Creative Genius Driven by Distraction

http://www.northwestern.edu/newscenter/stories/2015/03/creative-genius-driven-by-distraction.html

by wglb • 11 years ago

92 42 11 years ago

dsfsdfd2• 11 years ago

The brain is an antenna. A poorly tuned radio connected to a large antenna picks up a lot of nonsense - but it sometimes also picks up novelty. It can sense and concentrate the signals/ideas that others miss.

Creating an intelligent thing is like creating a garden, all that is required is to prepare the soil and remove those plants/ideas which do not serve the purpose of the garden.

Perhaps the idea that is contained in this message will find a home in the garden of another mind - give it a chance to grow, it needs a particular kind of soil. But once you get it started it's a corker.

Perhaps someone with a different set of skills to mine can make this idea manifest. I strongly believe that formalising this notion will lead to strong AI.

chops• 11 years ago

So if I understand you correctly, what you're saying is that if one were to bury a radio in rich soil, it will grow a large antenna and eventually become self-aware.

Terr_• 11 years ago

We're part-way there: http://www.pbase.com/trip/image/107161981

Sealy• 11 years ago

Is that saying that the easier you are to distract, the more likely you are to be a creative genius?

Sweet. There's still hope for me...

utxaa2• 11 years ago

i am the exact opposite. ha ha ha ... once i get going on a problem, you could fire a cannon next to my ear and i may notice. as a matter of fact, i prefer noise around me when i'm working. i'm not being sarcastic. i'm pretty good at my job, although no genius (not even that smart) by any stretch in any way :)

but i feel that this ability to hyper-concentrate helps me overcome an otherwise average intelligence. anyone else experiences this?

praveer13• 11 years ago

It's impossible for me to focus if I am not interested in something, but if something is fascinating to me, I forget to eat, drink water and do normal tasks and keep at this thing for hours. It has nearly ruined my life.

utxaa2• 11 years ago

yeah. same. but for me it doesn't matter. if it's a puzzle (from number theory to computational geometry and everything in btwn) if i start, game over. it's a problem.

digi_owl4• 11 years ago

I find that it has changed with age.

When i was younger i could blast music and not get thrown off a line of thought. But these days even a notification ding will get me derailed.

dwarman2• 11 years ago

It's called "Hyperfocus", and is common in ASD and ADHD. You might want to get a proper diagnosis. It does not particularly correlate with intelligence as far as I know.

Somewhat unintuitive too, but there it is. Low filter threshold and hyperfocus co-existing in the same brain. I'm waiting for the fMRI results on what is going on here.

dropit_sphere• 11 years ago

I always hate reading things like this because I find myself saying things like, "Oh, just like me," ---even if I read a similar article with opposite findings the day before. Then I point out to myself my biases, and feel bad for, basically, being human.

Back to work.

imjk• 11 years ago

Don't spoil this for me! I'm a creative genius damnit, and my inability to focus on work proves it!

dsfsdfd2• 11 years ago

For me it depends on how much caffeine I have had.

udev• 11 years ago

My observations about a different kind of noise ...

There are people who have focused, surgical thinking. They solve a hard problem by trying to follow a chain of logic arguments, and give up after a few tries. When they don't fail, they find the solution quickly.

There are also people with "noisier" thinking, who can stray from the chain of logic arguments, or even get lost. These people throw everything and the kitchen sink at the problem, can think of almost unlimited ways of attacking a hard problem, and often discover unexpected properties.

The "noisy thinkers" take a longer path to arrive at the solution, but they often manage to go around barriers in a way that is impossible for the former group.

unabridged• 11 years ago

The "noisy thinkers" take a longer path to arrive at the solution, but they often manage to go around barriers in a way that is impossible for the former group.

creative annealing

rndn• 11 years ago

And people in the opposite regime basically suffer from a strong Einstellung. They can recall more easily, but that also means that they are strongly primed on things they've learned, it's perhaps similar to overfitting. I'd wager there is a golden mean.

darkmighty• 11 years ago

Yea I find anecdotal support for your claim, which indicates that indicates both ways of thinking can lead to creativity. Look at John Von Neumann's wikipedia page:

"At Princeton he received complaints for regularly playing extremely loud German march music on his gramophone, which distracted those in neighbouring offices, including Albert Einstein, from their work."

So those two geniuses were opposite in this way, and I would describe their thinking verbatim as you claim!

That is, in this case, von Neumann being a "surgical thinker", he might have needed external noise sources to achieve breakthroughs ...

digi_owl4• 11 years ago

Reminds me of a test i heard about regarding creativity, and found that kids were way more creative before being run through the education system. This because they would go outside assumed limitations (changing the size and and material when asked about how many ways they could use a paperclip).

vonmoltke• 11 years ago

I think my stubborn and and somewhat anti-authoritarian streak helped me avoid most of this damage. I was the kid who always questioned the arbitrary restrictions placed on problems, the ones designed to drive you down a certain subset of paths.

