Imagination Institute Awards Nearly $3 Million to Advance the Science of Imagination - Beautiful Minds - Scientific American Blog Network Imagination has many different components: idea generation, mental imagery, mental simulation, future thinking, pretend play, personal meaning-making, episodic memory, perspective taking, empathy, narrative generation, and narrative understanding. Unfortunately, we spend so much time on standardized testing and measuring the ability to learn what is, we don’t track how much we’re developing the key competencies that enable us to imagine what could be. This has real implications for human innovation and creativity, as well as social and emotional well-being, peace and compassion. The latest research suggests that the ability to transport your mind into the mind of others draws on the same mental machinery that it takes to transport your own mind into the future. With generous funding by the John Templeton Foundation and administered by National Philanthropic Trust, the Imagination Institute was founded in 2014 as a way to stimulate scientific research on imagination.
Working Memory and Fluid Reasoning: Same or Different? - Beautiful Minds - Scientific American Blog Network In 1990, researchers Patrick Kyllonen and Raymond Christal found a striking correlation. They gave large groups of American Air Force recruits various tests of working memory, in which participants performed simple operations on a single letter. For instance, in the "alphabet recoding" task, the computer briefly displayed three letters: H, N, CFollowed by an instruction, such as:Add 4In which the answer would be:L, R, G Of course, adding four letters is a piece of cake. Across four different studies, they found extremely high correlations—ranging from .80 to .90 — between their measures of working memory and various measures of reasoning. Many studies since then have confirmed that working memory is an important contributor to fluid reasoning. But just how strong is the relationship between working memory and fluid reasoning? There are many reasons for the inconsistencies. A new study suggests an additional factor at play: the timing of the tests. Why does this matter? Conclusion
Scatterbrained People Are Basically Geniuses Another idea? Your big brain just got even bigger. There's a lot of truth to the stereotype of the absent-minded professor. You know, the scatterbrained academic who can't find his glasses (they're usually on top of his head). Or the creative type, who's so busy dreaming up new ideas that she misses her stop entirely on the subway. It turns out that someone who's disorganized, forgetful, and seemingly lacking in the concentration department is actually a genius. When someone's brain has so many different ideas bouncing around inside of it, practical matters may be pushed aside; surprisingly, the scatterbrained brain is working at high capacity. According to an article in TIME, the more disorganized your brain is, the more brilliant, creative, and smart you are. In the book Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation by Steven Johnson, he talks about how having many different hobbies can lead to creative breakthroughs. Keep thinking about everything.
Tutorial: Concrete vs. Abstract Thinking WHAT ARE CONCRETE AND ABSTRACT THINKING? Abstract thinking is a level of thinking about things that is removed from the facts of the “here and now”, and from specific examples of the things or concepts being thought about. Abstract thinkers are able to reflect on events and ideas, and on attributes and relationships separate from the objects that have those attributes or share those relationships. Thus, for example, a concrete thinker can think about this particular dog; a more abstract thinker can think about dogs in general. A concrete thinker can think about this dog on this rug; a more abstract thinker can think about spatial relations, like “on”. A concrete thinker can see that this ball is big; a more abstract thinker can think about size in general.
Brain Games & Brain Training Types of creative thinking - The Second Principle Creative thinking is much more than using your imagination to crank out lots of new ideas. Creative thinking is a lifestyle, a personality trait, a way of perceiving the world, a way of interacting with other people, and a way of living and growing. Gary Davis © Leslie Owen Wilson email To create – the most complex type of cognitive thinking: Since the 1950s cognitive psychologists and researchers have been trying to explain the differences in diverse types of types of thinking. To be frank the original progressive array never set quite right with me as I always thought to synthesize something surely one had to evaluate it first. Apparently I was not alone in this criticism because in 2000-2001 a revision of Bloom’s Taxonomy was put forth and reworked. Unfortunately much of what we do in school concentrates, not on creating, but on remembering, understanding and applying. Convergence and divergence – two necessary types of thinking for being creative:
7 Skills To Become Super Smart People aren’t born smart. They become smart. And to become smart you need a well-defined set of skills. Here are some tips and resources for acquiring those skills. Memory If you can’t remember what you’re trying to learn, you’re not really learning. If you want to amaze your friends with remembering faces, names, and numbers, look to the grand-daddy of memory training, Harry Lorayne. Reading Good scholars need to be good readers. Evelyn Woodski Slow Reading Course Announcer … Dan Aykroyd Man … Garrett Morris Woman … Jane Curtin Surgeon … Bill Murray … Ray Charles Announcer V/O: [The following words rapidly appear on a blue screen as they are read by the fast-talking announcer:] This is the way you were taught to read, averaging hundreds or thousands of words per minute. Psychologists have found that many people who take speed reading courses increase their reading speed for a short time but then fall right back to the plodding pace where they started. Writing Speaking Numeracy Empathy
Intelligence is getable Did you read the 1996 book Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (A Free Press Paperbacks Book) and did it make you feel uneasy because you did not (want to) agree with its conclusions but did not exactly know how to refute them? Among its conclusions were (loosely formulated): 1) that intelligence is highly important in many areas of life, 2) that differences in intelligence are largely responsible for societal stratification, 3) that differences in intelligence are largely heritable, and 4) that intelligence gaps between (racial) groups are hard to close (if that is possible at all). If you felt (feel) uneasy about these conclusions read How to get on to the system;: A guide to the A.I. Lab timesharing system for new users (M.I.T. Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. by psychologist Dick Nisbett. , David Perkins' Outsmarting IQ: The Emerging Science of Learnable Intelligence .
