SPOTTED IN THE WILD! Cartoonist and graphic recorder Lloyd Dangle used as poster child for überblogger Chris Brogan post: A list of articles on creativity - http://bit.ly/gdA6pf
On a vacation a few years ago, I described what I do for a living to family friend who is a neuropathologist.
When I asked him what happens in my brain while I listen and draw images to capture ideas on large surfaces, he replied: "Why, your whole brain is lit up like a Christmas tree!"
I have always wanted to have my brain scanned while listening and scribing. One limitation, however, is that I'd have to lay immobilized on my back in a giant beige magnet known as a fMRI.
Charles Limb is a doctor and a musician who researches the way musical creativity works in the brain. He wondered how the brain works during musical improvisation -- so he put jazz musicians and rappers in an fMRI to find out. What he and his team found has deep implications for our understanding of creativity of all kinds.
The working hypothesis is that, in order to be creative, a person has to have a "weird dissociation in the frontal lobe".
For creativity to work well, one area of the brain has to turn on, while another a large and important area needs to turn off. This is so that the artist is uninhibited and willing to make mistakes along the path of discovering something new.
The prefrontal cortex is this brain region where the juggling act occurs. This area is important in planning complex cognitive behaviors, personality expression, decision making and moderating correct social behavior.
Yet in order to accomplish tasks and make decisions--otherwise known as executive functions--the brain tends to filter out new generative impulses and stimuli that are deemed as incongruent or interfering with the focus of our attention.
Executive function is key to higher level analysis and critical thinking. It relates to abilities to differentiate among conflicting thoughts, determine good and bad, better and best, same and different, future consequences of current activities, working toward a defined goal, prediction of outcomes, expectation based on actions, and social "control" (the ability to suppress urges that, if not suppressed, could lead to socially-unacceptable outcomes).
This is most likely why graphic facilitation, scribing and mind mapping--as well as jazz and improv--are such effective tools in the process of innovation.
All of these modes of thinking and performing require (1) recognition of key patterns; (2) the generation and recombination of new information and seemingly unrelated content; (3) the synthesis of disparate elements into an experience that is beautiful, funny, unique and, ultimately, innovative.
If you like brains and creativity, check out a related posts:
from Steve Davis, Founder, FacilitatorU.com
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In the 1960's, Timothy Leary coined the term "set and setting" referring to a context that influenced the outcomes of psychoactive and psychedelic drug experiments on his subjects. "Set" refers to one's mindset, "setting" refers to the environment in which the user has the experience. Now I'm not necessarily suggesting that you administer psychoactive drugs to your participants, though I'm sure that would make your job a whole lot more interesting. What I am suggesting is that "set and setting" play a significant, and often overlooked role, in your work as a trainer, facilitator, or group leader. The Set "Imagination creates reality... Man is all imagination." The set is the mental state a person brings to your group. This includes their thoughts, judgments, beliefs, mood, and expectations about the work, the group, and/or particular group members. According to Neville and many modern thinkers, mystics, physicists, and others, our expectations and intentions about what will happen often has a lot to do with our experience of what does happen. The Setting The setting refers to the physical or social environment. We all know the impact that friendly versus unfriendly, or stressful versus relaxed environments have on us. Stress, fear or a disagreeable environment may contribute a great deal to an unpleasant experience (bad trip in Leary's terms). Conversely, a relaxed, curious person in a warm, comfortable and safe place is more likely to have a pleasant experience (or a good trip). Can we facilitate the mental state of our participants before, during, or after group work? Can we manipulate the physical or social environment to get better results? As facilitators, I say "yes" and "yes," this is a big part of what we do, intentionally or unintentionally. But how? |
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The Bowl Several years ago, during a weekend workshop at our local community college with a group of learning disabled students, I thought I'd try something a bit provocative. This was a personal growth workshop aimed at facilitating self-awareness around effective and ineffective behaviors to improve workplace success. I decided to bring in a crystal bowl used to create rich harmonic sounds for meditation and ritual. This particular bowl was tuned to the 3rd chakra, that of "Will." Though I was a bit unsure about trying what might be considered by many to be a little too "woo woo" for a college course, I trusted by intuition and decided to give it a go. I placed the bowl, of opaque white crystal, measuring ten inches in diameter, in the center of the table in front of the room. After some introductory remarks about the work to follow, I told the group about the bowl. I said something like this, "This is a crystal turning bowl I brought from home that I thought might help us focus and tune in to each other today. This bowl creates a very pleasant sound. The sound it creates is said to resonate with a body center responsible for our will and our action in the world. Since we are all here to clarify and strengthen our ability to act effectively, I think that playing this bowl might help us off to good start. You may find that closing your eyes will be most beneficial and simply let the sound fill you."
