Childish Creativity

Photo courtesy of Leo Reynolds

"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?"

"School is canceled, and you have the entire day to yourself. What would you do? Where would you go? Who would you see?"

In a recent study about creativity these two sentences were given to two different groups of undergraduate university students. After a period of activity, the students were given several tests to assess their creativity. Which group do you think scored higher? It seems that the inclusion of the words "You are 7 years old" made all the difference. Why is this?

Jonah Lehrer argues that it's got something to do with the way our brain develops as we get older. Scientists have been able to show that we get increasingly less adept at divergent (or lateral) thinking.

We trade away the ingenuity of our youth for executive function. As the brain develops, the prefrontal cortex expands in density and volume. As a result, we're able to exhibit impulse control and focused attention. The unfortunate side-effect of this cortical growth is an increased ability to repress errant thoughts. While many of these thoughts deserve to be suppressed, it turns out that we also censor the imagination. We're so scared of saying the wrong thing that we end up saying nothing at all.

Encouraging older students to imagine that they are young again, to literally think like 7 year olds, is a recipe for success when we want to develop creative learning. I wonder if it has the same effect on teachers?

Collateral learning

Steven Johnson is fairly convinced that popular culture is making us smarter. His influential book, "Everything Bad Is Good For You" identifies a whole range of cognitive abilities that have been developed as a direct result of the increasing sophistication of popular television, the Internet and video games. He argues that non- linear narratives are especially important in stretching our ability to process complex information. Even when the content of popular media is less than edifying, the way that it is presented to the reader/viewer is what counts. Johnson calls this "collateral learning." I wonder if this idea is something we could consider when we think about learning in school? Perhaps we should be a little less concerned about the content of the curriculum and more interested in the connections, processes and metaphors that provide rich "collateral learning"?