tests measure intrinsic ability rather than trainable skills. We, too, have documented the fact that visual thinking ability correlates with scientific success (Root-Bernstein, et al., 1995). We have also discovered that scientific creativity is predicted by avocations that build visual thinking skills, such as visual arts, sculpting, modeling, photography, painting, wood- and metalwork, and other forms of tool use (Root-Bernstein, et al., 2008). This additional set of correlations strongly suggests that visual thinking ability can be trained. In fact, a number of science and technology educators have demonstrated in controlled studies that science and engineering students who initially test poorly on visualization tests (many of them women), and who are subsequently given mechanical or artistic drawing training, improve dramatically on retest and perform better overall in their science and engineering coursework. Women benefit particularly from such training (Lord, 1985; Deno, 1995; Sorby SA, Baartmans BG. 1996; Alias, et al., 2002; Sorby, 2009).

So what are visual thinking tests actually good for? We believe that they are good for differentiating between those who have already achieved a certain skill level and those who need further training. Testing, in our view, shouldn't be used to cull the ‘scientifically talented' from the ‘scientifically untalented', but rather to insure that our schools and colleges provide an adequate and appropriate education that will bring every student up to their full potential. If we assume that visual thinking ability is intrinsic rather than learned, we will fail to follow through for those students who can benefit from proven interventions such as crafts, drawing and computer modeling classes.

The distinction that we have drawn here between intrinsic ability and acquired skill is not, of course, as black and white as we have made it out, but we have drawn it this way in order to make an important point: It is all too easy to fall into dichotomous thinking. Lubinski and Benbow, for example, recently gave an interview about their research in which they proposed a much broader program of testing for visual thinking in order to "identify Edisons and Fords" overlooked by other forms of testing. Their language unfortunately sounds as if they are thinking of visual thinking as an inborn trait rather than a learnable skill. The point of such testing would be to find what's already out there, not to remedy educational deficits. Yet the notion that a single score on a single test taken at single point in our students' lives could identify all the scientific and engineering talent in the country seems absurd to us. We hope that Lubinski and Benbow also find it so.

Rather than waste money using visual tests to search for Edisons and Fords (both male!), we suggest modifying science and technology curricula to teach the ‘thinking tools' that underpin all creative thinking. Visual thinking (indeed, imaging and manipulative skills of many kinds that are valuable to scientists and engineers) can and ought to be taught to improve the skills of all students (especially women), thereby equitably enlarging the pool of potential innovators far beyond a few Edisons and Fords.

If we're right, more students will do better in their science and technology courses; women will come into their own in these professions; and the pool of innovators will expand. It all comes down to whether we assume the pool of talent is predetermined and the problem is to find it, or whether we believe that the pool of talent is determined by how well we teach. We're teachers. We believe in the latter (Root-Bernstein, 2009).

Sources:
Alias M, Black TR, Grey DE. (2002). Effect of instructions on spatial visualization ability in civil engineering students. Inter Ed J 3(1): 1-12.
Deno JA. (1995). The relationship of previous experiences to spatial visualisation ability. Engineering Design Graphics J, Autumn: 5-17.
Holden, Constance. (4 Sep 09). Science needs kids with vision. Science, v. 325, p. 1190.
Lord TR. (1985). Enhancing the visuo-spatial aptitude of students. J Res Sci Teaching, 22 (5): 395-405.

Lubinski D. (2009). Exceptional cognitive ability: the phenotype. Behavioural Genetics, 39: 350-358.
Lubinski D, Benbow C. (2006). Study of mathematically precocious youth after 35 years. Perspectives on Psychological Science, pp. 316-345.
Root-Bernstein RS, Bernstein M, Garnier H. (1995). Correlations between avocations, scientific style, work habits, and professional impact of scientists. Creativity Res J 8(2): 115-137.
Root-Bernstein RS, Allen L, Beach L, Bhadula R, Fast J, Hosey C, Kremkow B, Lapp J, Lonc K, Pawelec K, Podufaly A, Russ C, Tennant L, Vrtis E,Weinlander S. (2008). Arts foster success: Comparison of Nobel prizewinners, Royal Society, National Academy, and Sigma Xi members. J Psychol Sci Tech 1(2):51-63.
Root-Bernstein R. (16 Oct 2009). Teaching, not testing, for scientific vision. Science, v. 326, pp. 365-6.
Sorby SA, Baartmans BG. (1996) .A course for the development of 3D spatial visualization skills. Engin Design Graphics J 60(1): 13-20.

Sorby S. (2009). Developing spatial cognitive skills among middle school students. Cogn Process 10 (Suppl 2):S312-S315. DOI 10.1007/s10339-009-0310-y

Stimulating Imagination Through Constraints

Michele and Robert Root-Bernstein — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 20:53:31 +0000

You're a sixth grader. The teacher has just asked you to make up a story. Any story. Any way you want. "Be imaginative," she says.

You're all grown up. You've just asked yourself to write a poem. Any sort of poem. Any way you want. "Be creative," says your inner voice.

No problem, right? Wrong.

Recently we picked up a book called Creative Expression, Creative Education (2008) by Robert Kelly and Carl Leggo, two artist educators from Canada. Ostensibly a compilation of essays on creative process by Canadian artists, musicians, writers and performers, the book also has as its subtext the idea that creativity is a primary rationale for education. Now, creativity is widely valued these days. But as Kelly and Leggo astutely point out, it is also widely misunderstood - within and without educational circles. The teacher says "be imaginative;" we tell ourselves, "be creative." But what do we mean...exactly?

Kelly and Leggo propose that we need to do more than just let the chips fall where they may. Especially in classroom practice we need to be clear and explicit about definitions, concepts and processes. "While ambiguity is important in enabling possibilities in the act of creating," they argue, "it is equally important that the vocabulary for creativity be clearly defined to enable the development of an educational culture of creativity" (14).

