Continued from the previous Blog………… 

The Synthesizing Mind:

I began to think about the Synthesizing Mind when the great physicist Murray Gell-Mann made an off handed remark.  He opined that in the twenty-first century, the most important mind will be the synthesizing mind. A great example of a synthesizer is Charles Darwin. He travelled for five years aboard the Beagle, and collected a huge amount of information about the flora and fauna of the world. He did his own experiments and observations of the world, corresponded with everybody who was a naturalist, and then twenty years later put forth one of the great intellectual syntheses “On the Origin of the Species.”

The Synthesizing Mind realizes that nowadays, we are all inundated with information. If you looked up the word “evolution” on your search engine, you could spend the rest of your life just reading secondary sources. Many of them are of questionable value and you need criteria for deciding what to pay attention to and what to ignore. Additionally, to synthesize for yourself, you have to put information together in ways which cohere, which make sense for you. And if you are involved in communication, as every teacher, parent, and professional is, the synthesis has to be transmittable to other people.

 I thought that psychology would have something to say about synthesizing because it is so important, but my research revealed that in fact psychology doesn’t have much to say. Some of you are thinking: “well, isn’t synthesizing what teachers have always done?” But let me introduce Monsieur Jourdain from the Bourgeois Gentilhomme by Molière.  M. Jourdain got very excited in middle age because he found out that he was speaking prose all his life without realizing it. I think we have been in the business of synthesizing, but we haven’t been aware of how important it is and how we might help other people to become better synthesizers.

 How one might be more reflective about synthesizing? The answer is: looking for the current best synthesis, deciding what our ultimate synthesis should look like, picking a method, deciding what are we going to look at, listen to and why, examining what are we going to ignore and why, and importantly, how are we going to record information, using equations, mind maps, stories, formulas, taxonomies, or whatever.Again, the kind of things that most of us do already, but we aren’t really reflective about it, we don’t spend much time explicitly transmitting that lore to people who are less experienced in synthesizing. Life is short, syntheses are due, term papers are due, lectures are due, but you want to finish the proto-synthesis some time beforehand, so that you can get informed reactions. Not only from people who know a lot but also from people who don’t know so much.

 

The Creative Mind:

 The Creative Mind is embodied by Einstein in the Sciences and by Virginia Woolf in the Arts. People who are creative are those who come up with new things which eventually get accepted. If an idea or product is too easily accepted, it is not creative; if it is never accepted, it is just a false example. And acceptance can happen quickly or it can take a long time.

I believe that you cannot be creative unless you have mastered at least one discipline, art or craft. And cognitive science teaches us that on the average, it takes about ten years to master a craft. So, Mozart was writing great music when he was fifteen and sixteen, but that is because he started when he was four or five. Same story, with the prodigious Picasso. Creativity is always called “thinking outside the box.”  But I order my quintet of minds in the way that I do because you can’t think outside of the box unless you have a box.

  I thought that creativity was mostly an issue of how good your mental computers were. But  studies  of others have convinced me of two other things. First, personality and temperament are at least as important as cognitive powers. People who are judged creative take chances, take risks, are not afraid to fall down, and pick themselves up, they say “what can I learn from this?” and they go on.

The other day I was giving a talk and the first question asked was “How do we make people creative”? And I answered that “It’s much easier to prevent it than to make it”. You prevent it by saying that there is only one right answer and by punishing the student if she offers the wrong answer. That never fosters creativity.

Second: People think of creativity as a property of the individual and therefore they say “I am creative”, but that doesn’t work. The only way that creativity can be judged is, if over the long run, the creators works change how other people think and behave. That is the only criterion for creativity. Therefore, the bad news is that you could die without knowing that you are creative, but the good news is that you will never know for sure that you are not creative. Because maybe after you die, people will make a big fuss about you and then, post-mortem, you will be creative. That’s what happened to Emily Dickinson and Vincent van Gogh.  We call that the judgment of the field.

To be continued………….

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