Imagine That!

On Cubbyholes and Creative Mashups: Thoughts on “Nacho’s Halo”

Michele and Robert Root-Bernstein — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 22:30:01 +0000

What do handmade cubbyholes and video mashups have to do with one another?
Or R&B ballads and contemporary dance? Lately, two experiences quite separated in time and place have taken on for us an associative buzz that speaks volumes about the nature of creativity.

The first experience took place over twenty-five years ago, when Michele's Dad showed her his latest bit of knock-it-together carpentry. The second occurred not more than a month ago, when our daughter showed us - several times! - a YouTube video that had caught her fancy. We'll let Michele tell the tale...

My dad was an economics professor and over the course of his career, wrote a number of books. Some of his creative behaviors - or at least, book-writing behaviors - struck me forcefully as a child and remain embedded in my memory. For hours, days, weeks, months, he holed up in his study, emerging only for meals and some bedtime horseplay. For many years he secured his study door with a chain fastened at the very top. He didn't want any of his five young kids messing with the many chapter drafts topped with rocks and other paper weights on his big desk. Later, when his children were older, he occasionally opened up his study to the curious.

The day I recall, he pulled me and one of my brothers into the room, eager to show off his latest organizational effort, a waist-high case of cubbyholes on wheels. Each of the twelve cubbyholes shelved the notes and drafts for a different chapter of the textbook he was currently revising. "That way, things don't get mixed up," he said. My brother, who liked carpentry himself, was suitably impressed with the speed and pragmatism with which my father had knocked together the woodwork.

"Just one thing," Jon said. "What are these holes doing here?" All the interior cubbyhole walls were randomly pocked with medallion sized perforations.

"Well," Dad replied, a sly smile hovering on his face, "you could say those holes reduce the weight of my cubbyholes, making it less work to wheel from my armchair to the desk. But, they have a dual purpose."

My brother and I took the bait. "What's that?" Dad's smile broke into the clear. "Those holes allow ideas to circulate from one chapter to the next!"

Did I mention my dad loved verbal jousting, the mental sleight of hand? My brother and I laughed. But I remember the exchange all these years later because those sturdy, but sieve-like cubbyholes provide a compelling metaphor for the many intellectual activities which our society holds as independent and impermeable one from the other. I particularly have in mind artistic genres and styles, academic disciplines, and professional fields.

On closer examination, however, genres, disciplines and other activities often turn out to have permeable boundaries and interdependent concerns. For the most part, we accept that a song is a song and a dance is a dance. Dance may be choreographed to a song, of course, and may even intend to dramatize or otherwise respond to the music. But for the most part our first thought would be that a pop ballad, for instance, and a modern ballet have nothing to say to one another.

Well, that was my first thought when my daughter Meredith insisted I watch a U-Tube video mashup (by Renada Ward) of Halo, the smash hit by the American R&B singer Beyoncé, and Por Vos Muero (I Die for You), a modern dance by the Spanish choreographer Nacho Duato. (This and other links below.)

What's a mashup? For those of you (like me) just catching up to the latest terminology, a mashup is a composition created by "blending" or "remixing" two or more unrelated songs (or, in this case a song track and a dance video), by overlaying one upon the other in some synchronous fashion.

Clearly, for a mashup to work well, there has to be some convergence of pattern between the unrelated songs, or the unrelated song and dance: rhythm, perhaps, or melody or thematic content. So the mashup creator relies heavily on recognizing patterns, an imaginative skill that involves perceptual awareness of structural regularities and congruences in and among things in their environment, like songs and dances. The mashup creator also flexes imaginative muscle by regrouping things according to these perceived patterns. If all goes well, something interesting takes place and a new pattern forms that is more than the sum of its parts.

I think that's just what happened when Ward remixed Beyoncé's Halo and Duato's Por Vos Muero. Meredith and I watched the U-Tube clip several times together and later I watched it some more by myself - (though not as many times as Meredith, who says she has only to hear the song now to see the dance in her mind's eye). In all fairness to the original compositions, I also checked out its constituent parts. I listened to Halo alone, I watched the ballad's original music video, and I watched video clips of Por Vos Muero and other dances by Duato.

