profound thoughts

If a man approaches a work of art with any desire to exercise authority over it and the artist, he approaches it in such a spirit that he cannot receive any artistic impression from it at all. The work of art is to dominate the spectator: the spectator is not to dominate the work of art. The spectator is to be receptive. He is to be the violin on which the master is to play. And the more completely he can suppress his own silly views, his own foolish prejudices, his own absurd ideas of what Art should be, or should not be, the more likely he is to understand and appreciate the work of art in question. This is, of course, quite obvious in the case of the vulgar theatre-going public of English men and women. But it is equally true of what are called educated people. For an educated person’s ideas of Art are drawn naturally from what Art has been, whereas the new work of art is beautiful by being what Art has never been; and to measure it by the standard of the past is to measure it by a standard on the rejection of which its real perfection depends. A temperament capable of receiving, through an imaginative medium, and under imaginative conditions, new and beautiful impressions, is the only temperament that can appreciate a work of art.

Oscar Wilde in The Soul of a Man under Socialism

Actually I do not think that there are any wrong reasons for liking a statue or a picture. Someone may like a landscape painting because it reminds him of home, or a portrait because it reminds him of a friend. There is nothing wrong with that. All of us, when we see a painting, are bound to be reminded of a hundred-and-one things which influence our likes and dislikes. As long as these memories help us to enjoy what we see, we need not worry. It is only when some irrelevant memory makes us prejudiced, when we instinctively turn away from a magnificent picture of an alpine scene because we dislike climbing, that we should search our mind for the reason the aversion which spoils a pleasure we might otherwise have had. There are wrong reasons for disliking a work of art.
/../
There is no greater obstacle to the enjoyment of the great works of art than our unwillingness to discard habits and prejudices.
/../
It is infinitely better not to know anything about art than to have the kind of half-knowledge which makes for snobbishness. /../ One sometimes sees people walking trough the gallery, catalogue in hand. Every time they stop in front of a picture they eagerly search for its number. We can watch them thumbing trough their books, and as soon as they have found the title or the name they walk on. They might just as well have stayed at home, for they have hardly looked at the paining. They have only checked the catalogue. It is a kind of mental circuit which has nothing to do with enjoying the picture. /../ They may have heard that Rembrandt was famous for his chiaroscuro - which is the Italian term for light and shade - so they nod wisely when they see a Rembrandt, mumble 'wonderful chiaroscuro' and wander on to the next picture. /../ To talk cleverly about art is not very difficult, because the words critics use have been employed in so many different contexts that they have lost all precision. But to look at a picture with fresh eyes and to venture on a voyage of discovery into it is far more difficult but also a much more rewarding task. There is no telling what one might bring home from such a journey.

Ernst Gombrich, The Story of Art, Introduction

How about you? How many times have you surrendered to the picture or a photograph the way you surrender your soul at a concert of your favorite rock band. I can't figure why are we such snobs when it comes to pictorial arts (and sometimes classical music, artistic movies...)? I am trying do discipline myself to approach art with a fresh soul, clean of prejudice but most of all - with time. There is so much more to experience in a painting or a photograph if you just take time and let your eyes wonder around and collect little details. It really is an incredible quest, far better than just "thumbing trough" and mumbling adjectives, adverbs and nouns. Sometimes even an amateur drawing can be an amazing experience, because it was drawn with a whole heart (and of course, it can happen that a fashionable artist can leave you empty, but lets leave that aside) and really make your day. Just see it afresh and give it enough time!

And guess what; it works for people too!

During the last fall I did an interesting project with highschool students. Together we decided to print a calendar to collect donations for charity and some also for our work. Even though the project was a huge success and we raised a lot more money than we could realistically hope for, it was not without trouble. And as recent evaluation of the project showed, almost all the problems we experienced stem from the fact that adolescent psychological time perception is different than one of older adults.

Here's the problem: suppose you give a teenager three weeks to complete some project. To me that would mean that I prepare my first draft by the end of the first week, consult it with my mentor or peers, finish the corrected version by the end of the second week, consult again and finish the final version at least one day before the deadline (so I can sleep well or have some extra time in case of computer crash, printer malfunction, stuff like that...). Well, for an average teenager a deadline in three weeks would mean that they start working one or two days prior the deadline (let's not talk about results of such work). It is no different (rather worse) with regular school work. Most of them would admit that it makes no difference at all if the test is scheduled in three weeks or just in one. They would study the last day in either case.

Maybe this is the case just for Slovenia. Maybe this is the case just for our times. Perhaps in the times of feudal system, when the whole family was involved in farm planing (like planting seeds and collecting harvest), it was a little more obvious that there are certain deadlines within each season that should not be missed, because if they are, starvation follows.

