DMC-FX7
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From across the room, their wiki heads were glowing bright. (Matt and Ross are from Socialtext, the company providing the wiki services for Brainstorm 2006)

Seemed like the visualization of a Brainstorm to me…

The editors of FORTUNE magazine asked four questions of the attendees and Ross Mayfield (on the right here) is blogging the replies and the ongoing conference. Sandra Day O’Connor and Queen Noor are a special treat today.

Here is my answer to one of the questions… I had flickr on my mind when I wrote it:

• WHAT VALUE DO YOU MOST CHERISH?

Playfulness. I cherish the child-like mind. I celebrate immaturity. I try to play every day. At work, I expect to fail early and often.

From what I can see, the best scientists and engineers nurture a child-like mind. They are playful, open minded and unrestrained by the inner voice of reason, collective cynicism, or fear of failure.

I went to a self-described “play-date” at David Kelley’s house. The founder of IDEO is setting up an interdisciplinary “D-School” for design and creativity at Stanford. David and Don Norman noted that creativity is killed by fear, referencing experiments that contrast people’s approach to walking along a balance beam flat on the ground (playful and expressive) and then suspended in the air (fearful and rigid).

What is so great about the child-like mind? “Babies are just plain smarter than we are, at least if being smart means being able to learn something new…. They think, draw conclusions, make predictions, look for explanations and even do experiments…. In fact, scientists are successful precisely because they emulate what children do naturally.” (Berkeley Professor Alison Gopnik, co-author of Scientist in the Crib)

Much of the human brain’s power derives from its massive synaptic interconnectivity. Geoffrey West from the Santa Fe Institute observes that across species, synapses/neuron fan-out grows as a power law with brain mass.

At the age of 2 to 3 years old, humans hit their peak with 10x the synapses and 2x the energy burn of an adult brain. And it’s all downhill from there. The UCSF Memory and Aging Center has shown that our pace of cognitive decline is the same in our 40’s as in our 80’s. We just notice more accumulated decline as we get older, especially when we cross the threshold of forgetting most of what we try to remember.

But we can affect this progression. Prof. Merzenich of UCSF has found that neural plasticity does not disappear in adults. It just requires mental exercise. Use it or lose it. We have to get out of the mental ruts that career tracks and academic “disciplines” can foster.

I try to take a random walk of curiosities and child-like exploration. Photo-blogging has become a form of mental exercise for me. I try to embrace lifelong learning, to do something new. Physical exercise is repetitive; mental exercise is eclectic.

13 responses to “Luminaries”

  1. svur Avatar
    svur

    creativity grows with age and is not at its core something that can be taught in school – so i agree fully

    the flipside is that modern society mandates specialization for most people, as a result little things of us get lost in the drone of daily work life. sad but true.

    Reply
  2. angry shock Avatar
    angry shock

    …some thoughts…

    Immature playfulness is hollow in the long run.

    Playful maturity is what I cherish. Mature people can really value what they do or are. Children don´t enjoy themselves playing as much as adults playing or watching kids playing, for children lack of the maturity -i.e. reflection, conciousness- enough to give their activity / condition the worth it has.

    Nowadays I play more than when I was a child and I am more "child-like" in many ways. More creative and at least "as" curious… in any case: today with 27 years I assure that I enjoy my playfulness and live it fully more than when I was a kid. When I was a kid I wasn´t concious of the treasure I had in my hands.

    Neither I was independent to "be myself" hence "play MY game". Neither I knew myself and the world enough to know by similarity and by difference who I was and what was my game.

    I go for playfulness, I go for child-like approach to the world, I go for creativity, questions and curiosity… but I eagerly dettach those from immaturity. By the hand of human inmaturity everything is pointless in the long run, not valued and wasted. And worst: immaturity can be dangerous. Like a monkey with a knife a young fool overrating his child-like mind can be potentially dangerous.

    Maturity does not relate to adulthood necessarily, just as playfulness doesn´t to immaturity. The world is unfortunately full more of immature adults, than of playful grown-ups..

    I love to see the elder play. I love to see adult animals play… it’s a dance… a treat to see… while baby animals are clumsy and can be unintentionally aggressive and get anxious about everything when they play. There´s a ghost of ignorance and fear to the unknown… that those experienced lose.

