[Music]
[Applause]
who here thinks that children are more
creative than adults raise your hands
okay now what if I told you that isn’t
true you’re probably thinking but wait
I’ve heard statistics on there so
there’s a there’s a TED talk on this and
you’re right about that in fact the most
viewed TED talk of all time
by Sir Ken Robinson is based on this
very idea that children are more
creative than adults in another popular
talk he justified this view with a
longitudinal study from the 1960s by
George land which claimed to have found
that 98% of five-year-olds are creative
geniuses but that only 2% of adults are
but what Sir Ken Robinson didn’t know at
the time is that this study doesn’t
actually exist or to be a careful
scientist I should say I haven’t been
able to find any evidence that the study
ever happened so
the study itself was never published so
I had to track down the organizations
that George land claims that he had
worked with on the study that’s NASA and
the US organization called headstart
neither had ever heard of him and
neither had any record that the study
had ever happened in fact the NASA
archivists that I spoke to said that she
thought maybe this study was just an
urban myth but this idea that children
are more creative than adults
it feels so true doesn’t it and you know
the research that’s been done since that
talk in 2006
has shown us that there’s a lot more to
creativity than what we originally
thought you see I’m a child development
researcher at the Lego foundation where
I study creativity and learning and the
work that I’ve done there has shown me
just how complex the creative process is
and how nuanced its development is as
children grow but you know we all know
this intuitively too because we are all
children once and here we all are as
adults we’ve lived this I’ll give you an
example when I was seven or eight I used
to love building these stick forts in
the woods by my house you know the kind
where you take a tree branch and you
lean it up against a tree trunk in a
circle and if I built it just right it
would last me a while and I could go
there every day after school with my
best friend and we’d save a special
little snack from our lunches we’d climb
inside and eat chocolate pudding with
just our fingers but those forts they
were they were more than just sticks in
my mind I had plans for those things I
somehow came up with this elaborate plan
for the perfect tree house that we could
build so first of all would be up in the
trees it wouldn’t be down on the ground
and inside it there would be a swimming
pool but you could cover up the swimming
pool and make it into an ice-skating
rink when the season was right I mean I
had ideas I had big plans for this thing
but you know I had never got around to
building that tree house which is
probably a good thing because it would
have been a safety hazard but I can
still feel the exhilaration of having
those ideas and imagining just how cool
that tree house would be I had a pretty
good imagination but I really had no
idea what it would take to bring that
idea of the tree house in my mind into
reality and that right there is key
creativity is not the same thing as
imagination or having big ideas
there’s something else involved that
takes those ideas into reality into
fruition and creative expression there
are actually many parts to the creative
process but it can be summed up by two
main features originality and
appropriateness and by appropriateness I
mean something that’s meaningful and
relevant for the situation at hand so
when I had this idea for a swimming pool
ice-skating rink treehouse that was
original but it was not appropriate not
given the constraints that I would have
faced as a seven-year-old with only
sticks for building materials no
knowledge of engineering or building no
access to contractors and of course no
budget so I might call it an imaginative
idea but it wasn’t technically creative
because to be creative it would also
have to be appropriate now to get this
combination of originality and
appropriateness you have to be capable
of two things divergent thinking which
is basically about exploring
possibilities coming up with ideas and
convergent thinking which is about
basically deciding what to do you take a
look at all of those possibilities
you’ve come up with and you decide on
the best one given your situation
divergent thinking includes things like
exploration originality idea generation
risk-taking and flexibility convergent
thinking includes things like evaluation
logic inhibitory control persistence and
focus but the key is that you need both
of these things divergent thinking and
convergent thinking to get to those two
main ingredients for creativity
originality and appropriateness but now
let’s think about the balance of skills
that you typically associate with
children and adults so when you’re
thinking about exploration idea
generation risk-taking who are you
thinking more of children or adults
children right yeah and when you think
about evaluation logic and hibbott or
ikan soul control children are
adults and which of these two do you
think of most often when you think about
creativity well many of us have a very
strong bias to think almost exclusively
about divergent thinking and it’s really
easy to do in fact researchers even
share this bias many of the studies on
creativity that exists right now
actually look at divergent thinking and
the problem is even greater when you
look at the research on childhood
creativity there’s an upcoming review
that looked at all of the studies on
children and creativity and it found
that 82% of those studies looked at
divergent thinking so we’re not alone in
this but keeping all of that in mind we
need to separate fact from myth so let’s
take a look at the following statement