We need also to dispel the misconception that to be imaginative and creative means to proceed without limitations of any kind, to do whatever you want. Chances are, for most children and most adults, such an open-ended, blue-sky task is altogether unmanageable and frustrating. And besides, how do you evaluate an endeavor whose only qualification is to have no qualification except to be 'imaginative' and 'creative', whatever that may mean.

So how do we define imaginative? What does it mean to be creative? Both those questions may be considered the guiding spirits of this blog. Indeed, they are twin spirits, for it is with imagination that we internally conjure the things that we externally construct or create. In our book Sparks of Genius we examine the imagination's thinking tools. Some of these-like observing, imaging, abstracting, body thinking and playing-we've discussed here in cyberspace. Learning to use these tools purposefully goes a long way to honing your ability to imagine something that is personally original and meaningful. We've also discussed in these blog-pages some definitions, some myths, and some desiderata concerning creativity. But what we haven't discussed, yet, is that the creative imagination works best when faced with explicitly understood constraints. (1)

What we mean by constraints are any number of boundary conditions, craft requirements, aesthetic standards and self-imposed 'rules'. Taken together, these conditions, requirements, standards and rules define the 'problem' you wish to 'solve' artistically and in your own way.

Recently, one of us - Michele - became very aware of the role of constraints in learning and making 'imaginatively' and 'creatively' while taking up a new art - in this case, the writing of haiku. The first thing many people will say is that haiku are syllabic poems. In the early 20th century, haiku practice indeed included the counting of syllables, and arranging them in a 5 - 7 - 5 pattern. Contemporary practice has tended to eschew syllable counts in favor of stress counts (2 - 3 - 2) or, simply, of the fewest words and syllables possible. Haiku primers lay out additional patterns: 3 lines (usually) of minimal length, the 1st and 3rd line (usually) shorter than the 2nd; two images and two phrases (most of the time); and a multitude of relationships that may be articulated between these two parts of the poem.

Michele quickly learned there was a difference between verbalizing these constraints and constructing poems that met the basic requirements. Or rather, she found that outward constraints were rather easy to satisfy (syllable counts, for instance, or 3 lines short - long - short, or two juxtaposed phrases).

autumn tattletale
again a field mouse rustles
through the kitchen trash

(unpublished)

However, in actual practice, constraints framing inward form were much more difficult to grasp. In fact, it was not until she began to explore and define inward constraints on her own terms that she met with some success publishing her poems in haiku journals across the U.S. and Canada. The relationship between the first and second phrase was not simply one of context and observation, she slowly realized; it was, rather, one of suggestive comparison between enduring and fleeting experience, in a way that made sense to her.

fall frost
a new piece of cheese
in the mouse trap

(South by Southeast, 2009)

For the novice the difference between these two poems may be all but unrecognizable. For the adept tuned in to shared as well as personal 'rules' of the game, the difference is profound.

There's a lesson here for teachers who want their students to be ‘imaginative' and ‘creative' and for grown-ups who ask the same of themselves. It's a lot easier to be make something personally original and publicly meaningful when tasks are understood as open-ended problems, with ‘rules' or constraints that help sift effective solutions from the duds.

Robert Kelly gives an example particularly relevant to the classroom. When he was in second grade, he recalls, the beginning of each week meant a new set of vocabulary words to be mastered. And the end of the week meant the writing of a story that used words from that list. Kelly loved this task. It was well defined and well-constrained. The vocabulary words would have suggested-but not dictated-certain lines of narrative. But Kelly's example doesn't end there. He remembers one week in particular, when he and some friends added an additional constraint of their own to the set task. They each decided to write the same story, but each from the point of view of a different character. Then, one after the other, they each read their stories to the class. The teacher was impressed.

And so are we. The boys not only had fun, they bumped up the creativity monitoring meter to a whole other level! Though it may seem something of a paradox, they had tightened their own personal set of requirements for the task, making it that much the easier to 'solve' the 'problem' in a way that was personally novel and effective.

As with children in the classroom, so with adults at work in the world. Having well-defined, well-constrained problems, we assert, is much more conducive to creative imagination than unrestrained blue-sky thinking. What do you think?

(1) Note: We base much of our understanding of constraints on the recent book by psychologist Patricia D. Stokes, Creativity from Constraints, The Psychology of Breakthrough (Springer, 2006).

SOURCES:

Robert Kelly and Carl Leggo. (2008). Creative Expression, Creative Education: Creativity as Primary Rationale for Education. Calgary: Detselig Enterprises.

Chained box at http://lateralaction.com/articles/thinking-inside-the-box/ brain and

Brain in the box at http://zenfulness.com/2008/09/13/thinking-inside-the-box/

Fostering Creative Scientists, Technologists, Engineers, and Mathematicians (STEM)

Michele and Robert Root-Bernstein — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 00:14:37 +0000

The National Science Board, which governs the National Science Foundation, convened an expert panel on August 25-26, 2009 to discuss ways to foster science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) talent. Getting ready to participate, Bob asked you some months ago what you would do if you could train the next generation of scientific and technological innovators. Here's his report on the meeting.

Bob was there at NSF to make sure that someone from outside the gifted and talented community had input. And a good thing, too! Some of the presenters clearly wanted to perform wider testing at earlier ages in order to capture kids with STEM talent and get them into accelerated programs as soon as possible. How does taking the SAT at age 12 strike you? Score a 700 and you'll be recruited into a gifted program or encouraged to go to a science magnet school or even a residential school focused on developing geeks. Score below 700 and you might miss out on all these opportunities, no matter how motivated you are!

