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Creativity is Normal, Developed, and Special
Learning Creativity: Creativity is Normal, Developed, and Special
June 5, 2016 • 0 Likes • 0 Comments
by Duane Sharrock (revised 6/15/16)
After I had graduated from college, I became obsessed with the arts, especially the art of fiction writing. In pursuit of my obsessions, I discovered that there are a few ways to “learn” creativity and there are ways to “teach” creativity.
Creativity is natural. We are creative every day, in minor ways, and occasionally, we are creative in big ways. Some of us are creative in huge ways. I say this because I prescribe to Kaufman’s and Beghetto’s Four-C description of creativity: “mini-c is the creativity that happens in the learning process. It could be a child learning to write a song. Pro-c is expert-level creativity. It might be someone who’s composed music that is currently popular.”
The life of a creative writer, for example, might progress through these stages as follows:
Judging the magnitude of a creative product, process, or performance depends on the judge’s emotional and social intelligence, the judge’s engagement with the society’s culture, and the judge’s ability to reflect on personal experiences. Those are just a few of the judge’s prerequisite abilities, knowledge, and aptitude needed before reliably, validly judging the value and impact of a creative’s work. These are prerequisites because there are instances where incredible work is ignored or dismissed because the judge didn’t “get” the work or because the name of the creative is not established. Then history becomes the judge. Someone revisits the work or discovers and gives the creative her due based on a more enlightened evaluative process. This more enlightened view didn’t happen though while the creative is alive. It may take years for society to appreciate the work’s power. The importance of the Four-C model of creativity though is that it accounts for the everyday creativity involved with learning and creating knowledge.
We are creative in minor ways when we decide to be better parents to our kids. Our solutions to the daily problems parents face can be dogmatic, slavish parroting of what our parents have told us to do. That’s not being creative. Instead, it’s when we look at a problem, creatively explore the problem in its context, review the values you are actively promoting in your family to your child, and then, like someone in public relations, we construct the message and the narrative and the response you have designed in order to deal with the problem. Part of this process may involve ruling out parental responses that you haven’t seen work. Another part of the process is ruling out possible responses that you don’t believe will work in your present situation, since you know your family and your child best.
Teaching others how to be creative is possible. Learning how to be creative is possible as well.
Walking the Earth
I was obsessed with “great writing.” I had no cohesive set of examples of great writing though, so I could not articulate what “great writing” is. I had some examples of great works, but it was also true that I didn’t enjoy every passage of every page. I had read some classics as assignments and on my own, so as a result, my list of “great writing” examples included some popular fiction. Soon, I found myself with a kind of dilemma.It was a kind of crisis of taste.
I struggled with the aesthetics of my past English teachers and the learned literary critics. On the one hand, I struggled with what I *should* love. These perceived values conflicted with my own aesthetics, the sensibilities of what I actually “do” love. My quest led me to The Paris Reviews and to fiction writing instruction books.
The Paris Review is described in Wikipedia as “a quarterly English language literary magazine established in Paris in 1953[1] by Harold L. Humes, Peter Matthiessen, andGeorge Plimpton.” I read their author interviews so that I could get into the heads of different authors. Many of the more established authors even published books about writing. John Gardner published one called On Moral Fiction, but I’ve read many others.
Authors have their favorites, but they write what they like. From these authors, I found that each believed that the author’s way–his or her way–is the best way.
In “The Complex Psychology of Why People Like Things” Vanderbilt makes this important point: “The more you can think about something, and the more tools you have to unpack it, you definitely open more ways into liking something.”
My exploration opened a window, a glimpse, into a relationship between choice and taste. After all, these aesthetics were refined from the reading of many books and short stories.
Authors describe their reading of texts as having two levels. At least two.
At one level, authors read for entertainment. If a story doesn’t engage you, make you care about what happens, evoke emotions, or works to maintain the reader’s interest in reaching the end of the story, then the story was a failure. It may have had its moments, but it may not have entertained enough to inspire a wish to be able to write like that. It wasn’t enough to make you want to figure out how certain experiences were achieved.
The other level is reading with the intention of learning how certain effects were achieved. If an emotional response is evoked, you might analyze the writing for the elements that worked together to achieve that emotion. If you experienced a high level of suspense, you might analyze the writing for techniques the author used to create tension and worry enough that you cared about the events described on the pages. You might discover other effects that, upon further analysis, you realize that the author never explicitly told you the mood of the setting or the fear you should feel about the place. With this kind of analytic reading, you may discover that the author achieved what she did by what was written as much as by what was not written or by what was left out.
