Normal Child Development

 

Historical

As academic disciplines go, the study of child development is relatively young. At beginning of the 20th century, the field of developmental psychology was still in its infancy, and psychologists were preoccupied with debates whether the developmental process was largely inherited, or molded by the child’s environment.

Psychologists such as the American John B Watson, believed that environment was the main factor and that any child could be fashioned into almost anything. This echoes the Jesuit motto: “Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man”. Sigmund Freud’s disciples also supported the “environmentalists” and claimed that most deviant child behavior was caused by mismanagement on the part of the parents.

Another American psychologist, Arnold Gesell, conducted child development studies in 1924 using motion pictures. In 1930, he introduced the use of the one-way observation room using a one-way mirror that enabled the investigator to watch secretly. He observed that the order and age of child development is determined more by nature than by nurture.

 

This view was supported by the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget.  He studied how children learn, by detailed observations on his own three children. He became intrigued with his observation that children of a similar age often gave the same wrong answers to questions. This implied that there were persistent differences in the thinking and reasoning skills at various ages, which were not merely due to increased intelligence. Over the next few decades, he developed the concept that a child’s thought processes developed along particular patterns, independent of environmental influences.

 

Noam Chomsky observed that children had an innate knowledge of basic grammar common to all languages. This is interpreted that certain fundamental aspects of language development being due to nature rather than nurture. Obviously the environment will determine whether a person will speak one language or another.

 

Thus nature provides the basic framework for child development, upon which nurture will shape  subsequent growth.

 

In the field of personality development, Arnold Gesell proposed that as a child grows older, he assumes a new identity, a new personality. Therefore at each age, a child is not merely older and cleverer, but actually becomes a completely different person.

 

In 1965, the American psychologist and educator, Edward Zigler, introduced the Head Start program, which was an intervention program designed to give children from poor families a head start on their education. It has been beneficial and has given a boost to disadvantaged children as well as their parents.

 

Normal Child Development

 

Child development is the story of how a baby transforms from a helpless infant into a mature, independent, talented, intelligent, and loving adult. It includes following a child’s physical and intellectual progress, personality and social development.

The order of developmental events through which a child journeys is incredibly constant, with few deviations. Baby has to learn to sit before he can stand or walk. However, the rate at which development proceeds can vary quite substantially. Saying “ma” or “da” can commence as early as six months or as late as eighteen months.

The most prominent exception in the order of development, which is accepted as normal, is the absence of crawling. About 25 percent of children never crawl, and go straight from sitting to standing and walking, bypassing the crawling stage. Other children move themselves sitting on their buttocks, a form of propulsion known as “bottom shuffling”. Such children are delayed in their walking, which may not emerge until about two years of age. Development before and after this period of bottom shuffling is entirely normal. Perhaps the most variable component of childhood development is that of speech. While most children can say single words by 10-12 months, this can occasionally be as late as two years. A stimulating environment helps promote earlier development.

One Month Old

The one-month-old behaves very much like a newborn baby. He may be able to start smiling and to track movements by following with his eyes. The neck muscles are still weak and, if tilted forwards backwards, the head will just flop down. Although he cannot locate the source of a sound by turning his head, he can be startled by a sudden loud noise like a door bang.

 

Three Months Old

 

The three-month-old baby is starting to gain more muscle control, and can hold the head upright a bit longer, but this is still a shade unsteady. The smile is now a definite social smile in response to a familiar face or to express real happiness. Some children may start to roll half way from the back to the front. Some may start swiping at an object placed in front of them. If you give him a rattle, the first thing he does is to put it in his mouth as a form of oral exploration. He can make a lot more noise by babbling.

 

Six Months Old

 

The six-month-old is full of energy. If, when lying on his back, he sees you offer to pull him up to sit, he will anticipate you and tilt his head forward. The back will straighten and his knees will be bent, with the legs lifted up in the air. He can reach out to grab a toy, and transfer it from the left hand to the right. He may even be able to sit with his hands propped out in front like a tripod.

 

When he sees someone familiar he will squeal or laugh. He knows that he can make you smile by beaming a smile over to you. Babbling is much more frequent, and he might start blowing bubbles from the mouth. The first tooth may be starting to erupt, but this is a variable event, and some children do not have their first tooth until after their first birthday. From about six months old, children may develop stranger anxiety, so if they see a strange face, they might start crying.

 

Nine Months Old

 

The nine-month-old baby can sit without using his hands to support himself, and he can pull himself up to stand. Most nine-month-old children can crawl, but about a quarter of all babies bypass the crawling stage, and go straight from sitting to standing and walking. The baby can now pick up tiny objects between finger and thumb, clap hands and wave bye-bye. He might be able to say “ma” or “ba”, or just continue babbling. He should be able to turn his head to locate a sound source. You will probably be able to play games such as “peek-a-boo” with your nine-month-old.