Fortunately, other presenters pointed out that interest, dedication, perseverance, and other personality traits are often more important than testable talent. Moreover, those who perform extremely well on tests like the SAT at very early ages are almost always from privileged families who have access to unusual educational and sometimes financial resources that many equally talented, but under-achieving or disadvantaged children do not. A major issue was therefore how to identify STEM talent in underprivileged populations and in people who simply do not realize how fascinating STEM subjects can be until they are in their late teens or even twenties.

Interestingly, it emerged that the efficacy of science magnet schools and even residential preparatory schools in training STEM talent has not been demonstrated. Given an entering class of several hundred really bright kids every year, what school wouldn't produce lots of successful graduates? So how do we know that early, focused training in STEM subjects is really effective? Turns out we don't. This problem will undoubtedly be investigated in the future.

Equally surprising was the fact that out-of-school, self-choice learning environments are VERY effective in stimulating kids to become interested in, and to stick with, STEM subjects. One of the most inspirational speakers was undoubtedly Dean Kamen, President of DEKA Research and Development, who is well-known among teachers nationwide as the founder of FIRST Robotic Competitions. FIRST has cajoled tens of thousands of engineers, and hundreds of the companies they work for, to donate time and materials so that school-aged kids can build robots that then compete in local, state, national, and even international competitions to achieve pre-set goals. Studies have shown that kids voluntarily participating in FIRST competitions are five times as likely to graduate with an STEM degree from college as are kids from the same schools who don't participate. Pretty impressive! A major focus of discussion was how such expensive, highly intensive, volunteer-based programs might be cloned for other STEM subjects, and how we can better make use of museums and other community resources as well.

Bob's take was that we shouldn't try to test for talent. Talent is not something you have or don't have. There is no best curriculum that will turn out innovators. Talent is something that varies with the problem at hand, and needs to be nurtured in different ways at different rates in different people. Bob therefore argued for spreading the net as widely as possible in our search for promising STEM students. One way would be to introduce a curriculum on questioning that would teach every student what the great, unanswered questions are that still motivate STEM research. Draw students in by showing them how much we still have to accomplish. Make it personally exciting by showing each student how they might contribute.

Next, Bob argued that rather than identifying STEM talent as early as possible in order to provide special STEM training, we should do the opposite: we should foster breadth rather than narrowness. The basis for this argument is the simple fact that every unsolved problem exists only because the experts do not have the answer. That basic fact means that only people with knowledge distinctly different from that of the experts will be able to solve it. So rather than putting everyone through the same intensive, rigid curriculum, we should foster curricular diversity and diversity of skills. One thing our research has clearly shown is that the most successful scientists are also artists, musicians, creative writers, craftsmen, etc. (See our earlier post on this topic.) The "thinking tools" learned in the arts and crafts appear to be just as important for STEM success as specialized STEM knowledge.

Finally, Bob argued that the only proven way to teach innovation is through the example of innovators. Rather than moving students interested in STEM subjects through the curriculum at ever greater rates, we should slow the curriculum down and incorporate in-depth examples of how real innovations are actually made. What problems were innovators trying to solve? What unusual knowledge and methods and skills did they bring to these problems? What kinds of creative processes did they use in solving these problems? And how were these solutions received by the "experts" who had not foreseen such answers? Model the creative process as well as instill content knowledge.

In short, make science human, recognize the diversity of human beings who participate in science, and society will do a better job of recruiting and developing talent - that's our message.

If you want to see Bob's presentation, and those of many of the other National Science Board presenters, go to <http://www.nsf.gov/nsb/meetings/2009/0824/index.jsp>.

And check future posts for follow-up on our basic points!

Abstracting: The Angel Is in the Essence

Michele and Robert Root-Bernstein — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 19:06:26 +0000

We've all heard that "the devil is in the details," yet mathematicians, scientists, writers, and painters all contend that the angel is in the essence. It's only by doing away with the details that one can find the essence of things. But here's the question: Why should simplification produce greater insight than having all the details to hand?

Consider devils and angels themselves and you'll understand. Draw an angel and devil, or describe each in detail. Then compare your two depictions or descriptions. If you do this rigorously, you'll find that angels and devils actually share many characteristics. Most of these shared characteristics are not, therefore, useful in differentiating one from the other. Most of these shared characteristics can be eliminated.

Go ahead and try to eliminate every line or shade in your drawing that doesn't need to be there. Excise every word (especially those adjectives!) that you can cross out. How spare can you make your depiction or description and still communicate your meaning?

This is a delicate proposition. Eliminating too much information creates confusion. Say you eventually characterize angels by the word ‘halo' or its image. Devil you characterize by the word ‘horn' and its image. That's fine, but halos can also be found around luminescent objects of all kinds and people who have had neck surgery wear a type of brace called a halo as well. The horn creates equivalent kinds of confusion: lots of animals and even some beetles have horns. So reducing the difference between angels and devils to halos or horns is an oversimplification.

We need to add back some of the characteristics we eliminated. But knowing which ones are both necessary and sufficient isn't so simple. We could try specifying that angels and devils are human in form but differ in having halos and horns. Depending on our choice of words or our composite image, however, this still might not take care of the problem. French horn players certainly have horns, and cuckolds are also said to have horns; saints and neck surgery patients share halos with angels. So we need more qualifiers.

How many more qualifiers? There's the rub! We need a description or depiction of an angel that is general enough to describe all angels and another that is general enough to describe all devils, yet these descriptions or depictions also need to be specific enough to differentiate their subjects from all other objects. What, then, is the essence of each?

Getting at this essence is the process of abstracting. Practitioners of every sort of discipline define abstracting in almost identical terms. Abstracting is the process of choosing the one set of characteristics that uniquely typify or describe a class of things, eliminating all others. As the example of devils and angels suggests, this process is not easy, simple, or without its challenges. Indeed, despite the often very simple products of this process (a dictionary definition, a two line poem, an abstract painting, an equation), practitioners of all disciplines often consider abstracting to be one of the most difficult and rigorous processes that anyone can learn.

