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: Brainstorm, divergent thinking, female brain, male brain, Rebecca Jordan-Young, Research and Development, sex differences in the brain, the biology of originality | 2 Comments »

Rousseau and Me, We Don’t Agree– A Post in Two Parts and a Coda

Posted on February 17, 2011 by galarzamonsalve

For five days I’m writing about the most interesting methods people have used throughout history to raise brilliant children of all types. Yesterday I wrote A Mad Poet and a Sane Mathematician.

Part I:

Around this time– a year ago, I longed to walk outside with my toddler or stand by the pond with my five-year-old checking out brand-new tadpoles. I wanted to bake bread or travel to Ethiopia or just drive an hour to visit my sister. But I couldn’t. I could wiggle my toes a bit and shift my weight from left to right, but no more than that– doctor’s orders. If I moved more than that, contractions began immediately. But the tiny person growing inside me needed to swim around in amniotic fluid another 15 weeks.

The slightly-open window behind my chair let in crisp air in waves. I heard swallows swishing around high in the sky and chirping. Birds so happy to have arrived safe from Argentina and ready to build spring nests under the eaves of my house. My toddler wanted to share my chair, but we couldn’t both fit. She cried and begged me to pick her up. Later, she dragged her wicker rocker and set it next to me. I read her books. My 7-year-old and 5-year-old brought me little snacks of oranges or cinnamon toast. My 10-year-old made pasta for lunch.

Several weeks later, resting still, this time in a hospital bed, I couldn’t focus to read. I couldn’t think in complete sentences either. I just lay there, with my uncomfortably quiet mind. Living requires action– and without it you seem barely human, let alone a competent parent of little children. I stared at their photographs taped to the wall in front of me. All those smiling faces kept me company. But I couldn’t touch them or kiss them. They couldn’t tell me the stuff they thought or what kept them awake at night. So still, I drifted in and out of mind for hours. One night, in a moment of both subtle desperation and fierce maternal agency a thought came to me. My mind’s eye followed the thought as it entered and spread across my consciousness. It is time to study my children in the way that thinkers do, with closed senses but open mind. The timing could not be better.

This thought– It is time to study my children in the way that thinkers do, with closed senses but open mind, expanded until it took up so much mental space it squished the limbic helplessness out of my soul.

I’ve wanted to study the lives of sixteenth century Spanish monks or figure out how the Universe really began. But figuring out Creativity from its simplest reduction to viral idea-spreading– that I could study until I die. And here I had time!

Instantly I felt the luckiest woman in the world– with a laptop, speedy internet access and several bright children with budding creative powers to think about and later observe. That night I started Creating-Brains, this blog. I also e-mailed my friends with the link so they’d read my first post and make it all official before I chickened out.

Part II:

Months earlier, I had read the most interesting book on human development theory– Jean Jacques Rousseau’s classic Emile. Here Rousseau writes the life story of his young aristocratic charge– Emile and chronicles his growth to astonishing mental independence. When Rousseau ends his tutorship (20 yrs. long) he introduces Emile, a virgin thinker, to the world.

So how did Rousseau raise Emile? Here are some highlights:

Emile…

Never wore binding clothes.
Ran around barefoot, even in Winter.
Took frigid showers outdoors, even in Winter.
Lived in a bare cottage, alone with his tutor, in the countryside.
Ate plain food.
Cultivated one habit– Have no habits (no bed time, no wake time, no set daily schedule whatsoever).
Knew no books, was not read to and did not know how to read until age 16.
Had no friends.
Learned through experience only ( i.e., poking a real skunk to learn it stinks, and not reading about it).
Led his own life with little human interference.
Had a tutor who followed him from afar outdoors, but sat with him to discuss humanity’s grandest questions to close a day.
Could ask his tutor anything and get a question for an answer.
Ran free.
Lived happy.
Thought for himself.

Rousseau’s Emile was an imaginary character (Rousseau was a philosopher, after all). But the methods used to educate Emile influenced Western thinking about childhood development and education for two centuries. The Sudbury Valley School in Massachusetts, the Idler in the UK and the International Unschooling movement are examples of today’s Rousseau-groupies.

