Educating the Creative

 
At this moment, I have maybe 15, maybe 7 or 8 ideas that are going through my head, each of which is focused in on an idea. Those Ideas are coming from an article I read about a year old in a US. News about adult adhd. Of those ideas I will now chose one and focus it in. However, as I have learned about myself, in order to be able to write about the one idea, I will also write somewhere else about the other ideas, and how frustrating my conclusions are about that. But in a future post, you will get to read these as well.

So what am I choosing to write about? The positive, constructive things that someone could apply today to help them tomorrow. And I am illustrating my first principle as we speak. Learn how to focus on one aspect of the many. For any subject, there are an inordinate amount of perspectives one could take, but which are appropriate? This takes discipline to learn, but it is pivotal to the learning experience to do just that, learn which ideas are relevant. And it is almost never one. But what I chose to do is limit it to one, then allow my mind to branch out from there on the aspects of that particular idea, like right now, what would help a parent with a child with adhd right now.
-Guiding questions
Again I just illustrated it by asking myself a question that I can answer in may ways, as I ponder this question I almost always come up with several other questions before I am able to answer the first. This is where I failed in school, the teacher would ask a question, and I would start thinking of her warped perspective on the subject, her bias, what were other relevant questions. These were all valid thoughts, I just have do learn to focus them. So I will just write several questions down on the paper, and go back and answer them later, or not. Sometimes just thinking through that logical process I come to a new revelation about the topic and I realize my original perspective was warped or not on topic. My initial questions were not failures, they helped to guide me to the more relevant topic. It is all about failing towards success. But how can you allow a child to do this? Still working on that idea.
-A channel for off topic ideas.
I get some of my best revelations while I am trying to do something else. So what I do now is to keep a journal with me basically every where I go, and write down random ideas, words I like, things I want to do when I am 60, whatever. This has helped to focus my ideas, and to utilize the creativity that is pent up in my brain. As I drive I have a tape recorder in my car that I can talk to and capture my ideas. Now I have yet to go through and document those, but nevertheless they are there for me when I have a dry moment of inspiration to draw from.
-Physical release of energy
I have a hard time sitting in one place for very long. Despite this I spend up to 6 hours in coffee shops every day studying, reading books, hanging out. I bring juggling balls with me, my unicycle, toys I call them. If I am very creative, I will need to take an energy break more often, but sometimes I will just go out side and walk around for a little to release some energy. Also by being in the coffee shop environment I get constant visual input and small breaks from what I am doing. These small breaks help me to refocus on what I was doing.

Well I am reaching my max for sitting here, and I have even taken several breaks, will write a several more editions to this though, and It is kind of an ongoing thing learning what works, what doesn't, and all that stuff.

What is genius

 
This is not expert opinion, just me thinking out loud.

It is impossible to see everything that is happening around you at once. It is also impossible to interpret all of the signals that we receive in sensory input, like what we are seeing, hearing, smelling... Examples of abilities associated with interpreting signals are that some people are able to read others responses like a book, others can play chess really well, still more can apply their huge database of knowledge to the appropriate situation at any given time.
For an extreme example of this, think of the movie Rain man. Dustin Hoffman's character was not able to interpret the social situations that they encountered, yet he was a "genius" at numbers. But not at every aspect of numbers, at memorizing numbers, and at doing arithmetic with them. Point covered, on to the idea.
What is this "genius" ability? I think there are many different abilities, and some of them combined together form a strategy for comprehending the world. Lets make some assertions, then see which prove out.

-one person can not have every ability.

-If your ability is to focus in on one ability, you lose out on the opportunity to have it's opposite.
(If you don't agree with me yet, see where we go, hold on for a little and try me)

-These abilities combine to form a strategy unique to that individual, but through different strategies can come to similar results, with differing successes in speed, and accuracy.

and the last assertion (no drum roll please)
-Being a really realy good genius ( not evil or anything) comes from having the ability to instantly and continually decide if the ability you are using or focusing on is the one needed for the situation.

I will edit this to actually talk about it when I am not so tired.

Learn how to succeed through Failure

To preface this, it is not my own idea. I have read many books, and I got it from one, but now that I have applied the philosophy to my life, I have incorporated it in new ways.

The learning process is really about error correction. However it is not about reduction of errors, or trying not to make very many, learning something well can be about making as many error's as possible in the beginning. I will now use an example. There was a game called dance dance revolution. People walking by it in an arcade were drawn to the flashing lights and dance pad on the ground, wondering in amazement how it worked. Then an expert would walk up and make it all look so easy that no one else would want to try it.