children learn more flexibly than adults
that’s true and it can be seen pretty
clearly in some work by a researcher
named Alison Gopnik she’s been looking
at what happens when you give
information to children and adults that
does not support an existing bias that
they have in other words how willing are
they to change their minds when they’re
given new information and this is an
ability called cognitive flexibility now
in her studies when adults are giving
given this evidence that does not
support their bias that conflict
conflicting information does not change
their view of the world but it’s totally
different when you look at
four-year-olds four-year-olds will
totally change their mind based on a
single new piece of information and
she’s found in her research that this
cognitive flexibility decreases steadily
from childhood to adulthood
and that makes a lot of sense when you
think about it
children don’t really have that much
evidence in their database yet right so
a single new piece of information that’s
gonna be pretty meaningful to them where
as adults they have a whole lifetime of
data points in that database to support
what they already believe and so one new
piece of information will come with a
grain of salt and this actually matches
what we see in brain development so this
image here reflects the sin
optik density in the human brain at
birth that’s sort of a complicated way
of saying the number of neural
connections in the brain now in the
earlier development focuses on
exploration in fact in the first few
years of life more than 1 million new
neural connections are formed every
second but as childhood goes on
development begins to focus on pruning
down those connections to the ones that
are most needed based on interactions
with the environment so you can put it
this way children are born into the
world ready to adapt to whatever
environment they’re born into but then
they specialized for the context they’re
actually in it’s pretty ingenious so
keeping that in mind let’s go back to
this fact check children learn more
flexibly than adults yes this is true
that’s strength along with their
abilities in imagination and idea
generation that means that children have
enormous creative potential but it
doesn’t mean that they’re more creative
and that’s because flexibility is only
one of those abilities needed for
creativity and it just so happens to
fall into that divergent thinking
category now let’s take a look at this
other idea that adults are not creative
that somehow growing up kills our
creativity
well sometimes growing up can do that
yes sometimes we can get a bit out of
balance and become quite rigid in our
convergent thinking abilities right we
can become afraid of exploration of of
trying new things of risk-taking and in
that sense young children can be our
role models but this notion that if we
just stayed children if we never grew up
in our minds that somehow we would be
more creative that’s false because while
children are great at exploration
they’re not always great at getting the
job done or or choosing the best
solution for the situation at hand and
in fact in adulthood having high levels
of convergent thinking and low levels
are high
of divergent thinking and low levels of
convergent thinking that’s a profile
that’s associated with adult ADHD so
these convergent abilities are actually
really important for helping us to focus
and to persist through challenges toward
our goals surprisingly there are
actually important elements of
convergent thinking that even enhance
our divergent thinking abilities so
we’ll take inhibitory control for an
example inhibitory control is an ability
that helps us to suppress or inhibit our
impulses so for example I’ve been told
that I need to stay on this big red dot
for my whole talk fortunately for the
camera operators I have the inhibitory
control to follow those instructions but
a four-year-old’s probably wouldn’t be
able to do that for a full 15 minutes
right for the same inhibitory control
that keeps us from following all our
impulses and exploring everything we see
it’s the same inhibitory control that
keeps us from fixating too much on the
first or most common solution to a
problem and helps us to then imagine
other possibilities I’ll give you a
classic example let’s say I gave you a
match box a box of tacks and a candle
and I asked you to try to attach that
candle to a wall what would you do I’ll
give away the ending most people will
take some tacks and try to tack the
candle onto the wall directly and others
will try to melt the candle a bit and
use the wax as a kind of glue to get
that candle up on the wall right but
neither of these solutions is going to
work the best solution is to tack the
box to the wall the box that the tacks
came in and then place the candle into
the box but most adults become so
fixated on that box is just a container
for the tacks they don’t even realize
it’s a resource for the problem and
that’s where inhibitory control comes in
it can help you to suppress that
traditional use of the box and see other
possibilities there
so you can think of it this way
creativity requires balance if the focus
becomes too heavy on divergent thinking
we can get stuck an idea generation and
never bring ideas into reality if the
focus becomes too heavy on convergent
thinking we can become so stuck in our
knowledge of constraints that we fail to
recognize great ideas when they come
along so how do we find that sweet spot
that balance between the two how do we
maintain cognitive flexibility while
balancing that with inhibitory control
how do we maintain a fresh outlook on
the rural world while also balancing
that with expertise we have to find some
way to be both spontaneous and
reflective and that is a tough balance
to strike so how do we get there here’s
my proposal
