Den här texten är saxad ur en text jag fann på sajten edutopia, där John Cleese – en av de mest magnetiska personer på jordklotet – skriver om boken Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind: Why Intelligence Increases When You Think Less av psykologen Guy Claxton. Som de flesta andra kreativa människor har han en stark intuition för hur skapandet uppstår.
»I was a history teacher for ten years and I enjoyed it very much indeed. But today’s educational trends, which focus on specific metrics of accountability, represent a fundamental change in mind-set that demands some pretty astounding creativity on the teacher’s part.«
»I’ve been interested in what makes people creative ever since I started writing forty years ago. My first discovery was that I would frequently go to bed with a problem unsolved, and then find in the morning not only that the solution had mysteriously arrived, but that I couldn’t quite remember what the problem had been in the first place. Very strange.«
»Then I came across research done at the University of California at Berkeley in the 1970s by Donald W. MacKinnon. He had examined what made people creative, and he found that the professionals rated “most creative” by their colleagues displayed two characteristics: They had a greater facility for play, meaning they would contemplate and play with a problem out of real curiosity, not because they had to, and they were prepared to ponder the problem for much longer before resolving it. The more creative professionals had a “childish capacity” for play — childish in the sense of the total, timeless absorption that children achieve when they’re intrigued.«
»This is fascinating, but it’s completely countercultural. Our current business ethos dictates that the only real kind of thinking is quick, logical, and purposeful. Any other kind feels sloppy, amateur, self-indulgent, because we’re supposed to be busy saving time.«