The authors read texts multiple times. Then they reflect on the reading. They also evaluate it for quality and analyze the texts to see how the author makes it all work. In the process, a kind of conversation develops between the author and the reader. In this conversation, the reader and the author may agree about some choices, about some arguments, about the quality of the evidence used to develop the arguments, but they may also disagree.
This is where a third level to the author’s reading emerges: reading to learn about life, about being human, about being in a relationship, about making choices, and finding meaning. All artists make a statement about the human condition. Some statements can be profound. The artists also may make these statements in the form of questions: Why do we do what we do? Why can’t we do this other thing? When do we turn our lives around for the better? The moment the reader realizes he might do better or may have a response to the questions posed and begins to collect and create the evidence to support this response, that’s the moment the reader becomes a writer.
Writers have role models, and these role models can be found within the domain of writing, but can also be found outside of that domain. This is true of many kinds of creatives. The creatives may specialize in one domain but can expand their appreciation and expression by exploring other domains.
Seeking and Finding
Artists, scientists, philosophers have a tendency to collect together in coffee houses, wine shops, parlors and salons. They are drawn together by their ideas. When they could not meet face to face, they exchanged letters. They exchanged ideas, they challenged each other’s assumptions, and they delved deeply into each other’s perspectives. These experiences also offer opportunities for discovery since each person shares their understandings of new ideas. In their creative productions, in their own ways, they rephrased these discussions and offered solutions. Sometimes, they suggested future outcomes based on those ideas, and even posed more questions as a means to challenge each other’s thinking. These discussions can act as a kind of research.
This is another way to teach students how to be more creative: teach them how to find what what resonates within them. To be more creative, students need to open themselves to new experiences, new information, and to the discovery of connections. Discovery can be overlooked though because of the myth of the madness of creativity.
People may seem crazy because they are attuned to certain concepts, certain qualities of relationships, or the importance of certain elements to a singular, heightened degree, with an acuity few others can see. It is a way of seeing that is not limited to the sense of sight, though. Other senses can be involved. How often has an artist described the heat of a relationship? How often is water, or metaphors of water, used in poetry? Weight can be felt in the air around combatants. Character and character traits have smells that border taste even as they press against the forms of your own feelings and sentiments. Meaning is discovered in the ways things connect. Creativity is about how things connect, how they relate, and where they fit in a certain context. Connections cause and correlate, but they only exist because you are there to sense them.
Connections are how things relate to the different parts of you and the information you seek. Paradoxically, experiences and information can be discovered and consumed. They transform in ways that not only alters how you see things but also makes you see what you can see.
Research is at the heart of every creative endeavor, but aesthetics also inform what we uncover in our research. Our preferences for certain kinds of artistic goals are aesthetic in nature, but the creative’s skills and resources are directed towards achieving the expression of that vision. Research helps us explore possibilities, which in turn gives us ideas and the means of expressing those ideas.
For example, chefs research recipes and “experiment” with them. Their research explores the qualities of ingredients as well as the effects of certain methods, certain techniques.
Don’t be so surprised that research includes more than the picking apart of text in scholarly journals. Research can also include videos found on YouTube and can include conversations with experts, the conversations that can take place in the bars and parlors that I mentioned earlier. Research is also practice and the attempts one makes trying to duplicate someone else’s techniques. Research includes primary sources and secondary sources that can be mined for missing information, conflicting evidence, or as a source of more questions based on exceptions and implications.
I even suggest that the memory of your own personal experiences as well as the experiences of others are research. Anecdotal research is useful for performance arts as well as for the narrative arts. Anecdotal research might also be useful in the sciences, especially when using your imagination to roll out mental simulations and thought experiments. Scientists make leaps using their intuition, mental models, and imagery. How these discoveries are expressed, and how these insights are supported and explained, using which media and avenue of delivery influences how successfully the creative expresses them.
This brings me to the next thing that needs to be taught about being creative: communication.
Seven Basic Types of Dialogue
Students need to learn how to speak with others, because just as these students may discover wonder and awe, and can become curious, students need to find other people, like experts and practitioners, who can clarify distinctions, share their own perspectives on these topics, provide insights, or to relate their own personal experiences of wonder, awe, and curiosity. These others might share their own questions and may suggest implications. They can explain their own connections and understanding. Just as the artists, intellectuals, and writers had their own impassioned discussions in the days before computer technologies, meeting in cafes or salons, your students may also find themselves embroiled in exciting, engaging, and emotional dialogues. There are different kinds of dialogue. Each type of dialogue has its value.
