Creativity

We go into meetings, make decisions, generate numbers, organize them, email them, and schedule another meeting. Rarely is there something physical produced on the other end. Something we can take ownership of. Something we can hold and say “I made that.”

What made them so remarkable was their ability to weave together geometry, chemistry, architecture, and anatomy with unmatched grace.

The Germans have a lovely saying for the benefits of keeping an idle (or idling) mind: ‘ die Seele baumeln lassen’ , meaning ‘let the soul dangle’.

President Dwight Eisenhower’s Farewell Address of 1961 warned against the dangers of the ‘military-industrial complex’, but it also fretted about the loss of ‘intellectual curiosity’ attendant on the rise of collectivised science, done on government contract or sponsored by industry.

Interestingly, these studies used quite contrasting approaches to test whether creativity is learnable. In the Stanford study, participants exercised cognitive flexibility to generate creative solutions in the classroom. Meanwhile, the meditative training of the Dalian-Oregon study was an exercise in cognitive persistence, the main focus being on... See more