How Einstein Got So Smart – 10 Learning Hacks How would you feel if many people thought you were the smartest person in history? How might your life be different if you actually were that intelligent? Although we often think of Albert Einstein as one of the smartest people ever, we don’t investigate what it was that made him so. Einstein…the Failure? Before you get the list of Einstein’s learning habits, consider some interesting facts about his early life. These things represent just a taste of the irony about his early life. 10 Things Einstein Did to Get So Smart From what I can find, no one has compiled details about how Einstein actually studied. 1- He daydreamed and contemplatedWho has the right to say what is absentmindedness and what is pure genius? 8- He Relied on Faith to LearnEinstein’s faith was that by inquiry and discipline you could learn things about invisible objects or phenomena. Get this high resolution graphic (pdf) on Einstein’s Learning Hacks – for free! Sources (contains some commissioned affiliate links):
Why I Let My Students Cheat On Their Exam by Peter Nonacs| On test day for my Behavioral Ecology class at UCLA, I walked into the classroom bearing an impossibly difficult exam. Rather than being neatly arranged in alternate rows with pen or pencil in hand, my students sat in one tight group, with notes and books and laptops open and available. They were poised to share each other’s thoughts and to copy the best answers. As I distributed the tests, the students began to talk and write. All of this would normally be called cheating. Who in their right mind would condone and encourage cheating among UCLA juniors and seniors? Animals and their behavior have been my passions since my Kentucky boyhood, and I strive to nurture this love for nature in my students. Nevertheless, I’m a realist. Much of evolution and natural selection can be summarized in three short words: “Life is games.” So last quarter I had an intriguing thought while preparing my Game Theory lectures. Gasps filled the room. “None,” I replied.
Critical Thinking in Everyday Life: 9 Strategies Most of us are not what we could be. We are less. We have great capacity. But most of it is dormant; most is undeveloped. Improvement in thinking is like improvement in basketball, in ballet, or in playing the saxophone. It is unlikely to take place in the absence of a conscious commitment to learn. Development in thinking requires a gradual process requiring plateaus of learning and just plain hard work. How, then, can we develop as critical thinkers? First, we must understand that there are stages required for development as a critical thinker: We develop through these stages if we: In this article, we will explain 9 strategies that any motivated person can use to develop as a thinker. There is nothing magical about our ideas. First Strategy: Use “Wasted” Time. The key is that the time is “gone” even though, if we had thought about it and considered our options, we would never have deliberately spent our time in the way we did. When did I do my worst thinking today? Go to top
d.school: Institute of Design at Stanford Nabokov on Inspiration and the Six Short Stories Everyone Should Read by Maria Popova “A prefatory glow, not unlike some benign variety of the aura before an epileptic attack, is something the artist learns to perceive very early in life.” “Show up, show up, show up,” Isabel Allende advised, “and after a while the muse shows up, too.” That’s precisely what Vladimir Nabokov addresses in an essay titled “Inspiration,” a fine addition to famous writers’ collected wisdom on writing, originally published in the Saturday Review on November 20, 1972, and found in Strong Opinions (public library) — the same fantastic volume that gave us the author’s rare BBC interview on literature and life. He begins with several dictionary definitions of the elusive grab-bag term: Writing three decades after Rosamund Harding’s Anatomy of Inspiration and just eight years after Arthur Koetler’s cult-classic The Creative Act, Nabokov addresses the dismissive attitude many “serious” writers take toward the notion of inspiration — an attitude that E. Thanks, Natascha Donating = Loving
Home | The Creativity Post The 10 habits of highly creative people, applied to creative companies « Marketing Babylon The book Creativity : Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention (previously titled: Creativity: The Work and Lives of 91 Eminent People) contains an exploration of the common personality traits of creative people. The traits are articulated as a series of ten paradoxes. Before listing them, he writes: Of all human activities, creativity comes closest to providing the fulfillment we all hope to get in our lives. Call it full-blast living. You’ve got to love the man, I’m sure he’d be against speculative work and 6-way creative pitches. The list itself is delightful on its own, and will feel intuitively familiar to anyone who has an appreciation for creativity and creative people. So here are Csikszentmihalyi’s Ten paradoxical traits of the creative personality, translated to the the traits of creative companies. 1. Creative companies balance a great capacity for doing and action with time for focus, reflection and a healthy work-life balance. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.