 

One Year Old

 

The one-year-old can stand and walk around holding onto your hand or onto some furniture. He can say single words other than “ma” and “ba”, and understand simple commands like “give!” He might begin to show preference in using the right or the left hand. When given an object such as a rattle, he will examine it in different ways, like shaking it, hitting with it, throwing it, or mouthing it. He enjoys looking at the pictures in a book, and will point correctly to the familiar object that you name. But he is unable to turn the pages singly, grasping several pages at once. If a small object is hidden with a piece of cloth or paper, he will realize that it still exists, and will remove the cloth or paper to uncover it. This is known as object permanence. By 13-15 months of age, he can walk unaided.

 

Eighteen Months Old

 

The 18-month-old can walk very securely, and might even run around or stoop to pick up a toy. He can say several single words, such as “bird”, “dog”, “grandma”, and “brother”. When given some wooden cubes, he can build a tower with at least three of them. If given the opportunity, he can learn to drink from a cup, and attempt to eat using a small plastic spoon. When given a large nontoxic crayon, he can scribble with it. He can point to his nose and other body parts, and can roll a ball back to you. He can brush or comb hair, and hold a phone to his ears. Emotionally, he is still a little sensitive, and if you say “no” to him in too harsh a tone, he might cry.

 

My 18-month-old is still not walking yet. Should I worry?

 

Most children start to walk around 13-15 months. But there are some who start walking relatively late. Their parents may also have walked late. If walking is the only developmental delay, and the rest of the child is normal, then there is nothing to worry. Some children who get around by shuffling on their bottoms tend to walk around 20-24 months of age. However, if your child is not walking at 18 months, it is best to consult your doctor. Conditions that are associated with late walking include muscle and joint problems, or problems with the nervous system.

 

Two Years Old

 

The two-year-old can run around and climb up and down stairs holding onto the rail. He can build a tower of six blocks, scribble with pencil and paper, pour from a bottle, and point to the nose when asked. He can drink from a cup, and can sometimes indicate his toilet needs. He can join words together into a short phrase, like “no more”, “all gone”, “mama eat”, “go there”. Some become a little negative, and say “no” to whatever you want them to do. This may be a method of attention seeking. Although he can interact with adult caregivers, when placed with another child, he will probably play by himself with relatively little interaction. This is known as parallel play.

 

Three Years Old

 

The three-year-old can run so fast that you may have difficulty catching him. He can stand on one leg, jump, and ride a tricycle. He can build a tower of nine blocks, and turn the pages of a storybook singly. He can speak in short sentences comprising five words or more. He enjoys bombarding you with questions like “why?” and he can enter into a conversation with you. He can identify colors, and can answer correctly when asked “What is your name?”, “How old are you?”, and “Are you a boy or a girl?” When given a pencil, he can draw a straight line, circle, and a cross. Make-believe play, such as pretending to be a parent, can become quite imaginative. There will be much more interaction with other children, and this is the age when he might profit from a playgroup. He can feed himself, but is quite sloppy. He may be dry by day, and can indicate when he wants to go to the toilet. When upset, however, the three-year-old is prone to temper tantrums.

 

Four Years Old

 

The four-year-old can hop, leap, climb all over the place, and can start to use chopsticks. He can tell you a simple story, like The Three Little Pigs. He can draw a square, a triangle, and a picture of a person made up of only three to five body parts, albeit the limbs shown as stick figures. He can recognize numbers, alphabets, and knows opposites (small-big, hot-cold). He can sit reasonably still at the dinner table and feed himself. Many would have started attending either a nursery school or a kindergarten. He can put on and remove his socks and shoes. His play can be quite imaginative, and he can pretend to be a doctor looking after a doll patient. He can be quite susceptible to television advertisements, and join with current childhood fads. This age is probably the most dangerous time for your child because he is able to do many things, and yet has no perception of danger, such as when jumping from a height or dashing across the road. He can speak quite fluently, maintain a coherent conversation, read a few simple words, and count to ten.

 

Five Years Old

 

The five-year-old can somersault and jump down from two steps. Most are dry throughout the day and night, although a small but significant percentage still bed wet. He can hold a long discussion with you. He can read words such as “chicken” and “flower”, or even short sentences. He can write the letters of the alphabet and simple words, including his own name. He should be able to do easy additions and subtractions. The five-year-old is able to express concern over his younger sibling, and can show the little one the pictures in a storybook. However, he may not be able to distinguish fact from fantasy, and may tell untruths as if they were true. For example, he might say “I went to teacher’s house today”. His sense of time may also be inaccurate, so when he says “Yesterday I went to the toyshop”, it may mean that a few months ago, he was at the toyshop.

