Sleeping Around in London

Posted on March 13, 2011 by galarzamonsalve

Before I start today’s post, I must disclose.  I sleep some,  but not enough to think and walk at the same time. My 11-month-old still nurses through the night.  I get up when she cries at night because I want her to fatten up and grow long.  And, she is my precious baby after all. So, against medical advice (my physician sister-in-law looks out for me–  she thinks I need more sleep),  I sleep some and figure, someday I’ll sleep more. And besides,  I can always find a chair to land on if I feel a thought coming.

It turns out, you don’t need a set amount of sleep at precise intervals to think original  thoughts.  Creativity scholar Mihalyi Csikzentmihalyi found highly creative people work with their bio-rhythms.  They arrange their lives to sleep when tired but work when they’re sharp– regardless of hour.  My current baby-controlled schedule is not ideal ( i.e., running a 5k this morning seems impossible) but it’s not horrible for creativity.  I’ve had plenty of brilliant insights in between mid-night naps (unfortunately, I don’t always remember them by morning)  and I’ve found my sharpest hours seem to fall between 1:00 a.m. and dawn (if, I’ve slept early and deep the previous three nights).  I’ve made peace with my sleep issues and continue. My good friend Jennifer says, In a year, things will be different.  She’s right.  I can imagine longer nights a year from now.

Some friends– a high-flying London couple, are about to have their first baby.  She’s a novelist.  He’s a club DJ by night,  international lawyer by day.  Their spacious Hackney flat has plenty of space for the gear they’ll need and they both love kids. They’re more than ready;  they’re giddy non-stop with anticipation.  There’s only one small problem.  They love their current party-almost-every-night, sleep in, work late and do it all again life rhythm.  Last time I visited them,  the guy asked,

Do kids HAVE to go to bed early?  I mean,  that doesn’t make sense.  My sister is adamant.  She says, Just wait.  You’ll see.  Kids HAVE to go to bed super early. It’s just the way it works. But why would that be?  I mean, as long as they get the amount they need–  you know, like 8 hours,  or whatever.  Right?

I said,

I don’t know. I suppose you could convince your baby you live in another time zone–  you could carry around a full-spectrum light lamp in your diaper bag and shine it on your kid’s face at sundown.  And shut the blinds in her room in the morning,  so she still thinks it’s night. That shouldn’t be too hard–    days are pretty dark here in London anyway. I don’t know.  I haven’t tried it.

I don’t remember where our conversation went from there.  But now (two years later) I wonder if they’ll try to make the baby adjust to their time.  Will they lug her around London’s night-scene in a sound-proof bassinet?  I doubt it.  I think the novelist will nix any exceedingly silly plan.  But she is pretty flexible and does like to try things out.

In any case,  the man’s question is a good one.  Do babies need to sleep when 7:30 p.m. hits wherever they are?  I’ve always stuck to a traditional bedtime.  But, I’d love to watch the London couple trick their baby into sleeping exactly when they’d like her to sleep. If they pull this off,  they should write a book and I bet it would hit the bestseller list on Day 1.

Filed under: Biology, Creative Families, Following Rules, Living the Creative Life, Music, Parents, The Child | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments »

My Inner Map of Old Paris and A Bothered Researcher

Posted on March 4, 2011 by galarzamonsalve

This morning, my six-year-old ran to me waving a neatly folded twenty-dollar bill.  She said,  Mom. Is this yours?  I found it on the breakfast table.  Can I have it?  Please?

I have no idea whose bill she held or why she found it where she did.  Regardless, I didn’t let her keep the bill.  I said Thank you, darling, and mumbled something about $20 being a lot of money.  Still, my daughter’s open-faced honesty and hope impressed me.  Her stance showed she had no real expectations of keeping the money–  but she’d try anyhow.  Just in case.  As she handed me the bill and walked away,  my 11 month old, sitting on the carpet two feet away, coughed several times. I bolted off the couch to her, swept the inside of her mouth with my index finger and removed a flat,  juicy piece of wicker.  My baby crawls fast enough now we’ve nicknamed her “speedy”.  She’s more than just speedy though, she’s efficient too.  She constantly collects stuff from the floor to investigate. She even has a method. Here’s how it goes: pick up object, move it from right hand to left. Turn it about in various directions and angles.  Then, either drop it or continue research and taste the thing.  Chew and swallow if possible.

Through all this excitement my two-year old stayed kneeling in front of and using the couch as her desk.  She spread a stack of index cards haphazardly except for her “done” pile.  The “done” cards, stacked together, exhibited various slashes, circles and more of color.  One blue.  One red.  She kept enlarging that “done” pile oblivious to the rest of us.  Focused but just following whims.

