Mindhacks

This is a truly gripping 20 minute speech which seeks to put all the wrong doings of education right by cultivating our children’s creativity rather than killing it.

Sir Ken Robinson, knighted by the Queen in 2003 for achievements in creativity, education and the arts, is an English gentleman with a charming wit and repartee that has an amazing vision to harvest creativity and create an amazing future for the world. He believes that CREATIVITY is as important as LITERACY and should be treated with the same status.

Ken Robinson, who lived in Stratford Upon Avon the home of Shakespeare for many years, begins by demonstrating the amazing creativity of children with numerous funny quips.

He shares a story of a 6 year old little girl who pays no attention in class except when she can draw. The Teacher asks what she is drawing and she claims to be drawing God:

The teacher asks: “BUT nobody knows what God looks like”

The girl replies “They will do in a minute”

This quip literally illustrates how children have no limits to their levels of creativity. Most kids are fearless and are never ever frightened to make mistakes. This leads to out of this world creativity. HOWEVER, our current education systems worldwide are making children lose this capacity to be creative.

You will literally be glued to the screen in this riveting 20 minute video

After you have viewed this clip I invite you to just imagine how much wonderful change we could bring to this world if we truly embraced these teachings!

I’m sure you’ll agree that Ken delivers a highly entertaining, and profoundly moving case for creating an education system that nurtures creativity, rather than undermining it.

Picasso once said:

All children are born artists, the problem is remaining an artist as we grow up.

This is the problem that Ken outlines quite brilliantly in his speech. We don’t grow into creativity, We grow out of it. In fact Ken argues we are educated out of creativity.

Comments? Share Your thoughts

Happy people are open to all sorts of ideas, some of which can be distracting

by JR Minkel

Despite those who romanticize depression as the wellspring of artistic genius, studies find that people are most creative when they are in a good mood, and now researchers may have explained why: For better or worse, happy people have a harder time focusing.

Pic Left:   People in a happy mood perform better than others on a task that requires them to be creative, but do worse when asked to cut through distractions and focus on one thing.

University of Toronto psychologists induced a happy, sad or neutral state in each of 24 participants by playing them specially chosen musical selections. To instill happiness, for example, they played a jazzy version of Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 3. After each musical interlude, the researchers gave subjects two tests to assess their creativity and concentration.

In one test, participants in a happy mood were better able to come up with a word that unified three other seemingly disparate words, such as “mower,” “atomic” and “foreign.” Solving the puzzle required participants to think creatively, moving beyond the normal word associations–”lawn,” “bomb” and “currency”–to come up with the more remote answer: “power.”

Interestingly, induced happiness made the subjects worse at the second task, which required them to ignore distractions and focus on a single piece of information. Participants had to identify a letter flashed on a computer screen flanked by either the same letter, as in the string “N N N N N,” or a different letter, as in “H H N H H.” When the surrounding letters didn’t match, the happy participants were slower to recognize the target letter in the middle, indicating that the ringers distracted them.

The results suggest that an upbeat mood makes people more receptive to information of all kinds, says psychologist Adam Anderson, co-author of the study published online by Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA. “With positive mood, you actually get more access to things you would normally ignore,” he says. “Instead of looking through a porthole, you have a landscape or panoramic view of the world.”

Researchers have long proposed that negative emotions give people a kind of tunnel vision or filter on their attention, Anderson says. Positive moods break down that filter, which enhances creativity but prevents laserlike focus, such as that needed to recognize target letters in the second task, he says.

As for the myth of the depressed but brilliant artist, Anderson speculates that creativity may be a form of self-medication, giving a gloomy artist the chance to adopt a cheerful disposition.

Article From Sciam.com >>

Advice so Inspirational, It Gets Turned into a Music Video

Inside every adult lurks a graduation speaker dying to get out, some world-weary pundit eager to pontificate on life to young people who’d rather be Rollerblading.

Most of us, alas, will never be invited to sow our words of wisdom among an audience of caps and gowns, but there’s no reason we can’t entertain ourselves by composing a Guide to Life for Graduates.

I encourage anyone over 26 to listen to this.

Humor or Sagely Wisdom?

You Decide.

The Story of “Everybody’s Free to Wear Sunscreen”

Wear Sunscreen is the common name of an essay, (actually called “Advice, like youth, probably just wasted on the young”) written by Mary Schmich and published in the Chicago Tribune as a column in 1997.

In 1998, the text of the Mary Schmich (picture left) piece was turned into a “spoken voice” recording featuring the voice of Australian actor Lee Perry. Titled “Everybody’s Free to Wear Sunscreen,” the piece immediately became a cult hit in Australia, and by early 1999 the “song” was taking America by storm.

The most popular and well-known form of the essay is the successful music single released in 1999, accredited to Baz Luhrmann (the producer of Moulin Rouge).

Here’s the Full Text Version of the Speech/Song in the Video

(more…)

Forty-odd years ago the most respected and certainly one of the most famous authors in America ofered to teach a class in one of the ivy league coleges. The university notified its alumni of the course, which was to be in creative writing. The response was far beyond wildest expectations. So many students wanted the benefit of this great man’s knowledge that the colege auditorium had to be used as a classroom. The semester began and the great day was at hand.

The auditorium was filed to overflowing. Al the students, pencil and notebook in hand, waited in hushed and excited anticipation. The famous man strode out to the lectern, leaned upon it, looked out upon a sea of faces intent on what he was about to say. He took of his eyeglasses, hufed on them gently, wiped them for a bit, seeming to heighten the almost electric energy in the air. He replaced his spectacles carefuly, cleared his throat, and then asked a question: “How many of you truly want to be writers?”

One could have stroled across the auditorium on the tips of the upraised hands. Not a single arm remained upon the owner’s lap. The great man was quiet for a long moment. He walked to the center of the stage, stopped, placed his hands arrogantly upon his hips and commenced to speak: “Then why aren’t you at home writing?”

With that Sinclair Lewis turned, strode of the platform, out of the auditorium, of the campus, and was never to be seen at that university again.

That was the entire creative writing course.

To Continue Reading the Full Article, Click Here >> 

Want a more useful mind? Your mind is like a muscle, it can be trained to be stronger and more efficient. Here are some good ways to help you develop your brain into a better tool. I’m not saying they’re easy, but they’re definitely worthwhile.

Read More on Paul’s Tips.com >>

Jose Silva, parapsychologist and founder of the Silva UltraMind ESP System used to demonstrate an experiment on creativity with kids in his hometown of Laredo, Texas. He would ask kids to think of solutions to a particular problem while they were at the beta, or waking, level of mind.

He would then guide them to the alpha, or meditative level of mind and ask them to think of further solutions. The children were always able to come up with more ideas while at alpha.

Does your mind function more creatively when you’re at the alpha level of mind?

Click here to read more.