 

Developmental Delay

 

If a child fails to attain certain developmental milestones at the expected age, then that child may be developmentally delayed. For example, the normal child might start walking as early as nine months, and the median age for walking for most populations is around thirteen months. But if a child is unable to walk by eighteen months, one would consider him developmentally delayed. No two individuals develop at the same rate, so therefore a sound knowledge of normal childhood development and its variations is essential in the assessment of developmental delay.

 

Diagnosis of Developmental Delay

 

A child is considered developmentally delayed if he is behind in any one of the major areas of development:

 

A. Motor Development

– Head lags behind when pulled to sit by four months

– Not reaching for objects by five months

– Not rolling over by seven months

– Not sitting tripod by seven months

– Not sitting unsupported by ten months

– Not walking unaided by 18 months

 

B. Hearing and Language Development

– Failure to respond to noise

– Not babbling by six months

– Not saying single words by 18-20 months

– Not speaking in two or three-word phrases by three years

 

C. Personal and Social Development

– Not smiling by eight weeks

– Not waving goodbye or clapping hands by 15 months

 

 

Conclusions

 

Understanding normal childhood development helps you provide appropriate care for your child, and appreciating the variability of this development can allay some of your anxieties.

 

Developmental delay may be a variation of normal development, especially if the delay runs in an otherwise normal family. On the other hand, it may signal potential problems. A delay in motor skills could be due to cerebral palsy or a muscular dystrophy. A delay in intellectual development may indicate an intellectual disability. A delay in speech development may be due to hearing deficit, specific language disorders, or an autistic spectrum disorder.

 

If you notice any developmental delays, do consult your doctor or health care provider.

 

(By Kenneth Lyen)

 

 

 

Hello Kitty

Childhood Fads

Children’s fads are nothing new. Over the years we have seen them come and go. There was He-man, Cabbage Patch Dolls, Teenage Ninja Turtles, Care Bears, Teletubbies, Transformers, Tamagotchi, Pokemon and the incredible Hello Kitty!

For people like myself who do not find any of these creatures particularly appealing, the obsession displayed by their fans seems completely bewildering. What would entice large numbers of people to queue up overnight just to buy a Hello Kitty doll? What generates the incredible demand for these dolls such that the black market price for them is inflated several fold? Why did some of those who queued up for these dolls lose their tempers and come to blows over such a trivial matter? And as for those who got hurt when they pushed so hard that the glass door shattered, we ask why?

As a parent and as a paediatrician, I look at behavioural problems from a developmental point of view. Namely, what did we do wrong as parents? Why did we fail to vaccinate our children (some of them already grown up) with values and judgements so that they would not succumb to peer pressure, or to advertising’s ugly influences? How did we as parents, fail to inculcate independent thinking in our children?

Alexander Pope once wrote: “Tis Education forms the common mind; just as the twig is bent, the tree’s inclined”.” I fully agree with him. It is through education, in its widest sense of the word, that we can shape our children, so that they will develop into upright citizens. But recent events suggest that we have not been as effective parents-cum-educators as we thought we were. Let me stick my neck out, and make a sweeping generalisation. Let me preface this by saying that I don’t have any research data to back up my impressions.

I believe that parents these days seem more intent on getting their children to do well at school, to pass exams, with a view to securing better paid jobs and a more comfortable lifestyle. Children nowadays seem to be taught more and more facts, and less and less about values; they are taught more about the techniques of passing exams, and less about moral judgements; they are taught more about winning, and less about coping with failure; more about following instructions, and less about independent thinking. Now, before I get a flood of criticisms, let me immediately apologise if the above generalisation provokes a negative reaction from parents, educators, and others who feel that I have got it all wrong.

But have I really got it wrong? I think that the events rising from the Hello Kitty madness has already vindicated my beliefs. Let me give you some further observations. I have seen people queuing up behind a sign placed by the fast food chain that the Hello Kitty dolls are sold out at this point. My colleagues have noticed that their several of their office staff have arrived late to work because they had queued up for a doll. Many rubbish bins outside the fast food chain were full of discarded food uneaten, because once the person queuing obtained the doll, the food became redundant.

Some parents feel that they are displaying love to their children when they shower them with presents. They indulge their children’s every craving. This is exacerbated by the highly successful advertising on television. The child becomes obsessed with the desire to own the object advertised. Their peers exert further pressure. Parents think that they are doing their child a great favour by giving in to their demands. Sometimes the child becomes insufferable and goes into a temper tantrum. To stop these tantrums, the parent might give in, even though the parent may initially object to buying the toy. As a paediatrician, often asked to advise parents on how to deal with childhood tantrums, I always tell the parents never to give in to their child’s tantrums. Children are often smarter than we realise. They know how to manipulate their parents. They are fast learners. If they go into a temper tantrum, and the parents give into their demands, they will learn that this technique works. In future they will always go into a temper tantrum to get what they want. If, on the other hand, the parents consistently deny the tantrum child’s demands, that child soon learns the futility of launching into a tantrum. Over the course of time, the tantrums will extinguish.