Lateral thinking Lateral thinking is solving problems through an indirect and creative approach, using reasoning that is not immediately obvious and involving ideas that may not be obtainable by using only traditional step-by-step logic. The term was coined in 1967 by Edward de Bono. [1] According to de Bono, lateral thinking deliberately distances itself from standard perceptions of creativity as either "vertical" logic (the classic method for problem solving: working out the solution step-by-step from the given data) or "horizontal" imagination (having many ideas but being unconcerned with the detailed implementation of them). Methods[edit] Critical thinking is primarily concerned with judging the true value of statements and seeking errors. Random Entry Idea Generating Tool: The thinker chooses an object at random, or a noun from a dictionary, and associates it with the area they are thinking about. Challenge Idea Generating Tool: A tool which is designed to ask the question "Why?" See also[edit]
Catalyzing Creativity: 7 Playful Activity Books for Grown-Ups by Maria Popova Greenlighting mess-making, 101 ways to astonish yourself, and how to flowchart your way to happiness. The intersection of childhood and adulthood is a frequent area of curiosity around here, from beloved children’s books with timeless philosophy for adults to quirky coloring books for the eternal kid. Today, we turn to seven wonderful activity books for grown-ups that inject a little more whimsy and playfulness into your daily grind. “The definition of insanity is continuing to do the same thing over and over, and then expecting different results,” Einstein famously proclaimed. In Cheerful In 3 ½ Months, spotted last week at the NY Art Book Fair, author Gerard Jansen invites you to do precisely the opposite, finding your sanity by doing things a bit differently than you’re used to. Here’s a sneak peek at the Dutch version, subsequently translated in English: Images via bloesem living You might recall The Open Daybook by LA-based writer and artist David P. Christoph Niemann
Ways not to kill classroom creativity Eleven Classroom Creativity Killers Marvin Bartel - © 2001, updated Apri 3, 2013 ". . creativity scores had been steadily rising. . .until 1990. Since then, creativity scores have consistently inched downward." from: Bronson, Po & Merryman, Ashley. "The Creativity Crisis." PROLOG: Many teachers still assume that creativity is innate and random. Before the industrial revolution, work and creativity was woven into the fabric of everyday life. Will universal pubic schools fade away like shop classes at the end of industrial life, or will they transform themselves into a new life form to meet new needs? #1. Real artwork is based on the child's own experience, memory, observation, and/or imagination. # 2. What is fair? When grading is needed in art, it is only fair that we have a way to measure and achnowledge new learning. # 3. How can I encourage more imagination, better observation, and expressing what is remembered? We all know that a heart stands for love. # 4. # 5. # 6. # 7. # 8.
Test Your Creativity: 5 Classic Creative Challenges Fascinated by how brains and creativity work, we frequently share new research on the 99U twitter feed, showing how everything from drinking alcohol, to taking vacations, to moving your eyes from side to side can make you more creative. What’s particularly interesting, however, is that most of these studies rely on just a small group of core creativity tests – and you don’t need any special lab equipment to take them. Below, we’ve collected five of the most commonly used creativity challenges for your self-testing pleasure. 1. Developed by J.P. Hold papers togetherCufflinksEarringsImitation mini-tromboneThing you use to push that emergency restart button on your routerKeeping headphones from getting tangled upBookmark The test measures divergent thinking across four sub-categories: Fluency - how many uses you can come up withOriginality – how uncommon those uses are (e.g. Try it yourself: How many uses can you think of for a spoon? 2. 3. Try it yourself: 4. 5. For the solution, click here.
What Is Intelligence? Just a Byproduct of Cooperation. | IdeaFeed What's the Latest Development? By developing computer simulations of neural networks that evolved over 50,000 generations, scientists at Trinity University have concluded that intelligence is an evolutionary byproduct of social teamwork. Each neural network, or 'brain', took part in two social dilemmas in which "two players must choose between cooperation and defection during repeated rounds. Upon completion of either game, each 'brain' produced 'offspring' with other 'brains' that made more advantageous choices during the games. ... After 50,000 generations, the model showed that as cooperation increased, so did the intelligence of the programmed brains." What's the Big Idea? Evolutionary biologists have long been puzzled by the high levels of intelligence that are seen in humans and other animals like primates, dolphins and birds. Photo credit: shutterstock.com
Critical Thinking On The Web Top Ten Argument Mapping Tutorials. Six online tutorials in argument mapping, a core requirement for advanced critical thinking.The Skeptic's Dictionary - over 400 definitions and essays. The Fallacy Files by Gary Curtis. Best website on fallacies. Butterflies and Wheels. What is critical thinking? Nobody said it better than Francis Bacon, back in 1605: For myself, I found that I was fitted for nothing so well as for the study of Truth; as having a mind nimble and versatile enough to catch the resemblances of things … and at the same time steady enough to fix and distinguish their subtler differences; as being gifted by nature with desire to seek, patience to doubt, fondness to meditate, slowness to assert, readiness to consider, carefulness to dispose and set in order; and as being a man that neither affects what is new nor admires what is old, and that hates every kind of imposture. A shorter version is the art of being right. More definitions... Program for Critical Thinking 6 Dec 21 May
A Model of The Creative Process Created in collaboration with Jack Chung, Shelley Evenson, and Paul Pangaro. The creative process is not just iterative; it’s also recursive. It plays out “in the large” and “in the small”—in defining the broadest goals and concepts and refining the smallest details. It branches like a tree, and each choice has ramifications, which may not be known in advance. Recursion also suggests a procedure that “calls” or includes itself. Many engineers define the design process as a recursive function: discover > define > design > develop > deploy The creative process involves many conversations—about goals and actions to achieve them—conversations with co-creators and colleagues, conversations with oneself. See also our How do you design? Download PDF