The first time I did it, I knew I would look funny doing it, and that I probably would not be able to do anything about it. So I tried tons of different songs, watched others do it, and would hopelessly abandon all sense of coolness in my attempts to get my feet where the screen told me they should be. (as I am writing this, I am noticing the lack of point, or maybe meandering through it, will try to fix). So for the next several times, I tried to discover what I was having a problem with, and what I was already good at doing. Sometimes what I was good at doing would lead me into one of the things that I was awful at. But in the beginning there can be so many things that you are not doing well that you don't know where to improve or how.

The Point. Pick one thing, and get better at it. No one can improve in every area at the same time. Become aware of what is failing and what is working, and be willing to be bad at many things until you figure out what it will take. I think I noticed this most dramatically with the unicycle. I would say there were around 15 leaps of understanding that I had to go through to be able to ride it more than a few inches. Until I could do each of these, and be at least somewhat aware of them, I was not going to be able to ride it.

So my philosophy in riding the unicycle was, fail at as many things as possible, in order to discover what I was going to have to learn how to do. After those initial sessions, I could look for small areas where I was improving, even if they were subtle. I could have learned half of the things to get better at the unicycle the first day, and I still would not be able to ride it. So for a large learning curve like that, it takes just failing for a while, and for the unicycle quite a while.

Then one day, you don't feel like you have improved in the least since you got the darn thing(going from one inch to ten inches does not really count). All of a sudden, you do it for a good distance, everything just falls into place.

(So far, all of this was just cursory info that came to my head as I was thinking about what I was really wanting to say. And as an aside, I am speaking on the main idea at my Toastmasters group this Tuesday, in 2 days)((Alternate title: How to kill two birds with one stone, write about what you are thinking about for a blog, then speak on that topic in your public speaking group. Ha ha ha, I will include that advice in my book on how to take over the world)

Now what I was going to be talking about. The 1 % success rate. This is also not my idea, read it in a book a while ago. If you improve in something by 1 %, anything at all, after a year with compounding interest you will be 1000% better or more. So here is my take on this. I am energized by having new ideas and thoughts in my head. I was interested in cryptography recently for about 3 days, then something else caught my interest. I don't mind jumping around as long as I know that I will come back to this later at some point and learn more about it, or get better at it. In fact, sometimes just having these ideas not completed is exciting because I can take the concepts I did learn about in that brief time further. Then when I go back to the cryptography, I have context to put the information in, as well I have thought about it at random times for a while.

Another way to apply this philosophy would be to think about having a core set of competencies that you want to be able to do. I like to improve myself through reading, improving my motor skills through learning new manual skills like juggling or unicycling, learning how to improve my memory, many others. So lets say there are 10 of these things that can be relaxing and may or may not help me in the future. I go in cycles of doing some of these things and completely neglecting others. Lets break it down

I probably have a top three that I am always doing one of these. If it is juggling, I have all of that stuff in my car, and may always carry three balls around with me wherever I go. I may do this for an average of 20min a day, in between this class, during my break at work. I have the other 7 things that I do occasionally, like origami, where I keep some paper handy in my room or in my backpack, when I get the urge I will do it for a few days, then not do it again for 2 weeks.

At the moment I can only do 3 models of origami. You could call me a failure at origami. I learn one new model a month, if that. And soon It may drop off the radar screen as other things push it out of the way. But one day I will pick it back up, and It might be on the top of the list, in which case I will work on it in a creative frenzy learning two or three figures a day for several weeks.

I guess you could call this the 5min a day principal. Anything you want to learn, if you were to put in a little bit of time towards it every day, at the end of a year, you could be awesome at it. The other point I see in this, is that you could do several of these things, and let a natural flow develop as to which one is more interesting at the moment. This is a very exciting way to go about the day.

Everyone stands in lines, has to sit at stop lights, or wait for a meeting to happen. What could you learn while this was happening?

This question alone is exciting to me, almost blowing my mind. It conjures ideas like what are the limits of human potential? What would be possible if a person continued to get better at an increasing number of things through out their whole life?

Perfection is only attainable within Perfection

So I haven't posted in a while, because I was worried about formulating my ideas more clearly, aswell as making sure I made sense. Well it is a good idea to make sense, but I think seeing the process unfold can be a beneficial thing aswell. There is something to be said of keeping the aesthetic beauty of something intact by leaving some of it's original form in place. I am speaking of my writing style in this instance.