I still have trouble with trying to "conform" or find "the right way" to do something, though.

ThrustVectoring• 11 years ago

There's a mixed approach that I've heard described.

Assume the solution to the problem is simple enough that it can be found in five minutes. Then spend five minutes trying to find the solution.

If you found the solution, congratulate yourself. If you didn't find the solution, do the above procedure for fifteen minutes instead of five.

This approach gives direct, "surgical" solutions for simple problems, and leads you to more creative solutions to more complicated problems.

wwweston• 11 years ago

http://everything2.com/title/Matchstick+pattern+analogy+to+t...

dwarman2• 11 years ago

"leaky" filters are also characteristic of ASD and ADD/ADHD. I have often wondered if these conditions occur at a higher frequency in the creative thinkers vs general population. I wonder if they will look at that too?

walterbell3• 11 years ago

They do. Also at higher frequency in pilots, ER staff, accountants, salespeople, entrepreneurs. At least before kids started being medicated.

spdustin5• 11 years ago

Kids being medicated - now that's an unfortunate generalization. Please don't assume that all medicated children are being fed drugs to make them conform to a group norm. There are some kids who legitimately have problems with managing their attention, and who could benefit greatly from a medication that offsets the neurotransmitter imbalance that prevents them from doing so.

kendallpark3• 11 years ago

The study suggests that creative people with “leaky” sensory gating may have a propensity to deploy attention over a wider focus or a larger range of stimuli.

I've always thought that creativity and chaos go hand in hand. At least in my experience. The inability to draw barriers between categories and subjects.

I think the bigger struggle is being able to retain focus on an idea once you've conceived it. You can have all the innovative ideas in the world, doesn't really amount to much if you can't pull it together and ship.

digi_owl4• 11 years ago

Yep, many discoveries recently seems to come from someone glancing over the category fence and going "hey, that looks similar to xyz".

kendallpark3• 11 years ago

Yeah. I was sitting in my PHIL 101 class way back in the day and was like, "Wait, this argument doesn't work because it assumes too low a level of computational complexity." Made for a great paper.

I also took some advanced creative writing courses. I was the only science major in my Novella class. So of course I wrote sci-fi. Had the most original story out of the group.

fnordfnordfnord2• 11 years ago

I take Adderall and it's kind of a trade off between the ability to be creative and the ability to be persistent and methodical. Before I had the Adderall, in order to complete methodical tasks, I had to have either the kind of silence described in the article, or I could find certain types of noisy environments that would also help.

heurist• 11 years ago

Has your creativity changed since starting adderall?

spdustin5• 11 years ago

Speaking for myself - no. I compose music and write creatively, and Adderall (and Vyvanse) give me the ability to choose where my focus/attention goes.

fnordfnordfnord2• 11 years ago

Yes. I used to be good at art and music. I still have the skills, but some part of the creativity is lacking.

lfowles• 11 years ago

My personal experience is that it has not. The effects wear off in the evening, which lets me mow down on chores/tasks to free up time to be creative without the thought "something else needs to be done" in the back of my mind. I'm also much more able to implement my creative approaches instead of discarding them as soon as I found a task that was just a little more fun and distracting.

kendallpark3• 11 years ago

I am the exact same way.

spdustin5• 11 years ago

I humbly submit that many folks "driven by distraction" may have an attention deficit disorder. The creative sorts described in the article strike me as people with AD/HD.

"Driven to Distraction" by Drs. Hallowell and Ratey [0] changed my life. The big moment for me was learning that AD/HD doesn't mean that you can't pay attention ... it's that you have little conscious control over where your attention goes unless the novelty factor is high.

Seriously. Changed my life.

[0] http://www.amazon.com/dp/0307743152/

Retra• 11 years ago

It's not really a disorder if it doesn't cause problems.

spdustin5• 11 years ago

It caused problems until I sought treatment.

TeMPOraL• 11 years ago

Reminds me of yvain's "Negative Creativity"[0]. The gist of it is that maybe building "creative machines" is actually an easy task - because even if our first AI will have zero creativity, humans seem to have a negative amount of it - because we need to induce random noise in ourselves to get out of a mental rut.

[0] http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/05/negative-creativity/

mtgentry• 11 years ago

This sounds awfully similar to being a highly sensitive person. I.E. covering your ears when a siren goes by, being exhausted after being around too many people, being aware of subtleties in your environment.

I encourage anyone who identifies with the above to take this HSP quiz: http://hsperson.com/test/highly-sensitive-test/

Kortaggio• 11 years ago

Here's the original paper (PDF): https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B-_F9a3KJf3LWmlWdzd6OU5MM28...

I'm surprised this wasn't linked anywhere in the press release.

Creative Genius Driven by Distraction

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