Scott Barry Kaufman: Creative People are "Mindful Daydreamers"

Image: Geoff Oliver Bugbee

Successful creatives are "'open to experience,' highly sensitive, often introverted, resilient and vulnerable." 

Is this description of creative potential also a description of intelligence?

Recounting his life story, cognitive psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman talked to IdeaFestival attendees on Friday about how traditional measurements of intelligence are now changing to account for what he referred to as "activators of potential," the so-called soft skills.

That accounting is happening in no small part to his work.

Kaufman's life long goal has been to "redefine intelligence" away from a relatively narrow confines of the traditional IQ test so that fewer children are consigned, as he was through the 9th grade, to special education, and more are helped to fulfill their talents. IQ tests, he pointed out, are great at measuring quick thinking, but not deep or reflective thinking, or mistake tolerance.

An ability "to fall in love," he said, "with a future image of themselves" is after all hard to do when that self is being treated as "ungifted," as he was.

That is also the title of Kaufman's book.

A quick story: in the presentation just prior to Kaufman's talk, the artist Titus Kaphar explained his revelation in his early twenties that "if he could make it visual, he could learn anything." That understanding of who he was has since been the key to his success as his haunting mixed media and paintings - and the acclaim they have won - can attest. What the IdeaFestival audience didn't see, sadly, was the huge hug exchanged between Kaufman and Kaphar backstage at the IdeaFestival after Kaphar came off stage.

As it turns out, the two have known each other for many years. And they met once more through sheer coincidence. Because of a last minute cancellation of one of the scheduled speakers, Kaufman was contacted relatively late in the process to speak during the Friday lunch hour at IdeaFestival 2015.

Not every success is planned.

As a cognitive scientist, Kaufman has founded the Imagination Institute to expand our ideas about intelligence to included the stage-setting abilities that so often precede insight. This dual-process theory of human potential is one that includes passion, inspiration, resilience, grit, grace and an ability to adapt among the qualities needed for any individual to flourish. They account, as well, for an ability to freely imagine while being simultaneously able to pick out and focus on important connections revealed by expansive thought. And in an age when innovative success depends less on what you know than what you do with what you know, that work, it strikes me, is needed more than ever.

Stay curious.™

Wayne

Titus Kaphar: "When I Make Work"

Image: Goeff Oliver Bugbee

Asked after talking about his work "how he had the courage to be so real," Titus Kaphar sighed, and after a moment replied "when I make work I don't want to lie to himself."

Encounter his his work.

Stay curious.

Wayne

To See What's There

Images: Geoff Oliver Bugbee

The artists of Creative Capital never fail to inspire, or to provide unexpected insight. This year is no different. Listening to Andy Kropa talk about his efforts to "hack Alzheimers," I watched a demonstration of an app designed to scrub backwards, much like a video editor might, to remind the sufferer of an event in the recent past - to get directions, or to be reminded of an appointment, or to put a name with a picture.

Ken Gonzales-Day, whose artwork focuses on the troubled history of race in America, showed several images of public lynchings, spectacles all. Asked about the why of his art, Gonzales-Day talked briefly about the importance of seeing things as they are, or in his words, "to see differently" so that healing may take place. It impressed me.  

I was struck watching the two artists talk and show their work about the importance of memory. A fidelity to events means more than accuracy. It occurred again to me that it means someone - or someplace - may make its way toward a better place.

Stay curious.

Wayne

The Sports Gene: Specialization Discounts

Image: Geoff Oliver Bugbee

The Big Idea from The Sports Gene:

Nations that encourage sampling of a variety of sports among promising athletes - rather than intense, early specialization - take home a higher total number of Olympic medals per capita.

The process is a lot like idea generation. Focusing on a single idea to the exclusion of others produces fewer and fewer returns over time. It's the law of diminishing returns. For most of us, for those of us who have average ability with a capacity to improve, sampling a wide variety of ideas will produce more opportunities for that breakthrough or a meaningful new connection.

That's what the IdeaFestival is all about!

Stay curious.

Wayne

Blue Mind Illumination

These are two of my favorite quotes. The kind that stick with me and bubble up frequently:

“The sea, once it casts its spell, holds one in its net of wonder forever.”
         - Jacques Cousteau

“The cure for anything is salt water.”
         - Isak Dinesen

In the world of science, which has been my scholarly and professional domain for three decades, words like these are reserved for keynotes, postscripts, and plaques. Used publicly, such sappy sentimentalities regularly evoke cynical eye-rolling.

But what did Captain Cousteau and Ms. Blixen (Dinesen was her pen name) mean when they wrote them? Were they being literal, poetic, or both? Were they wonderfully prescient or merely passionate?

Chances are, if you are still reading this, you’re much like me. We’ve been put under that aqueous spell, found wonder, and healed ourselves through water. And if I asked you if those personal experiences required scientific verification you’d poke me in my cynical little eyeball.

I’d also wager that if such explanations were available, you—like me—would let your curiosity pull you in for an exploratory journey. If cognitive scientists, neuropsychologists, and physiologists held insights about cognitive benefits related to our love of water, we’d want them.

Some might argue that exploring the science of wonder, joy, love, and awe diminishes its experience. For me it’s just the opposite—inquiry grows the island of knowledge, which then offers longer beaches to explore.

So, over each of the past four years we have assembled top neuroscientists, explorers, big wave surfers, deep sea divers, musicians, writers, and educators in San Francisco, on the Outer Banks, Block Island, and the Cornish coast. Thrown together for three days, surrounded by water, and isolated from modern distractions, we’ve taken some deep dives into the topic known as “Blue Mind”.

Our simple goal has been to better understand “our brains on water” and to communicate what we find as widely as possible.

I won’t give it all away, and space won’t allow it, but suffice it to say the results from fMRI, EEG, and neurochemical studies are profound and surprising, with ramifications for conservationists, economists, architects, public health practitioners, athletes, travelers, educators, and parents.

Karen and Jacques’ lasting words are thoroughly and scientifically defensible: the spells, wonderment, and cures of salubrious waters are indeed quite real.

Please join me on October 12th for IF Water, and let the eye-rolling cease and the teaching and Blue Mind illumination begin.

“In the end, we conserve only what we love. We will love only what we understand. We will understand only what we are taught.” – Baba Dioum, Senegalese Naturalist.

- Dr. Wallace J. Nichols - Scientist, marine biologist and author of the New York Times best seller, Blue Mind