Thus, if we as parents are obsessed with acquiring material wealth, or we ourselves queue up for our condominiums, or cars, our country clubs, then unwittingly we transmit these values to our children. If we would rather spend our money on expensive holidays rather than helping destitute families, we are also making a value statement. Hence to some extent, the misbehaviour of those obsessed with buying the latest fads can be traced to our own misplaced sense of values, our own obsessions, our own misbehaviour.

What can we do? As doctors, I believe we have a responsibility to society. Like it or not, society scrutinises our every act, our every word, our every deed. We are already seen to be a role model for society, and we should therefore be seen to fulfil this role responsibly. Furthermore, we are also educators. We are constantly educating our patients and the parents of our patients. We have that opportunity to allow others to “catch” our own views and values.

Education needs balance. Currently it is imbalanced towards competition rather than cooperation, towards wining at all costs rather than coping with failure, towards acquiring facts rather than values. The least we can do is to discuss the problems, to air our views, to listen to the views of the public. Maybe by engaging in dialogue we can find new solutions to achieving a balanced education. That is the direction we should be heading towards.

(In 2000 a well-known fast food restaurant gave out Hello Kitty dolls for each meal purchased, and sparked off a nation-wide craze.)

Almost Normal

My spelling is awful and I make many misrakes. When I read, the meaning does not sink in, and I have to reread several times to find out what’s it about. In fact I prefer listening to audio books than reading the printed word.

Am I normal?

Apparently not. My psychologist friend tells me that I have a hidden dyslexia. It will explain why I did so badly at school, why I was a D student, why I nearly failed all my exams.

Hence I am delighted that the British Dyslexia Association, in conjunction with the University of Westminster is spending £478,000 in a quest to uncover latent dyslexia, dyspraxia, and dyscalculia … people who struggle with reading and writing, who have problems in motor skills, or have difficulty handling numbers.

But I am worried by this study. You see, the boundary between normal and abnormal is blurred. When is dyslexia just poorly taught reading and spelling? When is dyspraxia just clumsiness? And dyscalculia just a disinterest with mathematics?

Come to think of it, is anybody normal? Are we all borderline sufferers of one psychological disorder or another? Or as John Ratey put it, do we have “shadow syndromes”?

In the 1960s there was a movement led by Thomas Szasz that claimed there was no such thing as psychiatrically abnormal people. It was society that was abnormal. Nowadays the pendulum has swung to the opposite extreme. Psychiatrists, psychologists, doctors, educationalists, busybodies, are very keen to dish out labels on everyone. There are even new labels to be distributed liberally, like “borderline personality disorder.”

If I were a hypochondriac, I would claim to suffer from a touch of everything. I would love to add a few more maladies to my inventory of complaints. I could add borderline attention deficit because I could never concentrate on anything for very long. Plus borderline autistic because I am a shy quiet type, and do not like crowds or parties. Then I would add borderline manic-depressive disorder as I have mood swings. And maybe a touch of obsessive-compusive disorder, and possibly a borderline personality disorder to boot.

Joking aside, there will undoubtedly be some genuine cases of learning disorder that will be detected by the University of Westminster’s study. However, I fear they will open Pandora’s Box, because dyslexia, dyspraxia and dyscalculia are ubiquitous. The cutoff between normal and abnormal is arbitrary. And treatment is largely unsatisfactory.

I guess you have to start somewhere, and I can only wish them the best of luck.

Sometimes I wonder how my life would have changed if they detected my dyslexia earlier. Maybe I wouldn’t have become a writer. What a dumb idea for a dyslexic to choose to be a writer!

Gilles de la Tourette

Today I was introduced to a family whose 10-year-old son has little jerky movements consisting of sudden and involuntary shrugging of the shoulders, splaying of the arms, twiching of the face, fluttering of the eyelids, and if seated, kicking of his legs. On top of that, perhaps even more startling, is that he can unexpectedly blurt out an obscenity. For a well-educated genteel upper middle class family who would never use four-letter swear words even under extreme duress, this tendency to vulgarities is most bizarre and bewildering to them.

What the little boy has is a condition called the Tourette Syndrome. It was first described in 1884 by a French physician, Gilles de la Tourette (1857-1904). He wrote about nine patients who were affected with the symptoms that were later to bear his name. One of these was the Marquise de Dampierre, an aristocratic lady who developed compulsive tics from the age of seven years, and they persisted until her death at the age of 80 years. She became a recluse and according to another doctor, she “ticked and blasphemed” all her life.

