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Ask 10 adults to offer an example of a wondrous person, and I'd wage that 9 of them would point to a child. Children have their own version of wonder, but so do adults. In fact, many adults have the capacity for a richer form of wonder than do most children.
Why do adults give wonder away to children? Take, for instance, a 2009 study titled "Child's play: Facilitating the originality of creative output by a priming manipulation." The scientists gave a group of undergraduates a prompt: "You are 7 years old. School is canceled, and you have the entire day to yourself. What would you do? Where would you go? Who would you see?" They gave a second group this prompt: "School is canceled, and you have the entire day to yourself. What would you do? Where would you go? Who would you see?" So, of course the second group - with no instructions to think like a seven-year-old - offered adolescent-like responses that paled in creativity to the first group's. Then both groups took a version of the Torrance Test of Creativity. The first group fared much better in flexible thinking.
Following this study, the blog and magazine headlines - including one in the most recent issue of Psychology Today - predictably announced, "Think like a 7-year-old to boost creativity." That's catchy and an accurate reflection of the study. But the idea itself also might be misleading.
True, many infants, toddlers, and children have a perpetual fascination with all-things-new because, well, everything - from hair pins to mud puddles to the ability to draw to the ability to make farting sounds with the armpit - is new to them. I admit I spend some time almost everyday watching with wonder my own one-year-old daughter's perpetually awakening consciousness that explores the world through pudgy fingers, smacking lips, and wide blue eyes. For most of us, fresh senses, indeed, are the first avenue to cultivate wonder, and fresh senses are what many children have that we adults often sorely lack.
Still, I prefer my experiences to my daughter's - and I hope to prefer mine when she's a curious ten-year-old bouncing through the Wonderland of upstate New York and Manhattan.
In her journals, Pulitzer Prize winner Ellen Gilchrist muses while observing her three-year-old grandchild's risk-taking and openness, "How to hold onto that genius?" And in the late 1890s, poet Charles Baudelaire wrote in an essay about modern art, "Genius is the capacity to retrieve childhood at will." That's precisely what the subjects of the study were doing by ‘thinking like a seven-year-old."
Our Picassos and Klees and Oldenbergs have just that capacity. Scientist Richard Feynman stayed in perpetual wonder to make breakthroughs in physics. Economist Paul Romer recently broke away from the academy to wonder how capitalism could be done differently. He's helping Third World leaders create "charter cities." That's radical wonder in action.
But these highly creative people are not retrieving childhood - which includes, remember, all of its muddled-ness and meanness and necessary dependency and utter self-centeredness. These adults are retrieving wonder - which is what Baudelaire meant. When we say that "Genius is the capacity to retrieve wonder at will," then we're not nostalgically trying to bring back some "lost child" or "find our inner child." We are supremely present with who and how we are.
The grown-up brain is better than the young brain - even the teenage brain - in some ways. That, according to Barbara Strauch's gathering of recent neuroscientific studies in her book The Secret Life of the Grown-Up Brain: The Surprising Talents of the Middle-Aged Mind. True, Strauch reports, that a typical fifty-year-old brain processes information at a slower speed than the typical twenty-five-year-old's. And, yes, the sixty-year-old brain might be more apt to forget names. But the middle-aged brain has a wealth of experience - thus making its problem-solving skills superior to the young adult brain.
And the middle-aged brain also is more prone to calmness and happiness.
A forty-four-year-old brain might have more potential to be prone to wonder than a four-year-old, fourteen-year-old, or twenty-four-year-old brain. Why? Fear, or our reactions to fear and negativity. That's the finding of cognitive psychologist Mara Mather of U.C.-Santa Cruz and colleagues. They hooked up the brains of young adults and of middle-aged and older adults to measure their amygdalae. The amygdalae is the almond-shaped region of the limbic emotional brain that registers our primal flight-or-fight (or, I would say, our shoo-or-shout) reactions. If you want to measure your Reactivity Meter, then measure your amygdalae. In the study, slides of images that typically would elicit positive reactions (children on a beach) and images that typically would elicit negative ones (people standing over a grave or a cockroach crawling on a pizza).
Older people's brains kept responding positively - even when faced with otherwise "negative" images.
Here's one of my points: More open-ness and less reactivity can prime people for more wonder than worry. And in general older brains are less reactive. Stressed, maybe, but less reactive.
We can cultivate wonder at will. That's an operative difference between most adults and most children.
Knowledge and experience can enrich, not destroy, wonder. The William Blake School of Innocence and Experience - that divides the two - distorts and over-simplifies this fact. This "school" equates childhood with innocence and wonder, and adulthood with innocence and wonder lost as experience settles in like some looming cloud that rains on every adult's parade.
Knowledge can be of service to wonder. When I read, say, Amy Leach's essay "Pea Madness" in Orion Magazine on the pea, her knowledge is in service to wonder. Because of the lyrical way her mind
Knowledge of peas can lead to deep wonder.
imparts knowledge, I will regard and taste peas with fresh eyes and tongue now. My experience of loss, of grief, of sorrow in turn deepens my awe of this gossamer existence, sustained by breath and blood and bones and wind and love. In his memoir A Private History of Awe, Scott Russell Sanders stands in the middle road of middle-aged wonder between his newborn granddaughter and his dying mother.
If we continue associating wonder with childhood instead of with dynamic adulthood, then, ironically, we might continue to refuse to grow up. And we might continue to create a culture in which children and teenagers also refuse to grow up. When an adult sings the Peter Pan song, "I Don't Want to Grow Up," I think, "Really?" You want to be a poop-in-your-pants toddler? Or a teenager? Do you really want to be twenty years old again? Is adult responsibility and the inevitable disappointments and desires deferred only a burden to be wished away?
I adore my daughter and honor children their sovereignty and innate wisdom that often far supersedes mine, but I do not desire to live in a world created mostly by children and teenagers or by adults who wish to grow down. I desire a world created by dynamic adults awake to their capacity for wonder. Over and over again. An adulthood characterized by empathy, creativity, true knowledge, and wisdom - all four with their sources in wonder. Are you calling me naïve and innocent? Okay, you're proving my point. I'm 45 and practical, too.
A sixty-three-year-old client of mine said, "You know, you're right: I could spend several more years trying to psychoanalyze who I was in the past and who I was supposed to be in the past. But the truth is, I'm becoming someone new, and I don't know who that is. And that unknown is exciting. It's infinitely more exciting than who I was or who I was supposed to be."
And that is a far, far richer wonder than making mud pies.
Let me know what you think.
See you in the woods.
Jeffrey
Jeffrey Davis is a writer, researcher, and speaker on wonder and creativity. He is author of The Journey from the Center to the Page: Yoga Philosophies and Practices as Muse for Authentic Writing (Penguin 2004; Monkfish Publishing 2008) and also coaches writers around the world through his organization Center To Page, LLC. He teaches in Western Connecticut State University's MFA in Professional and Creative Writing Program and at centers around the world, including The Omega Institute, Kripalu Centre, and UNM's Taos Writer's Conference.