So I don't really know whether this is a cultural or a temporal thing, but I have a hunch it goes deeper than that.

It was quite surprising to find a possible answer in Milan Kundera's latest novel Ignorance. There he discusses teenage suicide:

To die; to decide to die; that's much easier for an adolescent than for an adult. What? Doesn't death strip an adolescent of a far larger portion of future? Certainly it does, but for a young person, the future is a remote, abstract, unreal thing he doesn't really believe in.

And I figure he is right. I remember that when I was a freshman at high school the graduation seemed like a distant dream. I thought it would never come to pass. But eventually it did and much quicker than I had supposed. It was like a little wake up call (the first of many, actually). Trough the following years I realized that things do happen, especially the predictable ones. So even though I have still trouble believing it, being old and eventually death will happen to me too (if I'm lucky enough). I think adolescents are biologically not equipped yet to perceive future in such way simply because they haven't experienced much of it yet. You can't blame them for that, you can only take that into account when you plan to work with them.

So if you think about it, many problems of education could easily be solved if school work was organized according to this principle. What we have instead was already debated here and I don't want to elevate my blood pressure again.

If you are further interested in this topic, there is a whole chapter on it in Dan Ariely's book Predictably Irrational. Backed up with hardcore experimental data and all that.

EDIT: what I forgot to mention is that time perception changes over years in either case. Most people (like 95%) would agree that time goes by faster when you get older. Experiments confirm that. In some cases they played a song or a sound to a bunch of people and older folks regularly give shorter estimate of the time that actually passed. Sometimes they just keep them waiting and the results get even more dramatic. Of course, there are several theories (=reasons) why this might be that way. Some argue that when you are 30 one year of life feels proportionally less than when you are 10. Then there are theories that metabolism slows down with age so there are less "beats" per year, thus less time perceived. There is also one line of reasoning that states that we perceive time by the amount of new events. Surely enough, there are many more fresh experiences in the life of a child than in the one of an older person. I think there is some truth to all theories and that they might work together... So it is more or less a biological fact that older people perceive much less psychological time in the same amount of physical time ... To younger people three weeks just seem longer than to older folks, that is why they fail to plan their future accordingly. (and even to older people 5 years of future seems a much longer time than 5 years of past).

EDIT 2 (as of 3rd December 2012): It is actually all about frontal cortex and how it makes you do the hard thing (=study) instead of the easy impulsive one (=play). See Sapolsky's lecture here.

Even though I often write and talk about creativity, I never said much about talent. There is a reason why: it is damn hard to define it. General definition would be that one is talented when one presents skills that are far above average for one's age. The problem is that those skills may very well be a result of huge amount of work, lucky circumstances (being born in the right family, having stimulating circle of friends, and so on) and many other complex things, including genes. Probably it is influenced by a combination of everything mentioned and even more by the things we couldn't possibly think of. So how to talk about something so elusive? Here is my solution.

The author of this video says it takes on average about 10.000 hours of practice to achieve a notable skill. I don't remember exactly where, but somewhere I read that to reach the level of grandmaster in chess you need about 20.000 hours of training (the exact number is hard to prove and it doesn't matter anyway... let's just take it metaphorically). But there's a catch! Not just any 20.000! This is an over-simplification. It is as if we are saying that to win a chess match you need to make about 50-70 moves. True - but not just any moves! They have to be the right ones, from the very beginning. Especially at the beginning!

I agree that achieving mastery takes a HUGE amount of work - but where talented separate from the average is in the way they are playing. They are doing the right things from the very start. Every artist has to move trough different stages, one has to make a lot of mistakes to learn the right way of doing things, but gifted ones move trough that phases very quickly and can even skip a few. They have a deeper insight into the game they play. When I play chess I can rarely have that kind of insight into my game. I am smart enough to see my mistakes from the past, but not smart enough to see clearly the present or even the future stages of the game. I believe it is very much the same in art, music, science, life or other complex games. Talented people just see deeper and move faster. They make a much better use of those 10.000 hours, just like a talented chess player makes a better use of his 50 moves, no matter the external circumstances. Of course they might be inclined to take larger risks or present much less fear (and have a few lucky picks with lucky outcomes), but that is beyond this argument.

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3

“All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling. To be natural is to be obvious, and to be obvious is to be inartistic.”

