For years now I’ve been reading and researching anything that describes ‘creative’ for signposts to shine some light on why I might have walked the path I have, separately from those I have called family, friend and acquaintance?

Enter Nancy C. Andreasen (I love people who display an initial as a middle name – why do they do that?). She’s not any more significant than some other thinkers I have come across, but she is one of the smarter ones, who’s doing some very cool research on creativity by studying people’s brains. According to Wikipedia:

Nancy Coover Andreasen is an American neuroscientist and neuropsychiatrist. She currently holds the Andrew H. Woods Chair of Psychiatry at the University of Iowa Roy J. and Lucille A. Carver College of Medicine

I found her in an article in The Atlantic, titled, Secrets of the Creative Brain – Where genius comes from, whether it is dependent on high IQ—and why it is so often accompanied by mental illness.

There’s a lot to get through in this article (I’d define it as a long read), and it left me only a little further down the road, but there’s enough in it to have anyone interested in this space, a little more engaged than normal. It left me with the overwhelming view that to include oneself in the category of ‘creative’ reinforces just how much of an outsider you might really be.

For example…..

I have spent much of my career focusing on the neuroscience of mental illness, but in recent decades I’ve also focused on what we might call the science of genius, trying to discern what combination of elements tends to produce particularly creative brains. What, in short, is the essence of creativity? Over the course of my life, I’ve kept coming back to two more-specific questions: What differences in nature and nurture can explain why some people suffer from mental illness and some do not? And why are so many of the world’s most creative minds among the most afflicted? My latest study, for which I’ve been scanning the brains of some of today’s most illustrious scientists, mathematicians, artists, and writers, has come closer to answering this second question than any other research to date.

This bit of information becomes an interesting matter for contemplation of self / family reflection. It’s also loaded with thoughts of finding an online test that measures ‘mental illness’. While creativity and mental illness are linked in many research papers, there’s still nothing conclusive. However, from as early as 1891, a physician named Cesare Lombroso put forward a …..

gossipy and expansive account of traits associated with genius—left-handedness, celibacy, stammering, precocity, and, of course, neurosis and psychosis—and he linked them to many creative individuals, including Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Sir Isaac Newton, Arthur Schopenhauer, Jonathan Swift, Charles Darwin, Lord Byron, Charles Baudelaire, and Robert Schumann. Lombroso speculated on various causes of lunacy and genius, ranging from heredity to urbanization to climate to the phases of the moon. He proposed a close association between genius and degeneracy and argued that both are hereditary.

Not sure I’m happy with his inclusion of left-handedness in that, but it was 1891, I’m prepared to give him some space 🙂

Mental illness isn’t the only predictor. There have also been theories about IQ and creativity. While this has always been a difficult one for me to consider personally because I’m certainly not overly developed on the IQ spectrum. It turns out I’ve not really had to worry because it isn’t much of a predictor to begin with.

Intelligence doesn’t have much effect on creativity: most creative people are pretty smart, but they don’t have to be that smart, at least as measured by conventional intelligence tests. An IQ of 120, indicating that someone is very smart but not exceptionally so, is generally considered sufficient for creative genius.

So, I while I might be part of the category ‘creative’, I certainly do not belong to the sub-category ‘creative genius’.

Andreason, driven by some small thinking man in the University she was housed in, was determined to solve the answer to where creativity came from and hypothesized the following….

subjects would have an increased rate of schizophrenia in family members but that they themselves would be relatively well. I also hypothesized that creativity might run in families, based on prevailing views that the tendencies toward psychosis and toward having creative and original ideas were closely linked.

