Tag Results
14 posts tagged creativity
New flexible classroom design breaks out of rigid row-column design
-
Researchers at North Carolina State University have developed a classroom design that gives instructors increased flexibility in how to teach their courses and improves accessibility for students, while slashing administrative costs.
The new flexible approach acknowledges the fact that students are now bringing their own laptops to class. The classrooms also include mobile infrastructure, where whiteboards, desks and tables can be reconfigured according to the needs of students and instructors.
“These classrooms work really well in terms of engaging students, particularly in regard to helping students bridge the gap between in-class instruction and out-of-classroom assignments,” says Dr. Susan Miller-Cochran, an associate professor of English and director of the First-Year Writing Program at NC State and lead author of a paper on the flexible classroom design.
The flexible design also improves access for students with special needs.
This approach could also lead to more creativity and active involvement by students, replacing the centuries-old, mind-numbing passive lecture format. Would this also improve some working environments? — Editor (via New flexible classroom design breaks out of rigid row-column design | KurzweilAI)
Brain scans of rappers shed light on creativity : Nature News & Comment
Rappers making up rhymes on the fly while in a brain scanner have provided an insight into the creative process. Freestyle rapping — in which a performer improvises a song by stringing together unrehearsed lyrics — is a highly prized skill in hip hop. But instead of watching a performance in a club, Siyuan Liu and Allen Braun, neuroscientists at the US National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders in Bethesda, Maryland, and their colleagues had 12 rappers freestyle in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine. The artists also recited a set of memorized lyrics chosen by the researchers. By comparing the brain scans from rappers taken during freestyling to those taken during the rote recitation, they were able to see which areas of the brain are used during improvisation. The study is published today in Scientific Reports1.
Creativity Predicts a Longer Life: The trait of openness improves health through creativity-Scientific American
Researchers have long been studying the connection between health and the five major personality traits: agreeableness, extraversion, neuroticism, openness and conscientiousness. A large body of research links neuroticism with poorer health and conscientiousness with superior health. Now openness, which measures cognitive flexibility and the willingness to entertain novel ideas, has emerged as a lifelong protective factor. The linchpin seems to be the creativity associated with the personality trait—creative thinking reduces stress and keeps the brain healthy. A study published in the June issue of the Journal of Aging and Health found that higher openness predicted longer life, and other studies this year have linked that trait with lower metabolic risk, higher self-rated health and more appropriate stress response.
Imagine a creativity cap. A device that would free you, if only momentarily, from your mindsets, from your prejudices, from the mental blocks to creativity. These words are emblazoned on the website Creativitycap.com, and they represent the vision of neuroscientist Allan Snyder. Snyder believes we all possess untapped powers of cognition, normally seen only in rare individuals called savants, and accessing them might take just a few jolts of electricity to the brain. It sounds like a Michael Crichton plot, but Snyder, of the University of Sydney, Australia, says he wouldn’t be surprised to see a prototype of the creativity cap within a couple of years. His research suggests that brain stimulation improves people’s ability to solve difficult problems. But Snyder’s interpretation of his findings remains controversial, and the science of using brain stimulation to boost thinking is still in its early stages. “I think it’s a bit of a minefield,” said psychologist Robyn Young of Flinders University in Australia, who has tried to replicate Snyder’s early experiments. “I’m not really sure whether the technology is developed that can turn it into a more accurate science.” (via Unlock Your Inner Rain Man by Electrically Zapping Your Brain | Wired Science | Wired.com)
Source 
“…Creativity is, in a nutshell, a bit crazy - and most crazy people are too disorganized to do much. But geniuses require to be a bit crazy, yet also do prolonged focused work - and this is a reason why there are so few of them. * So - high intelligence is very rare (and some societies have too low an average intelligence to generate more than a tiny proportion of very intelligent people). Within this tiny group of highly intelligent people, on top of all this, to get the coincidence of a creative way of thinking with a sufficiently persevering personality type is very rare. And among this small percentage of a small percentage, there are the workings of sheer luck, there is the higher than normal risk of (self) sabotage by mental illness and addiction, there are the problems of a higher than usual probability of an abrasive or antisocial personality - and (as Murray identifies) the likelihood that for a person to aim very high requires a belief in transcendental values (the beautiful, the truth, virtue) - and that some societies (such as our own) lack this belief. * Put all these together and it is clear why in all societies genius is rare; and why genius is completely absent from most societies…”