According to Douglas Walton, there are seven kinds of dialogue. Each kind of dialogue has its context (or its “initial situation” if you read the chart), the participant’s goal, and the ultimate goal (or “goal of the dialogue) . We dialogue when we communicate. Each type of dialogue has its use, but the types are also listed and more fully explored here:
Without question, not every type of dialogue will serve the creativity seekers, but if you explore each type of dialogue, each supposed goal of the participants, and about the goals of each dialogue type in general, you can begin to understand how problems can develop. In problems, there are opportunities.
Some of these dialogues may lead to long-standing arguments and hates. Many will not though. In the development of my own aesthetics, I learned that as we learn in life, many emotions motivate differently, and there is no accounting for taste. As a result, the more you study and reflect on the elements involved in what you study, the more strongly you develop opinions and insights about their truth, beauty, power, and importance. You may prioritize those qualities over other qualities that the topic may possess. For the connoisseur, these beliefs may gain religious and political implications, and the connoisseur may come to believe that the greatest thinkers of a given society would do well to share the creative’s worldview and perspectives. In other words, you may passionately conclude that people who believe as you do will thrive; rejection of your beliefs will lead to their destruction.
Of the passions, there are few more invigorating and motivating than resentment, hate, and envy. I have never been more attentive and engaged in any topic than when I could use information to prove my opponent wrong. This experience is almost as satisfying as when I find information to prove that I am right, right, right. On top of this, you can gain allies who agree with you. Your squad can become a “school of thought.”
This negativity will disappoint a large number of people.
This is not to say though that the more socially productive emotions of love are not valuable. They definitely are. But a creative can’t afford to commit to only recognizing positive emotions; the creative has to see as much of the whole to make clearer, wiser choices, greater insights. One way to understand what I am saying is to recognize the meaning of duality in the Taijitu symbol (aka, the Yin and Yang symbol). Those who study the duality understand that the taijitu “describes how opposite or contrary forces are actually complementary, interconnected, and interdependent in the natural world, and how they give rise to each other as they interrelate to one another,” but we westerners have a tendency to fit so much into categories and parts and focus less on bigger pictures, systems, and a “whole”, so adding shades of grey can remind us how oppositions are interconnected and interdependent. Westerners might understand this better by imagining that shades of grey separate the black and the white.
Mirror, Mirror
Reflection is another important practice for learning. It makes the information you have learned into knowledge you will use. Reflection is also a big part of developing aesthetics, so teaching students how to be reflective can also teach them how to be creative. Students need to relate to the product, process, or production. They need to engage to such a degree that you can find distinctions between one example and another, but you engage with the art by asking questions of our senses and emotions. Thinking includes physical or the sensorimotor “thoughts” as they are expressed in sensation, qualities of motions, and more. This also includes your noting the connections you make to your other personal experiences–not just your intellectual connections, but to your emotional connections and to your values as well. Art asks questions of those connections and suggests answers to those questions at the same time.
Some people can look at paintings and only think about how art makes them feel. Which is fine. You can search for the emotions that the art triggers in you. Artists though work on more than one level. Masters do more than try to make you “feel” something. They also suggest that reality can be attained or perceived with more of some elements or less of other elements–color, lines, shades, light, detail, etc. Science is involved to varying degrees of formal understandings of physics and psychology.
Engagement is a set of skills that can be deepened and broadened depending on how you practice these skills. Practice can also develop the creative’s prowess at attunement, awareness, and attention, and can increase the speed with which the creative achieves these attentive states of mind. One can get started with these questions because these questions access the affective domain of thinking as well as the cognitive and ethos domains of thinking. In the various performing arts, there are methods of reflection promoted by various acting and dance schools. Authors have used meditative practices to generate ideas and to break through creative blocks. The sciences also accesses methods like systems thinking, systems dynamics, and design thinking to generate ideas and to address problems. There are many forms of meditation, reflection, contemplation, creative methods and processes.
Design Thinking
Lately, design thinking has captured the imaginations of engineers, leaders, educators, and other knowledge workers. The questions of design thinking are different from other kinds of thinkers, especially because it insists on considering the human needs a design is supposed to address. This introductory video lists five key elements of design thinking: Learn from people, find patterns (access “informed intuition”), define design principles by addressing questions/needs accumulated from people data, make tangible, and iterate relentlessly. These elements are probably simplified for us lay people, but I can already see that social networking can support the “learning from people” information and access.