Oscar Wilde

So here it is, the last part. After discussing fear we turn to the final obstacle that is on the way of reaching our full creative potential. You are not going to like it. It is:

Satisfaction with the Obvious
Or in short: laziness! People are plain lazy! I believe laziness in creativity comes in three stages and we'll deal with each separately:

- Satisfaction with the Obvious (this sounds so good I took it as a general title, sry)
- Lack of Homework
- Lack of Persistency

Satisfaction with the Obvious¹
Huh, how to begin with this? Well, in a nutshell: everything that has a value in life doesn't come easy, does it? I mean, it takes some time and work! It takes some time and work to understand Coltrane or Beethoven, but after that, you are more than well rewarded. Many people go for Lady Gaga (or equivalent, don't pick up on me) whose tunes are so obvious that one can easily remember them after the first listening. There is nothing sublime in it, something that would wait for you on your second, third or 100th listening. Nothing. Most people are satisfied with that kind of obvious!

And once you'll start being aware of this phenomena you'll see it everywhere. People, as consumers and creators of the culture, quickly quit. They don't dig in for the solutions that are not so obvious. But it is precisely those that are often the most valuable. You just have to go the extra mile!

I see this in my classes. When I try to inspire some creative work, most students quit searching for solutions the minute they get their first or second idea. And it is often that I am no better myself. It is only at my most motivated point that I dig deeper to find the most valuable ones. For one thing, the first ideas, the obvious ones, are usually the ones that are already done somewhere so they are not novel at all (hence, they are not really creative, are they?) and beside that they are most likely be the ones that I am most comfortable executing. Usually they pose the least amount of risk (precisely because they are already executed somewhere with known outcome). The deep ideas are usually counterintuitive and highly risky. But those are the revolutionary ones! Practically every invention, from a lightbulb to an iPhone was at its creation very counterintuitive. So is the best music, like Beethoven's Grosse fuge which went against everything people recognized as music at its time. Yet it is more musical than almost anything else created in the history, but you realize that only after a couple dozen times you listen it. At first it is very demanding, but then it is very rewarding piece.

The reasons for this are of course complex (like everything we discuss here). On one side it is perhaps a natural disposition of the brain to spare energy once an acceptable solution is found. Secondly; our brain uses memories of past events to envision future so it is quite natural that most people can't envision any other future than a mashup of what has already happened. This is a huge handicap for creativity and another evolutionary advantage that backfires (envisioning the future on the basis of past events helps survive, no doubt). See Jeff Hawkins for more on that.

The other reason was already mentioned before; the incredible passivity of the 20th century. Trough out the history of man kind people had to entertain themselves. In order to have some fun they had to tell stories, sing, act, dance or draw for them selves. Of course some were better than the others, but I believe all of them did at least something. This was amateur culture at its best. In the 20th century technological inventions allowed mass distribution of sounds and pictures. Unfortunately those inventions were not developed enough to allow interactive participation of the audience. The audience became evermore passive, while on other side professional entertainers got the largest stage in the world: the whole planet! Why would I listen my father while Sinatra sings so much better! Why don't we all just sit down on our couch and laugh at Letterman's jokes? 20th century is a century of cultural passivity which has no precedence in human history. So in hunger for bigger and bigger audience (=ratings), any reasonable TV station has to adopt measures that fit the largest crowds, which means doing productions that are easy to grasp. People are educated into the obvious and quickly gain notion that everything in this world should be this way. So when they go to a modern gallery or when they see some art photography, they are lead to believe, that this kind of culture is obvious too. They couldn't be more mistaken. The best creative works are anything but obvious. They are fruits of the deepest creative thoughts and in order to understand them one should take time and dive into those depths.

Of course, sometimes even renowned art is shallow and sometimes what appears to be deep on the surface is actually empty on the inside. It happens. Even people who are trained in arts or sciences are often mislead by the appearance. One such example could IMHO be the famous Drake's equation which on surface looks like hardcore science (it is math, right), but when one inspects it closely, one can find out that it is actually bullshit. Almost all of the factors in the equation are arbitrary and unknown. So the 'equation' can easily yield a huge number of different results (from 0 to gazillion) which are almost equally probable. Is that equation solving anything? Of course not. It just mimics science by appearance in a form of an equation. At best is just an other way of saying: we don't have a clue! But we are off the track now. I am sure there are similar examples of phoniness in art too: things that just look like real art on the outside but hold nothing valuable inside. It happens. My point is that you can't really tell if you don't dig into it. You can't just glance at a painting in the gallery and say "This is nothing." You can't!