“If we could identify a gene for creativity, let’s call it the “creativity gene”, you would be hard pressed to find very many people who would consider it a “negative gene” or a hazard to possess or carry. But what if, purely hypothetically, we could identify a gene for Schizophrenia? Or Bipolar Disorder? Or Depressive Disorder? Or ADHD? Would you select for those traits if you could genetically engineer your offspring at will? If you wanted to give birth to a creative child, the answer should be yes. The very traits that make someone creative, passionate, and likely to achieve a high degree of success in their domain, are the same traits that define psychological disorders such as Bipolar Disorder, Schizophrenia, and ADHD. So what is the difference between creativity and psychopathology? Where do we draw the line between functional excess of extreme traits and the point at which they define a psychological disorder? Is there a discriminating characteristic that separates these two groups? Yes, there is, and it’s called cognitive control, or high executive function. We’ll discuss this more in a bit.”
“Would Isaac Newton have conceived his theories without his network of colleagues, associates and rivals? In work published in 1992, Dean Simonton, a psychologist at the University of California, Davis, sifted through the correspondence of more than 2000 eminent scientists and inventors and mapped the links between their relationships. He found that Newton was stimulated and provoked by 25 scientists of his time, including Gottfried Leibniz, Edmond Halley and Jacob Bernoulli. Interactions with these rivals, confidants and correspondents was crucial for shaping the consequent passage of Newton’s ideas into history (Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, vol 18, p 452).”
Creativity enhances life. It enables the great thinkers, artists, and leaders of our world to continually push forward new concepts, new forms of expression and new ways to improve every facet of our existence. The creative impulse is of particular importance to scientific research. Without it, the same obstacles, ailments, and solutions would occur repeatedly because no one stepped back and reflected to gain a new perspective. Unfortunately, in the academic world—where much of today’s scientific innovation takes place—researchers are encouraged to maintain the status quo and not “rock the boat.” This mentality is pervasive, affecting all aspects of scientific research from idea generation to funding to the training of the next generation of scientists. (via Opinion: Academia Suppresses Creativity | The Scientist)
How Creativity Connects with Immorality: Scientific American
In the mid 1990’s, Apple Computers was a dying company. Microsoft’s Windows operating system was overwhelmingly favored by consumers, and Apple’s attempts to win back market share by improving the Macintosh operating system were unsuccessful. After several years of debilitating financial losses, the company chose to purchase a fledgling software company called NeXT. Along with purchasing the rights to NeXT’s software, this move allowed Apple to regain the services of one of the company’s founders, the late Steve Jobs. Under the guidance of Jobs, Apple returned to profitability and is now the largest technology company in the world, with the creativity of Steve Jobs receiving much of the credit. However, despite the widespread positive image of Jobs as a creative genius, he also has a dark reputation for encouraging censorship,“ losing sight of honesty and integrity”, belittling employees, and engaging in other morally questionable actions. These harshly contrasting images of Jobs raise the question of why a CEO held in such near-universal positive regard could also be the same one accused of engaging in such contemptible behavior. The answer, it turns out, may have something to do with the aspect of Jobs which is so admired by so many.
“
“Anyone can learn to be creative.” Is that really true?
Absolutely. We’ve believed for thousands of years that creativity is an all-or-nothing phenomenon: you either have it and you are Pablo Picasso, or you don’t and then you’re the rest of us. But that’s not the case. What you discover when you look at creativity from the perspective of the brain is that it is universal. We’re all creative all of the time, we can’t help but be creative. It is, of course, distributed: like any other talent, some people are going to have more of it than others. But that doesn’t mean the majority of us have nothing at all. That’s why I also think that we can all get better at it. We can look at what successful creators do and try to learn from them.
”Source 