On the other hand, another approach to design thinking is described here “Design Thinking… What is That?” Allen Samuels, through the Fast Company Staff author, explains design thinking as including these four elements. One element is to define the problem: “The goal of the definition stage is to target the right problem to solve, and then to frame the problem in a way that invites creative solutions.” Another element is create and consider many options: “Design thinking requires that no matter how obvious the solution may seem, many solutions be created for consideration. And created in a way that allows them to be judged equally as possible answers.” A third element to design thinking involves refining selected directions: “At this stage many times options will need to be combined and smaller ideas integrated into the selected schemes that make it through.” The author suggests that the second and third elements may need to be revisited a few times until the right answers emerge. And finally, the fourth element or step requires the choosing of a solution and its development or execution: “Prototypes of solutions are created in earnest, and testing becomes more critical and intense. At the end of stage 4 the problem is solved or the opportunity is fully uncovered.”
Facilitating Creative Thinking
Teachers miss these opportunities and forget these learning goals because of time constraints, urgency, and the need to fit within the school’s culture and to honor the requirements of the school’s leadership. Teachers also don’t teach creativity nor teach how to learn to be creative because of popular misconceptions that limit teaching and learning of reflection, research, and what amounts to deliberate practice.
For example, we think aesthetics can’t be taught, but this is not true. As I describe the process of developing aesthetics above, we can develop our aesthetics and acquire our own personal tastes by exposing ourselves to variety, reflecting on qualities, and making choices.
Aesthetics are educated, and people really hate to learn this fact. They prefer to believe that aesthetics are like passionate love and hate “at first sight”, and that tastes are spontaneous reactions or they become evident upon exposure. It’s the old “I can’t define art, but I know it when I see it” way of thinking.
Wine connoisseurs are one example of acquiring a taste. Although one might argue that many wine tasters are frauds, we cannot fail to recognize that there are some gifted wine tasters who prove to be accurate identifying the wines they drink through the use of their sophisticated taste and sense of history. We should never forget that our aesthetics are acquired tastes.
Developing our aesthetics and acquiring our tastes amounts to education, to learning. Sometimes, we are self-taught. Other times, we are taught. This is true of foods and drinks, but also true of any product, process, and performance. Tastes change over time, with more experiences, exposures, reflection, and even through appreciation as we deliberately practice the techniques and thinking approaches towards mastery.
Ultimately though, we must remember that there is a large taxonomy of thinking methods. There are different kinds of knowledge that result. It is pointless to restrict how we think of thought, and to cram our examples of creativity into non creative categories. Except when it doesn’t get in the way of being creative (it happens). However, in “The Complex Psychology of Why People Like Things” Julie Beck interviews Tom Vanderbilt, where they explore aesthetics and taste. Vanderbilt makes this important point: “The more you can think about something, and the more tools you have to unpack it, you definitely open more ways into liking something. Obviously we should not just stop with our gut reaction and say “I don’t like this.” If we did that, we would never get to a lot of the things we end up liking.”
Aesthetics give rise to values, which in turn, gives rise to vision. Your vision informs what things you do, what gets created, but it also informs how these things should be done. Your vision embodies your sense of the true, the beautiful, and the good.
Vision can be creative, but to achieve one’s vision, one must also employ creativity. Steve Jobs had a vision of a music collection that fit in your pocket. Creativity was used to achieve that vision.
On my journey, I learned that creativity can be learned as well as “taught”. This can be achieved with facilitation or by encouraging habits of thinking and reflection, encouraging habits of attention and focus, and in providing varieties of exemplary products, performances, and experiences. But teachers can more indirectly –yet effectively– teach how to be creative by teaching the student how to self-teach and explore. If students are taught how to open their minds, research for their own interests and needs, reflect on on what is found, and taught ways of communicating their insights to others, the students will become more obviously creative. This is to say that they were already creative. It’s just that there are many aspects to creativity. Some are easier to recognize than others.
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The Creative Economy — Michael Casey – YouTube
Published on Mar 26, 2012 on YouTube
Michael Casey, the inaugural James Wright Professor, and Chair of The Department of Music at Dartmouth College, explains how links between knowledge disciplines are allowing the creation of new things and new creative artists at Dartmouth. Neuroscience and music students work together to map and express the interplay of emotion and music. See more at http://strategicplanning.dartmouth.edu/.
via The Creative Economy — Michael Casey – YouTube.