Some of why schizophrenia is included in the study of where creativity comes from, has to do with well known creatives who’s family history is littered with the illness

• James Joyce had a daughter who suffered from schizophrenia, and he himself had traits that placed him on the schizophrenia spectrum
• Bertrand Russell had multiple family members who suffered from schizophrenia
• Einstein had a son with schizophrenia, and he himself displayed some of the social and interpersonal ineptitudes that can characterize the illness
• And others…

From this part in the article it felt as if it got messy (perhaps it was just too long for me) in terms of an easy narrative from to follow. So for those who don’t end up reading the full article (and you should), let me list the headline characteristics, thoughts and theories that captured my attention:

In one of her studies, a full 80 percent of the researched group had had some kind of mood disturbance at some time in their lives, compared with just 30 percent of the control group

When the psychologist Kay Redfield Jamison looked at 47 famous writers and artists in Great Britain, she found that more than 38 percent had been treated for a mood disorder; the highest rates occurred among playwrights, and the second-highest among poets. When Joseph Schildkraut, a psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School, studied a group of 15 abstract-expressionist painters in the mid-20th century, he found that half of them had some form of mental illness, mostly depression or bipolar disorder; nearly half of these artists failed to live past age 60.

Creative people are better at recognizing relationships, making associations and connections, and seeing things in an original way—seeing things that others cannot see.

Many creative people are polymaths, people with broad interests in many fields—a common trait among my study subjects.

One thing I’ve learned is that creative people work much harder than the average person—and usually that’s because they love their work

I’ve also found some evidence supporting my early hypothesis that exceptionally creative people are more likely than control subjects to have one or more first-degree relatives with schizophrenia

As in the first study, I’ve also found that creativity tends to run in families, and to take diverse forms. In this arena, nurture clearly plays a strong role. Half the subjects come from very high-achieving backgrounds, with at least one parent who has a doctoral degree. The majority grew up in an environment where learning and education were highly valued.

Many creative people are autodidacts. They like to teach themselves, rather than be spoon-fed information or knowledge in standard educational settings

The biggest thought I am left with having read this article, is that to be included in the category ‘creative’, or perhaps it’s that sub-category ‘creative genius’, isn’t just something you’re good at? It’s not just a gift you’re born with, or develop. To be included in the category ‘creative’ means that you truly are a loner, by virtue of your DNA. You’re physically and mentally made up very differently to the other categories we drop human beings into. It’s certainly not an easy category to belong to, and perhaps the rest of us should be a little kinder to those who do.

Some people see things others cannot, and they are right, and we call them creative geniuses. Some people see things others cannot, and they are wrong, and we call them mentally ill. And some people, like John Nash, are both.

The post Creativity – Where Does It Come From? appeared first on Calidascope.

When 13 year-old Logan LaPlante grows up, he wants to be happy and healthy. He discusses how hacking his education is helping him achieve this goal.

While the word ‘Hacking’ is often associated with Computers, Urban Dictionary has a definition I liked, that’s more inclusive, and closer to what Logan is talking about in his talk…

A person (usually possessing thorough knowledge in no single field), who is talented at devising superficial “fixes,” which are nothing more than auxiliary work-arounds for problems which eventually have to be solved “correctly” by a “trained professional.”

Whatever else you take from his thoughts, it’s a great reminder that the world needs hackers, and that everything’s open to being hacked. We do live in a world where so-called ‘experts’ still hold too much authority. Experts speak, and most people listen and obey. We assume because experts are involved that we’ve got the best design at play. Sometimes we do, and often we don’t.

If I drop back into education, where Logan is speaking from, our current system doesn’t encourage the development of Hackers. Hacking requires (at the very least) curiosity, creativity, courage, failure, experimentation, play. I challenge anyone to find me a traditional education system (even a school) where these characteristics are encouraged and celebrated over discipline and curriculum and tradition and benchmarks and group think and manipulation. There isn’t one!

We assume we’ve got the best education systems (especially if your child goes to a Private School) because the experts tell us it’s so. But there’s not evidence to show that it is. You can’t build a case for the best, when you’re benchmarking against yourself. And no matter how you sell it, every school, rich or poor, is exactly the same. It’s just the number of facilities that differ. They all run off the same system (platform).

So here’s to the hackers out there. And there are many. I meet them all the time. They’re everywhere. They know that things need a shake up. They have great ideas, and plenty of skill to execute. It’s just that they lack a little courage.

I sometimes wonder what might happen to the world if all those sleeper-hackers got a massive dose of courage (just 30 seconds of the insane kind)? What might happen to the world if that happened?

