By Bayo Ogunmupe
Our natural creativity is stifled from the time we are born. Dr George Land dropped this bombshell when he told his audience about the shocking result of a creativity test developed by the US national Aeronautic And Space Administration (NASA) but subsequently used to test school children. The NASA had contacted Dr Land and Beth Jarman to develop a special test that would measure the creative potential of NASA's rocket scientists and engineers. The test turned out to successful but the scientists were left with a few questions: where does creativity come from? Are some people born with it or does it come from our experience?
The scientists then gave the test to 1,600 children between the ages 4 and 5. What they found was shocking. A full 98 percent of the children were born creative. This is a test that looks at the ability to come up with new, different and innovative to problem solving. Ninety eight percent of these children fell in the genius category of imagination. The story does not end there. The scientists were so astonished that they decided to make it a long and extensive research extending it to five years later when the children were ten years old.
The result? Only 30 percent of the children now fell in the genius category of imagination. When the kids were tested at 15 years the figure had dropped to 12 percent! What about us adults? How many of us are still in contact with our creative genius afters years of education and experience? Sadly only 2 percent. And for those who question the consistency of these results- or think they may be isolated incidents, these results have been replicated more than a million times, reports by Michael Michalko whose book Creative Thinkering first alerted me of the shocking implication: that the school system, our education, robs us of our creative genius.
"The reasons for this are not too difficult to apprehend; school, as we call it, is an institution that serves the wants of the ruling class, not the common people. "In order for the elite to maintain their lavish lifestyles of overt luxury - they understand that children must be dumbed down and brainwashed to accept the unending exploitation and the incessant war," in the society, writes Michalko. But how therefore can we recuperate our creativity?
However, Dr George Land says we have the ability to be at 98 percent if we want to. From what they found from the brains research, there are two kinds of thinking that take place in the brain. Both use different parts of the brain with varying kind of paradigm in the sense of how it forms something in our minds. One is called divergent- that's imagination used for generating new possibilities. The other is called convergent thinking , it is used in making judgment, when you're making a decision, you're testing something , you're criticizing someone.
So, divergent thinking works like an accelerator and convergent thinking puts a break on our thinking. "We found that what happens to these children, as we educate them to think, and criticize mostly," says Land. Teaching children only to criticize and decipher error is what we must stop doing. When we look inside the brain we find neurons fighting each other because we're constantly judging, criticizing and censoring," said Land. When we operate under fear we use a smaller part of the brain but when we think creatively we put total brain to use.
What was found as panacea to creative thinking was putting the brain into exercise daily like dreaming about your solution. By giving yourself a time lag about finding solution to the issues at stake you arrive at a just and accurate solution to your problem. As an adult, you become more creative by attending creative problem solving institutes and reading books on creativity. Above all we found that creativity can be learned. Which is why you should not fret if your ward isn't doing well in school. Education as we practise it today stifles creativity. Great inventors like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg never finished school, they taught themselves to think and invent.
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