    Wise people (who) play. <—- I want to be in that group.

    thx.

    Reply
  3. drona Avatar
    drona

    Great reading. Thanks for posting this…much to learn from it. Playfulness, as a trigger for creativity, is a great value to cherish.

    Besides aging there are social factors that that get in the way of adults being creative. For example (to add to what Svur is saying) financial pressures, the burdens of conforming to social norms, etc get in the way.

    There is a certain randomness to creativity that makes it impossible for adults in general to be creative and yet be considered productive (and get paid for what they’re doing). Even the truly creative adults have their own sandboxes where they foster their creativity in specialized fields. Sometimes these adults work for Research Labs (I’m thinking of the great physicists of the mid-last century)

    Thanks for the post . I’m going to share it with my (not so) kids.

    -Vas

    Reply
  4. complexify. Avatar
    complexify.

    Wow, this is a topic near and dear to my heart (and mind). Thanks.

    @Alieness: "playful maturity" is a great term. The distinction between "child-like" and "child-ish" is far too often underappreciated or even ignored. We’re taught to specialize from an early age, which somehow translates to closing our minds to new ideas.

    @Jurvetson: have you read Curious Minds: How a Child Becomes a Scientist? There’s a good essay by Alison Gopnik on how her own curiosity shaped her career path.

    Finding that path – and having enough time to explore the infinite offerings of our world’s cultures, economies, and disciplines – surely justifies keeping and exercising the child-like sense of wonder that each of us is born with.

    Getting paid to do this is indeed the tricky part, as Drona pointed out. The guys at IDEO seem to have the right idea. I watched a video in which they designed and prototyped a better shopping cart in a single day — while very visibly having a lot of fun.

    I really believe that Flickr and its community are "forces for good" in this quest, encouraging each of us to spend some time wandering around with open eyes and open shutters. Like the best photos, the most important realizations are all around us if we look closely enough.

    (Incidentally, I like the "blue man group" tag on this photo, which I’ll admit reminds me of the TV show Arrested Development as much as anything else — speaking of child-like) 😉

    Reply
  5. Todd Huffman Avatar
    Todd Huffman

    Good job capturing the halos. I didnt know you dabbled in aura photography? I thought you could only do that with film!

    This morning I was thinking along the sames lines as your essay… Playfulness is a a form of exploration, and any type of exploration is expensive and risky. As children, we have the time and resources to play, we haven’t yet felt the pressures of aging and our parents provide and shield for us.

    Once we hit pubescent years three shifts take place, conceptually and biologically and environmentally. We as we pass through the formal operation stage of Piagetian development, we aquire the ability to draw conclusion and create abstractions with which to predict the future. Around this age we undergo biological changes, where our mating desires kick in, and we start trying to attract members of the opposite sex (or same). The world around us starts to shift more responsibility onto our shoulders, and prunes us for entry into society. These converge on a realization….

    "I can’t mess around."

    The expense of exploraiton becomes apparent, and play becomes more structured and focused. Teenagers organize into social groups and direct thier play, and no longer follow the random acts of curiosity which younger children have the luxury of doing. Silly play costs too much, we have to be efficient in our play, because we have work to do.

    In my own life I try very hard to give myself a ‘sandbox’ to play in. I make sure to set aside money which is not for life-expenses or saving, but to pursue spontaneous curiosity driven project. I also make sure to give myself time on a regular basis to follow my curious urges, and even if I dont have time to follow all of them, I try to pay attention to them and foster that kind of thinking in myself.

    On a related tangent, this plays very much into my sociopolitical views — I believe the middle class is the most important economic strata of society, for the primary reason they exhibit high propensity for creative and explorative play. They have enough economic security that they can afford (financially and cognitively) to explore, create and play. Middle-class geeky engineers are responsible for the bulk of technological innovation in society – think of the geek engineer stereotype… in the basement or lab completely fascinated, tinkering and playing. You can’t take time to play if your kids are hungry.

    Reply
  6. angry shock Avatar
    angry shock

    what a wondeful conversation.