This condition affects 2% of the population, and among famous patients afflicted with this disease was Amadeus Wolfgang Mozart. Perhaps Mozart had outbursts of profanities, or coprolalia, which may have inadvertently upset poor Salieri, who is alleged to have murdered Mozart.

By the way, “coprolalia” is derived from the Greek words “kopros” (dung) and “lalein” (to babble).

The condition is inherited as an autosomal dominant, which means that it can be passed on by either parent. But to date, the gene has not been identified, nor the biochemical aberration which gives rise to the condition. Medical treatment is available but drugs only suppress the symptoms, and when the medication is stopped, the manifestations may recur.

When I asked the parents where the boy may have picked up his scatology, they immediately blamed the school. Apparently it is the norm for schoolboys to use four-letter swear words that would shock any grandmother. Definitely they would not have picked it up from Singapore television which is squeaky clean. How then, I asked, is it possible to make a diagnosis of Tourette Syndrome, if the only manifestation was the coprolalia?

The disease remains as baffling and mystifying as it did 120 years ago when Dr Tourette published his findings.

Heels on Wheels

I was nearly knocked over by a little kid today. It was during my lunch break. I had just eaten at a nearby hawker centre. Duck noodles accompanied by a bowl of soup. Chopstick licking good. Burp.

Sauntering back to my office, punctuated by casual window shopping, I suddenly saw hurtling towards me, a high speed lump of child. He couldn’t stop in time, and my reflexes were dulled by post-prandial hypoglycaemia. “Hey, watch it” he shouted at me, as if it was my fault that I trespassed into his flight path. I was too stunned to react appropriately, and my instinct, trained by my conservative middle class parents, was to be perpetually polite. “Are you all right?” I asked the boy. Without even a word of apology, he sped off quick as The Flash.

I realised that the problem arose because he was wearing shoes with wheels embedded into the heels (heelies). These shoes are now ubiquitous, and has largely replaced both the squeaky sports shoes, and heels that light up when you put your weight on them. This is a new fad. Children think it is cool to race across shopping centres and any pedestrian walkways wearing these heels on wheels.

“Freedom is a wheel in your sole”, screams a poster advertising these shoes. “Freedom obligates responsibilities”, I thought to myself.

My friend who owns a shop, said that when he was shown a pair of these shoes, before the fad caught on, he dismissed it. “It would never catch on” he told the distributor. Now he lives to regret his decision. Trying to comfort him, I told him the true story of Timex Watch, who was offered the distributorship of shiny colourful plastic watches, before they became fashionable. They turned their noses at these cheap-looking “toy” watches, and lived to regret turning down one of the most profitable distributorship of Swatch watches.

Curiously enough, I would have expected the rate of fractured arms and head injuries to have shot up with the sale of these heelies. But this does not seem to have happened. I guess the reflexes of young children are lightning fast and they usually avert disaster in the nick of time.

Like all fads, I’ll give it a year or two, tops. And these heelies will end up in the eternal resting place of all yesteryear’s fads. Yep, I know, at bottom, I’m a heel! Hehe!

Lost for Words

Can a concept exist without the words to describe it?

Would we have thought about gravity if Isaac Newton didn’t help identify it? Or how about the concept of “space-time” before Einstein defined it?

Without words, could we have been able to conceive of the following abstract ideas: “soul”, “reason”, “energy”, “subconscious”, “conscience”, “remorse”, “quark”, “pi”, “square root”, “calculus”, “absurd”, “meaning”, “endurance”, etc?

Does language shape our views and influence our thoughts? This question was first posed by Benjamin Lee Whorf in the 1930s. The Whorfian Hypothesis, as it is sometimes referred to, claims that the particular language a person speaks, independent of the culture in which he resides, affects the way that he thinks, by determining the framework for his perceptions and thoughts. Whorf and his teacher Sapir argued further that a person’s world view is largely determined by the vocabulary and syntax available in his language.

The extreme version of this hypothesis is that all thought is constrained by language. If the word does not exist, then that thought cannot be thought. Of course this is patently untrue. For example, we all experience difficulties in expressing ourselves. We know what we are thinking of, but we are stumped to find the word to express it. Hence we do not need words to think.

At the opposite extreme, to say that language has absolutely no influence on thought, is also false. For example, if a language organized colour names differently, it has been shown that a person’s discrimination of similar shades of colors can be influenced.