what if children and adults worked
together on co-creative teens and I
don’t just mean inviting kids to your
work meetings because they’re cute or
encouraging parents to be more involved
in their children’s science fair
projects these are not true co-creative
teams what I’m talking about is real
true creative collaboration where adults
can look to children as role models in
imagination and idea generation and
children can look to adults for guidance
and experience if the two truly respect
the strengths that the other brings to
the table those abilities might just
become contagious under the playful
guidance of adults children can start to
think about constraints to problem-solve
to select high-quality ideas and under
the leadership of children adults can
rediscover their cognitive flexibility
and start considering off-the-wall ideas
that they never would have entertained
otherwise but what does that look like
practically well at play parents can let
their
children take the lead in play asking
open-ended questions and then following
their children’s ideas no matter how
silly they may seem at home parents can
invite their children to be authentic
partners in the household for example by
inviting dinner suggestions and then
helping their child to select the best
one gather supplies and then cook it at
school teachers can look at children as
more than just consumers of information
but instead as co educators and
collaborators in the classroom using
inquiry based methods and guided play
techniques they can build in
opportunities for uncertainty in the
classroom and supports the children’s
budding convergent thinking skills while
also supporting their own divergent
thinking abilities in industry we should
think of children not just as end-users
of products but as co designers who have
ideas and insights that could transform
and change the field places like kids
team at University of Washington have
had great success with this and others
could too
but I think the key is that we neither
glorify nor shame one another for the
creative strengths that are a normal
part of human development children are
not creative geniuses no but we have a
lot to learn from them and we should be
careful not to communicate to them that
the highest form of learning is
expertise in the same way adults are not
creative failures and we should be
careful not to shame one another for the
knowledge and experience that is so
critical to bringing ideas into reality
I think we have a long way to go as
parents as teachers as decision-makers
to start emphasizing that creative
balance but it’s what’s required the
world is changing more rapidly than ever
before and generating unpredictable
dilemmas
but if children and adults can work and
play together to enhance our collective
creative abilities then I think we have
a pretty good chance of making this
world a better place
thank you [Applause]
[Applause]
who here thinks that children are more
creative than adults raise your hands
okay now what if I told you that isn’t
true you’re probably thinking but wait
I’ve heard statistics on there so
there’s a there’s a TED talk on this and
you’re right about that in fact the most
viewed TED talk of all time
by Sir Ken Robinson is based on this
very idea that children are more
creative than adults in another popular
talk he justified this view with a
longitudinal study from the 1960s by
George land which claimed to have found
that 98% of five-year-olds are creative
geniuses but that only 2% of adults are
but what Sir Ken Robinson didn’t know at
the time is that this study doesn’t
actually exist or to be a careful
scientist I should say I haven’t been
able to find any evidence that the study
ever happened so
the study itself was never published so
I had to track down the organizations
that George land claims that he had
worked with on the study that’s NASA and
the US organization called headstart
neither had ever heard of him and
neither had any record that the study
had ever happened in fact the NASA
archivists that I spoke to said that she
thought maybe this study was just an
urban myth but this idea that children
are more creative than adults
it feels so true doesn’t it and you know
the research that’s been done since that
talk in 2006
has shown us that there’s a lot more to
creativity than what we originally
thought you see I’m a child development
researcher at the Lego foundation where
I study creativity and learning and the
work that I’ve done there has shown me
just how complex the creative process is
and how nuanced its development is as
children grow but you know we all know
this intuitively too because we are all
children once and here we all are as
adults we’ve lived this I’ll give you an
example when I was seven or eight I used
to love building these stick forts in
the woods by my house you know the kind
where you take a tree branch and you
lean it up against a tree trunk in a
circle and if I built it just right it
would last me a while and I could go
there every day after school with my
best friend and we’d save a special
little snack from our lunches we’d climb
inside and eat chocolate pudding with
just our fingers but those forts they
were they were more than just sticks in
my mind I had plans for those things I
somehow came up with this elaborate plan
for the perfect tree house that we could
build so first of all would be up in the
trees it wouldn’t be down on the ground
and inside it there would be a swimming
pool but you could cover up the swimming
pool and make it into an ice-skating
rink when the season was right I mean I
had ideas I had big plans for this thing
but you know I had never got around to
building that tree house which is
probably a good thing because it would
have been a safety hazard but I can
still feel the exhilaration of having
those ideas and imagining just how cool
