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Can Creativity Show the Flynn Effect?

In the 1920s, Alexander Luria, a Russian psychologist, interviewed a group of rural Russians who had been untouched with the scientific advancement of the 20th century. His goal was to understand the influence of social environment on cognitive development. What kind of thought patterns would dominate in societies where life revolved around handling tangible objects, as opposed to technical societies that induce more abstract reasoning?

A sample interview (see picture above) shows the questions and responses to a logical syllogism, posed to a rural adult. Nowadays, these kinds of deductive reasoning puzzles can be easily answered by a typical 7-8 yr old. But based on the response, it is clear that abstract, hypothetical reasoning is an alien concept to the interviewee. As Prof. James Flynn points out, “Today, we are accustomed to detaching logic from the concrete, and say “of course there would be no camels in this hypothetical German city.” The person whose life is grounded in concrete reality rather than in a world of symbols is baffled.”

The Flynn Effect, which was first documented by Prof. Flynn, is the observation that IQ has been rising steadily from one generation to the next over the last century. The reason fueling this phenomenon has been a matter of debate. While Flynn initially attributed the rise in IQ to improved nutrition, affluence and other factors, in his recent book, “Are We Getting Smarter?”, he proposes a new theory.

He now believes that the Industrial Revolution and its subsequent social changes led to the rising IQ trend. He explains in the book, “The ultimate cause of IQ gains is the Industrial Revolution. The intermediate causes are probably its social consequences, such as more formal schooling, more cognitively demanding jobs, cognitively challenging leisure, a better ratio of adults to children, richer interaction between parent and child.”

At the same time that IQ scores have been rising, another set of scores have been changing – in the opposite direction, unfortunately. Prof. Kyung Hee Kim, has been studying Creativity and its trends for several years. In a meta-analysis of creativity scores since the 1990s, Kim found that Creativity scores have been declining over the last two decades. The decline in creative thinking has affected Americans of all ages, but is especially pronounced for elementary age kids. Our focus on logical and analytical thinking certainly helped raise IQ scores, but it might have come at the expense of other thinking patterns. 

In his book, “A Whole New Mind”, Daniel Pink outlines why the 21st century will be the “Conceptual Age”, dominated by creators and empathizers. He uses three prevailing trends – Abundance (most things are not scarce anymore), Asia (work that can be outsourced, is) and Automation (linear, logical work is increasingly being handled by automation) – to make his argument that non-linear and creative thinking will become essential in the 21st century.

So, this brings us to an interesting state. On the one hand, the 21st century will place more demands on creative thinking, and on the other hand, creativity is currently on the decline. Would the cognitive demands of the Conceptual Age spur a trend of rising Creativity?

An optimistic view would be that just like Industrial Age triggered a rise in IQ, the new Conceptual age will set off a rise in creative thinking. However, the current declining trend of Creativity, should give reason to pause. Maybe the transition towards more creative work will be more challenging, than the adaptation to the industrial and scientific age.   

To address the declining creativity, Prof. Kim says, “Reversing the trend will be a process that will require patience and perseverance, because the results will not be immediate.” We will eventually find out the answer to our question, but in the meantime we can all start taking steps to influence the outcome.

 

 

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Analogical Reasoning

In the early 1860s, when Leo Tolstoy was teaching writing to children of Russian peasants, he hit upon an interesting way to bring more creativity into the exercise. He asked his students to write a story on the proverb, “He eats with your spoon and then puts your eyes out with the handle.” The result of his exercise surprised even him.

After some initial hesitation, his students approached the challenge with an unexpected enthusiasm and produced a much better composition than the one Tolstoy had himself written. Tolstoy commented on the quality of his students’ work in an article with, “Every unprejudiced man with any feeling for art and nationality, on reading this first page written by me, and the following pages of the story written by the scholars themselves, will distinguish this page from all the others, like a fly in milk, it is so artificial, so false, and written in such a wretched style.”

While Tolstoy was simply trying to motivate his students to write with more vigor and authenticity, he accidently introduced his students to a key creative thinking skill – analogical reasoning.

Analogical reasoning is the ability to find relational similarity between two situations or phenomena. Robert and Michele Root-Bernstein in their book, Sparks of Genius, consider analogical reasoning to lie at “the heart of what it means to think creatively” and a skill that many scientists rate as the most important one to possess.

In fact, several discoveries in science can be traced back to finding the right analogy. For instance, early geneticists likened genes to beads on a string to help them understand how traits are passed along. While this simple analogy couldn’t explain everything, it did suggest possible mechanisms for inherited traits. Making analogies is a fundamental way of thinking applicable not just in science, but in almost every field like mathematics, religion and literature. Robert Frost’s metaphor of life to a journey in “The Road Not Taken” is especially powerful because of the unique associations it invokes each time.