I am in a summer school art class at the moment, and it is so liberating and exciting. This class has added a filter of perception to my brain, that as I go about my normal things, I am seeing the world through a whole new set of eyes. I still have all of my old biases, but this is now an added one that plays with all of the others. (see right now I realize that my subject is a little fuzzy, aswell as my meaning, will try to clear this up). It is like when you read a book, you could look at it from the historical perspective, a feministic perspective, why did the author write it, so many ways. So I call these the filters through which we see the world. ( see I am bringing it back, slowly I know). Each of these gives context to the book, and allow us to experience it on a deeper level.

Well this filter of perception that is true for books, is also true for our interaction with others. All of this is covered in philosophy, so I won't delve into it too deeply, but it has major relevance. As I meet new people, many of these filters come to my head, and I question which ones apply to the current situation, and which are irrelevant. This ability to decide on appropriateness of these ideas is a factor of intelligence, but so is the ability to have many filters. (aha, another subject to discuss in a later blog, the idea of multiple intelligences, and what I believe are some of the factors). So what happens when, upon meeting a new person, wondering what their background is, where did that accent come from, how much of what you say do they understand based off of your analysis of their education level? These are all good ideas, but with too many of them, they become overwhelming, especially when people accidentally give off false clues, maybe use a high register word that is not normally a part of their vocabulary ( and here I could go off on all the false clues I have seen, or just misconceptions I had based upon a first impression.)

I have said how these multiple filters can be a negative in light of meeting a new person and trying to fit them into your understanding. But the process of allowing your mind to wander through so many ideas, and come to random conclusions can also be a good thing. For one, once it is refined, can allow for very deep insights without a lot of information, case in point, Sherlock Holmes. All of his assumptions always seemed to turn out right, but as I work at Starbucks and see inordinate amounts of people walk through the door, there is much information that can be gained from appearances. What I have learned from experience is how much weight to give to these. Everyone has inconsistencies in their lives. My room might be a mess while my car is spotless. Granted, this extreme is rare, but people are always in the process of changing and growing, and they do not grow at the same rate in every area ( this has been a recent acknowledgement for me, and a great relief to the personal internal inconsistencies I saw in myself. I can now realize that these are a part of the human condition).

Let me summarize what we have up to now, so we can go further. So we have perceptions through which we see the world, these allow us to put context to our experiences and interactions with others, and allow us to instantly gather a great deal of information about the other person, but we have to further the relationship to see how much of this initial information truly describes the person. There are many good and bad things about this way we see other people, but that is what happens. So on to my point. With adhd, these filters come pouring into my brain, without the ability to decide which are more relevant than others. Or if I chose to try to decide which are more important, I become overwhelmed with competing ideas and the degree of relevance each has in comparison to the other. You could call this getting caught up in the process without regard to the results. I have learned how to continually think about, why was I trying to do this, what was the point of this thinking process. By continually analyzing this, I am able to have a wide variety of ideas and still narrow them down into a cohesive idea or result.

An interesting by product of these multiple filters of perception and random associations, is the ability of memory. Because any experience, like meeting someone with an accent, has this huge database of ideas and thought experience surrounding the event. So I do not only have the one experience of meeting this person with an accent, I have what I was thinking about, the free associations and Ideas that were swirling around in my brain, aswell as the strange Sherlock like conclusions that my brain came to. Now these ideas my not be relevant to the interaction, but they serve to preserve it in my brain. If someone mentions accents and asks if I ever met someone with a strange one, I can recall a large portion of my meeting because of the volumes of information I associated with that meeting. I might remember what they were wearing, what we talked about, or more likely the ideas that came to my head as a result of meeting them. So learning how to control this process, or at least use it to your advantage could be a very helpful thing.

The premise behind Learning

Does everyone have ADHD? Is the number of cases of people with ADHD going up? These questions came from an interesting conversation I had with a Starbucks partner yesterday In the Ina and LaCholla Starbucks.

As we talked I was able to articulate some of the ideas that I have been pondering for quite a while. To begin to answer these questions I will first use an analogy to describe the process that I believe happens in normal people, and then what it would be like from the eyes of someone with ADHD. You will notice the similarities and the differences between them, then I will use those to explain further if everyone does in fact have ADHD.

So a lawyer reads a new law for the first time. As he reads it he is using the left, logical side of his brain to interpret the meaning behind the law. The left side of his brain will begin to analyze the words and what they individually mean, then put them together in a corporate context to begin to understand what their use collectively means as a whole. Now a good lawyer will begin to use his right hemisphere, or creative side and allow his mind to wander through different cenario and applications that he might use this new law. He might wonder why this law was enacted as a clue to how to use it, what loopholes this new law creates, any number of paradigm's concerning the laws application, interpretation, or it's ambiguity. If he were introduced to this new law in a meeting, it would be quite distracting for him to have to do this and not pay attention to how the meeting was proceeding. My point with this is that the good lawyer know the balance of how much he can allow himself to think about this subject according to the appropriateness of the situation.

