Monday, November 16, 2009

on the stifling of creativity

An experiment was conducted by Desmond Morris in 1962 comparing the artistic creativity of young children and chimpanzees.  Remarkably, both chimp and human child became so engrossed in their painting that they showed very little interest in food, sex or other activities that would be expected to divert their interest.  The major revelation of this study was that creativity was, perhaps, a natural potential; yet, for many of us, the urge to create diminishes significantly as we grow older, revealing itself only in the sciences, music, art... and on a more modern note, advertising [trash].

A follow-up study to Morris' added a reward system to the chimps' sessions of abstract expressionism.  The results was that with each reward, the creativity and depth of the painints degenerated until producing only the minimal product necessary to obtain reward from the experimenter (The Biology of Art, Methuen London, 1962).

David Bohm has described this phenomenon as follows:
"In order to do something for a reward, the whole order of the activity, and the energy required for it, are determined by arbitrary requirements that are extraneous to the creative activity itself.  This activity then turns into soemthing mechanical and repititious, or else it mechanically seeks change for its own sake.  The state of intense passion and vibrant tension that goes with creative perception... then dies away.  The whole thing becomes boring and uninteresting so that the kind of energy needed for creative perception and action is lacking.  As a result, even greater rewards or punishments are needed to keep the activity going" (Science, order and creativity; 2000).
I've written about ADHD before, but was inspired to revisit the topic by a seminar forwarded to me:


So my question is this: to what extent is the reward system of education -- any kind of education -- destructive to the development of the self?  Is not the self-consciousness, dissatisfaction and boredom resulting from intervention by directed creativity dangerous to development? Some of what were considered the greatest creative minds of history thwarted standardized education.  From the science realm alone (with which I am most familiar), Copernicus meandered through universities for seven years without bothering to fulfill a degree.  Da Vinci was educated by the royal Medici family, but education in the Italian Renaissance was its own matter entirely.  Tesla boycotted academia at the age of ten.  Thomas Edison never went. 

On the other hand, in more recent history it has become nearly impossible to achieve recognizable creativity without eons of academic vigor.  How is that demand defining the way we structure the reward system of education?  We pump in the sedatives to get this "most troubled" generation through the hoops.  In so doing, we are pummeling creativity from both ends: reward and sedation.  What will become of our next generation of scientists and artists?

2 comments:

  1. You should read: www.maa.org/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf

    - The problem isn't just a reward, it's that the reward is given for the wrong things. In the reward system for the chimps, I suspect the reward was given for paintings in general, not "better" paintings, so that the chimps quickly learned that they got juice without putting much effort in. In real life, reward is often given for good creations, but in school it takes a very good teacher to recognize how to nurture it.

    To make a BS evolutionary psychology argument, but I think children are born with a drive to learn and experience the world and what they can do in it, and stop pursuing those things that don't produce a reward. Drawing might start out 'for drawing's sake', but that's really just an evolutionary mechanism to get kids to develop their minds. Even in Michelangelo's time, when art skills weren't exactly rewarded, people's natural creativity died off.

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  2. Thank you for the Lockhart article (and for your thoughts); he makes several very good arguments, although I'm not sure how I feel about his promoting "scrapping" systems (if I may apply his perspective to other disciplines) over their reformation.

    "Many a graduate student has come to grief when they discover, after a decade of being told they were “good at math,” that in fact they have no real mathematical talent and are just very good at following directions. Math is not about following directions, it’s about making new directions." -- This quote from the should be displayed over the chalkboard of every math classroom.

    I don't think your evolutionary point is BS at all. I think there is an innate urge to create that does die off with age, in part because of educational structure and in part, I'm sure, due to other factors. The urgency of applying oneself to other things as the environment demands, etc.

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