In this context an other thing should be mentioned: critical thought! People often fall in love with their ideas and their work, but only those who can maintain a safe distance can produce really good stuff. "You have to be routhless!" William Allard told me in an interview. Not everything you produce is good, in fact, most of it isn't. Scrutiny is perhaps the most overlooked aspect of creativity, but it is critical for any kind of creative work. The most obvious example would be photography; photographers return from assignments with thousands of photographs, but only 10 can make it into print. Which 10? A movie director might have a dozen different dialogue versions for each scene, but how to pick ones that really play well? I spoke on taste already, and I also noted how to recognize really a mature performance, so I will not repeat that here. It suffices to say that critical judgement and developed taste is an important aspect of every creative process. One should be in a constant zig-zag between non-judgemental playfulness and harsh self-criticism. When one is in the zone (i.e. having an almost spiritual creative experience of totally focused mind) those two modes either merge or totally disappear - it is hard to tell since this is such a delirium that it has rules of its own. Needles to say, being in the zone is the best creative state of mind and we should do everything we can to make it happen. More about that in a minute.

Lack of homework
I don't know whether this should be before or after the previous argument about being satisfied with the obvious, but in a way it doesn't even matter. I believe every creative act needs some sort of theoretical (or practical) background. The only way to invent something (without a huge amount of luck) is to study all of the available knowledge that existed before you on that subject. You can't push the whole field of physics forward without studying all of the physics that is already known. You can't invent a new way of storing liquids without studying all of the ways we store liquids today. You can't! It is absolutely necessary to study every detail of every thing you can find in order to find flaws and imperfections which are opportunities for improvement or in the best possible case; the reinvention. In a case when there is simply no solution available, you must study the problem so much more. Only then you may count on being lucky. The discovery of Penicillin is often regarded as an accidental discovery, but in my eyes is anything but that. It didn't happen to just anyone. It happened to Alexander Fleming, a man who invested so much into science! Discovery of comets, stars or fossils are most often described as the same kind of "lucky accidents", but just think if that could happen to you rather than to a person who studies the sky or the bedrock 24/7. I believe not. They know exactly what they are looking for! Similar kinds of accidents can happen in art too (see this blog post about it). Again it is not what happens, it is about you recognizing a true value in it. You can recognize that only if you are ready, only if you did your homework! Many people don't!

Lack of Persistency
Creativity is often confused with rich imagination. Sometimes you find these weirdly looking self-proclaimed artists who wouldn't stop telling you how creative they are. They go on about their 'ideas' and how nobody understands them. Those people may have rich imagination, but creativity involves an act of creating something tangible; an invention, a painting, a dance, a piece of music, an article, a new economic theory... something! And that takes work!
The amount of time you actually feel inspired and illuminated is very short in comparison to the amount of time you spend crafting this thing into its final form. Just to give you a trivial example; I had an idea for this series of articles written down in 5 minutes during a breakfast one morning (I must have had too much tea, I was quite hyper that time) and I think I had more or less everything written down in my head at the time. But it took me more than three weeks to actually execute it, no matter how good or bad the actual result really is. Most of the time went for trivial typing, spell-checking, double checking the facts and stuff like that. Nothing typically creative at all - just dull and boring work. But that is nothing compared to Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel. You think that ceiling painted itself? I am not sure we can even begin to imagine the impossible conditions under which the great genius spent 4 (four!) years of his life simply executing his idea. Even though the whole idea is brilliant, the majority of the work lies in trivial craft of painting. The first part of creativity (getting an idea) might be about letting it go and be as unconditioned as possible, but creativity is also about holding on to it. It is about not quiting when the work becomes dull and borring. It is about not quitting when the time of crisis and self-doubt erodes your will. Self doubt will almost always come if you are working with novel and untested ideas. We discussed that in the previous part of this series (I really like the way how everything is coming together).

The reason why people don't do their homework and why they lack the will to carry on is in my opinion in lack of passion. When people are blindly passionate about some problem or activity, they don't care about "what if they're wrong" or "what will people think." That fear is gone like the laziness is gone too. They simply push forward like a bulldozer. They don't care much if it is possible or not, they don't care if people are telling them how stupid they are, they don't care if they haven't eaten for hours or haven't slept for days... they just don't care!

How to bring people to that passionate inspired state of mind? How to fall in the zone? It helps a lot to be in your element. You must do what you love to do! Being in an element is fun! You are playful which, again, doesn't mean you are careless, it simply means you take enjoyable risks! And secondly; you must have an inspired figure to look up to. It could be an idol from television (not everything about television is bad, ok) or even better, a person from your own place - a really good teacher, mentor, athlete, somebody who also loves his work and shares this positive energy with others. An inspirational person can become only someone who is inspired him-herself.