I will explain cycle rates, and then we will look at this same cenario with the creative knob turned up.

Cycle rate? What is that? This is a way of thinking about the balance between being logical, being creative, or simply being aware of stimulus. For a "normal" person, they look at a problem, and slowly look at it from different angles. They may read the law, and think of another law that it reminds them of. This would be the personal filter of past experience. Then once they have gone down that path for a while, and may or may not have given them any new revelation to the new law, they look at the law analyticity, is the law clearly stated or is it hazy or ambiguous. There are tons of these different perspectives that they could look at the law from, some more relevant, some less relevant. You could say they cycled through different filters that they had, to see which would apply or where appropriate.

Now lets turn the cycle rate up. As this person starts to think of the past experience of the law, before they have finished, they start looking at the wording of the new law, then they realize the old law was worded a little funky, well gee there was this one law that was really funky in wording, but that came about because of the amount of people working on the law. Maybe this new law had too many people giving input to it, Man my sock is really bothering me, maybe those people who wrote the law had socks that bothered them too, or their room was dimly lit like mine. Who, where did that come from? When the cycle rate for going through personal filters, the current stimulus is sometimes more pressing in the mind that what one was thinking about, but this could flip also. If they are driving and the physical stimulus of driving is what is important, and driving by an old building with interesting architecture passes, the driver could start thinking about architects, what kind of schooling they must go through, all that crazy math. Speaking of math, I wonder what my instantaneous velocity is at this moment, am I speeding up at an increasing rate, or am I accelerating at a constant rate? Ok, sorry to do that to you, I know it can get confusing to be thrown down random paths like that.

But what did we learn from this? "Normal" people have the same brain process as ADHD people. In fact, this ability to connect past events to our lives to help us interpret present information is vital. So is the ability to see different perspectives when approaching a problem. These are considers good skills to have. The problem arises when these skills are taken slightly farther than necessary. This cycling through logical, then creative, then sensory impute, is handy and troublesome. I would like to talk about this at some length later on, but feel it would draw me away from my topic.

As I have learned, must continue on the topic. So what were we talking about? Aha yes, everyone has this ability to cycle through different inputs, both physical and mental, and in the mental, from both sides of the brain. I will give some examples of where this is very good, and let you think about these taken to the extreme.

A good salesman has the ability to look at the customers objections from their perspective and overcome them in a way adequate to that customer. What if you looked at situations from other peoples perspective too often? Especially without ever knowing if you were able to actually see it from their perspective?

Lawyers look at the ambiguity of language to find multiple meanings in the laws, aswell as the testimony of witnesses, or even contractual agreements. What if you herd the multiple interpretations of what everyone said? And not necessarily all the time, but that was one of the things your brain cycled through?

A good chess player is able to look at tons and tons of lines of strategy to see which ones work better, but take this skill out of context and apply it to social situations, or simply a question someone asks you. This skill being a positive one in the chess setting, suddenly becomes a weakness when applied to situations where quick decisions and assessing of the situation is a must.

I will sum up what conclusions I make from all of this. ADHD is simply the natural creative ability that we all posses, simply taken to a higher thinking cycle rate. It is not even thinking faster, is is just more jumping around. And even this skill is beneficial applied to some concepts. Another way I can put the cycle rate, is that the subconscious thoughts are continually interrupting what I am consciously doing. A different perspective on this, is that the natural feedback loop in my mind is like low volume elevator music, you only hear it when it stops or something really interesting comes up. But for me the volume is turned up a little more, so I hear the thought process of my subconscious continually working, and this can be distracting. One last analogy for this. As I was talking to the Starbucks partner, she herd the incorrect grammar that she had said, and immediately corrected it. This is the internal subconscious listing to what she said and alerting her to the incorrect grammar. So we all have this subconscious voice filtering information, it is just a little louder in ADHD, but in some cases it can be much louder.

I think there was good information here. Again as usual, any comments are appreciated. If you have any other ways of thinking about these, let me know, or if there was something not quite as clear, I would love to know how to express these ideas better. The only thing not very beneficial is criticism without a way to fix it.

What is ADD/ADHD

As a disclamer, this is what my experience along with many conversations with other people that have ADHD. This is by no means comprehensive, nor are the ideas taken from somewhere else, they are an amalgamation of experiences up to this point.