Blame it on my romantic streak, but I like the mashup a lot. I'm particularly taken with several moments of congruence between the words and the dance movements. (You'll have to watch it to see what I mean.) By remixing the right pop ballad with the right contemporary dance, Ward really did create something new and compelling. The mashup tugs both song and dance in unexpected directions.

To my mind, Duato's dance brings Halo depth and breadth of meaning. Inspired by the love poetry of Spanish Renaissance poet Garcilaso de la Vega, Duato choreographed Por Vos Muero to 15th and 16th century Spanish music. His dance expression, however, is very much in terms of 21st century feeling and physicality. "When people come to see us at the theater, they should see themselves reflected on the stage," he says [Kumin]. Por Vos Muero explores that reflection in body movements abstracted from modern behaviors and gestures, but not identical to them. This abstraction means we are free to understand the dance physically, but also metaphorically. And suddenly, the words of the song suggest the multitude of ways - embodied, spiritual, ineffable - in which lovers achieve fragile moments of sympathy and union.

At the same time, Halo brings to Duato's dance an earthy impact. Judging from the mashup's number of views (over 13,000 as of this writing), that earthiness has a popular appeal that does not require a refined taste for ballet. Duato should be pleased. Connecting to today's audiences, he has said, is a primary concern. "I want them [people] to find a way to connect our dancing to their daily lives, to the clothes they wear, to the music they listen to..." [Kumin].

Ward's mashup does just that. By poking a few holes in the walls that formally separate R&B from ballet, she let's ideas circulate between the two. For both arts, new possibilities in aesthetic reach and audience appeal open up. And that's creative.

Links and References:

Beyoncé sings Halo at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnVUHWCynig

The Halo/Por Vos Muero mashup at

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0z2aqB9Swy0
Note: The German lines at the start of the video may be translated as follows:
I am bathed in constant tears
My sighs pierce the air
But still worse is not daring to tell you
That the state I'm in was your doing.

Kumin, Laura. (June, 2001). Nacho Duato and The Compania Nacional De Danza: Contemporary Dance with a Spanish Accent - Interview. Retrived January 10, 2010 from http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1083/is_6_75/ai_75089723/

NEED A CREATIVE NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTION? RECREATE!

Michele and Robert Root-Bernstein — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 22:55:49 +0000

It's New Year's, time to pitch unrewarding habits and catch on to new, soul-satisfying behaviors. But how to choose what to toss and what to try? When it comes to the promising hobby or two, it pays to know the difference between wreakreation and recreation.

We take Sir Frederick Banting, M. D., for our guide. Banting is best known to the world as the man who discovered insulin in 1921. But in Canada, where he lived and worked, Banting is also known as one of the nation's most prominent painters. In fact, he was nearly at the point of retiring from medical research to paint full-time, when he undertook a war-time mission for the Canadian government and died in a plane crash. Both science and art lost a hero that day. Science, because of the life-saving drug that makes it possible for millions of diabetics to live a full life with their disease; art, because of Banting's testament to the personal value of aesthetic practice.

Up until his death at the age of 49, Banting's science and his art coexisted in a healthy give-and-take. While medical research required dogged work (as any history of the discovery of insulin will attest), painting offered the replenishments of play. Banting identified painting as "recreation," explaining that while some people relaxed through activities that made them "wreckreated," others undertook projects that "recreated" them. Creating a painting was Banting's "recreation" and "re-creation." Filling his mind with the beauty of nature, and creating the means to re-create what he experienced, provided the inspiration and resolution to forge ahead with defeating diabetes.

Banting knew what we all discover sooner or later - that everyone needs to recharge their mental batteries. Creative people know that there is nothing like recreations to recreate the creative charge. Make things and make them your own, whether paintings or quilts or songs or poems or birdhouses. Avoid what wrecks you and resolve to "recreate" yourself through recreation!