Reinventing Stamford – a civic conversation – John Howkins, “Creative Ecologies: Where Thinking is a Proper Job”
Dipping my toe into the approaches to encourage creativity and problem solving (thinking). Big ideas. I was introduced to the idea when I began reading about conation and the conative domain.
copied from the webpage…
John Howkins, “Creative Ecologies: Where Thinking is a Proper Job”
| What is the nature of creativity? What is the nature of creative work and the creative economy? What is their relation to other factors of change, such as innovation? How does a market in ideas operate? What should governments do, if anything?These are the questions that John Howkins addresses in “Creative Ecologies.” As the title suggests, Howkins uses concepts from the science of ecology to find his answers. He shows how the key drivers of natural ecologies–diversity, change, learning, and adaptation–also drive creative ecologies. He shows that cities are the best habitat for creativity because they are the places where these four drivers are strongest. Howkins has deep knowledge of creativity, not just as a long time… |
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Creativity in Gifted Children – Definition and Traits
Creativity in Gifted Children – Definition and Traits.
excerpt:
Traits of Creativity
It might help to take a look at the characteristics many see as necessary for creativity. Here is a list of the traits from J.P Guilford that people still consider important to creativity. .
- Sensitivity to Problems
In general, this is the ability to see deficiencies in products, social institutions, theories, and pretty much anything in life. and to determine that goals have not been met. A deficiency in this case is not a flaw in the sense that the product doesn’t work or the situation is impossible, but rather a deficiency in this sense is something that could be changed to make the product better or the situation more effective or more efficient. The problems in science, too. For instance, a physicist may see a problem with the Big Bang Theory. Such “problems” or deficiencies exist…
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Destructive Ignorance: Ratatouille’s Lessons About Appreciation and Creativity (Part 1)
by duane sharrock
Some people can sit at a fine, well-prepared meal, and appreciate nothing about the table setting, the placements, the atmosphere that was detailed and precisely prepared. They are oblivious to the floral arrangement, the unique designs in the plates or the choices of silverware and glassware.They focus only on the food, on how it tastes.Only on the dish!
But the dish as a whole should be acknowledged. Some chefs feel appreciated when an unusual use of a seasoning is noticed or that a traditional side dish is prepared in an unusual way. Their creativity is missed, overlooked. It goes unappreciated.
Also, the guest might not know how the wine was chosen–paired–with the meal, either. They might know nothing about the wine, how to taste wine, how to smell it, or what to value in the wine as it is sipped with the meal. And great wines have histories as well. The histories are unknown. The winemaker or vintner (the person who made the wine) and the events around its vintage are unexplored as well.
Then the guest rejects the dessert, the denouement, the conclusion.There can be creativity even in this. Instead, it is missed, overlooked, unappreciated.
We do this all of the time. I have only recently changed my ways. Before the movie, Ratataouille, I was ignorant, even after watching various movies about restaurants.
Sometimes, restaurants and hosts offer supports and interventions to help dinner guests appreciate a fine meal. Conversation can provide what educators call “scaffolding” in the form of a skilled host or wait staff (waiter, waitress). A host’s, or a wait staff’s, greatest gift to guests is to tell these stories—about the wines, the tradition of the dish and what the chef did differently, and the relevance of certain settings. The courses have stories but there are also relationships to the host or the guests in terms of cherished memories of eating this food, the gathering of people, the event being celebrated or mourned, and the skills of the person who prepared this dish specifically for family gatherings. In this way, we honor our parents, our matriarchs and patriarchs, our friends and family.
This can be learned from many sources, as well as (hopefully) from our own life experiences.
I have learned this by reflecting on the animated movie Ratataouille, a movie that seems so simple and humorous, but it is layered with wisdom and valuable insights.
First off: If you haven’t seen this movie, then watch it immediately, (check my “flipped classroom” stylo). Here’s the trailer acting as my introductory summary:
Much about the life of the artist, creativity, and about the power of appreciation, can be learned from the movie Ratatouille.
For example, Remy is a talented chef. We learn about isolation and from the isolation of the skilled rat chef whose own family and community cannot appreciate foods and flavors or the complexities of taste. They just eat.
Django, Remy’s father explains sagely, “Food is fuel. You get picky about what you put in the tank, your engine is gonna die. Now shut up and eat your garbage.”
There is another exchange, but is between brothers this time.
Remy: [observing what Emile is eating] What is that?
Emile: [pause] I don’t really know.