But what does Rousseau’s Emile have to do with me hanging out in the hospital, far from my charges? Plenty (stay with me here). First, disclosure– a host of loving , sometimes fun, but always responsible people cared for the kids when I could not. Also, Super-man (a.k.a.my husband) cut his work days dangerously short to come home. He also spent too many nights awake nursing sick kids (yes, they all got the flu) or warming midnight bottles for our toddler. But back to Rousseau and me: in gist– my children lived a lot like Emile. Rousseau theorized and Emile turned out super human. But real children, I learned by being away, do not thrive cultivating the habit of no habits. Also, real children grow confused, rather than fonder, for lack of gentle touch. But worse of all, the independent life reeks of danger for little ones and free-thinking is small without limits.

I resolved, then, as I began to study my children to also study their broken mama and by sheer mindfulness and consideration, we’d learn to live right. Together we’d learn to live the Creative life, which, as I’ve written often since my first post, is not without habits or discipline.

Coda:

Several years ago, I would have disagreed with every iota of Amy Chua’s Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother– the book I’ve mentioned several times in this series. I would have suggested Emile’s lifestyle as the enlightened (and opposite) alternative. Not today– Chua’s not totally wrong. Discipline does breed brilliance. But Chua is fundamentally wrong, because disciplined skills without philosophy make for hollow output.

So there it is. I’ve told you another piece of my story and dragged you through contrived concepts. But, stay with me…there’s more to come!

I’d love to hear from you and learn what you think. Leave a comment. I love reading comments!

Filed under: Childhood, Complexity, Constraints, Creative Families, Parents, Philosophers, The Child, The Scientist, What Hasn't Worked for Me | Tagged: Amy Chua, Creativity, Creativity in hard times, Emile, Jean Jacques Rousseau | Leave a Comment »

Twelve Children and a Fifty-Fifty Proposition Throughout

Posted on September 20, 2010 by galarzamonsalve

Highly Creative people keep favored routines. This is the last post on the routines of individual Creators, historical and current. My previous post: Strict Schedule as Newbie Novelist.

Lillian Moller Gilbreth

1952: “The World’s Greatest Woman Engineer”

Inventor, Writer,

Founder of Modern Management

Mother of Twelve (of Cheaper by the Dozen Fame)

“Lillian worked hard during the Providence [Rhode Island] years. In addition to producing a baby every fifteen months or so, she ran Frank’s business during his frequent absences, researched and wrote an entirely new doctoral dissertation, and authored most of the books and papers that appeared under Frank’s name. Although her activities and stamina seem prodigious, a typed copy of “Mother’s Daily Schedule,” dated July 11, 1912, may explain how she managed to do so much.”

Historian Jane Lancanter includes this schedule in her book Making Time: Lillian Moler Gilbreth–A Life Beyond “Cheaper by the dozen.“

It read:

“The schedule includes a note in Lillian’s handwriting: ‘Important to start family off each day–’cheerful and happy.’ Eliminate worry and rush by proper planning’.”

‘No matter what happens I manage two hours of rest and quiet immediately after lunch. This is the best time for me as most of the children are at school and the little fellows are out of doors and the house is the quietest.’

“She neither cooked nor cleaned, and although she scheduled much more time with her children than women who work outside the home usually manage, she had assistance with the children during the hours she spent on her professional work. In fact, hers could almost be seen as a leisurely schedule. In addition to Martha Gilbreth (her mother-in-law), who acted as household manager, an English widow named Anne Cunningham did most of the cooking, and Tom Grieves, an Irishman, became the Gilbreths’ man-of-all-work.”

“Tom did the washing, ran errands, shopped, and became somehow indispensable. The older children adored him. He was a mimic, a dancer, a harmonica player, and a whistler, and he would bang his chest melodramatically and insist he had been a fool ever to permit himself, to be “shanghaied” into this crazy household, where the work kept increasing with a new baby every year. He would sigh deeply and say, “Lincoln freed the slaves, all but one, all but one.”