The surprising power of abstracting emerges from the fact that by distilling the characteristics that uniquely typify a class of things, all the possible meanings associated with that class of things are also distilled. Very simple descriptors can convey huge amounts of information. A good example is the painting that we illustrate here, which we found in our hotel room in Toronto last week. (We were there for a meeting of the American Psychological Association, but that's another post.)

At first sight, this painting looks like a piece of non-representational art; perhaps a color field exercise that is meant to bring up calming emotions associated with greens and blues. But placed in different contexts, it takes on additional meanings. Our hotel was only a stone's throw from Lake Ontario, so the painting describes an aerial view of the shoreline and the lake - at least in our minds. Or turn the painting so the green is on the bottom and suddenly it looks like a green hill topped by blue sky, the summer landscape of Canada. When it comes to abstracting, contexts mean everything. And what makes this painting an effective abstraction is the distillation of contexts into one simple image.

In our next few posts, we'll continue to explore ways in which people in a variety of professions abstract and how, at heart, they are all doing the same thing in the same way even though their products differ markedly. So we'll be doing our best to abstract out the essence of abstracting.

But what about those angels and devils? Once you've arrived at an abstraction of either one or both that you think works, try them out on a series of friends and acquaintances. Without giving anything away, see if they perceive what you intended. Do they get the reference to angels; do they see that you mean ‘devil'? Interestingly enough, their ability to understand your abstractions may very well depend on the context in which you place your drawing or your words. In fact, by placing a halo and horns together, you might provide enough context for an unambiguous interpretation of each.

So You Dance? You Can Think!

Michele and Robert Root-Bernstein — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 00:13:59 +0000

We admit it. We're great fans of the television show So You Think You Can Dance. Who can resist all those dance styles, all that great choreography, all those wonderful young dancers! Aside from the sheer fun, we also find ourselves thinking back to a series of short columns we wrote for a local dance school newsletter some years ago. We find ourselves reminded that if you think you can dance, it is also often true that you dance so you can think.

We excerpt a couple of those columns here:

#1. What is dance? Look in any dictionary and you'll find it variously defined as a rhythmic movement, a pattern traced in space, an emotional expression, a disciplined technique. Yet, all these criteria have been called into question in our century -- or at least reconsidered. For Alwin Nikolais, the defining characteristic of dance is motion. "The dancer," he has said, "is a specialist in the sensitivity to, the perception and the skilled execution of motion." But not any motion. The difference between mere movement and real dance is the difference between seeing and observing or hearing and listening. Two people may walk down the street with a destination in mind, but only the one who is aware of her body and her surroundings is dancing. Dance is also awareness.

Attention to everyday locomotion certainly informs a great deal of modern dance. Peter Pucci, for example, has created dance from the motions involved in basketball playing (see left). Does this mean that athletes are dancers? They move and they are aware. We don't usually call them dancers, however, and for good reason. As Anna Halprin puts it, some kind of symbolic expression is as important to dance as motion and awareness. "Anybody's a dancer to me at any time," she has said, "when I am involved in communicating with that person through his movement." Of course, if conscious communication through motion is the hallmark of dance, then we better call painters like Jackson Pollock dancers too. In his drip paintings, Pollock placed the canvas on the floor and moved around it rhythmically, flinging paint as he went. Painting was, for him, an experience and an expression of the moving body. His paintings might even be considered dance notations!

Motion, awareness, communication: at the end of one millennium of dancing and the start of another it seems as if dance is no longer just for dancers, but for anyone sensitive to the meanings of human motion.

#2. Dancers exercise every one of the universal thinking skills we explore in Sparks of Genius, The Thirteen Thinking Tools of the World's Most Creative People (Houghton Mifflin: 1999). They observe the movements of people and things. They image, or mentally manipulate, what they have observed and experienced, seeing with the mind's eye the movements they wish to make, feeling the feel of these movements before they enact them. Dancers analogize, linking the human body to living forms and inanimate processes around them. They imitate or model the movements of these things. They abstract certain elements of these movements in order to simplify, to grasp the essential. Thinking dimensionally, they form patterns in space and through time. They play with these patterns, altering and improvising. Ultimately, dancers transform stories or pictures or sculptures or games or ideas into dance. They synthesize music, choreography, costume and setting into one coherent spectacle. But most of all and most specially, dancers empathize through role-playing. And in related fashion, they think with the body, exploring what they know about the world with muscle movements, visceral tensions, gut feelings, and emotions.

The physical logic of body thinking is not readily expressed in words or numbers -- but it supports a kind of language nonetheless. And though dancers speak this language in every dance they make, they are not the only ones fluent in the imaginative vocabulary of body thinking. People in all sorts of professions, from backhoe operators to puppeteers, from artists and historians to surgeons and scientists think with movements and tensions of the body...

And so do all the millions of people who enjoy watching So You Think You Can Dance! We observe, we image, we empathize, we intuit what the dancer means us to think. We may not be able to dance with the same skill as the young men and women on the show, but like the muppet Miss Piggy and her French, we sure do "hear" the language of dance. By setting the mind dancing, we also set it thinking!

Be sure to check out our posts on Martha Graham, Loie Fuller, and dancing scientific experiments, too!

References:

Alwin Nikolai and Anna Halprin, cited in Root-Bernstein & Root-Bernstein, 1999. Sparks of Genius, pp 39 and 41.

Photo of basketball dance: Michael O'Neill

Do You See What I DON'T See?

Michele and Robert Root-Bernstein — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 18:37:42 +0000

We made the point in two previous posts that observing is the key to imaging. Perhaps perversely, here we also want to argue the reverse. Imaging is a key ingredient in any recipe for good observing-or bad observing, for that matter. Try on some inattentional blindness and perceptual illusions to see for yourself.