The post Hacking Education and Most Other Things appeared first on Calidascope.

Here’s the explanation from Wikipedia. I chose them over the MIT explanation (where the illusion was published in 1995) because it was easier to understand. Really 🙂

The visual system needs to determine the colour of objects in the world. In this case the problem is to determine the gray shade of the checks on the floor. Just measuring the light coming from a surface (the luminance) is not enough: a cast shadow will dim a surface, so that a white surface in shadow may be reflecting less light than a black surface in full light. The visual system uses several tricks to determine where the shadows are and how to compensate for them, in order to determine the shade of gray “paint” that belongs to the surface.

The first trick is based on local contrast. In shadow or not, a check that is lighter than its neighboring checks is probably lighter than average, and vice versa. In the figure, the light check in shadow is surrounded by darker checks. Thus, even though the check is physically dark, it is light when compared to its neighbors. The dark checks outside the shadow, conversely, are surrounded by lighter checks, so they look dark by comparison.

My interpretation goes something like this…. your brain messes with information from time to time. Mostly, I understand, because it’s underpowered and frankly, a little lazy. So we don’t always see what we’re looking at. Well not accurately, anyway. In my journey of #theCrayonProject I’ve become fascinated by those places and spaces where what we think is real is not actually real at all. It’s important both to acknowledge that those spaces exist, and to practice identifying them. Not doing that may leave you horribly exposed.

The post Your Brain and the Checker Shadow Illusion #theCrayonProject appeared first on Calidascope.

My friend Mike came over to pick up his daughter (who was hanging out with my daughter). We got chatting about stuff and he asked if I knew anything about Caine’s Arcade? No I hadn’t. We watched, and an afternoon of conversation ensued.

As I said above, the video clips are the main event in this post. All I have is this one thought….. If you invited your mates around, gave them cardboard boxes and suggested you were going to build a ‘Caine’s Arcade’, what would the outcome be? My guess…. they’d think it was a stupid idea, and you’d not end up with anything close to what Caine achieved.

Adults have forgotten how to play, and with that, they’ve lost a large chunk of their creative ability. As you watch the two video clips, I’d suggest that the part of you that connects with Caine and what he’s achieved, is also the part of you that you left behind a long long time ago. About that time ‘they’ started telling you that ‘play’ was only for children.

The post Caine’s Arcade and Fostering Creativity Worldwide appeared first on Calidascope.

Last Sunday morning I watched an episode of Brain Games on Netflix. It’s described like so…

Think your brain is focusing on everything happening in front of you? Think you know exactly what is most important at any given moment? Think again.

It’s all connected to my fascination of how our mind works, and sometimes doesn’t, and what that means for how we experience and engage with the world around us. It all goes back to Calidascope, and why we started it, to help our clients see and think differently in order to do better stuff.

When it comes to the concept of DISRUPTION, we often associate it with shaking things up to see a different picture. But having watched the show I did, and having listened to the clip Jim sent, I realised that DISRUPTION is sometimes also about shaking things up to see things for how they really are.

With all of that as an intro, may I recommend you grab a set of headphones, plug them into whatever device you’ll be listening through, sit in a chair (as if in a barber shop), push play below and close your eyes. This isn’t one of those scary things were something loud shouts out. This is a very cool experience that gets your brain to do some amazing stuff.

What it is, is something called Binaural recording. According to Wikipedia:

Binaural recording is a method of recording sound that uses two microphones, arranged with the intent to create a 3-D stereo sound sensation for the listener of actually being in the room with the performers or instruments.

What you’ll experience is amazing. This is more than just good old-fashioned stereo. You’ll be transported into a barber shop. You may even feel things that aren’t real at all. I couldn’t help shake the thought that if my brain can experience all of this when there’s nothing there to begin with, what might be happening in my real life right now, that actually isn’t real at all?

The post The Barber Shop Audio Brain Trick appeared first on Calidascope.