Aha! Recognizing Everyday Creativity

Michele and Robert Root-Bernstein — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 16:28:14 +0000

We know an aha! moment when we have one. An emotional exultation often experienced as light piercing darkness illuminates our mind as we see something we’ve never seen before. Recognizing that aha! as it takes place in someone else’s mind can sometimes be an equally moving moment of awareness. Last month one of us (Michele) witnessed the flare of insight in a 5th grade classroom in Mississippi. Here’s what happened, in Michele’s own words.

For some time now, I have partnered with my colleague Lynnette Overby to present a haiku dance workshop in association with the Kennedy Center of Performing Arts Partners in Education Program. As part of a recent gig, I had the opportunity to demo how some part of that workshop might shape a classroom lesson. I had 30 minutes to lead some 5th graders in an exploration of abstracting as a concept and as a framework for the writing of haiku.

The basic idea I hoped to get across is that abstractions are simplifications. They express the essence of some complicated experience or understanding. Picasso’s ‘Bull’ is an abstraction (see left). So is a science experiment. So are numbers and so are many kinds of poetry, especially haiku. What all these share is the finding of a simple thread that weaves its way among complex phenomena to yield a surprising insight. Haiku can help students “get” this concept by implementing it. The form is so spare it forces novice and master poets alike to strip some heightened experience of nature to its bare bones. Feelings, experiences, emotions and ideas that may at first occur as random images and impressions must be distilled into just a few words that are both efficiently descriptive and yet sufficiently ambiguous to carry multiple meanings and intentions.

As a prompt for the writing of haiku, I gave each of the students a different nature photograph. Step by step, they observed the photographs and imagined themselves within the scene. Then they recorded on paper the things they saw, as well as the things they imagined hearing, feeling, smelling and so forth. I call this “getting clay on the table.” Now the poets had ideas and words to work with as they learned to construct a haiku. First they pulled out a few words to describe where or when the observed scene took place. Then they pulled a few more words to describe the most important or remarkable thing in that scene – what and what about it. They assembled these words and phrases in the haiku’s traditional 3 line form. This was a lot to do in half an hour and there was just time left to share the poems and the photos with other children seated nearby and then with the group as a whole.

It was in the sharing that I recognized a moment of insight. One of the students, a young girl, drew my attention to one of the other student’s photograph and asked, what is it? I was disconcerted. I had tried to choose pictures of things the children would be familiar with, so that the imagined experience would have some of the richness of lived experience. The photograph in question focused on a spider weaving a blade of grass into a circular web. Spider and web were backlit by a reddish yellow sun. But the photo was not as easily parsed as I had thought.

“That’s a spider,” I said. I included the other girl in my explanation, the one who had actually written her haiku to that picture. “Did you see the spider?”

She shook her head no. “What did you see?” I asked.

“The sun,” she answered.

Considering that she hadn’t seen the spider, I wondered what kind of impressions the sun alone had made on her. “Can I see your haiku?” She showed me something along these lines (I don’t have the exact words in front of me):

the rising sun
the sun is setting

I read the poem out loud to the two girls. “That’s an interesting abstraction,” I said. “Having two things happen that supposedly can’t happen at the same time makes an interesting poem. It makes me think.”

It made the first little girl think, too. A few minutes later, just as the class was dismissed she tugged at my sleeve.

“I think I know how the sun can rise and set at the same time,” she said. “My mother once lived way up north. I can’t remember where…”

“Alaska?” I asked.

“Yes. Alaska. My mom told me that in winter the sun comes up very low and then, before you know it, it goes down again.”

“You’re right!” I said. “How clever of you to think of that!”

How clever, indeed. That little girl had realized that during the Alaskan winter, the sun, even at it’s highest, looks like a setting sun at any other time of year in almost any other place. And since it goes almost straight across the horizon, a rising sun could not only look like, but act like, a setting sun. The girl had puzzled out an incongruity, reconciling two apparently incompatible ideas. Aha!

As the mathematician and poet Jacob Bronowski once wrote (and I paraphrase), the discoveries of science and art are each in their own way explosions of hidden likeness. The impromptu collaboration between the two girls yielded just such an explosion. If the first little girl gave voice to an intuitively felt contradiction, the second gave voice to the combustion of that tension. In puzzling out how a setting sun and a rising sun could simultaneously be one and the same, things that were different suddenly became one. What a wonderful illustration of everyday creativity!