Does the school play a vital role here? Mostly no, but sometimes yes. Speaking abstractly - in most schools only three kinds of mental capacities are fully exercised; math (logic), languages and memory. Even these are far to abstract and are not practised on the applied level. Studying languages in (most) school is like learning to swim by performing swimming moves on dry ground. What about jumping into the water, dammit!? Schools offer far too narrow curriculum for kids to test their talents. The hierarchical structure reveals that applied arts or dance are undervalued. This is a legacy of the 19th century in which schools were popularized to educate the working class. A good factory worker should know some basic algebra and have some writing/reading skills. Hence math and languages are still at the top of importance list of every school. Math is something that is forced upon as common knowledge, something that we all have capacity to learn, while at the same time, art or music is denied on the basis of the required talent. Just how stupid is that? You need a talent for music, but you don't need it for math?! This curriculum is totally out of balance, it has nothing to do with our real mental capacities and worst of all, it denies people their talents... Many very bright people who don't happen to be interested or gifted with those few skills that school rewards, can live their whole life thinking they are stupid and untalented. I believe this is simply unacceptable for the 21st century. True, in 19h century you couldn't have make a living being a dancer, but that is no longer the case now, at least not in developed countries (forget Slovenia... see part 3 for that). Of course, we all need some math, we all need some language skills, but we also need some music, some art, some dance, some photography or movies... The thing is in proper balance which should also be individually based, and proper execution which should be based on practical application. And this is just the beginning... Again, this is not an article about education.

Luckily we at least have a few inspired teachers, mentors and public heroes who can overcome these obstacles and fire up new generations of students. When Appollo program was running MIT didn't have any problems with not having enough students. At the same time we unfortunatelly have bored and frustrated teachers who do so much damage that it would be better if they hadn't thought at all. Perhaps I am exaggerating, but maybe you are better off having no math at all than hating math for the rest of your life just because the person who was teaching you, hated math (and his life) more than anything in the world. Don't you think?

But let us rather finish with good news. We DO have inspired teachers, mentors and public figures, we DO have people who are aware of how broken our education system is and we DO have people who work hard to make it better. And with the advent of the internet and Web 2.0 there is an overabundance of creativity everywhere. People stood up from their 20th century couches, picked up cameras, pens, guitars, brushes (etc) and the results are here. The new generation cares less about mass media (politics, entertainment...) and cares more about their own creativity. There would be no Flickr, DeviantArt or Vimeo without them. Of course, not all of what is uploaded is creative in the most meaningful sense, but some of it is! Give me one good reason why not be optimistic about it!


Epilogue
First of all - if you came to this point - thank you for reading. To be completely honest, I didn't write it for you. I wrote it (as almost everything on this blog lately) for myself. I write these things as preparation for articles, lectures or debates. You can see it as a kind of public notebook if you will. But anyways, thank you.

This series can be viewed in two ways. The way it is written is a list of things that can go wrong when we try to reach our creative potential. But it can also be understood in an other way in which it can help you understand just how many small things have to go right in order to get productive geniuses on the level of Tesla, Picasso, Bill Gates... Of course, not everything can be controlled. There are so many arbitrary and random factors that shape our life and work together that it is impossible, despite all that was written, to predict where one will end up in life. Life is full of randomness which we don't understand. We know a little bit about certain trends that happen, but that is all. Just as we know what happens to a certain amount of gas when we raise temperature for 10K, we have a small clue about social and economic trends, but just as we can't predict the movement of a single molecule in that gas so we can't predict a life of a person or stock market. So please, try to read and understand this with a grain of salt. Try to understand life and creativity on the basis that you don't understand it fully or even at all. I believe this is a mature place to start.

Basic references:
Hawkins, J., (2004), On Intelligence, New York, Holt Paperbacks
Robinson, K. et all, (1982), The Arts in Schools, London, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation
Robinson, K., (2001), Out of Our Minds - Learning to be creative, London, Capstone
Robinson, K., (2009), The Element - How finding your passion changes everything, New York, Viking Penguin
Lessig, L., (2004), Free culture - How big media uses technology and the law to lock down culture and control creativity, New York, Penguin (Free PDF)
Lessig, L. (2007): TED Talk
Robinson, K. (2006): TED talk 1
Robinson, K. (2010): TED talk 2
Drori, J., (2007): TED talk

Footnotes
¹ Many smart people often say that the most difficult things to grasp are usually the most obvious ones. Things that are the most difficult to see are usually the ones that are before your eyes. There is some truth to that. But that is a different kind of 'obvious,' it is a 'higher level of obvious'... I hope it is clear I am not talking about that, but I have to put this note here in order to avoid any misinterpretations.

Part 1 Part 3 Part 4

In the first part of this series I discussed the noise that is created by the media outlets which clutters and occupies our minds so that we simply cannot think creatively. But there are other problems too. The next in line is:

The Lack of Imagination
Imagination is the core engine of creativity and many people simply lack that. Imagination simply means seeing with your mind's eye what has not been materialized yet. At least not that you know of it. There are IMHO two basic reasons why people don't develop/carry this ability in adult age:

1- they lack proper genes for their brain to be powerful enough (I don't believe this could be true for such a large amount of people),
2- they had it too easy in life.