To explore this question further, Peter Gordon of Columbia University studied the Pirahn Indians. This tribe of hunter gatherers living on the banks of the Maici River in Brazil do not possess a vocabulary for numbers other than two words, “one” which stands for “one or two”, and the other meaning “many”. Members of this tribe are intelligent, but they have difficulty counting beyond 8 objects. Peter Gordon wrote: “They do not have the word for “number”, pronouns do not encode number (e.g. “he” and “they” are the same word), and most of the standard quantifiers like “more”, “several”, “all”, “each” do not exist.” Peter Gordon concluded that without having numbers, the Pirahn Indians were handicapped in their ability to conceive of mathematical calculations. This tribe could survive without this concept because their commerce was a form of barter, in which there was no exchange of money. Numbers did not exist as there was no need for them.

Numbers, symbols and words, act as convenient labels for concepts. They help clarify one’s thinking. For example, the 19th century physician Langdon Down discovered a subset of intellectually disabled who were later labelled as Down Syndrome individuals. This enabled better delineation of this group and allowed for further studies, such as their the genetic origins.

Words are like building blocks or stepping stones that allow us to advance concepts one step at a time. Armed with the concept of gravity, Isaac Newton took the next step and formulated the inverse square theory of gravity. Similarly, with Einstein’s concept of mass and energy, he could formulate the equation linking the two, which led to further discoveries.

One additional point of interest. Not only do the Pirahn Indians not count, but they also do not draw. Gordon wrote. “Producing simple straight lines was accomplished only with great effort and concentration, accompanied by heavy sighs and groans.”

This leads us to the next issue, namely the written representation of words. Benjamin Lee Whorf was acutely aware of the role culture and society played on the development of concepts. Take two cultures, Western and Far Eastern. In the west, words are represented by an alphabet script, whereas in the Far East, words are represented mostly by pictograms. Does the representation of words in alphabet form versus pictograms lead to qualitatively different modes of thinking? Can it explain the differences between, say, Far Eastern philosophy from Western philosophy?

Trying to display abstract ideas in pictograph form is particularly challenging, because it is very tough converting pictures into abstract concepts. The Chinese do it quite cleverly. For example the word for endurance shows a knife directly above the heart, and the word for peace is a woman under the roof of a house.

Whether this pictographic representation of concepts can subconsciously lead to a different way of thinking and a different world view remains largely unexplored. Cross-cultural studies are therefore of immense interest, not only in understanding differences in thought processes, but also in unravelling other mysteries, such as dyslexia.

Signs of Success

I am a slow learner.

I was one of the judges for a concert where the disabled co-wrote songs with the able. For the closing theme song, we were taught how to sign the lyrics. All my fellow judges learnt the sign language very quickly. But I just could not remember the action sequences, frequently getting it wrong. It was quite embarrassing.

On another occasion, I was part of the committee that made the decision to introduce the Makaton sign language, a simple system, for learning-disabled children. As committee members, we were taught some of these easy signs, and I discovered that I was actually the more learning disabled, because of my inability to learn this simplified sign language.

It is therefore with astonishment that I read about a group of Nicaraguan hearing-impaired children who created from scratch, a brand-new sign language.

It all began after the 1979 Sandinista revolution, when the new Nicaraguan Government started a nationwide program to educate deaf children. Hundreds of students were enrolled in two Managua schools. Before then, deaf Nicaraguans stayed at home and interacted with family members using a personal system of communication. They could only communicate basic needs like “eat,” “drink,” and so on.

Unfortunately the new teachers were inexperienced. They were advised by the Soviet advisors to teach the children finger spelling, which meant manually stroking with the index finger the outline of each individual alphabet onto the children’s open palms. But having no knowledge of either the alphabet or the words they were meant to spell, the children could not make head or tail what it all meant, and the effort was totally futile. The teachers even tried other methods, including lip-reading, but once again all their attempts to communicate ended in abject failure.

Then, to the teachers’ amazement, the children started communicating with each other through a unique system of hand gestures. A new sign language was being born right in front of their very eyes.

There are three major findings in the evolution of this extraordinary sign language. First, the originators of the language were children, and the signs were gradually improved upon as they entered their 20s. Secondly, a few years later, when a new generation of younger deaf children were learning this sign language, they modulated the cruder signs of their elders, enriching them so that they became more nuanced and streamlined. Their improvements were soon adopted by everyone in the community. All this was done without any assistance from their teachers or parents, who were mere spectators to this creation. The third observation is that the new sign language had rules of grammar that were similar not only to all the other sign languages in the world, but also to spoken languages.

Steven Pinker, author of “The Language Instinct,” says that what happened in Nicaraguan children is proof that language acquisition is hardwired inside the human brain. The development of this unique sign language by young children supports Noam Chomsky’s postulate that children have an innate ability to produce language, and that they are equipped with the rules of a universal grammar.