that tree house would be I had a pretty
good imagination but I really had no
idea what it would take to bring that
idea of the tree house in my mind into
reality and that right there is key
creativity is not the same thing as
imagination or having big ideas
there’s something else involved that
takes those ideas into reality into
fruition and creative expression there
are actually many parts to the creative
process but it can be summed up by two
main features originality and
appropriateness and by appropriateness I
mean something that’s meaningful and
relevant for the situation at hand so
when I had this idea for a swimming pool
ice-skating rink treehouse that was
original but it was not appropriate not
given the constraints that I would have
faced as a seven-year-old with only
sticks for building materials no
knowledge of engineering or building no
access to contractors and of course no
budget so I might call it an imaginative
idea but it wasn’t technically creative
because to be creative it would also
have to be appropriate now to get this
combination of originality and
appropriateness you have to be capable
of two things divergent thinking which
is basically about exploring
possibilities coming up with ideas and
convergent thinking which is about
basically deciding what to do you take a
look at all of those possibilities
you’ve come up with and you decide on
the best one given your situation
divergent thinking includes things like
exploration originality idea generation
risk-taking and flexibility convergent
thinking includes things like evaluation
logic inhibitory control persistence and
focus but the key is that you need both
of these things divergent thinking and
convergent thinking to get to those two
main ingredients for creativity
originality and appropriateness but now
let’s think about the balance of skills
that you typically associate with
children and adults so when you’re
thinking about exploration idea
generation risk-taking who are you
thinking more of children or adults
children right yeah and when you think
about evaluation logic and hibbott or
ikan soul control children are
adults and which of these two do you
think of most often when you think about
creativity well many of us have a very
strong bias to think almost exclusively
about divergent thinking and it’s really
easy to do in fact researchers even
share this bias many of the studies on
creativity that exists right now
actually look at divergent thinking and
the problem is even greater when you
look at the research on childhood
creativity there’s an upcoming review
that looked at all of the studies on
children and creativity and it found
that 82% of those studies looked at
divergent thinking so we’re not alone in
this but keeping all of that in mind we
need to separate fact from myth so let’s
take a look at the following statement
children learn more flexibly than adults
that’s true and it can be seen pretty
clearly in some work by a researcher
named Alison Gopnik she’s been looking
at what happens when you give
information to children and adults that
does not support an existing bias that
they have in other words how willing are
they to change their minds when they’re
given new information and this is an
ability called cognitive flexibility now
in her studies when adults are giving
given this evidence that does not
support their bias that conflict
conflicting information does not change
their view of the world but it’s totally
different when you look at
four-year-olds four-year-olds will
totally change their mind based on a
single new piece of information and
she’s found in her research that this
cognitive flexibility decreases steadily
from childhood to adulthood
and that makes a lot of sense when you
think about it
children don’t really have that much
evidence in their database yet right so
a single new piece of information that’s
gonna be pretty meaningful to them where
as adults they have a whole lifetime of
data points in that database to support
what they already believe and so one new
piece of information will come with a
grain of salt and this actually matches
what we see in brain development so this
image here reflects the sin
optik density in the human brain at
birth that’s sort of a complicated way
of saying the number of neural
connections in the brain now in the
earlier development focuses on
exploration in fact in the first few
years of life more than 1 million new
neural connections are formed every
second but as childhood goes on
development begins to focus on pruning
down those connections to the ones that
are most needed based on interactions
with the environment so you can put it
this way children are born into the
world ready to adapt to whatever
environment they’re born into but then
they specialized for the context they’re
actually in it’s pretty ingenious so
keeping that in mind let’s go back to
this fact check children learn more
flexibly than adults yes this is true
that’s strength along with their
abilities in imagination and idea
generation that means that children have
enormous creative potential but it
doesn’t mean that they’re more creative
and that’s because flexibility is only
one of those abilities needed for
creativity and it just so happens to
fall into that divergent thinking
category now let’s take a look at this
other idea that adults are not creative
that somehow growing up kills our
creativity
well sometimes growing up can do that
yes sometimes we can get a bit out of
balance and become quite rigid in our
convergent thinking abilities right we
can become afraid of exploration of of
trying new things of risk-taking and in
that sense young children can be our
role models but this notion that if we
just stayed children if we never grew up
in our minds that somehow we would be
more creative that’s false because while