Since the first reason is completely arbitrary and hard to prove (then again, I am not a geneticist), I shall not discuss it.

But what about the second? Again, I might be speaking from my gut, but I came to believe that imagination develops when there is a certain delay between a wish and its fulfillment. If that time is too long then frustrations and its suppression can occur, but that is an other subject.

Remember your childhood; you want a new toy so badly it almost hurts. But your parents don't buy it right away, so you'll have to wait till Christmas or your birthday. During that time you start imagining how sweet would it be to get that thing and everything you could do with it. You can see yourself playing with it, sharing it with friends, and so on... This is how your imagination was born! If you have parents that fulfilled your wishes instantly, it is very likely you will not develop imaginative powers of the brain. Again, this is from the gut, but in my experience as a mentor, spoiled kids tend to have more difficulty understanding fairytales, poems or even visual art. They also produce less (and lesser quality) of their own works. It is not that they are stupid or unknowledgable, they simply lack imagination. And patience! How could anything be created without patience!? (another product of non-fulfilled wish)

Then you go to school and school fails even harder than some parents at developing children's imagination. Almost every education system in the world is what Lawrence Lessig would call a Read-Only (RO) system. That is a centralized system at which one person broadcasts his knowledge or skills, while a myriad of other are in a role of completely passive receivers, who have to repeat whatever was told or demonstrated. This system has no respect for individual intellect or personal creativity. Most classes are organized in a way that knowledge is brought to you readily on a tray. You don't have to work for it. It is just there for you to consume it. It often feels like the system thinks I am so stupid, that I can't find that knowledge myself. Only the most inspired teachers have the power to overcome this built-in flaw and make their classes a Read-Write (RW) class, at which students equally participate in creation of the lesson, and where their individual contributions (ideas) are crucial for the class. But those are rare exceptions.

Imagine now, if you will, a different kind of class. It is a class at which knowledge is acquired by hands-on experimenting and (field) research. A class where you have to work to get your answers. The knowledge doesn't come right away, you have to wait and search for it, and while you're at it, you imagination is already working out the possible solutions for your problem. It might take a little more time, but the understanding you get is far deeper and the knowledge more real. It is not just words you memorize from a book, it is The Knowledge. This kind of teaching respects learner's intellect. It is as if it's been sublimely said: "I know you are a smart person. I believe you can find answers yourself and you don't need me to bring them to you." It is a lot easier to be motivated after such compliment. And imagine a class at which testing is done in a way that is not humiliating. Questions are completely different. One can get a question like;

"From where does a tree get all the stuff it needs to grow?"

If you want to answer that, you have to know really a lot about trees, but not just that; you must also connect together different domains of knowledge, like biology, chemistry, geology, meteorology, math... Everything has to fall into place for you to answer that the tree is made mostly of carbon and that carbon doesn't come from the ground (like the majority would answer), but from the air with a process called photosynthesis. You didn't see that one coming, did you! Photosynthesis is how a tree makes wood! If it really came from the ground there would be a large hole under every tree. A tree wants to grow up to reach even more sunlight and dominate the space (evolutionary explainable). Oxygen is just a side product. But you didn't learn that in school, because you were too occupied with memorizing the exact word order of the proper definition of photosynthesis, which goes as followed:

"Photosynthesis (from the Greek φώτο- [photo-], "light," and σύνθεσις [synthesis], "putting together", "composition") is a process that converts carbon dioxide into organic compounds, especially sugars, using the energy from sunlight.Photosynthesis occurs in plants, algae, and many species of bacteria, but not in archaea ..." (source)

It is a scientifically correct definition, but it completely blurs the point. It is a wood making process! Of course, memorizing and repeating that dull definition will rob you of the joy that is thinking. I assume you had a great time pondering the question "From where does a tree get all the stuff it needs to grow?" but not such a great time when you had to memorize in school. People simply love to think, they love to use their imagination, but the schools will just not give you enough opportunities to use your brain in a way that it was built for and we are lucky to have that many creative people who retain this capacity into their adult life. For the most people, by the time they finish school, they are just a machine to store and reproduce a few facts and some basic skills (language and some math). If people are creative, they are creative despite of-, not because of the schools.

The schools are tiring and stressful, but that shouldn't be confused with intellectually hard. The schools are far to easy. Thinking is fun, but there is almost no thinking and imagining done in schools.¹ This kind of teaching is actually an insult for one's intelligence. No wonder kids rebel! Again: there is no delay between a wish and its fulfillment that is needed to spur imagination. Hence, for the most of the people, schools are boring and no fun at all! The unnatural way of learning and testing is a cause of a lot of anxiety. There is something very wrong with that. The majority of people doesn't see it that way (they assume this is the nature of things, that it cannot be done any other way...), but I simply find it problematic. Give me one good reason why should the school be stressful! Why in the world should 10-year-olds have cramps in their stomach every morning? Why do we torture our kids like that? Schools could be so much fun, full of adventure and exploration, just like Naional Geographic, but in real life! We just have to shift our logic from RO to RW and develop respect for their young but huge intellects.

