Fragments #9: re-learning creativity

education | aliveness | kid Q+A | writing theories | tapestry | citizenship

Field Notes explores interdependence, human and non-human nature, history, inner life, poetry, creativity, spirituality, community, civic belonging, and the ways we make a life. This instalment is Fragments; a regular gathering of underlinings, links, and the things I’m turning over in my mind. Between Fragments, I also write longer Village View pieces, and occasional pieces on writing and my book-in-progress. Thanks for being here!

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The Sleeping Gypsy,1897, by Henri Rousseau. We are vulnerable in our dreams, but I think they also watch over us. Or perhaps the gypsy tamed that which might devour her using her music, her creativity. Perhaps we might do the same.

In 1968, NASA wanted to tackle its most challenging problems by giving them to its most innovative engineers and scientists. But they weren’t sure how to identify those team members, and so they commissioned a study by Dr. George Land and Dr. Beth Jarman who tested 1,600 children aged 4 to 5 for divergent thinking. 98% of those children scored at ‘creative genius’ levels. Returning to the same children as they grew older, the results changed:

Age 5 — 98% scored genius level

Age 10 — 30% scored genius level

Age 15 — 12% scored genius level

They then tested adults, and found that just 2% scored genius level.

The researchers eventually concluded that traditional educational systems and societal conditioning are primarily responsible for the decline. As children move through school, they are encouraged to think convergently (finding one "correct" answer) more than divergently (coming up with various possibilities and solutions), which discourages them from making unexpected connections between different subjects and arriving at new outcomes.

The researchers concluded that non-creative behaviour is learned.

Skeptics point out that divergent thinking is just one measure of creativity, and that human problem-solving abilities are too complex to be measured by a single test. But I have nonetheless been thinking about the test, and writing about the things that raise and shape us, and thinking about where our daughter(s) will go to school — and whether I am not actually so much worried about which school they go to but rather what world, what present, what future will best help them grow and flourish and be fully alive. I have been thinking about what it means for humanity when we prioritise left brain logic more than right brain creative problem solving.

Einstein said that “logic will take you from A to B but imagination will take you everywhere.” He believed that whilst knowledge was limited, imagination was not, and he once imagined chasing and riding on a beam of light. According to classical physics the idea made no sense — but he couldn’t shake the image, and a decade later came up with the general theory of relativity.

The late educationalist and creativity expert Sir Ken Robinson believed that the current educational model was shaped by the needs of industrialism, noting schools’ insistence on the external ‘what’ of information more than the internal ‘why’ of creativity (there are of course brilliant teachers who push against this). As children progress through the school system, they use both convergent and divergent thinking at the same time — taught to generate ideas but then immediately to judge them, to decide right and wrong. Like driving a car with one foot on the accelerator and one on the brake — it squashes our brain’s power and inhibits our creative abilities. Robinson said, “If you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original.” (Side note: I don’t think “original” is always the best goal — but that is for another piece).

The decline in creativity is not inevitable. It’s a consequence of how we structure our society, and perhaps of what we think being alive is for, of what consciousness is. I think about this in the context of AI — a “tool” that supposedly finds the information we need faster and generates ideas when we feel stuck. A recent study showed that using AI for just 10 minutes can measurably reduce cognitive engagement, problem-solving skills, and independent thought. When AI handles our tasks, humans quickly develop a "mental crutch," leading to cognitive atrophy and reduced persistence. I know that so many of us are tired, busy, numb, and that it is tempting to use AI to reduce the load, to make sure we’re not missing out on the gains that others might make by using it. But in the darkness of 3am insomnia, and increasingly in the clarity of day, I worry that rapidly dominating technology like AI is so severing us from the real world and from our own innate capacities and creativity and imagination that we might become robots ourselves.

And this is not a time for more robots. It’s a time to wake up, to come alive, to remember that “I am a human being, and I shall not squander such luck!” as illustrator Hallie Bateman puts it.

A time to put our humanity in the driving seat. A time to re-learn creative behaviour. A time to see there are things unreachable and unknowable by quantifying and rationalising. A time to align, like quantum physicists are beginning to do, to the fact that the material universe is underpinned by things unseeable, unknowable. By something more mysterious, which is not something that can be accessed by correctness and performance and information alone. A time to recognise the crisis of the spirit which seems to be deepening in this material and individual age. To question whether rationalism without creativity, the material without the numinous, will take us into a good new world. To ask how to rejoin these realms — as they have always been for the majority of humanity and history.

One tiny thing I’ve been playing with lately to ease my worries about creativity and aliveness and the future is to take a question my daughter asks me, for example —

• Why do we go in cars but animals don’t?

• Why do we live in a house but animals don’t?

• Who made all the trees?

• Why do bees like the sun and slugs like the rain?

— and after I’ve answered the question in as fact-based a way as I know how to, I ask her to imagine other answers with me. To honour both material fact and imagination. Perhaps, she said, bees like the sun because it makes their yellow stripes yellow. Perhaps, she said, animals don’t need to go in cars because they don’t need to visit the library. These are tiny possibilities that might one day lead to others for her, for me. The best children’s literature shows possibilities and new worlds too — for her, for me. There are worlds we cannot see, and that is one necessary limit of being human — but imagination and the unconscious might take us on a beam of light to those worlds, and to others.

I am alive, I shall not squander such luck!

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Underlinings:

“There’s a drive to live at the heart of things / gotta stick a pipe into that spring / let it water everything…” — a line from Bruce Cockburn’s song "To Keep the World We Know”

“There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun. If only they could all see themselves as they really are. If only we could see each other that way all the time. There would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed… I suppose the big problem would be that we would fall down and worship each other” — Thomas Merton

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Links / reading / tiny thoughts:

📝 The shapes that hold writing: In trying to write my own book, I felt confined for some time by the traditional linear narrative arc — the arc that originated in Ancient Greece, and was later developed by scholar Gustav Freytag, and which says there must be a beginning, middle and end to a story. To break me out of that confinement, I read Spiral Meander Explode, in which Jane Alison looks for alternative story-carrying patterns including in nature and other cultures, and also Ursula Le Guin’s Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, which “challenges prevalent ideas that time is linear and that stories need heroes.” In these and other inspirations, I found permission to shape stories and thoughts in ways that seem to better match the fragmented non-linear reality of life (of course, whether it works or not will be up to my Editor 😬).

🏛️ Weaving history and art and sociology: I’m sharing this for other history nerds like me — the Bayeux Tapestry is coming to the British Museum! It’ll be the first time for almost 1,000 years that the 70-metre creation is in this land. From the website: “One of the wonders of the medieval world, the Tapestry offers a vision of life in 11th-century England both before and after the [Norman] Conquest, from castles, warfare and ships to clothing, food and furniture.” You can see it from September 2026 to July 2027.

🗳️ Re-finding citizenship: I valued this piece by Gal Beckerman in The Atlantic — The Quiet Way Authoritarianism Begins to Crumble — about the islands of ordinary people who helped topple Victor Orbán in Hungary. “Across rural Hungary—the source of Orbán’s base—small civic groups were forming in places where civil society had all but disappeared…. Political identity felt like an important tribal marker, and not just an indicator of policy preferences or even ideology. These small local groups created an opportunity to break through the concrete — first, by giving people permission to imagine a world without Orbán, and second (and most important), by reminding loyal Fidesz voters that before all else, they were citizens who had a choice.”

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Fragments #8: spheres of influence

"You have to let the light in"