Babies and young children constantly try things out on a whim. Cognitive psychologist Alison Gopnick says in her fascinating book, The Philosophical Baby,

Children are the R&D department of the human species– the blue-sky guys,  the brainstormers.

[Their] brains seem to have special qualities that make them especially well suited for imagination and learning.

Each try a child makes and each whim she chases ever-so-slightly changes the physical map of her very plastic brain. New information connects loosely to other (less new) bits to form networks of thought. We all have a zillion (OK, that’s not a true number, but it fits) connections running throughout our brains–  more complex than the Los Angeles highway system.  The younger you are the looser (bumpier and sub-developed) your connections and also the more varied.  Again, Gopnik says,

Babies brains are actually more highly connected than adult brains;  more neural pathways are available to babies than adults.

All these connections are loose, tentative and will fade with time and lack of use. They’re also jumbled about in a disorganized mess. But disorganized minds, whether attached to a baby, a teenager or a 40 yr. old, are more likely to come up with original ideas. Hyper-organized minds think in patterns and already know outcomes from the get-go.  Disorganized minds catch novel patterns but are open-wide about outcomes. Original thoughts have no precedents.

Louis Pasteur said,

Chance favors the prepared mind.

As it turns out chance favors a mind prepared on more than one dimension.  First, you need kick-butt skills– virtuosity.  The 10,000 hours of sweat put in.  Second, your brain needs a zillion loose neuronal connections with plenty of Glia for juice.  Entire sections of your brain need beautifully bumpy, tentative and divergent mental pathways–  like a map of old Paris.

My three little girls’ minds work just like that.  Yet, neuroscientists think my girls are less likely to keep disorganized (divergent-thinking) minds into adulthood than their brother.  Men  keep their childhood R&D capacities but women lose them in favor of more organized, predictable mental pathways.  That’s right folks, women’s thinking tends toward predictability and away from originality.  Since originality is a crucial part of creativity, I must ask:  Could this all be true?

Well.  It’s hard to swallow.  But read on.  Neuroscientist Kenneth M. Heilman found men store the bulk of verbal capacities in one hemisphere (the left),  leaving the other hemisphere (the right)  free for disorganized mental pathways.  Women use both hemispheres for verbal communication and so have less mental space  left for wild chance. Heilman also points out scientists, inventors and mathematicians need top-notch spatial skills to shine. And in test after test, men take the prize over women, in all spatial abilities.  And even in fields requiring rich language networks, men outperform women.  Why? Remember those darned language networks taking up so much mental space in both hemispheres.

Yikes.

I am a thinker,  so I will plod on without screaming or pulling my hair or crying into this evening.

Think about all the women you know and all the men you’ve ever met.  Make yourself a little mental chart and place each person into one of two categories: dependable/predictable thinker or unreliable/original thinker.  How many women make your unreliable/original thinker?  And of those who made it, how many have the education to rocket to the top of their field?  Still have some women on this list?  I hope you do.  This is the twenty-first century, after all.

Still, I’m hot and bothered.  Fortunately,  I’m not the only one.  Ten years ago, researcher Rebecca Jordan-Young began questioning neuroscientific gender studies. Eventually, she could stand it no longer.  So many studies she read simply did not jive with reality. So Jordan-Young spent 10,000 hours going over studies dated back to the 1950′s (actually even earlier).  Then she wrote Brainstorm: The Flaws in the Science of Sex Differences, to peel the layers of untruth within the field.

Note:  If you are a Neuroscientist studying sex differences, please read this book.  It’s solid.

On my end,  I’ll make sure my daughters get the education they need.  I’ll also urge disorganized thought patterns.  I may even require (I’m still wishy-washy on this one) mega-time mastering video games (the spatial/visual– super-challenging kind)  starting tomorrow.

I’ve had enough of organized thought-patterns for now.  I’m hyped to feed my inner-disorganized thinker. I’ll start with fish. Hay. Egypt. Schools for Girls.  Sleepy limbs. Boston. Charles River.  MIT. Dream interpretation. Palm-readers and medical office-types named Kathy, Parkinson’s disease, oligarchies.  I’m gone….. lost in my own old-Paris-map of a brain.

How about you?  Do you think more men naturally tend toward originality than women?

*If you’d like to read more about this topic check out these posts: The Second, Less Creative Sex and Characteristics of highly Creative People:  Intro.

Filed under: Biology, Complexity, Divergent thinking, Must Haves of Creativity, Neuroscience, The Brain, The Child, The Scientist | Tagged: , , , , , , , | 2 Comments »

Talking Real Science.

