Child prodigies rarely become adult geniuses who change the world. We assume that they must lack the social and emotional skills to function in society. When you look at the evidence, though, this explanation doesn’t suffice: Less than a quarter of gifted children suffer from social and emotional problems. A vast majority are well adjusted — as winning at a cocktail party as in the spelling bee.
What holds them back is that they don’t learn to be original.
.. The gifted learn to play magnificent Mozart melodies, but rarely compose their own original scores. They focus their energy on consuming existing scientific knowledge, not producing new insights. They conform to codified rules, rather than inventing their own. Research suggests that the most creative children are the least likely to become the teacher’s pet, and in response, many learn to keep their original ideas to themselves. In the language of the critic William Deresiewicz, they become the excellent sheep.
.. Creativity may be hard to nurture, but it’s easy to thwart. By limiting rules, parents encouraged their children to think for themselves. They tended to “place emphasis on moral values, rather than on specific rules,” the Harvard psychologist Teresa Amabile reports.
.. When psychologists compared America’s most creative architects with a group of highly skilled but unoriginal peers, there was something unique about the parents of the creative architects: “Emphasis was placed on the development of one’s own ethical code.”
.. Evidence shows that creative contributions depend on the breadth, not just depth, of our knowledge and experience.
.. Nobel Prize winners are 22 times more likely to perform as actors, dancers or magicians; 12 times more likely to write poetry, plays or novels; seven times more likely to dabble in arts and crafts; and twice as likely to play an instrument or compose music.
The Surrealists’ ideal state for making art was the twilight between wakefulness and sleep, when they would dredge up images from the murky subconscious and throw them onto the page or canvas. Proposing sleepwalking as an optimal widespread societal condition, André Breton once asked, “When will we have sleeping logicians, sleeping philosophers?” It seems that the Surrealist vision of a dream culture has been fully realized in today’s technologies. We are awash in a new, electronic collective unconscious; strapped to several devices, we’re half awake, half asleep. We speak on the phone while surfing the Web, partially hearing what’s being said to us while simultaneously answering e-mails and checking status updates. We’ve become very good at being distracted. From a creative point of view, this is reason to celebrate. The vast amount of the Web’s language is perfect raw material for literature.
Contrary to public perception, he almost never worked on any invention that wasn’t already being pursued by several other people. What set him apart from his peers was his knack for transforming those ideas into practical results.
The Edison Papers team has been able to find little evidence to support the view that inspiration again and again struck Edison like lightning bolts out of the blue.
.. Yet the project team can identify only a few Eureka! moments that actually had valuable results over Edison’s long and illustrious career, and only one–the discovery of the principles behind the phonograph–that deserves the mythic importance with which the public invests such events.
.. Why, given that major inventions seldom emerge as revelations, was Edison so effective? The Edison Papers Project scholars can point to attitudes, work habits, and methods of reasoning that clearly contributed to his prolific output.
.. Edison could not conceive of any experiment as a flop. As Israel puts it, “He saw every failure as a success, because it channeled his thinking in a more fruitful direction.”
.. Edison viewed even disasters as an opportunity for learning. On one occasion his lab stove went out in the dead of winter, causing an assortment of expensive chemicals to freeze. On another occasion unprotected chemicals were damaged by sunlight. Instead of bemoaning the losses, Edison put aside all other projects to catalogue changes in the properties of the bottled substances. Keith Nier observes, “He knew how to turn lemons into lemonade.”
.. A closely related observation of the scholars–one with exciting implications for school-based programs aimed at cultivating innovative minds–is that Edison employed similar problem-solving strategies across numerous technologies. Notably, he reasoned by analogy, with a distinctive repertoire of forms, models, and design solutions that he applied to invention after invention. Reese Jenkins, who assembled and until last year headed the Edison Papers Project staff, calls these repeating motifs in Edison’s work “theme and variations.”
.. Edison the private man is not nearly as scintillating as Edison the inventor and self-promoter. “He had few of the endearing eccentricities commonly associated with genius,”
.. It had been prompted by the news that teenagers were turning up the speed of his cylinder phonograph to make the music faster. Instead of capitalizing on this trend, Edison complained, “This change of speed is far worse than any loss due to having dance records too slow. . . . They are absolutely right time but young folks of the family want this fast time & like stunts & I dont want it & wont have it.” To make sure his will was obeyed, he ordered his machinists to make a governor for the motor.