You often perceive what you expect to perceive and just as often ignore what falls outside your expectations. And there's the rub. Imaging can enhance perception, as we suggested in our previous posts, but it can also interfere with perception or fool with it entirely, so that you fail to observe things that really are there.
Studies of "inattentional blindness" suggest how and when this might happen.

Perhaps the most famous of these perceptual studies involves a video of two teams passing basketballs back and forth. Participants in the perceptual study are asked to observe the video and keep track of which team players pass the balls to which other team players. Given lots of movement and two balls, this is a challenging task. In the midst of the game, something quite striking happens that is not part of the basketball game. Amazingly, most of the study participants are so focused on keeping track of the game players and their passing balls that they do not perceive this striking event. Try if for yourself by going to the following website: http://viscog.beckman.illinois.edu/flashmovie/15.php

What did you see? Or not see, as the case may be? Go on, check it out now before we spill the beans at the end of this post.

The basketball-passing perceptual study game you just watched is based on earlier work done on perceptual inattention by Daniel J. Simons and Christopher F. Chabris at Harvard University. They videotaped people engaged in a similarly complex situation and asked participants to keep track of particular events. In the midst of the action, a young woman carrying an umbrella walks through the scene. Most study participants reportedly never saw her. You can see a still from the video in a paper by Simons and Chabris posted on their website at: http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~cfc/Simons1999.pdf. Take a look at Figure 1 and read the caption. See if you perceive anything odd about this figure and what is written about it. (**See note below for our observations on this image.)

Imaging can blind your observing. Imaging can also prime perception, as work with visual images by Gestalt psychologists makes clear. Gestalt images are characterized by incorporating more than one figure into a single picture in such a way that only one of them can be observed at a time. For example, we've placed the famous "duck-rabbit" image here. Looked at one way, it looks like a duck with its beak pointing to the left; looked at another way, it looks like a rabbit with its ears pointing to the left. Beak or ears? It depends on the imaging you bring to your observing!

We like to play a game with lecture audiences by biasing perceptions of this figure. We ask one half of an audience to shut their eyes and show the other half a picture of a duck head in a similar position to that shown in the Gestalt figure. Then we have the "duck group" close their eyes, keeping what they've seen in mind, while we show the other half of the audience a rabbit head in the same basic position as that shown in the Gestalt image. Finally, we show everyone the Gestalt image. Most of the people who were imaging a duck see a duck first; most of the people who were imaging a rabbit, perceive a rabbit. Though everyone eventually observes both duck and rabbit, what they perceive first depends to a large extent on what they expect or are otherwise influenced to see.

You can do the same thing with taste and smell. If you have some of those scratch-and-sniff stickers, try this with a friend or two. Get ready to use a scratch-and-sniff sticker that smells like one of their favorite foods, say chocolate. But first show them a picture of some very different food they really like, say pizza. Tell them to imagine the smell of the food illustrated in the picture and tell them that the sticker will remind them of that smell.

Before you go any further, consider that what you're concocting here is a perceptual illusion, in this case with smell. Artists, photographers, musicians, psychologists, and magicians routinely fashion such illusions by creating expectations that are not in sync with what our senses actually observe. Which all makes for some fantastic fun. So go ahead, have your friends scratch and sniff the sticker and watch the disgusted looks on their faces! Even though they like chocolate - and its smell - they will hate the sensation it gives them when they are expecting the smell of pizza!

Clearly, imaging can mess with observing in more ways than one. It can hinder observation of what is really there; it can project observation of what isn't there at all. And under certain circumstances we choose to believe our imaginary images rather than the reality of our perception. We see ducks and ignore rabbits. We count tossed balls and discount the gorilla, the one who walked through that perceptual study video mentioned above. Ever wonder what else you perceive that doesn't really exist? Or what you don't perceive that does? The history of exploration and discovery is littered with such experiences. Together, observing and imaging make up an interactive cognitive system that, lucky for us, is also often self-correcting.

And by the way,
** What we noticed about Figure 1 in the Simons and Chabris paper is that the caption says the photograph is a "still" from the video. A "still" is a single frame from a video or movie. But the photograph in this figure cannot be a "still" because one can see through several of the participants! The Figure must therefore be a composite, probably made by sandwiching two or more "stills" from the video. Now why did Simons and Chabris do this? Were they testing their readers' perceptual inattention? What do you think?

© Robert and Michele Root-Bernstein 2009
Sources:
Invisible gorilla video: http://viscog.beckman.illinois.edu/flashmovie/15.php
Inattentional blindness : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inattentional_blindness
Daniel J Simons, Christopher F Chabris. 1999. Gorillas in our midst : sustained inattentional blindess for dynamic events. Perception, 28 : 1059-1074 : http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~cfc/Simons1999.pdf

What Mr. Spock Can Teach Us About Imagination

Michele and Robert Root-Bernstein — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 16:52:32 +0000

Watching the new Star Trek movie reminds us once again that Mister Spock is a master of the imagination. How's that?! Spock, the premier exemplar of logic and reason, imaginative? Indeed! He is in full control of what may be the most important thinking skill in our creative toolbox.

That thinking tool is imaging. Imaging is the ability to recreate sensory impressions and feelings in our minds in the absence of extrinsic or direct physical stimulation from our eyes, ears, nose, tongue, hands or body. Imaging builds upon our ability to observe, explored in our previous post. Our store of imagistic memories depends on how much we have experienced and how well we have learned to perceive the subtle distinctions of life. In a nutshell, what we have observed with any of our senses, we can imagine; what we imagine, we image.

It should come as no surprise that imaging is tied to that larger web of cognitive skills we call imagination. According to the Webster's dictionary, imagination refers to our mental images and conceptions, but also what we can do with those images. The truth is, we are not stuck with our simple impressions of experience or memories of the past. We can alter, combine, synthesize and otherwise manipulate sensory images to form images and ideas of things "never before wholly perceived in reality by the imaginer." We can plan for the future. We can conjure things that do not yet exist or never will. We can make believe. We can take the creative leaps we call scientific hypotheses and artistic visions.