While it’s clear that analogical thinking plays an important role in creative thinking, what exactly does it involve? Underlying analogical thinking are three mental processes – Retrieval (with a current topic in working memory, a person may be reminded of an analogous situation in long-term memory), Mapping (aligning the two situations on the relational structure and projecting inferences), and Evaluation (judging the analogy and inferences).  

The MindAntix brainteaser, Proverbial Tales, inspired by Tolstoy’s challenge to his students, aims to strengthen the mental processes used in analogical reasoning. Using proverbs from different cultures, users have to construct an original story that reflects the meaning of the proverb, forcing them to go through the different stages of retrieval, mapping and evaluation.

As Robert and Michele Root-Bernstein point out, “There is so much to be learned by analogizing that we must not neglect to learn how. Like every other tool for thinking, the capacity within ourselves and our children ought to be nurtured, exercised, trained.”

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3 Simple Ways To Be Creative in Science

Bernard Baruch, the American financier and political consultant, once commented that “Millions saw the apple fall, but Newton was the one who asked why.” While it’s hard to imagine that no one else asked why, it is still worth pondering on how Newton managed to solve the puzzle.

Newton did not arrive at the solution in a sudden flash of insight. Instead, the groundwork for reaching his conclusion had been laid over several years before that. Newton had been mulling over what force prevents the moon from shooting off in a straight line at a tangent to its orbit. His breakthrough came when he connected the dots between the force that holds the moon in it’s orbit and the force that causes an apple to fall to the ground. In other words, by using an analogy, Newton was able to create the right hypothesis that eventually led to his theory of universal gravity.

Contrast that kind of thinking with how science fair projects in most schools are approached today. Most teachers (helpfully) give out a list of ideas to base science projects on and the focus is almost entirely on following the scientific process to construct good experiments. However, just like Newton’s discovery, most scientific breakthroughs are the result of generating new and novel hypotheses – a skill that unfortunately, doesn’t get as much focus.  Prof. William McGuire, who proposed different techniques to help generate hypotheses, laments that “our methods courses and textbooks concentrate heavily on procedures for testing hypotheses (e.g. measurement, experimental design, manipulating and controlling variables, statistical analysis, etc) and they largely ignore procedures for generating them.“

So how can you start to generate your own hypotheses? Let’s take an example. Suppose you wanted to do a science experiment that involves plants, but instead of the typical “how well do plants grown in different kinds of liquids?”, you wanted to use your own hypothesis. Here are three techniques that you could use to generate some interesting, fresh hypotheses.

  • Use Analogies: Say you start with an analogy that plants are like humans. We know that humans grow faster when they are babies and then start slowing down. We can apply this fact to plants to build a hypothesis of  “Do plants grow faster when they are small?”
  • Stretch or Shrink a Variable: We know that leaves have chlorophyll that help in photosynthesis (converting light energy into chemical energy). So one hypothesis could be that If we were to shrink the chlorophyll (maybe by removing all the leaves) would the plant be able to survive?
  • Use Reversals: You can get additional insights by reversing the causality or taking the opposite of a hypothesis. For instance, if your hypothesis is that “nature lovers make better gardeners”, by reversing the causality, you get the hypothesis that “learning gardening can make you into a nature lover”. By examining and experimenting with the new hypothesis, you can potentially uncover some new insights.

As a side note, it’s worth noting that these different techniques fit well with the broader framework of creative problem solving. Using reversals or shrinking a variable are both different kinds of manipulations, while analogies use the associative process.

Every scientific advancement started with asking the right “why?” followed by the right “how?”. We can get a lot more from our science education if in addition to understanding the scientific process, we also start focusing on generating original hypotheses. As Sir Isaac Newton himself said, “No great discovery was ever made without a bold guess.”

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MindAntix Brainteaser: Make-it-Better

The Wright brothers, Orville and Wilbur, after experimenting with gliders for a couple years, built and tested their first powered plane in 1903. The flight lasted 59 seconds. The next year, after making some design improvements, the brothers managed to stay in air for more than 5 minutes. And finally in 1905, they broke all records by flying 24.5 miles in a little over 38 minutes and landing safely when the fuel ran out.

Interestingly, despite having witnesses and photographic evidence, people were skeptical that two bicycle repairmen, with no expertise in designing airplanes, would have beaten well-funded experts in the field who were actively building their own planes. In fact, a 1906 article on the Wright Brothers in the Paris edition of the Herald Tribune was captioned “FLYERS OR LIARS?”. It took another couple of years for people to finally accept that the Wright brothers had indeed managed to create a flying machine. So how did these two amateurs end up outthinking the experts?