In both cases (parenting and teaching) the reasons for not giving a child enough time to develop imagination could be completely benevolent and even noble. Parents want their children to have things they couldn't have had. And many people go into teaching because they want to share knowledge and spare misconceptions they had themselves. They want to give kids the right answers straight away so that they wouldn't waste time on intellectual dead ends. That is a noble cause indeed, but by doing it too much they rob young people of the joy that is exploration (and imagination).

After school, your passive intellectual life, where information is only consumed (not even repeated anymore) continues in front of the TV set and other classic media.² We covered that already. 20th century is perhaps the only century in human history, where the predominant culture was of the RO kind. A big, centralized industry of music, movies, television, radio and publishing was feeding hungry consumers. Why wouldn't they consume; professionals in Hollywood are much better than the local theater. But there is a good news; with the dawn of the internet our creative potential is back at work. Just look at the Vimeo, YouTube, Flickr, blogs and everything that is created. We are back to Read-Write. We all participate in making the cultural landscape. And that fuels my imagination!


Basic references:
Hawkins, J., (2004), On Intelligence, New York, Holt Paperbacks
Robinson, K. et all, (1982), The Arts in Schools, London, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation
Robinson, K., (2001), Out of Our Minds - Learning to be creative, London, Capstone
Robinson, K., (2009), The Element - How finding your passion changes everything, New York, Viking Penguin
Lessig, L., (2004), Free culture - How big media uses technology and the law to lock down culture and control creativity, New York, Penguin (Free PDF)
Lessig, L. (2007): TED Talk
Robinson, K. (2006): TED talk 1
Robinson, K. (2010): TED talk 2
Drori, J., (2007): TED talk

And if you want to so see how a good RW kind of class looks like, see this.

Footnotes:
¹ - We should also note, that the school curriculum is far to narrow to cover all of the interests and talents that children might have. Not just that; it is completely unbalanced. Languages and math are dominant subjects everywhere you go while arts and certain sciences suffer from the lack of attention. As Ken Robinson puts it, a lot of people go trough their lives thinking they don't have any talent at all. They don't enjoy what they do in life, they just do their jobs and wait for the weekend. We are not all born just for math, languages and encyclopedic learning. We are much more than that! I spilled a lot of ink on that subject, I am aware of the problem, but it is an education-specific subject, so I decided not to write about it in this context.

²- One more thing. When you talk about schools and media in this tone, you can quickly pass the line and end up on the side of conspiracy 'theories'. It is a very thin line indeed! The point at which conspiracy simply fails is that it assumes that this system is put up and maintained by intelligent design of the elite. Now this is a kind of a compliment, don't you think? I simply don't believe they are that smart. Nobody is. There is simply too much data and too many arbitrary factors for anyone to manipulate with. Stephen Wolfram's A New Kind of Science will show you that even with the simplest of rules a great randomness can occur. Even supercomputers can't predict weather for more than 3 days ahead, not to mention the whole society. I would also strongly suggest reading some game theory on this subject. It will show how even if every involved member of the society is trying for the best, the whole system can go totally down. Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene will force you to make the same conclusion.

"There are no accidental masterpieces in painting, but there are accidental masterpieces in photography." - Chuck Close (in The Genius of Photography documentary)

There are no accidentally good paintings, but there are accidentally good photographs for sure. It often happens that I stumble upon some of them on facebooks, flickr or even in my mum's old family album. I find an amateur photograph and it is simply perfect. Everything is as it should be; the light, composition, subjects, colors, story, emotion, atmosphere... everything. I guess the medium of photography is so easy to master that these things can occur; amateurs instinctively produce quality that professionals work years to achieve. Of course, with amateurs these accidents are only a bright exception, whilst with professionals they are a rule made by design (talent + hard work). No problems so far.