children are great at exploration
they’re not always great at getting the
job done or or choosing the best
solution for the situation at hand and
in fact in adulthood having high levels
of convergent thinking and low levels
are high
of divergent thinking and low levels of
convergent thinking that’s a profile
that’s associated with adult ADHD so
these convergent abilities are actually
really important for helping us to focus
and to persist through challenges toward
our goals surprisingly there are
actually important elements of
convergent thinking that even enhance
our divergent thinking abilities so
we’ll take inhibitory control for an
example inhibitory control is an ability
that helps us to suppress or inhibit our
impulses so for example I’ve been told
that I need to stay on this big red dot
for my whole talk fortunately for the
camera operators I have the inhibitory
control to follow those instructions but
a four-year-old’s probably wouldn’t be
able to do that for a full 15 minutes
right for the same inhibitory control
that keeps us from following all our
impulses and exploring everything we see
it’s the same inhibitory control that
keeps us from fixating too much on the
first or most common solution to a
problem and helps us to then imagine
other possibilities I’ll give you a
classic example let’s say I gave you a
match box a box of tacks and a candle
and I asked you to try to attach that
candle to a wall what would you do I’ll
give away the ending most people will
take some tacks and try to tack the
candle onto the wall directly and others
will try to melt the candle a bit and
use the wax as a kind of glue to get
that candle up on the wall right but
neither of these solutions is going to
work the best solution is to tack the
box to the wall the box that the tacks
came in and then place the candle into
the box but most adults become so
fixated on that box is just a container
for the tacks they don’t even realize
it’s a resource for the problem and
that’s where inhibitory control comes in
it can help you to suppress that
traditional use of the box and see other
possibilities there
so you can think of it this way
creativity requires balance if the focus
becomes too heavy on divergent thinking
we can get stuck an idea generation and
never bring ideas into reality if the
focus becomes too heavy on convergent
thinking we can become so stuck in our
knowledge of constraints that we fail to
recognize great ideas when they come
along so how do we find that sweet spot
that balance between the two how do we
maintain cognitive flexibility while
balancing that with inhibitory control
how do we maintain a fresh outlook on
the rural world while also balancing
that with expertise we have to find some
way to be both spontaneous and
reflective and that is a tough balance
to strike so how do we get there here’s
my proposal
what if children and adults worked
together on co-creative teens and I
don’t just mean inviting kids to your
work meetings because they’re cute or
encouraging parents to be more involved
in their children’s science fair
projects these are not true co-creative
teams what I’m talking about is real
true creative collaboration where adults
can look to children as role models in
imagination and idea generation and
children can look to adults for guidance
and experience if the two truly respect
the strengths that the other brings to
the table those abilities might just
become contagious under the playful
guidance of adults children can start to
think about constraints to problem-solve
to select high-quality ideas and under
the leadership of children adults can
rediscover their cognitive flexibility
and start considering off-the-wall ideas
that they never would have entertained
otherwise but what does that look like
practically well at play parents can let
their
children take the lead in play asking
open-ended questions and then following
their children’s ideas no matter how
silly they may seem at home parents can
invite their children to be authentic
partners in the household for example by
inviting dinner suggestions and then
helping their child to select the best
one gather supplies and then cook it at
school teachers can look at children as
more than just consumers of information
but instead as co educators and
collaborators in the classroom using
inquiry based methods and guided play
techniques they can build in
opportunities for uncertainty in the
classroom and supports the children’s
budding convergent thinking skills while
also supporting their own divergent
thinking abilities in industry we should
think of children not just as end-users
of products but as co designers who have
ideas and insights that could transform
and change the field places like kids
team at University of Washington have
had great success with this and others
could too
but I think the key is that we neither
glorify nor shame one another for the
creative strengths that are a normal
part of human development children are
not creative geniuses no but we have a
lot to learn from them and we should be
careful not to communicate to them that
the highest form of learning is
expertise in the same way adults are not
creative failures and we should be
careful not to shame one another for the
knowledge and experience that is so
critical to bringing ideas into reality
I think we have a long way to go as
parents as teachers as decision-makers
to start emphasizing that creative
balance but it’s what’s required the
world is changing more rapidly than ever
before and generating unpredictable
dilemmas
but if children and adults can work and
play together to enhance our collective
creative abilities then I think we have
a pretty good chance of making this
world a better place
thank you [Applause]
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