I then played the bowl for a minute or so. There was a tangible sense of quiet and stillness in the room. It felt as if we had actually "attuned" ourselves to a common, peaceful mind state. I played the bowl each time we came back from a break and people scrambled to turn off the lights and get down on the floor to enjoy the experience. It was obvious that everyone loved it. Adjusting the Set For centuries, shaman have beaten drums, churches have sung hymns, and monks have chanted, all to affect states of consciousness through sound. I share my story as another way sound can be used to shift the mind state of a group. Here are more ideas you can use to align the mind state of groups.
Adjusting the Setting We all know that our physical and social environments can have a dramatic effect on us. We spend a great deal of effort decorating our homes and offices, landscaping our yards, and surrounding ourselves with our favorite people. When it comes to facilitating, training, or leading groups, we are similarly impacted by these environments. Here are a few tips to adjust the setting for your group work.
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via engadget.com
The future of interaction--and digital scribing--is gesture-based human computing interaction.
Students in a class on "strategy innovation" use basic skills in graphic recording and video editing to explain the process of creating a Video Resume. (via Professor David Owens who serves on the faculty at Vanderbilt University’s Graduate School of Management.)
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Caricaturing Economists
By JUSTIN WOLFERSI was at the Legg Mason Thought Leader Forum last week, talking about my research over recent years on prediction markets. It was good fun, but the real novelty was that as I was speaking — literally, in real time — there was a cartoonist next to the stage, cartooning my talk on a five-foot-wide poster. I’ve never seen this before, but it was a real hit.
As a speaker, it can be hard to organize your own thoughts even when you know what is coming next. And as an audience member, it can be harder still to sort out the key points a speaker makes from their conversational asides. But the artist — Christopher Fuller who works for Sente Corporation— was just amazing. He not only picked out the important analytic insights, but found an incredibly useful way to represent them, cartooning (or perhaps caricaturing) my message.
I think this is a great idea, and it will serve as a useful reminder to those who heard the talk. And if you weren’t there, hopefully this cartoon gives you some sense of what I had to say.
Now if only I could get my MBA students to do the same thing, they would all have a wonderfully entertaining set of notes to study in advance of their exams. I would love to see a study figuring out whether it helps them retain the material. I bet it would.
Way to go, Christopher!
From Rob Cunningham via BlogWorld:
I’ve learned that you can never go wrong by going to a Beth Kanter panel. The co-author ofThe Networked Nonprofit (I’m halfway through it on my iPad, and it’s terrific) has a gift for bringing out the audience’s shared wisdom and experience while keeping the panel conversation lively and valuable.
Not that panellists Danielle Brigida, social media outreach coordinator for the National Wildlife Federation, and Claire Williams, who leads social innovation at Twitter, needed any prodding. Each could have easily filled the hour with anecdotes, advice and recommendations. (Thanks to Williams, my new Twitter mantra is “WWKD: What Would Kanye Do?”)
Here are notes from Brigida’s and Williams’ presentations:
From Austin Kleon: In the digital age, use your digits. The @wsj on
why handwriting is good for you http://on.wsj.com/deijXL
are finding that writing by hand is more than just a way to
communicate. The practice helps with learning letters and shapes, can
improve idea composition and expression, and may aid fine motor-skill
development. It's not just children who benefit. Adults studying new symbols, such
as Chinese characters, might enhance recognition by writing the
characters by hand, researchers say. Some physicians say handwriting
could be a good cognitive exercise for baby boomers working to keep
their minds sharp as they age.
White House White Board: CEA Chair Austan Goolsbee Explains the Tax Cut Fight
September 30, 2010 | 1:56 | Public Domain | http://bit.ly/Tax-Cut-White-Board
Introducing White House Whiteboard. In this first edition, Austan Goolsbee, Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers here at the White House, tackles the tax cut fight and what it means that Congressional Republicans are "holding middle class tax cuts hostage" as the President has said.
Remarkably similar to the opening from Andrew Park's RSA Animate series!
(Thanks to Rob Benn of http://positiveculture.ca)
When it comes to technology, I think I’m a bit of a Luddite. (Come on, I work with pens and paper!) I have been using a Crackberry for the last few years, though...mainly to access e-mail. Well, Shannon King’s Lunch-and-Learn session the other day opened my eyes and pushed me over the edge...I have officially ordered my first Driod smartphone! (It’s all about how the Apps can enhance my business.) Since placing my order, I’ve been doing a bit of browsing in the Droid Marketplace. Here are the first five (and a half) Apps I plan to load onto my new Droid X...
via jeannelking.com