It should not surprise one that sign language can arise so relatively easily. Anthropologists claim that before the development of spoken language, early man was already communicating nonverbally. The earliest mention of sign language is by Xenophon in 431 BC. The philosopher Condillac proposed in the mid 18th century that language originated as gestures. It was the Abbé de l’Épée who observed that deaf people roaming the streets of Paris were communicating with one another using an animated system of hand gestures. The abbé established a school for the deaf in 1755, and used his deaf students’ natural signs to further their education. This French system of sign language was later to become the foundation of the American Sign Language.

It seems that sign language is closer to the origin of language than speech. Sign language appears to have arisen spontaneously and independently in different parts of the world. For example, Chinese sign language is very different from American, or Danish, or Nicaraguan sign language.

Inventing a brand-new sign language is not easy. Try it yourself. Create a new system of sign language. Pose yourself the following questions. How would you communicate the passage of time? How would you use signs to differentiate between something you have done just a few seconds ago, versus something you did last week? How would you differentiate between an act done by a male or a female, between a young person or an old person, or between people of different races, or between one solitary person versus a large group of people? How would you sign that you have just watched the film “The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”? Then tell us what the film is all about. It is like playing the game Charades, except it quickly becomes infinitely more difficult.

Whoever invented sign language must be a true genius!

Asperger Syndrome

Definition

Asperger syndrome is defined as a condition resembling autism in which there are speech and language abnormalities, problems with nonverbal communication, severe impairment in social interaction, a fixation on a narrow field of interest, rigidity in following unchangeable routines and motor clumsiness.

Historical

In 1944, Hans Asperger described a distinctive pattern of behavior that resembled autism and is now referred to as Asperger syndrome. A year earlier, Kanner had published his observations on autism. Unlike Asperger syndrome in which the intelligence is normal or high, Kanner’s autistic subjects were quite severely intellectually disabled.

Epidemiology

In Sweden, the prevalence of Asperger syndrome is around two per 1,000 school children, and boys outnumber girls by quite a large margin. Asperger syndrome is more common and less severe than Kanner autism.

Inheritance

A number of families have a mix of members with Asperger syndrome and Kanner autism. This suggests that there is an overlap in these two conditions, and it may eventually turn out that they actually represent different degrees of severity of the same condition.

Clinical Features

Persons with Asperger syndrome may have a history of school difficulties. They display abnormalities in speech, nonverbal communication, social interaction skills, and motor coordination. They may engage in repetitive activities and are resistant to changes in routine. Other family members may have similar disturbances. Asperger syndrome is more commonly associated with normal or high intelligence.

Speech

The development of speech may be delayed. The words expressed may be sing-song in intonation, or they may be flat, with inappropriately exaggerated inflections. There may be pronoun substitution, so that “you” is used instead of “I”. The Asperger subject may invent new words (neologisms) or use long and obscure words instead of simpler ones. Speech content can be pedantic and repetitive. Simple humor may be appreciated, but complex jokes may elude them.

Nonverbal Communication

There may be a paucity of facial expressions. Eccentric gestures, like holding the arms in the air and other odd posturings are sometimes manifest. They may frequently misread the body language, intentions or facial expressions of other people. Eye contact is said to be poor, but in Asians, this can be difficult to assess, because it is not the usual practice to look someone in the eye when communicating with that person.

Social Interactions

They have difficulties in initiating and sustaining relationships with others. Social rejection may result from a failure to grasp the rules of etiquette or social conduct, including rules which govern speech, hand gestures, body posture, choice of clothing and proximity to others. They may have a preference for machines or fantasies rather than human interactions. Even hygiene can be at the same time obsessionally clean and filthy. The Asperger subject may shower several times a day, but never brush the teeth. There may be extreme lack of common sense.

Resistance to Change

Once they develop a daily pattern, they resist any change in their routines. In a similar vein, they may form intense attachments to certain belongings, and may become very unhappy when away from home.

Motor Coordination

Their movements are awkward and clumsy, their posture appears peculiar, and they may have a tremor which can affect their writing and drawing.

Skills and Interests

Persons with Asperger syndrome may have an exaggerated interest or skill in one or two areas of expertise, and they may absorb every detail in these subjects. This is similar to those individuals with Kanner autism who sometimes display quite brilliant talent in a certain skill (autistic savants).

School Experiences

Children with Asperger syndrome tend to behave quite oddly and, because of their poor social defenses, may be bullied at school. They tend to do badly in their studies because they may prefer to pursue their own interests rather than complete their homework.

Differential Diagnosis

There is controversy over whether Asperger syndrome is part of the autism continuum or a separate entity. Asperger syndrome individuals tend to have higher intelligence than those with Kanner autism, but there is some overlap.

Currently there are no valid tests that can reliably differentiate Asperger syndrome from infantile autism. The observation that people with Kanner autism may transform into Asperger syndrome after intensive treatment further supports the notion that Asperger syndrome is part of the autism spectrum.

