Dan Rockmore writes: My job is to come up with ideas. Sometimes we mathematicians call the things we think about and work with “objects,” which doesn’t mean triangles, spheres, or other shapes. Mathematical objects are big ideas about algebra, geometry, and logic, about the properties and definitions of numbers. It’s not at all obvious how to go about thinking up some new twist on these things—the transformation from test-taker to
Creativity
October 20, 2019
We live in a one track world but anyone can become a polymath
Robert Twigger writes: I travelled with Bedouin in the Western Desert of Egypt. When we got a puncture, they used tape and an old inner tube to suck air from three tyres to inflate a fourth. It was the cook who suggested the idea; maybe he was used to making food designed for a few go further. Far from expressing shame at having no pump, they told me that carrying
September 19, 2019
Science is deeply imaginative. Why is this treated as a secret?
By Tom McLeish My latest book, The Poetry and Music of Science (2019), starts with my experiences of visiting schools and working with sixth-form pupils in general-studies classes. These students, aged 17-18, would tell me that they just didn’t see in science any room for their own imagination or creativity. Not just on one occasion but repeatedly I heard this from young people bright enough to have succeeded at any
September 6, 2019
First major center for psychedelic research opening in the U.S.
Discover magazine reports: The launch of a new privately-funded research center dedicated to investigating the therapeutic benefits of psychedelic drugs was announced today at Johns Hopkins University. The Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research will be dedicated to understanding how psychedelics alter consciousness, behavior and brain function. The bulk of the research will focus on psilocybin, the active ingredient in “magic” mushrooms, which has been demonstrated as a powerful tool
July 15, 2019
Gregory Bateson changed the way we think about changing ourselves
Tim Parks writes: [F]or Bateson the only worthy object of study appeared to be human behaviour, the kind of complex circumstances – the war, British academia, his family background – that had created the drama he was living through. What he would eventually do was to use the tools of observation and analysis that his father taught him, the zoologist’s attention to patterning and morphology, to bring a fresh approach
July 2, 2019
The power of seeing what is not there
In a review of Felipe Fernández-Armesto’s, Out of Our Minds: A History of What We Think and How We Think, Philip Marsden writes: Wallace Stevens called it ‘the necessary angel’. Ted Hughes thought it ‘the most essential bit of machinery we have if we are going to live the lives of human beings’. Coleridge described its role a little more vigorously: ‘The living Power and prime Agent of all human
June 18, 2019
Isaac Asimov on creativity
In 1959, Isaac Asimov wrote: The history of human thought would make it seem that there is difficulty in thinking of an idea even when all the facts are on the table. Making the cross-connection requires a certain daring. It must, for any cross-connection that does not require daring is performed at once by many and develops not as a “new idea,” but as a mere “corollary of an old
April 21, 2019
Open to the unexpected: Why jazz musicians are more creative than classical musicians
PsyPost reports: Scientists at Wesleyan University have used electroencephalography to uncover differences in how the brains of Classical and Jazz musicians react to an unexpected chord progression. Their new study, published in the journal Brain and Cognition, sheds new light on the nature of the creative process. “I have been a classical musician for many years, and have always been inspired by the great jazz masters who can improvise beautiful
February 27, 2019
A philosopher argues that an AI can’t be creative
Sean Dorrance Kelly writes: Advances in artificial intelligence have led many to speculate that human beings will soon be replaced by machines in every domain, including that of creativity. Ray Kurzweil, a futurist, predicts that by 2029 we will have produced an AI that can pass for an average educated human being. Nick Bostrom, an Oxford philosopher, is more circumspect. He does not give a date but suggests that philosophers
March 14, 2018
The ancient hunt in which the tracker’s skill united reason and imagination
“The San people of the Kalahari desert are the last tribe on Earth to use what some believe to be the most ancient hunting technique of all: the persistence hunt; they run down their prey,” says David Attenborough: “The hunter pays tribute to his quarry’s courage and strength. With ceremonial gestures that ensure that its spirit returns to the desert sands from which it came. While it was alive,