Posted on March 2, 2011 by galarzamonsalve

This morning before breakfast, I walked up the hill behind my house with my 11 yr. old to check out her new make-shift ant lab. She walked with notebook and pencil in hand, ahead of me.  Still, she turned often to wait while I coaxed the toddler with us to keep the pace.  I recognized the ant lab’s layout instantly from a sketch she’d shown me earlier–  open roof,  six-inch high wood-plank outer walls and cross-walls placed to funnel ants to imported sugar-water.

So,  my daughter said and pointed to one corner,  that’s where I’ll bury one magnet.  And, she pointed at a different corner, that’s where the other magnet will go.  I asked her questions, told her the study seemed interesting and we started back home, both satisfied we had done well.

I need to backtrack a bit here.

Last week, a few minutes before we left home to attend classes,  this same 11 yr. old asked,  Oh, mom.  Did you sign my science project proposal? I had not.  But she had the paper at hand,  ready to sign and a pen to sign it with.

Visually scanning the paper, I asked What’s this?

She said,  Oh.  We have to turn in our science project topics today.  You see, she pointed to the top of the paper I held, there’s the question I will work on. I read,  ”Is the direction a plant grows affected by light?”   I faced my daughter.  She raised her brows.

I started, Darling? but paused to find the right words.  I asked how she planned to run her experiment.  She explained.  Then I let loose, Everyone in the world,  including you,  knows plants grow towards light.  Everyone!

She half-smiled.  So, what should I do then?  I have to turn this in a few minutes from now and it can’t be late.

I said,  Yes.  But you can’t turn this in.  It isn’t a question a self-respecting scientist would ask. I launched into a mini-lecture on how the scientific process is to catalyze new discoveries,  not to serve as an end in itself.  She ended up turning in a question she thought interesting–  about the possible musicality of pond frogs. We both knew the science teacher would deny this project.

But,  I told her,  while your teacher is rejecting that question, you buy time to come up with a really great new idea.  The science teacher did reject the frog idea.  And my daughter did come up with a much better project and re-submitted a question.  Neither of us knows the answer to this new question and (as far as we can tell)  nobody else (in the entire world) does either.  Her new project?  ”The effects of increased underground magnetism on red ant colonial patterns.”  She’s got six weeks to figure things out and a good plan sketched out.  What she does not have, is an answer.

On our walk down the hill this morning,  she told me about some of the questions other students had come up with and we talked about those.  One student is studying volcanoes ( there’s got to be at least one, right?),  another is studying whether fruit floats.  But who cares?   My daughter knows her question is good and she’s excited she will discover something new— something no one in the world yet knows.  Now we’re talking real science–  and I couldn’t be happier to see her excited about it!

 

* Wait.  Please stay a little longer:  You may have noticed I’ve changed my blog’s look.  What do you think about that?  Is it better?  Worse?  In bad-taste?  Tantalizing?  I’d love to hear your opinion.  If you’re new here… I’d still love to hear what you think about my site, creativity…the Universe!

Filed under: advice and expectations, Biology, Childhood, Creative Families, Parents, The Child, The Scientist | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments »

Living the Creative Life (Part IV): Jonas Salk

Posted on February 26, 2011 by galarzamonsalve

How do you live the creative life? I’ve gleaned tips from some of my favorite Creators. For five days I’m writing about these insightful suggestions.  Yesterday I wrote about David Bohm’s Advice on Being  Original.

If money were no object and someone offered to build an institution in your name, what would it be?  A community theater for your town? Or a music conservatory?  Where would it stand?  On the edge of a forest or smack in the middle of town? How about architectural style?  California mission or post-modern conceptual?  Most of us will never get such an offer.  But, Dr. Jonas Salk  did.  After developing the polio vaccine in the late 1950′s he got a Carte Blanche to build an institution worthy of his legacy.  Salk founded The Salk Institute for Biologic Studies over-looking the Pacific Ocean.  His dream: to bridge the divide between science and philosophy,which he considered artificial.   For Salk, breakthroughs to help humanity came from a merging of fields, not from either/or thinking.

Salk saw this same artificial divide of either/or thinking in individual people. In his book Survival of the Wisest, he argues for an integration of mind as key to creativity.  Check out his advice below:

  1. Keep your mind as agile as possible.
  2. Don’t be frightened by fixed ways of thinking or taboos.
  3. Fill yourself with all the knowledge you can.
  4. Develop your imagination.
  5. Keep what you know (your intellect) and what you imagine (your intuition) balanced.  You need both functions.
  6. Sleep.  Your conscious mind and unconscious integrates while you sleep– this integration is the key to creativity.

What do you think?  Is integration of intellect and intuition crucial to creativity?

Filed under: advice and expectations, Biology, Integration, The Scientist | Tagged: , , , , , , | 5 Comments »

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