Remy: You dunno… and you’re eating it?
Emile: You know, once you muscle your way past the gag reflex, all kinds of possibilities open up.
Remy: This is what I’m talking about.
In that scene, you can see the differences between brothers, but you can also recognize the isolation, the loneliness, that Remy must be feeling. No one understands him. He appreciates fine food, flavors, smells, complexity over simplicity, and the complexities that SEEM simple. His family as well as the community he grew up in is ignorant.
Therefore, the inability to appreciate the art of food is ignorance.
Here is another scene illustrating one of the conflicts and challenges of being talented and operating at a “higher level” in Maslow’s pyramid, “The hierarchy of needs”.
Remy says, “This is me. I think it’s apparent that I need to rethink my life a little bit. I can’t help myself. I… I like good food, ok? And… good food is… hard for a rat to find!”
His father, Django, replies, “It wouldn’t be so hard to find, if you weren’t so picky!”
Remy is unable to explain himself to a art who doesn’t understand that there is more to food than its function and nutrition. There is more to food than just eating. So all he can say is, “I don’t wanna eat garbage dad!”
We, the audience, might feel pity for Remi’s dad, Django, who is only focused on food as fuel for the body and as a means to survive, but we don’t see the implications in our own lives. We offer the same advice to people whenever we reject appreciation and focus on base purpose and function rather than appreciation for beauty and form, rhythms, the leaps of inspiration and insight that take us beyond base experience.
This is what happens when we look at a phone and can’t appreciate the network it connects us to. We don’t appreciate that someone figured out a way to define specific combinations of numbers as a means to connect to a specific location, a specific machine anywhere in the country or the world. We just see a magic box that does what it was designed to do. We look at water bottles and are ignorant to the fact that water is just water but that the bottle’s design attracts us to one bottle more than another bottle. We are oblivious! We listen to our favorite songs with self-hate because the song is popular, because we believe it shouldn’t liked BECAUSE it is popular. We tell ourselves such things because, supposedly, all things POPULAR are base and commercial, even though we couldn’t write such a song or even perform it as a singer or as a musician.
Appreciation depends on a set of skills but also on a set of experiences, of memories. For example, regarding our maturity and child development, Mark Twain is quoted saying: “When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished by how much he’d learned in seven years.” This says a lot about the observer, right? He thinks his dad has changed, but it was really the observer who had changed. This is a simple example that can be analyzed for insights into our own lives.
For example, what did the 14 year old know? Then, at 21, what has changed in the boy’s life? What might he have experienced that made him appreciate his father more? What lessons do you think he learned? What losses and challenges?
The same can be said about him when he becomes a father, right? My parents “don’t understand” and they are “ruining my life” until I become a parent and start doing the same for my kids to keep them safe, to guide them from bad habits, from self-destruction, and to help them enjoy life better and for more of their lives. As a parent, we recognize the sacrifices our parents had made for those family trips, the experiences we most prize, for the educations that helped us make the careers we both love and complain about. When trying to get the wording of the Mark Twain quote correctly, I came across this article, which has a detailed exploration of my point.
But this is the point that I am making in a nutshell: Our senses are limited to what we know at the time we use them. Learning, imagination, and self-reflection opens our senses to greater awareness.
This also brings me back to the use of intelligence, imagination, and awareness as responsibilities of the observer. All of this combines to describe appreciation. But I am adding that appreciation is the most important quality of an observer seeking creativity. It is more than simply an understanding of the creative process or even the finished product. Appreciation is, after all, the ability to value what is observed or experienced, whether it is one’s life that is experienced, one’s friends, one’s neighbors, as well as the experiences one is exposed to through stories, songs, or photographs.
Appreciation is at the heart of learning. Appreciation is at the heart of creativity. It is a goal that can only become more sophisticated with experience, learning, and experience. Appreciation is developed and improved with the emotions, the imagination, as well as with the intellect. Just as this is so, ignorance is an act and a decision NOT to appreciate.
Except when it’s not.
Make Us Play! (Don’t you WANT to be considered “fun”?)
Why are adults so serious? Why are we so afraid of playing?
Don’t you WANT to be considered “fun”?
Play increases the ability to imagine. In our imaginations, we test our ideas about the world and use it as a means to reflect on our experiences. This testing can be used for problem solving. Some can do this play without any physical tools, by simply staring off into space. Daydreaming can be a kind of play in the virtual world of our imaginations.
There are many benefits from play.