What is ADHD/ADD

This is a tough question because I believe that ADHD is simply a normal trait that everyone posesses (creativity) taken to an extreme in some individuals. The degree to what extreeme this is taken is what creates the grey area, how much of this abundance must a person have to be classified as having ADHD. For my purposes I will state the extreemes of a given atribute, and let thee reader decide.

For me ADHD, is a blessing and a slight nusance. A blessing, in that I have a continual flood of ideas, inspiration and perspectives from which to draw on at any time. It can be a nusance in that I am always jumping from one idea to another, or have a hard time being consistent with most things on a daily basis.

Let's use some analogies. Imagine with me for a moment, a novelist writing a book on a typwriter. Sitting in a dimly lit room at 3:00 in the afternooon. The bed is unmade, with the room tidy but unorginized. Maby a hotell room or a sparse apartment. She is sitting at a small table trying to think of the complexities of her story. At any given time she must attain a balance between getting ideas, and writing them down. The process of typing down the ideas stunts her ability to think of more, while the more deeply she thinks about the story, the less she writes about it.

Where is her ispiration comming from? Is the inspiration a part of her will that she can force to happen? Or does it come in fits and starts and random times and from random places? She glances over at the disheveled bed and realizes her main charicter is not as one dimensional as she realized. Deep in his ethos is a part that longs for the freedom of spontenaity amongst his strictly regimented lifestyle. This thought came from her surooundings. It was the stimulos of her eyes applied to the thoughts going on in her head.

This is an example of a "normal" person using her creativity. Now imagine she has ADHD. She is sitting at the table, looking around the room for inspiration. lets do internal dialogue here "wow my room is a mess, look at the bed, all messy, I wonder why material my sheets are made of, I have herd egyptian cotton is nice, do they use sheets in egypt, why did the sphynxes nose fall off, my character should have a protruding nose, yess that is good. Then she starts to type, " Wow this old keyboard is weird, listening to the beat of the keys I am pounding I can make a rhythm, or even morese code. That's cool." And with each new idea a whole new stream is born. With one idea comes the whole mental shift of thinking about that idea to it's extreem, but that never comes, because as she takes that idea very far, more intriguing ideas come to mind.

I think this story illistrates the way the creative process when taken to an extreeme throws off the balace of being able to produce what one is thinkinng about. Creativity is only good if it produces something, but with ADHD the wonderment of the process hampers the ability to produce a work.

Let's do another anologie.

A man is at a party where he only knows the person that brought him. His firend wanders off and he is left to fend for himself. He begins a conversation with an attractive girl, which carries on for 10 min. Then they are interupted and somehow get separated and do not see each other again.

Now put yourself in this man's shoes. What is going through his head as he talks to the girl? "Man, I wonder if she likes me, is she intrested, does she have a boyfirend?" These are questions anyone would think about, somewhat surface level. Lets turn up the creativity knob. What was her up bringing, did you notice the southern accent, is she a natural blond, wow look at her nails, well manicured, her outfit matches well and seams to fit with her personality, aswell as matching the time of day, the season, and the general ambiance of the party. Did she just look away because she was bored, or looking for a more exciting conversation, or hoping one of her friends noticed the attractive guy she was talking too?

This train of thought is still pretty focused even though it shows the natural tendency to analyze the situation, and second guess what is really happening.

Another train exebited by overactive creativity, is the awarness of signals put off by others, and by yourself. But without focus or discipline, these run rampant without having the ability to measure the validity of each signal in turn.

So we will trun the creativity knob up full blast and see what happens.

Lets do the internal dialogue of the man again. "Man I wore the wrong shoes, they are a little uncomfortable, hey that hot chick is comming closer, intresting accent" he says to her"Excuse me, I noticed a slight accent, are you from the south?" bla bla bla.... he sees the fingernails well manicured and wonders how recently they were done, maby she is high maintinence and only likes to go to nice restraunts, dosen't enjoy the simpler things of life, wow these shoes are uncomfortable better shift my weight, oo no, I think she noticed that, she might think I am anxious to leave, but i just want to get to know her better, I wonder what kind of car she drives, I like bigger cars I fit into them better."

Not sure if this example illustrates it well but I will have to refine the core idea more. By the way, as my internal dialogue is going, if any readers of this have comments about how relivant each of these examples are, just post a comment. Or even better, if you have a good analogie to share, please do so, I appreciate the imput. None of these ideas are set in concrete, and I think each individual exibits these traits through their personality and individuality. I am looking for commonalities, and the deeper meaning of why we have this dialogue or self doubt, and how we can channel it into being productive, or deep thinking.

More to come later.

Talking Passionately about Something

Talking Passionately about Something
Originally uploaded by Coffee Master.