Book Review | 'Intelligence and How to Get It,' by Richard E. Nisbett Success in life depends on intelligence, which is measured by I.Q. tests. Intelligence is mostly a matter of heredity, as we know from studies of identical twins reared apart. Since I.Q. differences between individuals are mainly genetic, the same must be true for I.Q. differences between groups. So the I.Q. ranking of racial/ethnic groups — Ashkenazi Jews on top, followed by East Asians, whites in general, and then blacks — is fixed by nature, not culture. Social programs that seek to raise I.Q. are bound to be futile. Cognitive inequalities, being written in the genes, are here to stay, and so are the social inequalities that arise from them. What I have just summarized, with only a hint of caricature, is the hereditarian view of intelligence. Photo Richard E. Intellectually, the I.Q. debate is a treacherous one. Nisbett himself proceeds with due caution. Could the same logic explain the disparity in average I.Q. between Americans of European and of African descent? By Richard E.
“The Geography of Thought,” Richard E. Nisbett Is human cognition the same everywhere? Or do styles of cognition differ depending on geographic or cultural boundaries? Richard Nisbett explores these questions in his 2003 book “The Geography of Thought.” Nisbett primarily focuses on differences between Eastern and Western thought, defining Westerners as people of European culture and Easterners as East Asian (including China, Korea, and Japan). He proposes that Easterners and Westerns have markedly different styles of thought, using evidence from diverse areas such history, philosophy, language, and social science. Nisbett opens his argument by comparing the Ancient Greeks and Ancient Chinese as emblems of Western and Eastern thought respectively. Although the exact conclusions about Asian culture Nisbett draw are debatable, it is clear that culture influences the individual. Nisbett continues by using evidence from linguistics and social science experiments to create contrasting generalizations of East Asian and European thought.
Bespreking van Mindware: tools for smart thinking (2015) door Richard Nisbett. Psycholoog Richard Nisbett heeft een nieuw boek geschreven getiteld Mindware: tools for smart thinking. Ik vind het een must-read voor studenten psychologie. Hier is mijn bespreking van het boek. Als psychologiestudent in de jaren ’80 hoorde ik voor het eerst van het werk van Richard Nisbett. Nisbett was onder psychologen ook bekend vanwege werk dat hij had gedaan met zijn voormalige student Timothy Wilson over hoe veel mentale processen ontoegankelijk zijn voor ons bewustzijn. Nisbetts nieuwe boek Mindware: tools for smart thinking (2015) behandelt veel onderwerpen die hij in het verleden al heeft behandeld. Een voorbeeld bij uitstek van schema’s zijn heuristieken, vuistregels (vaak onbewust toegepast) voor het oplossen van problemen. Eén van de belangrijkste manieren, zo niet de belangrijkste, waarin we onszelf en anderen systematisch verkeerd beoordelen, is dat we de invloed op ons gedrag van situaties onderschatten en de situaties van persoonlijke kenmerken overschatten.
De plakfactor: de Vloek van Kennis In het boek De plakfactor (Made to Stick) van Dan en Chip Heath wordt de Vloek van Kennis genoemd als een van de belangrijkste oorzaken waarom er in de praktijk weinig 'briljant geformuleerde beklijvende ideëen' zijn. Bij de Vloek van Kennis gaat het om een natuurlijke neiging die ons tegenhoudt plakkende ideëen te lanceren. De gebroeders Heath illustreren de Vloek van Kennis met het Kloppen en luisteren-experiment van Elizabeth Newton uit 1990. Bij het experiment werden mensen ingedeeld in kloppers en luisteraars. Eén van de kloppers kreeg als opdracht uit een lijst van vijfentwintig bekende liedjes een lied te kiezen en het ritme ervan op een tafel te tikken. Vervolgens moest een de luisteraar aan de hand van het ritme raden om welk liedje het ging. Volgens de Heath broeders vallen de tegenvallende resultaten te verklaren omdat de klopper het lied dat hij of zij klopt in het hoofd hoort. In het onderstaande citaat vragen Dan en Chip Heath zich af hoe John F.