If you get a chance, check out this month’s Scientific American for a fascinating article on where creativity comes from.
According to a growing body of research, creative thinking is born from cognitive disinhibition, a process where the brain lets in much more of the external stimuli than usual, stimuli that most people’s brains automatically filter out.
“When unfiltered information reaches conscious awareness in the brains of people who are highly intelligent and can process this information without being overwhelmed, it may lead to exceptional insights and sensations.”
May seem a little obvious, but the research pertaining to filtering has us interested. In Fishbird, we often discuss the work of the reticular activating system, our brains’ small clump of cells that filters stimuli through three channels: what threatens us, what we value, and what is unique or unusual. In our automatic, unaware state, we typically hold what threatens us at the forefront of our filtering, creating our futures by dodging the experiences that have caused us trouble in the past. It may be that creativity is a commitment to what we value, and by placing fear on the back burner we allow ourselves to experience the unknown, things that we would usually withdraw from.
So Einstein used to pick up discarded cigarettes for tobacco for his pipe. Dickens used to fend off imaginary urchins with his umbrella. Schumann believed Beethoven was helping him compose music from beyond the grave.
Our April Fools’ post turned into a weekend-long discussion about the importance of playing life like a game. Looks like we aren’t the only ones with this mindset. Check out the TED Talk above from last year, where Jane McGonigal, in her work with the Institute for the Future, discusses the power of gaming in the real world.
Since the completion of Magellan’s circumnavigation of the world in 1522, we’ve had experiential proof that Earth is, indeed, a sphere, and not the flat, infinite plane our ancestors first imagined. We’ve learned that there is no direction in space, no north or south, left or right.
So why are we, almost 500 years later, still talking about things going up and coming down? Are we just being lazy with our words? Does it even matter?
We believe it does. So did Buckminster Fuller, one of the greatest thinkers of the 20th century.
In his masterwork, Critical Path, Fuller explains:
“Around the world nothing has ever been formally instituted in our educational systems to gear the human senses into spontaneous accord with our scientific knowledge… The first aviators flying completely around the Earth within its atmospheric mantle and gravitationally cohered to the planet, having completed half their circuit, did not feel “up-side-down.” They had to employ other words to correctly explain their experiences. So, aviators evolved the terms “coming-in” for a landing and “going-out,” not “down” and “up.” Those are the scientifically accreditable words—in and out. We can go only in, out, and around.”
Fishbird is all about becoming aware of unconscious habits, about questioning the habitual choices we make in our lives. We are only as powerful and intelligent as the stories we tell about ourselves and our world.
One of our team members, Mark, relayed a story to us over the weekend about an old high school Spanish teacher of his. It was too good not to share.
“This guy had done it all. He’d been driven into the Mexican desert by “policemen” and held at gunpoint for sliding down the back side of Teotihuacán, one of the country’s most famous ancient pyramids. He’d taken peyote on a secluded beach and lost track of days, maybe weeks. He knew Spanish inside and out, was something of a genius with languages, and here he was, teaching juniors and seniors how to conjugate verbs in a small Rhode Island town best known for its turf farms.
I’m sure he was bored to death by us.
And yet, he was the best teacher I had in high school. I don’t remember a single thing any one of my other teachers said, but I remember most of Señor’s stories. My favorite was about swearing. He often told us that the hardest thing to do in a non-native language was to swear reactively. The kind of swear where a truck tire runs over your foot and you’ve just got to yell something awful. In that moment of unconsciousness, we revert to our first language, to the words that have been ingrained and are the easiest to recall. Fluency meant swearing in Spanish.”
There’s a connection here to Fishbird. It’s easy enough to learn the concepts of Fishbird, quite another to apply them in real-time. Yet this is the only place that true change can occur, when the rubber hits the road. How many times has your “foot” been run over in the workplace? How many of those times have you unconsciously reacted?
The possibility of Fishbird is the possibility of awareness, to choose another language to operate within. Fishbird is fluency.
Give this a try at your next party. Put a blindfold on someone, take them outside, and ask them to walk in a straight line. If they’re like every other human on the planet, they won’t be able to do it (especially if they’ve already hit up the punch bowl). But why?
There doesn’t seem to be a good answer. Jan Souman, a research scientist in Germany, co-wrote a paper last year about the human tendency to walk in circles. After blindfolding his test subjects, he instructed them to walk straight for an hour. They walked on the beach. They walked through parks. They walked in the Sahara. No luck. Every externality was accounted for; from dopamine levels to different-sized legs, Souman tested every possible cause. None could explain the circling.
So what’s up?
According to Souman, humans apparently slip into circles when we can’t see an external focal point, like a mountaintop or the sun. Without a guide, our insides take over and move us all over the map. We see the same human workings in Fishbird on an internal level. When people don’t have an internal focal point, a core purpose to serve as their compass and guidepost for their work, they become lost in the day-to-day spiral. Keeping our eyes on the top of the mountain is fundamental to moving forward with velocity. It’s time to take off the blindfold.
Watching the “Emergency Mine Rescue” special on NOVA we saw lots of metaphors for Fishbird: The rescue set out to do the impossible – it had never been done before and no one had ever lasted, trapped in a mine that long. They were unstoppable – faced with failures, upset, and breakdowns the rescue effort never let the problems stop them. They were committed to the outcome not the path – there wasn’t one “right” way to save the miners, multiple tunnels were dug simultaneously. They dug many holes – as it was said in New Think: The Use of Lateral Thinking by Edward de Bono: “one goes on generating as many approaches as one can even after one has found a promising one.” We are reminded that “You cannot dig a hole in a different place by digging the same hole deeper.”