The problems arise when we have to evaluate these masterpieces. Should they be put in the same basket as masterpieces that are produced by skilled professionals? Many would say no; it is a matter of luck. But I hesitate; luck or no luck, the picture itself is what matters at the end. It is not an easy step (especially not for a photographer), but one should learn to accept and respect accidental masterpieces and enjoy their qualities. This should go not only for amateur accidental masterpieces but also for accidentally good photographs that professionals do at their work. The process of recognizing the quality (or selection) is a severely underrated step in creative process. Especially in photography it is crucial to understand that a good exhibition can be made or killed at this stage. Start with 3000 photos, select 300, and from those the final 30 for an exhibition or a book. I know that many times photographers would fight their better judgment and not include a good photo in, just because a significant amount of luck was present at its creation. It seems like it rivals their talent and skill. But I believe you shouldn't fight that emotion and let the "lucky" one into the selection, simply because your talent and skills are already at work when you are selecting! It is the same talent that is taking those decisions (light, angle, expression...) on the field while taking the photos, or in the studio while making a selection. The same talent! Picasso was once doing a simple paper sculptures; he would simply take a piece of paper and tore it into parts and pieces. How could this be art if it is governed by chance? Of course it is, because not every piece made Picasso satisfied. Even though his papers were torn with a huge amount of randomness, his artistic genius was able to recognize qualities in some that others simply didn't have. It is about that artistic recognition, and not necessarily about the process of making the piece itself.

Therefore it is not surprising that it is often the professionals, and not the amateurs, who recognize those accidental works for what they are. But certain conditions have to be met; one is honesty. You just have to accept the fact that sometimes instincts and pure luck can result into something that is usually achieved only by years of hard work and study. Just don't fight it!

Two days ago I had a talk here in Ankaran about the Internet, Creativity, Copyrights and how it is all connected. The talk is very much inspired by Lawrence Lessig, in the terms of the content and also execution. Unfortunatelly I have had a little bit of a cold, so my voice is not what it should be... Hopefully you will understand my English

Many thank to Joe Nicolosi for letting me use his awesome video

I could show you my last slideshow of photos from gymnastics world cup in Maribor (actually I'm doing it right now), but istead I'd much rather share with you my last talk from the conference in Olimje a week ago. The purpose was to present UMMI summer camps and our methods of working there, but in doing so also shine some light on the issues connected with giftedness and creativity, especially with children and youth.

Unfortunatelly for some of you, the talk is in Slovenian. If anyone is willing to make subtitles or translations I can provide source video file and the transcript in Slovenian. I lack time to do it myself. Those of you who understand it, thank you for watching and I'll be glad to recive some comments.

I have developed a habit to watch TED talks and then order books by those speakers. Quite recently I have found Scott McCloud, a prominent figure in the world of (American) comics and his book Understanding Comics which is soooo much more than just a comic book about comics.

I believe there is almost no child in western world that hasn't come in touch with comics sometime in his/hers childhood. For most of the youth in my country comics by Miki Muster provided an enchanted world of adventures by three amusing charachters: Trdonja the turtle, Zvitorepec the fox and Lakotnik the wolf. I remember that at age 10 or 11 there was nothing that could keep me away from those comics. This was my first 'serious' reading.

[/IMG]Now the book by Scott McCloud provides not only a very good insight into the realm of comics, but also a very good theory how visual communication and art-making work. The explanation is so straight-to-the-point that it could be valued even by people who never read comics and so simple (=elegant), that it could be only done by a genius. I will read this book again, for sure!

Originally posted by Jeff Hawkins, On Intelligence, page 134:

To the cortex, our bodies are just part of the external world. Remember, the brain is in a quiet and dark box. It knows about the world only via the patterns on the sensory nerve fibers. From the brain's perspective as a pattern device, it doesn't know about your body any differently than it knows about the rest of the world. There isn't a special distinction between where your body ends and the rest of the world begins.

We can now draw at least two conclusions. Firstly, that would explain the dualism in religion about body and soul being separated. But I will not talk about that. Instead I'm interested in an other phenomenon. Perhaps there there is a degree by which you can separate the rest of the world from your body and the level of it depends on psyhological aspects of "skill".
Maybe you are a skilled skier. Do skies feel like an object when you are "in the zone" skiing? I bet not! The same thing happens to me when I'm in the zone with my photo camera (Steve Taylor would say that my ego is in abeyance while by "inner game" model self1 would be in charge) I can no longer separate my camera from the rest of my body. It becomes a part of me. In the same fashion a conductor perceives his baton - just as an other part of his body. The more skilled you are, the more the object feels as a part of you.
So perhaps very good pilots think of their airplanes just as a bigger body inside of which they slip to fly. And we all feel of our cars as a new and bigger body when we drive. If that is true, we can explain a series of things that occour in connection to cars:

- It can explain why people extend their ego to cars. Pimping cars is nothing else than bodybuilding with different means.
- It can explain why it "hurts you" when a rock or something hits the car,
- It can explain why people worry so much about scratches on their cars,
- It can explain why people do all that nasty stuff inside their cars (like picking their nose). They are inside of the body, how could you see them?

Now, isn't that interesting?!?!