Whenever we say, “let me do this and see what happens,” isn’t this a kind of playing? We play video games to test our abilities to solve problems for particular situations, but we also play in order to lose our selves, to let go, to flow. We play with words to change meaning or to explore syntactic structures. We play with rhymes in order to find meaning in the different ways something can be said. We play with clothing to explore style–can stripes work with plaid? What can I do to make it work? What do people think? In doing this, we explore style in a given culture or in our community or our place of work. In business, we might play with the numbers in an electronic spreadsheet. Will this increase productivity? Why do profits drop when I change this number but the profits increase when I change this number?
The things we learn depend on where we play and how we play. What can I get away with? What works? Do I really believe this? Why? What changes can I make in order to encourage or drive this outcome?
All of it is play.
I recently read an essay from James Dickey about how to read poetry which provides instructions on how to write poetry. One thing that stuck in my mind was how to review lists of words. Check it out. How does someone generate images and connections from a list? By playing with the words, ordering and re-ordering, rolling them around in the imagination, accessing the sensory responses and recordings of our own experiences, and comparing the words to what comes before.
Another place for play is improvisational theater.There are rules to follow like in any game, but the objective is to find humor, to discover the humor in a situation, with the hopes that the audience might share that sense of humor. In humor, there is always so much to learn. Reflection on the audience’s responses can be quite instructive about our accumalitive understanding of politics, social customs and etiquette, our fears, hopes, our strivings towards success based on biases and fallacies, and the dissonance that results. These reflections can help us recognize the silliness that results from this dissonance. There is a lot of silliness to uncover.
And maybe that’s the problem. Silliness is scary. As a professional, I would rather be considered funny or sarcastic, witty and urbane, rather than silly. When someone is silly, they are easy to dismiss. Saying that someone is silly executes a judgemental kind of put down. It implies that the judge is superior to the silly person in some way. Clowns are silly. Instead of saying, “Don’t be a clown”, you can say, “Don’t be silly” with the same superior, judgemental tone, but convince yourself that you are being tactful. However, there is a fine line between highbrow and low-brow humor. In the world of work, in most non-entertainment occupations, that thin line means the difference between being taken seriously and being dismissed as inconsequential.
Creatives can make serious people feel silly.
Distrust is the main challenge of developing working relationships where serious people are forced to deal with creative types. A creative, depending on how socially adept the creative is, might play when people expect seriousness. Sarcasm, ribbing, word play, musings, role playing, impressions–who knows what to expect from the creative? The serious person might ask herself, “Is the creative playing me for a fool or playing the fool?” Also, when the creative is trying to understand how to set parameters for solving a problem, a number of activities are employed, often subconsciously, for loosening and expanding one’s perceptions and approach, reviewing what is known, exploring connections between facets of what is being discussed. It’s a ride. But when time is pressing and deadlines are approaching, cutting to the chase slams up against the creative’s processes. The goals may be the same, but the road to the objective is not always clearly understood or valued.
This may be why creativity is so challenging. The real risk of being creative is knowing when your ideas are ready for “prime time”. Play might be the raw, unedited material of reflection and exploration. All kinds of things pop up. The developing connections that sprout up or materialize are sometimes inappropriate, politically incorrect, or just plain wrong. Some connections are superficial. Some are insightful. Many need to be clarified in a way that your audience can understand, because there are leaps of sudden insights that need to be traced out, dots need to be connected, biases and assumptions need to be surfaced. Only after the ideas are fleshed out and simplified and translated into plain English are the greatest ideas are ready for publishing or ready for the big presentation to the Board or are ready for display.
There has been a lot of talk about failure and its value for learning and success. But let’s be honest, it’s one thing to be wrong about something, like public opinion or public response, especially when you can convince a majority to get onboard. It’s quite another when a small number of highly immersed-in-the-data experts make an error addressing questions non-experts can’t appreciate.
We need someone to do more than give us permission to play. We need someone to MAKE US PLAY! The space MUST be carved out. We want leaders to take this responsibility.
But leaders can’t predict when a creative is READY or ABLE to share.
That’s why the creative, as well as the leader, should learn about the types of dialogue. They need to learn how to recognize what kind of dialogue is taking place based on the situation, the participant’s goals, and the goal of the dialogue. Armed with this information, they need to learn how to shift the dialogue towards the kind of conversation they want to have, where ideas can be shared, where a clear understanding of the problems can be developed, and the boundaries framing the problems as well as the solutions can be manipulated. They need to learn how to create a space where they can play.
