The Brain Science Institute put out a Request for Proposals, to which the Salon has submitted the following proposal, care of Ian Gonsher and company. If you'd like to get moving on any of the projects you've talked about with folks at gatherings, we encourage you to put them in writing if you want to make them happen. The Institute has expressed some interest, so the possibility is out there.
I personally enjoy documenting the gatherings themselves as part of my exploration of informal learning. I've heard a lot from folks who have visited the blog but can't make it to the gatherings as scheduled. If anyone is interested in collaborating on developing some tools for teachers to create meaningful Data Visualizations + encourage the exploration of Qualitative Assessment, please DO ring my bell.
-Yaz
THE PROPOSAL
Overview Building upon the conversations emerging from the salons this summer, we request funding to continue investigating some of the topics discussed. We would like to gain deeper insights into the neurobiological, cognitive, and philosophical foundations of creativity, perception, and the imagination. We propose a series of studies and projects aimed at examining these areas. Our collaborative process will blur the methodologies of the artist and scientist, with the double goal of creating works of art for the upcoming exhibition, and establishing a community of creative collaborators.
Included below you will find brief synopses of our proposed projects, along with the team members involved. We will be working in teams building upon the salon model developed this past summer. We will also meet regularly as a collective group, with the hope of bringing other faculty and students into our collaborative process. This collaborative creative process is designed to generate projects which complement each other, as well generate questions and ideas that will lead to future inquiries. The documentation of this effort will be a part of our submission to the upcoming Brain Science exhibition in spring of 2011. The documentation of our efforts from this past summer can viewed at our blog.
Creative Cognition Creativity can be defined as that faculty to imagine what has not yet been imagined, while applying that understanding to a relevant context. This process is predicated upon framing experience into meaningful categories, and identifying novel patterns within the interrelationships which emerge.
Unfortunately, the study of creativity, from both an artistic and a scientific perspective, has been just as elusive as it has been intriguing. Recent advances in the brain sciences have allowed us to pursue the topic with the power with which other thought processes have been examined. However, though methodological progress promises to deliver new answers, the right questions must be raised first. Over the course of the summer, we have developed a series of hypotheses with regards to the creative process that we would like to put to the test. We anticipate that the data we collect will generate artworks for the upcoming exhibition.
The definition of creativity given above raises the question of how we arrive at new insights and give relevance to those insights. Perhaps more importantly however, we must also understand what it is that makes divergent thinking so divergent, i.e., not convergent. Convergent thinking has adapted so that we may focus our attention and pursue problems to completion, but this cognitive efficiency entails a trade-off, for as we structure our world so that we may interpret it more economically, we are prone to exclude or reduce environmental complexities in such a way that may limit our ability to reason, find solutions, or otherwise process information.
These types of restrictive conceptual frameworks abound across disciplines. For example, some have proposed that we have a tendency to categorize the world in terms of opposing, binary sets. This propensity to perceive strict dichotomies, rather than seeing the multichotomous or continuous information that often exists, is quite prevalent in culture, as evidenced in ethics, art, and religion.
In an attempt to contribute what we can to a multidisciplinary investigation of creativity, we would like to explore this particular feature of cognition. We want to better understand the ways in which these conceptual frameworks operate by exploring the following questions:
What is the nature of those conceptual frameworks that restrict our creative potential? How can artists and scientists working together pose meaningful questions, and what methodologies can be developed to ask them? Building upon our collaborative efforts this past summer, we are developing an interdisciplinary approach to these questions. We hope our approach to this investigation will shed new light into the creative process, with our ultimate goal of sharing these insights, so that we might all cultivate creativity within our respective fields.