In another post, we made the point that physicist Albert Einstein was a world-class imager, particularly of the visual, aural and kinesthetic sort. Perhaps you've seen on a tee-shirt or a poster somewhere one of his most quoted sayings: "Imagination is more important than knowledge." When it came to his breakthrough thought experiments, this was undoubtedly true. The same reliance on our imaging abilities suffuses art.

Consider, for instance, the mentation involved when poet Stanley Kunitz tells us that "the imagination is a deep-sea diver that rakes the bottom of the poet's mind and dredges up sleeping images...." (1) In order to tell us about the writer imaging, Kunitz asks us, in effect, to image. In your mind's eye conjure these things: See a deep-sea diver. See her rake. See the sea, the bottom of the sea. See the diver raking up visual impressions, but also sounds, tastes, smells, feelings, the flicker of candlelight, the stolidity of an tree--all these and more, like so many clams or anemones. These images are the building blocks of our thoughts, before we have words to preserve them and to communicate them to others.

Most people are aware of a spoken stream of consciousness that accompanies their waking moments. Many are also aware of their non-verbal mentation, Kunitz's "sleeping images" in the mind's deep. In researching Sparks of Genius, we came across innumerable artists, writers, scientists, and inventors referring to this pre-verbal imaging as the site of insight and inspiration. It seemed reasonable to conclude that very successful thinkers access this terrain as regularly as they can: in day dreams, night dreams and other relaxed, yet meditative states. For Kunitz (left), this ocean of images is, in fact, where a poem begins, "even before it is ready to change into language...." (2)

Creative individuals rely on imaging for primary thoughts. Only later do they find other means of expression. Einstein spoke explicitly of a secondary step, which in his case involved transforming his visual, aural and kinesthetic images into mathematical descriptions of reality. That translation process can be hard work. Poets and writers spend years learning to communicate publicly what they have privately imaged, to say in words "what cannot be said in words," as the novelist Ursula LeGuin has put it. (3) LeGuin's paradox is a real one. The poet, the novelist, the physicist or, for that matter, your very best friend may search long and hard for the right words (or other symbols) to convey what they see or hear or feel in the mind. But none can ever be sure that these words (or other symbols) reconstruct the same image in your mind or the minds of others.

The imprecise nature of communication has led some individuals to yearn for a direct imaging device. Such a device would allow them to bypass the difficult translation process. The writer Margaret Drabble, for instance, has imagined a machine for recording her dream images, so that she might retrace the narratives as she first experienced them. Likewise the inventor Nikola Tesla believed that one day "it should be possible to project on a screen the image of any object one conceives and make it visible." (4) By his own admission he "devoted much thought to the solution of the problem" - presumably by imaging!

It is tempting to speculate that recent advances in virtual reality projections and other neuro-technologies may be leading us, eventually, in the direction Tesla envisioned. Consider the cutting edge research which will allow paralyzed individuals to think movements which prosthetic devices and other machines can carry out for them.

For the time being, however, we're stuck with language and other manufactured translations such as the visual and plastic arts, music, dance, scientific graphing and modeling and mathematics to pass on our imaging to others. That's not such a bad tradeoff. And we can still dream--which brings us back to Spock.

In Star Trek lore the Vulcan species of humanoid (of which Mr. Spock is, of course, a member) can directly access (most) other minds via the mind-meld, a make-believe "technique for sharing thoughts, experiences, memories and knowledge with another individual." (5) Spock strategically places his fingertips on the face of another individual and directly experiences their imagining mind as if it were his own. If only we could do the same!

In some ways we're not that far off. What is really amazing about our imaging imaginations is that we can feel-intuit-know what Mr. Spock is doing when he performs a mind-meld, even though none of us can actually do it -- at least not directly! Indirectly, of course, we are all already adept at mind-melding, to the extent that when we read, for example, we try to recreate in our minds sounds, sights, smells, tastes and feelings we sense in the minds of the characters and authors we attend to. We try to imagine. We try to understand.

What Mr. Spock and his mind-meld reminds us of is that imaging - and imagination - truly is at one with knowledge.

REFERENCES:
1. Cited in Robert Campbell. (October 1, 2000). God, Man and Whale (review of The Collected Poems by Stanley Kunitz). New York Times Book Review, p. 16.
2. Ibid.
3. Ursula LeGuin. 1976. Introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness. New York: Ace Books.
4. Cited in Robert & Michele Root-Bernstein. 1999. Sparks of Genius (Boston: Houghton Mifflin), pp 66-67.
5. ‘Vulcan (Star Trek)', Wikipedia, retrieved June 16, 2009 from <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulcan_(Star_Trek)>.

Oh Say, Can You See?

Michele and Robert Root-Bernstein — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 00:21:38 +0000

What does a fish counter have in common with an experienced baseball player? A sighted choreographer with a blind conchologist? And what might they share with the people who clicked YouTube over 90 million times last month to see the unlikely Scottish singing sensation Susan Boyle? Tease out the imaginative thinking tool that crops up again and again in each case, and you've got the beginnings of your answer-and a start on understanding the bases of human problem-solving and creativity.

Fish counting is a low tech job. All it takes is a mechanical clicker and a pair of eyes. Or, rather, a trained pair of eyes. For a good fish counter must learn to distinguish between dozens of species that look very much alike in the space of the few seconds it takes a spawning fish to flash past the observation window at the top of a dam on an Oregon river.

Similarly, baseball is a game where it pays to keep your eye on the ball. When the batter hits one, outfielders typically take about a second and a half to respond to the sight and start running to meet it. But really experienced outfielders pay attention to the crack-or clunk-of the bat, a sound cue that registers in 0.3 seconds. These players are off to meet the ball a step ahead of everyone else.

