In almost everything we do we innovate or tinker with, or we “improve” it or try to change it, perhaps sometimes adapt it or even re-purpose it. Sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. But to innovate is an unescapable human quality.
The brain cannot leave raw information alone. Given a scattering of dots, it draws lines between them. Given noise, it hears a voice.
A story, which opens Malcolm Gladwell's Blink, is where I want to start, because it captures something a fourteen-month due-diligence process is structurally incapable of noticing about itself: it can be flawless and still be answering the wrong question. Logic needs the “gut” to decide…
The question our schools must answer is not whether children should be creative. They already are. The question is whether we will have the wisdom — and the courage — to stop educating it out of them
Art arrives by a different road entirely, bypassing the locked doors and finding the person still waiting inside. It is a small, quietly devastating observation, and it captures something that neuroscience has been methodically proving ever since: that engaging with art — making it, experiencing it, losing yourself in it — does something profound and measurable to the human brain.