Staying with improv for a little longer, I found David Alger’s First 10 Rules of Improvisation. While they’re written for improv, with a little work, I think they can be very useful for disruption. So I had a little fun and attempted to adapt them to be less improv specific and more relevant to disruption. They’re no longer David’s 10 Rules of Improv, they’re now the start of Barrie’s Seven Rules of Disruption 🙂

Be good to hear any of your views on what I’ve put together. I’m not convinced I’ve got it right yet? It’s a start. That’s all.

1) Say Yes-and!

For disruption to take place there must be a commitment to and agreement on what the desired outcome is? Disruption shouldn’t be for disruption’s sake.

2) After the `and` add new information.

Disruption can’t move forward or advance unless we add new information. And not just information you think is useful. You need as much information as you can possibly find. Information that stretches beyond whatever it is you’re working on. Logically, if all the information you needed was already present, then you’d have achieved your goal by now. You haven’t, so you can’t possibly have all the information you need yet.

3) Don’t Block.

There is nothing worse in a process of disruption than someone who blocks. Someone who says ‘no’. There’s a time for ‘no’, but it’s not time until much much later in the process. Much much later!

5) Focus on the Here and Now.

Another useful rule is to keep the focus on the here and now.  The change, the struggle, the win or loss will happen as things unfold. Focus on what is going on right now, in the moment.

6) Be Specific- Provide Details!

Details are the lifeblood of moving change forward. Each detail provides clues to what is important. Details help provide insights and flesh out the change that’s needed.

7) Change, Change, Change!

Disruption is about change. The organisation must experience some type of change for any chance of success. People need to go on journeys, be altered by revelations, experience the ramifications of new choices and be moved by emotional moments.

The post My Rules for Disruption, Borrowed from Improv appeared first on Calidascope.

An increasing number of professionals are being trained in improvisation skills. It helps them to play with their environment instead of controlling it.

It grabbed my attention because I’d visited Second City while I was in Chicago at the beginning of the month to watch an improv show.

A great deal of innovation / disruption / creativity comes out of the ability to improvise within your environment. I think it is a true-ism to suggest that ‘control’ can be an enemy of creativity and innovation. When I think of ‘play’ I think of (borrowing from Let’s Play Innovation again):

• Play doesn’t try to contain what is open.
• Play doesn’t make simple what is complex.
• Play doesn’t isolate what is a network.
• Play doesn’t make static what is dynamic.

I went in search of an example of improv at work that would illustrate this. I found The Subway Spa by Improv Everywhere.

We turned a very hot New York City subway platform into an unauthorized luxury spa. NYC’s un-air-conditioned platforms can feel like a sauna in the summer, so we figured we might as well embrace the heat

A fun example of improv within an environment, and delivering a surprising, fun and interesting result.

The post Improvisation as a means to Play and not Control appeared first on Calidascope.

It was a significant thought because I began to think about what it would mean, on a daily basis, to foster and nurture creativity and disruption in my world, inside of me. I’ve never really spent much time thinking about intentionally fostering and nurturing my own creativity in an expansive way.

I’m in the process of finishing a practical creativity workbook with my friend Ali, and so I’ve put much thought into and explored the link between play and enhancing creativity, and I regularly engage in these types of exercises. But there’s far more to it than just play….

Having just spent 10 days in the US, speaking at the PSDA CEO Summit on ‘The Future of Printing’, which gave me some time to reflect a little longer than I usually do, I realised that a good discipline might be to document my adventure, and the discoveries I have along the way.

For the sake of having something to categorise it under, I have called it The Crayon Project.

I’m not sure of everything I’ll post within this category. I do know there will be video, there will be thoughts I’ve had, there will be images, and there will be practical exercises I’ve done. I hope there will be more diversity of content than that. I hope the discipline of doing this will push and pull me to brand new places and spaces. But whatever is posted is simply a recording of my intentional attempt to foster and nurture my creativity and disruption.

The First Post

So that post number one (this one) isn’t just a description of what I plan to do, I submit this 18 min video from the year 2008, at a TED conference, entitled, Tim Brown: Tales of creativity and play.

The post Intentionally Fostering Disruption and Creativity #CrayonProject appeared first on Calidascope.