Two different esoteric skills, you might say: the first critical to the accurate assessment of salmon fisheries; the second to competitive edge in a demanding sport. But in both cases, the thinking skill is the same. Observing.

Observing is what we do when we pay heightened attention to things in an open-minded way. Sounds easy enough. Human beings are generally equipped to absorb information from the external environment with eyes, ears, nose, tongue and skin. We take in signals from our internal environment, too, by monitoring sensations of body balance, posture, tension and movement. But as our first two examples must make clear, observing well takes a little extra something. Call it sensitivity to the nuances in life. That means looking, not just recognizing; listening not just hearing. There's a difference between the crack and the clunk of a bat, a Chinook and a sockeye salmon, a difference that must be learned. And that learning takes time, patience, and practice.

Scientists know all about that kind of practice. Karl von Frisch, the man who first decoded the dance language of bees, wrote of the many hours he spent watching bees and other living things: "I discovered that miraculous worlds may reveal themselves to a patient observer where the casual passer-by sees nothing at all."

But simply looking is often not enough; you also have to know what to look for. The biologist Jared Diamond has said that in the field he and other experts on tropical birds must "learn to ... detect a bird just as a quick bit of motion that's different from the motion of a leaf in the treetops."

This means training oneself to see very fine differences between one thing and another - or to hear, smell, taste, feel or otherwise observe them. Ornithologists often identify birds by sound, not sight. And the blind conchologist Geerat Vermeij identifies seashells and other natural objects by touch. At times, his heightened awareness of shape and texture has allowed him to observe distinctions that sighted biologists overlook.

As must be clear by now, observing is all about the complex interaction between expectation and discovery. On the one hand, if we don't train ourselves in what to expect, it's hard for us to recognize the subtle signs of interesting phenomena. On the other, if we only look (or listen or feel) for what we expect, we also risk missing the new and remarkable.

The artist Jasper Johns explored this conundrum in a series of American flags, which he painted in strange colors, highly textured surfaces and ghost-like values. "What interested me is this," Johns says. "At a certain point I realized that certain things that were around me were things that I did not look at, but recognized. And recognized without looking at. So you recognize a flag is a flag, and it's very rare that you actually look at the surface of it to see what it is..."

Observe one of his flag paintings [Moratorium, 1969, to the left] and experience for yourself what he means: the uncanny sensation that what you recognize is not what you expect leads to the discovery that the new flag in green, black and orange is actually an afterimage of the old red, white and blue. When you really see what you usually only look at, it works like this: Stare at an American flag for 15 or 20 seconds without blinking, close your eyes, and you'll see Johns's flag. Conversely, stare at Johns's flag for 15 or 20 seconds without blinking and then close your eyes. You should see what most of us think of as the American flag, in its proper colors! (If you have trouble making this work with the small image here, check out Johns' piece, Flags, 1968, at http://www.wfu.edu/art/ac_johns_flags.htm).

Observing-and observing well-plays a role in many of our daily activities, both professional and personal. We all experience important moments when we really see something for the first time; or we realize we are mistaken in what we thought we heard-or thought we understood about people, places and things.

Chances are, many of the millions of people who watched Susan Boyle sing had one of those moments. Driven by curiosity to observe a performance that confounded expectations...they discovered something quite remarkable. About Susan Boyle and others like her. About themselves. When you really pay attention, and look, listen, and feel deeply, miraculous worlds may be revealed.

What have you observed lately, with renewed wonder? How does observing figure in your profession or hobby? In upcoming posts, we'll go one by one through the imaginative skills we explored in our book Sparks of Genius, The 13 Thinking Tools of the World's Most Creative People. Let us know how each plays a part in your thinking and creating. Help us make the point that these imaginative tools for thinking belong to us all.

SOURCES:

Glanz, James. (June 26, 2001). The Crack of the Bat: Acoustics Takes on the Sounds of Baseball. Science Times section of The New York Times, D1.
Lyall, Sarah. (May 31, 2009). Unlikely Web Star Loses on a British Talent TV Show. The New York Times, p. 12.
Riha, Carol Ann. (May 3, 1998). It's no fish story: Computers can't replace human counters. Associated Press/Lansing State Journal, p. 8A.

For sources on Frish, Diamond, Vermeij and Johns, see Robert and Michele Root-Bernstein. 1999. Sparks of Genius. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

If You Could Train the Next Generation of Scientific and Technological Innovators….

Michele and Robert Root-Bernstein — Thu, 14 May 2009 21:45:33 +0000

If you could train the next generation of scientific and technological innovators, how would you go about it? What aspects of education, in school or out, would you add, change or jettison?

These important questions have recently been posed by the National Science Board of the National Science Foundation. The Board will host two-and-a-half days of discussion at the end of August, 2009, and Bob has been invited to participate. The object is to envision new educational programs capable of fostering students most likely to make major breakthroughs in science, technology and mathematics. The National Science Foundation believes that to keep America at the forefront of innovation, something must be done to improve science, math and technological training. But what?

Instead of telling you what we think about this important topic, we've decided to run a bit of an experiment by asking you, our readers, what you think.

If you are one of the creative types that the National Science Foundation is looking for, what formal and informal educational experiences helped or hindered you?

If you got turned off at some point in your education by the current way math, science and technology are taught, what might have been done to stimulate your continued interest?

Who or what do you think makes an individual into an innovator?

What kind of programs would you devise to meet the National Science Foundation's objectives?

We want your input! We want the input of your colleagues and friends! Please feel free to send this post around and encourage responses at the blog site.

With your help, sometime later in the summer, before the NSF colloquium, we'll summarize what we've learned.