    I love how you, complexy and glyph, made this immature-mature distinction using the word "child-ish" vs. "child-like". Perfect! …nuances of the language that a foreigner like me can easily miss while writing. thx.

    Maturity comes when we learn to get the best of all worlds and of all stages of life. I welcome aging in that sense, for I get more experienced everyday, I discard what I don´t like about my life and I keep what I like… I become, as Todd put it: more efficient. About myself, and by extension, about my environment and the people who I make impact to and who impact in me.

    Great you bring Piaget here, Todd. I like his studies. And also the observation about social classes. Middle class lives a fortunate balanced impermanence (or an inbalanced permanence?), which tension keeps their members always fit. (although we curse about this!)

    We (I consider myself in this class) are economically secure enough to explore, play, dream, project and act… however our financial security isn´t that much to let us rest on our laurels or get viced in security ("no matter what I do, I will always have what I need).

    We know that up to some extent, if we play "too much" or go "too far" we can really mess it up… which gives this play, imo, an added value (it becomes a real thing: "playing the real life"… your sandbox is your own life). As well there´s always a beacon of a "better life" (mostly in the material realm) ahead of us, like a place where we would rather be. We can be better, we can do better than our parents, we can "succeed".

    If you are very poor, as you wisely put, you can´t play, you have to feed you children, you are out of the game. And it is more or less possible that you won´t be able to change anything about your condition. (Always in general terms) And if you are too rich (not self-made riches, but riches you have since you are born, so you never "made" any of it on your own) you will probably feel there is no "need" to explore, move, play, for there is nowhere better to be at (no "beacon" of a better life) neither a sense of "need" in regard to your current life, what you do and what you are.

    I am being unfaithful to my own thoughts with this short summary, because it really deserves a more detailed, exhaustive explanation to convey fully what I mean, but I hope that you can get the key points. 🙂

    Reply
  7. jorgempf Avatar
    jorgempf

    is there any study about child-like caracteristics of the sons and daughter of child-like people?

    Reply
  8. angry shock Avatar
    angry shock

    I find that, a more-than-excellent question, jorge. Thanks for making it.

    I´d love to know where it comes from? Why did you think of the children of people with this "personality pattern" -to say it in short-?

    What´s in your thoughts? How do you think these children are in regard to the child-like characteristics of themselves and of their parents? =)

    I have some ideas to open to a conversation on this based on other types of studies -like behavoural compensation in groups through the roles each member plays inside it -consciuosly or not-. If you want to know about them let me know 🙂 , but I don´t know if there´s any study in concrete about the specific situation you ask about.

    Anybody knows?

    Reply
  9. jorgempf Avatar
    jorgempf

    thanks, its good to have recognition.
    i was trying to understand how could this good pattern to propagate in society.
    i have no data, not even some personal examples to extrapulate, but i have a insite that this children will become the oposite of the parents, i dont know why.
    yes, i, my self, as a child-like person, as i see me, love to thing about different things, and this seams very interesting.
    its a pleasure to participate. thanks

    Reply
  10. angry shock Avatar
    angry shock

    Thank *you*, jorge, for the words and for sharing your thoughts. Very welcome. And: Bingo! We do agree in the insight. =)

    When I mentioned about the studies on behavoural compensation, I was going in that same direction as you. Those studies support the idea that in a group the members compensate the roles among them to form as a whole a harmonic total. This is clear to see in siblings… if one is the rebel, the other will probably pick up the role of the " correct", if one is too histrionic, the other may tend to have a low profile. The more extreme the initial roles are, the more extreme the later compensatory mechanism will be too. And as for parents and children something alike works, this could be an interesting hypothesis to ignite a study on this specific cases. Still… I am not soooo certain about its truth, but at a first thought, I can only think the same as you. =)

    Reply
  11. angry shock Avatar
    angry shock

    – Can you tell me how a fish net is made, Ann?
    – A lot of little holes tied together with strings.- replied the little girl.

    =)

    Reply
  12. angry shock Avatar
    angry shock

    "A person’s maturity consists in having found again the seriousness one had as a child, at play." – Friedrich Nietzsche

    Isn´t it cool that he had said that?

    Reply
  13. parallel summer Avatar
    parallel summer

    this made explore 🙂

    Reply

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