People need to take time to play. Individuals must act. Much of the talk about innovation and the need for creativity ignores this need for play. The need for making time and setting up a place for play are discussed as theory—are good “theoretically”—but is not often practiced. This is because, all the talk about failing and the need for failure is missing the point: playing a game is different for the person who plays to win from the person who doesn’t play unless they are sure they will win.
I found a video from Brain Pickings where John Cleese gives a mainly serious talk on play and creativity! He throws in little humor–a very small amount of humor—but he is focused and serious. In fact, if you didn’t know how amazingly funny he is, you wouldn’t believe it if this was your introduction to his work.
Ultimately, this is his point: comedy ain’t pretty. Like a great lesson executed by a teacher, a great deal of preparation is involved, usually behind the scenes as well as before the show. But as part of the research, it takes a lot of play.
Is it possible to focus attention without thinking about it?
This question is wide open.
I’m not sure if I can focus attention on something without thinking about it. I know I can see/hear/feel something without thinking about it or giving it much attention though.
On the other hand, are there levels of attentiveness like there are levels of consciousness? Can you have consciousness without conscious thought?
If I look at something, like a water bottle, I can give it attention and be aware that it is more than a bottle for water. I know that it can hold a number of liquids, but maybe not anything volatile like gasoline for very long. I know it can also be filled with sand. Different colors of sand, layered, might make an interesting decorative piece. Maybe I can paint the clear plastic with some kind of acrylic paint to make it opaque. I can fill it with black marbles and call it coca cola. I could use two of these bottles–sealed–as pontoons on some kind of floating model/toy. Maybe this is the difference between conscious thought and attention. I can pay attention to a bottle to see it, but the conscious thought opens connections and considerations. I may have to consciously consider the facets of the plastic bottle as a possible solution to a future problem or my problem could be: how can I use this bottle as something other than a container for water?
So, you can attend to an object and simply see it. You can focus on its visible features: the lines and curves, its opacity or its transparency. You see if it has something visible in it. These are observations. When you start to think ABOUT the glass, you cross into a higher level of conscious thought. Maybe you have a mental image of a similar bottle in your mind. Maybe you access memories of similar bottles. Where have you seen a bottle like that before? What should you do with this bottle? If you are thirsty, with what will you fill it?
A need focuses attention (thirst) but thoughts are used to consider how you might fill that need. If you have no hunger or thirst, maybe the setting drives your need. Someone asks you to draw a circle. You remember someone using a can to trace out a circle. Maybe the base of the bottle is round. Using analogy, you evaluate the base to see if it is like the can: perfectly round. It is. Problem presented and now solved in the tracing of the bottle base. The teacher asks how you are like a bottle. Quotes about half empty glass and vessels and cups some to mind. Maybe a quality of the bottle’s material is useful. Is it plastic? Flexible? Can you make the bottle sing by blowing over its opening? And what do you know about the opening? A perfect circle. Pi comes to mind regarding the circumference. Pi is equal to a little more than 3, but the numbers stretch endlessly beyond the requirements decimal point. A mystery. Man is a mystery, infinity around his head but empty inside, so can be filled with anything.
The bottle is gone.
Conscious thought can transform the data and information about an object. It creates knowledge about or includes the object but doesn’t have to be the object. Conscious thought calculates, infers, reasons, remembers, evaluates, and even anticipates. It accesses info about an object and its various features. Attention on the object might not amount to anything more than observations: data collection possibly. When you begin to think ABOUT the object, you are no longer focusing your attention.
To clarify–
You can have attention with very little sophisticated conscious thought. But higher functioning, sophisticated thought and knowledge generation (thinking Bloom’s for simplicity), then attention becomes focused on the mental imagery, the ideas, the relationships, definitions, for example, and less on the object about which you are thinking. Also, although you can only consciously pay attention to something, you CAN have THOUGHT that you are not paying attention to (unconscious or subconscious thought). Psychotherapy and some other techniques can help you become conscious of the SYMPTOMS of unconscious/subconscious thought, like that tingling at the back of your neck or in the pit of your stomach, other psychosomatic manifestations, or for the symptoms as certain neurotic behaviors. We can reach those places with assistance and training. For example, why is that song running around and around in your head? Are the words, the rhythm, the melody, or some other quality about the song that “requires” your attention, distracting you from everything else going on in your world? Or is there something going on in your world that you are trying to avoid and this song is a tool to do that? Or maybe–like the cigar is only a cigar–you just like the song.
Out of the Weaving Secret 