Inner Beginners, Entrepreneurs and the Future of Creativity

Michele and Robert Root-Bernstein — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 19:11:48 +0000

Creativity favors the inner beginner. This was the message we took home last month from a national symposium on creativity at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, NC. A light green haze hung in the dogwoods in and around campus, but spring was not the only thing in the air there. We sensed a hum of joint exploration and purpose among the many researchers from many fields in inquiry who came to give talks, hear lectures, attend performances and converse with one another. We found people willing to break out of their expert fields, to embrace multi-disciplinary endeavor and to consider in their work diverse notions of aesthetic and intellectual purpose. Three themes in particular ran through our two-day experience like sap in the trees. Let's call them supra-disciplinarity, the creator as neophyte, and creativity as a positive social value. The future of innovation depends upon them.

Supra-disciplinarity combines methods, tools and processes from many fields to address complex, multi-variable problems. It begins by acknowledging connections between disparate fields. The physicist Josh Frieman and the filmmaker, Abigail Child formally discussed points of contact they saw between their respective interests and endeavors. In preparing for their formal conversation, they discovered a shared fascination with certain ideas, like time, and shared commitment to certain knowledge-building strategies, like aesthetically informed discovery and play. Though no one argued that film making or theoretical physics produced equivalent intellectual or emotional results, there was a sense that these two practitioners met as creators equally captivated by the same fundamentals of wonder and exploration.

This common understanding was only a hop, skip and a jump from the kind of problem-solving collaborations that David Edwards, a biotechnologist at Harvard, tries to jumpstart at his experimental art-and-science center in Paris, Le Laboratoire. Edwards deliberately pairs artists and scientists whose complementary skills and convergent interests promise breakthrough ideas and inventions, from the gustatory (inhalable chocolate, anyone?) to the environmental (how about a living air filter, shown at left?).

It takes a particular, and even peculiar, kind of person to break through disciplinary boundaries and redraw intellectual or commercial markets. Whether artist, scientist, inventor or entrepreneur, we met individuals driven to follow inner drummers and strike out in unconventional directions. Often they are remixing and repurposing hitherto discrete ways of understanding things and being in the world. Edwards, whose own fields of endeavor combine biology, engineering, writing novels, and starting businesses, spoke of himself as a serial neophyte.

Neophyte means beginner. Neophyte is the opposite of expert. The serial neophyte is one who relishes the prospect of feeling a kid again, embracing the uncertainty of ignorance and discovering new things constantly. The serial neophyte, first cousin to the polymath, purposefully moves from one discipline and one venture to another, transferring thinking skills and problem-solving strategies as he or she goes.

Another symposium presenter, the artist Meredith Monk (portrait at left), has most definitely embraced the neophyte within, which, in the Buddhist tradition, she calls "beginner's mind." As an artist at work on the cutting edge of multi-media performance, Monk has fended off fear of the unknown by purposefully placing herself in the moment of art-making, trusting in the discovery process, waiting for problems and their solutions little by little to make themselves known. In a capstone concert, she demonstrated what may sometimes be the glorious result: creating a whole new dimension of human possibility. Monk did more than sing. With unusual sounds, hums, clicks, ululations and exhalations, she gave expression to the universe.

That's a tall order. By wearing the various hats of composer, vocalist, choreographer, dancer, filmmaker and performance artist, most often simultaneously, Monk takes it in her stride. Her particular blend of these art forms took root in one formative flash of inspiration: that her voice could move like the body, and like the body, was capable of a wordless vocabulary of images and emotions. For over forty years, she has dedicated herself to the discovery of that language, in the process breaking down specializations in art (voice is not dance is not image) and reintegrating them into a new whole (voicedanceimage).

Embracing the beginner within, not just in one field of endeavor, but in many, Monk has proven herself, in the words of one critic, "a provocateur, a pathfinder, even a prophet of sorts" (Ulrich). As we learned at the symposium, these characteristics place Monk in close company with entrepreneurs in many fields of endeavor. Successful entrepreneurs, along with successful artists, scientists and inventors, tend towards the visionary, show high levels of persistence and willingness to take risks.

These behaviors and mindsets come in handy for anyone set on generating novel ideas and effective inventions. The particular job of the entrepreneur is something more, however: to turn creative ideas and inventions into viable innovations. The entrepreneur, in other words, creates commercial products and economic markets that drive business. This is true whether the innovation in question is the next iteration of gee-whiz technology (think Twitter); the next workable strategy for alleviating poverty (e.g. micro-financing); or the next new forum for stimulating art science collaborations (among which, David Edwards' Le Laboratoire in Paris).

Like many in attendance at the symposium, we tried on a diverse idea or two ourselves-chief among them the notion that artistic and scientific creativity might fruitfully be understood as a kind of intellectual entrepreneurship, akin to the social and commercial kind. (In which case, Monk has been a pioneering intellectual entrepreneur.) Add to that the rather different idea that the challenges of today and tomorrow increasingly require the supra-disciplinary neophyte, whether working individually or in teams, to synthesize solutions that have thus far eluded specialized experts and to "bring them to market" in the arts, sciences and technologies. When novel arts and sciences expand our human understanding, when social policies and commercial technologies improve quality of life for more people, creativity takes center stage as a positive social value.

And here's another diverse thought. We might all profit, in professional vocation or personal avocation, from embracing our inner beginner, learning new things and starting afresh again and again and again... Do we dare?

References

Ulrich, Allan. (February 13, 2006). Meredith Monk's eerie vocals have led her to unique synthesis of arts. San Francisco Chronicle, C1.
Available at http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/02/13/DDGNA...

For more on Meredith Monk, see http://www.meredithmonk.org/

For more on Le Laboratoire, see http://www.lelaboratoire.org/

For more on the Wake Forest Symposium on Creativity, see http://www2.journalnow.com/content/2009/mar/15/finding-the-creati...

Photo of dogwood blossoms by Martin LaBar