“They [lived] in a clapboard house on Brown street…it was only half a block from the Brown University campus, so although the house had a very small backyard, the children could play on the main green, at least when the students weren’t around. They were so close to Brown (where Lillian completed her doctorate), that, Frank [Lillian's husband] joked, Lilian “could go to class and if a child fell out the window, catch him before he landed on the ground.”

“Tom and Mrs. Cunningham put the house in order.

“Much of the first floor was devoted to offices; two stenographers worked in one room, typing away from the Dictaphones that Frank and Lillian spoke into “at any hour day or night.”

“Lillian also found a well-educated mother’s helper, Helen Douglas, who was a student at Pembrike, the women’s college at Brown…Frank interviewed Helen, scaring her to death with questions about teaching, playing with, and disciplining young children. “I meekly said I’m a freshman wanting to study to be an English teacher–I’ve never been with young children so I’d just have to do what seemed proper on the occasion.”

“Frank hired her. He said, “I’ve just hired her because she doesn’t know a damn thing.” The Gilbreths sent Helen to a Montessori school to get a little training.

“With a full compliment of household assistants in place, Lillian was poised to play a more public part in Gilbreth and Company, management consultants.

“Frank wound down his construction business and became, in partnership with his wife, a management consultant. He also participated in all childcare basic care duties and education.

Lillian said,

“It was a fifty-fifty proposition throughout. Any woman can do it with that sort of husband.“

(Taken from Jane Lancaster’s book Making Time: Lillian Moler Gilbreth–A Life Beyond “Cheaper by the dozen.“, Pp. 130-132)

Filed under: Complexity, Creativity by Habits, Design Thinking, Supportive Spouses | Tagged: Cheaper by the Dozen Mother, Complex Families, Creativity, Habits, Habits for Creativity, Lillian Moller Gilbreth | Leave a Comment »

What Defines Creative Work? The Negative Spaces

Posted on September 5, 2010 by galarzamonsalve

The laws of nature not only describe the results of observations, but the laws of nature delimit the scope of observations. -Robert Oppenheimer (Theoretical Physicist, 1958)

While in college, time stood still for me inside a speeding Benz one very black night.

My hands, each white-knuckling a clutch of passenger-seat piping and leather. My arms, each locked at its side in upward shrug position. My heart skipped more than a beat. I froze in a silent scream. One. Two.

Snap. Like bullets, my words shot out,

Sarah!!!! What ARE YOU DOOOO-ING!!!!

My good friend Sarah laughed and turned the headlights back on.

Blacking-out any definition between car and unlit country road brought Sarah two seconds of joy or ecstasy or ultimate control. Maybe she just acted on some latent daredevil’s impulse. I don’t know. I still don’t care why she did it. And fortunately, we did not crash and suffered little more than a break in my trust of Sarah’s capability as driver. But that night I understood full-on, why seasoned artists ponder on Negative Space.

Scottish artist, Marion Boddy-Evans says,

Artists use negative space to define a subject. Negative space works when there’s a balance between the positive and negative spaces. Negative space also works when it draws the viewer’s eye into the subject at hand.

Before my friend Sarah turned off the headlights, light showcased the country road. But without light, she had no subject, no road before her.

Betty Edwards, author of Drawing On the Right Side of the Brain, explains the concept of negative space with a Bugs Bunny analogy. She says,

Imagine Bugs Bunny speeding along and running through a door. What you’ll see in the cartoon is a door with a bunny-shaped hole in it. What’s left of the door is the negative space, that is the space around the object, in this case Bugs Bunny.

Highly Creative people, in all fields, figure out negative space to define their work. Albert Einstein found time (the speed of light) to be the limiting factor defining energy. Only with energy’s limit defined, could he formulate the Theory of Relativity.

What limits Creative work, highlights it.

Filed under: Art Concepts, Complexity, creativity, Defining Creativity, Truth | Tagged: Defining a Problem, Negative Space, Using the Concept of negative Space | Leave a Comment »

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