And what a wonderful stimulant to my own everyday creativity. The more I think about it, the more I like that haiku, though I would add a final gloss:

rising sun
the sun is setting
day’s night

And even Bob, who rarely puts his mind to poetry--let alone haiku--was inspired:

far north
in evenings without days
the setting sun rises

Have the aha! moments explored here inspired you, too? If so, feel free to post your haiku in the comment section. By sharing everyday insights we sharpen our ability to recognize explosions of hidden likeness in others—and to appreciate those moments of awareness as our own.

Thinking INSIDE the Box!

Michele and Robert Root-Bernstein — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 00:40:28 +0000

Creativity is often equated with "thinking outside the box," but we think that's topsy-turvy. By playing with our open-ended puzzle, you can discover why.

Readers have made favorable comments on our recent post concerning the role of constraints in defining the creative process (Oct. 6, 2009). But recognizing that constraints free rather than fetter the creative mind has implications. Most importantly, it challenges the efficacy of "out of the box" thinking. Embracing rules and strictures can and often does stimulate discoveries that might otherwise go, well, undiscovered. To illustrate this point, we've invented the puzzle illustrated below, which has correct answers and incorrect answers. You'll notice it's a box. All the solutions take place INSIDE. And yet there are many, many solutions. In fact the point of the puzzle is to find as many viable solutions as possible. For this you have to use your imagination. You have to "see" patterns that will only appear when you INVENT them!

The rules are simple. Using the tiling illustrated below, find all possible differently shaped sets of four rectangular tiles sharing the length of a short edge wherever they touch. In other words, the tiles must touch, and wherever they touch, they must overlap along all of a short edge, or half of a long edge. Tiles that touch at just one point (a corner) or that do not touch any other tile cannot be part of a set. Two valid examples of sets of four rectangles are illustrated in red.

If you find all the different sets of four too easy to figure out, try sets of five and six. They become exponentially more diverse and exponentially more surprising. Just imagine what happens when you get up to sets of eight or ten!

Here's what we think you'll experience. You'll probably find the easy and obvious solutions first, often symmetrical sets. You will discover the inobvious and counter-intuitive patterns - often ones that are asymmetrical and disjointed - later, sometimes much later! Just as a guide, so far we've found more than twenty different sets of four. Note: we define sets as being different if they cannot be mapped onto one another by simply rotating them.

We should also warn you that you won't be able to fit all your solutions into the box that we've provided you: there aren't enough tiles. So you may want to print out several copies of the figure to play with.

If you analyze your "obvious" first solutions, you'll probably find that you begin by searching for patterns you're used to observing. The "inobvious" solutions are more difficult precisely because you have to reject the patterns you expect to find. In the process, you will probably find yourself redefining what makes a different yet acceptable pattern. The box stays the same, but new rules or constraints change what you can do inside it!

The other thing you may realize is that these kinds of puzzles can be used to exercise your creative imagination. Novelist Vladimir Nabokov recalled great sensitivity to patterns as a child, which he later realized trained his mind to discover hidden patterns among diverse things. Particularly when he was supposed to be preparing for bed, young Nabokov would begin to move the bathroom door back and forth to the sound of the dripping faucet. Then, "fruitfully combining rhythmic pattern with rhythmic sound, I would unravel the labyrinthian frets on the linoleum, and find faces where a crack or a shadow afforded a point de repère for the eye" - all the while singsonging a "youthful verse" of his own invention. (1)

In fact, our puzzle, too, was invented by looking at our bathroom floor, which is tiled just as in the figure above. Our creative leap was to recognize in a bathroom floor an analogy to creative thinking in general. Shades of Nabokov!

After all the head-scratching and tile-shading, we suggest that creativity isn't necessarily about getting out of the box. Sometimes it's about staying inside the box long enough to rethink and restate constraints, to reconceive and explore its almost infinite possibilities. And the great advantage is that by staying inside the box, and working with its rules, you can have complete assurance that every solution you reach solves the problem at hand.

(1) Nabokov, Vladimir. 1947 (reprint 1966). Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, p. 85.

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