To fully understand that, you have to look at what some educators believe our current education system lacks. Dr. Maureen Carroll, Director of Stanford University’s Research in Education & Design Laboratory, is an advocate for introducing Design Thinking into the K-12 classroom. Our educational focus, thus far, has been on building analytical thinking skills. But, as she explains, “While analytical thinking is critically important, design thinking blends in equally powerful creative thinking.” And, “It’s not that creative thinking is more important… a blend of both types of thinking are more productive for finding truly unique and transformative innovation.”

So, what does the design thinking process look like? As Dr. Carroll and her colleagues describe, the design thinking process has six key components – Understand, Observe, Point of View, Ideate, Prototype and Test. This is an iterative process, and not a linear one. Making prototypes and testing helps in understanding what works and what doesn’t, and in modifying the point of view.

How does this all relate to the Wright Brothers? Essentially, what made the Wright brothers succeed, was their exceptional design thinking skills. In an analysis of the Wright brothers’ thinking, Johnson Laird proposes that the brothers superior reasoning skills gave them the edge over others. Wilbur first spent three months reading up about aeronautical history and recognizing some of the gaps in the knowledge (understanding). They also developed their own, unique point of view on what factors would be most important in designing airplanes. For instance, while Wrights’ contemporaries believed building a light but powerful motors was key, the brothers believed that the ability to control the the plane was more important. They also used analogies from bicycles and nature to design specific parts of the plane (ideation, creativity). And of course, they spent years observing, iterating and building prototypes to test out their ideas.

Encouraging design thinking is the goal behind the Make-It-Better category of MindAntix Brainteasers. The goal is to look at everyday objects – understand how they evolved the way they did, observe how people use them, develop a point of view about what could be improved about them and then come up with ideas on how to make them even better. Design thinking, like other creative problems, helps build both critical and creative thinking. And because of the focus on users, it also helps build empathy. As Carroll and colleagues explain, “Empathy develops through a process of ‘needfinding’ in which one focuses on discovering peoples’ explicit and implicit needs.”

After my son had done a couple of these brainteasers, he identified his own problem –  he wanted to make stickers better. His problem was that stickers lose their stickiness quickly when you try to use them on different shirts (well, it was a problem for him). His solution was to attach the sticker to one magnet and use another magnet to hold it in place. Not bad for a six year old!

Developing basic design skills isn’t hard, even without having to prototype and test. There are hundreds of objects we interact with everyday that are waiting to be improved upon. All it needs is an inclination to pause, reflect and imagine.

 

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MindAntix Brainteaser: Twist-a-Story

In a study in the late 80s, researchers gave a group of 4-6 year olds the following information:

  • “All fishes live in trees.”
  • “Tot is a fish.”

They then posed a question to the children: “Does Tot live in the water?” This syllogism was presented in two different ways – as matter of fact or with a make-believe prompt like “let’s pretend I’m on another planet”. What the researchers found, turned a long held assumption upside down. More students in the make-believe prompt group answered correctly with a “No” compared to the matter of fact group, upending the belief that imaginative thinking constricts deductive reasoning.

Scientists have wondered if our ability to tell stories, or narrative intelligence, evolved to cope with the increasingly complex social dynamics.  Prof. Kerstin Dautenhahn, who proposed the Narrative Intelligence Hypothesis, explains, “narratives play a crucial role in how young human primates become socially skilled individuals” But like the study above suggests, narratives don’t just help with social learning – they also build logical thinking. Prof. Sarah Worth believes, “we learn to reason through the reasoning provided to us through hearing and telling stories. By engaging with narratives, we practice using our narrative reason.”

But what defines a narrative? A narrative is a story with the typical structure of exposition, rising action, climax, falling action and denouement, and focuses on unusual rather than stereotypical events. Or in other words, “narratives are about ‘unusual events’, ‘things worth telling’.” This focus on the unusual is one reason creativity and storytelling are so intricately linked. But more than being intertwined, storytelling can provide a great medium for practicing creative and critical thinking.

The Twist-a-Story brainteaser is a playground to build on creativity and narrative reasoning. These brainteasers use a familiar story but add an unexpected twist which users have to use to complete the story. A story, just like other creative problems, can be dissected into its various elements – plots, characters, events etc. which can be manipulated in different ways to make new creative stories.

These brainteasers help build the different kinds of creativity that Margaret Boden, author of  “The Creative Mind”, describes – exploratory (exploring a given space of concepts), combinatorial (combining existing concepts into new concepts) and transformative (changing the rules that delimit conceptual space). Examples of combinatorial creativity, posted by users, include the third Little Pig using Karate to fend off the fox when he couldn’t finish his brick house, or Snow White using incinerating liquid to defeat the evil queen (combining new elements, like karate and incinerating liquid, into the solution).

Stories are a great way to nurture creative thinking and reasoning skills, even when you don’t start from a blank page. You can always use existing stories to grow your creative and narrative thinking. The next time you read a story, try to change something and see how a new narrative emerges. As Ralph Waldo Emerson once quipped, “There is creative reading as well as creative writing.”