The unusual behavior, anxieties and fixed habits of those suffering from Asperger syndrome superficially resemble a number of psychiatric conditions, such as schizophrenia, the manic phase of manic-depression, generalized anxiety disorder, and obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Therapy

There is no specific medical treatment for Asperger syndrome. Therapy is largely educational and behavior modification.

– Teach the Asperger syndrome individual how to interpret facial expressions and physical gestures.

– Teach him how to analyze social situations.

– Encourage him to do some voluntary work.

– Find out what motivates that particular individual with Asperger syndrome, e.g., he may be willing to work for money to buy more computer equipment, and use it as positive reinforcement.

– Be sensitive to the person’s emotions, e.g., do not laugh at a joke that was not intended.

– If the person with Asperger syndrome uses “faultless logic leading to nonsensical conclusions”, then he needs to be aware of the absurdity of his conclusions.

– Some individuals can even gain insight into their own condition by reading about Asperger syndrome.

– It may be helpful to introduce people with this condition to each other.

Drug Treatment

Individuals with Kanner autism sometimes respond to high doses of vitamin B6 or pyridoxine. As this is a relatively safe drug with preventable side effects, it can be given an empirical trial. If a person with Asperger syndrome has a coexisting problem, such as an anxiety disorder, then treatment for this should be given. If there are fits, anticonvulsants should be administered.

It is important to emphasize that the medical treatment of Asperger syndrome is only a small part of the total therapy. Adequate comprehensive treatment requires education, analysis of the environment with appropriate behavioral adjustments and psychotherapy if indicated. In addition, there should be meticulous evaluation and treatment of other concomitant medical problems. Thus, a team approach to treatment is essential. Medication cannot be used as a substitute for these other components of therapy.

Prognosis

The outcome of Asperger syndrome is very unpredictable, and may range from poor to excellent.

Case Studies

John is a 14-year-old in a special school. He had a normal delivery at birth but did not talk until he was six years old. Now, he is able to express himself in short sentences and has a reading age of a nine-year-old boy. However, his understanding of what he reads is below that. He has no friends. When he is not engaged in any activity, he sings to himself, bites himself and puts his fingers in his mouth and nose. John was diagnosed as having autism with developmental delay.

Ahmad is a 13-year-old boy who comes from a low income family. Despite not having any tuition and coming from a family background that does not speak English at home, Ahmad did well academically and was in the top academic stream. As a child he had delayed speech. Over the years, his speech improved, and he liked to talk, but had difficulty communicating his thoughts. He has a high-pitched voice with a flat tone. Up till today, he has no friends because he is unable to relate to others. He has a strong interest in television programs and knows a lot about them. In fact, he has learned a lot of “communication skills” like reflective listening, summarizing, and interpreting body language, from watching TV interviews. He has a very strong logical memory. He is diagnosed with Asperger syndrome.

Both John and Ahmad lie within the spectrum of autism.

Learning Styles

People with autism spectrum disorder learn in a different way from others. They tend to learn much better when information is presented to them in a visual way. While the phrase “a picture is worth a thousand words” applies to the average person, “a picture is worth ten thousand words” applies to most people with autism spectrum disorder. They also tend to have a strong memory for details, but have difficulties piecing the bits of information together to form a whole. In other words, they see the trees but not the wood. Gary Mesibov illustrates the way they see the world like a laser pointer, while non-autistic people see the world like a regular torchlight. A laser pointer is a highly-focused beam of light and causes an intense concentration in energy on one aspect of the environment. Organizing, sequencing, and time concepts are generally areas of difficulty for people with autism spectrum disorder and Asperger syndrome.

Savant

About 10 per cent of people with autism spectrum disorder have talent or are “gifted” in some specific area. Some are gifted in writing poetry, while others are talented in music, drawing, designing, computers, and calculating the day when given a date. The movies Rain Man and Mercury Rising are examples of individuals with autism spectrum disorder who have special talents.

What is the Most Effective Intervention Program?

The most common and effective form of intervention for individuals with Asperger syndrome is structured teaching, communication training, applied behavioral analysis, and social skills training. The best intervention programs come from having a deep understanding of how they see the world. These intervention programs can then be crafted to help them to see the world meaningfully. Individuals with Asperger syndrome need help in understanding the social environment and learn best when information is communicated to them in a visual way.

To meet their learning needs, TEACCH , a division of the University of North Carolina, USA, developed a structure teaching approach that focuses on the use of visual information to prepare the individual with autism spectrum disorder to learn. There are three main components to this approach: physical structure, visual schedule, and work system.

There is no one clear approach or program that works for all people with autism spectrum disorder. An effective intervention program should have the following components:

– Clear assessment of needs.

– Development of learning goals in his immediate environment with a long term aim of creating independence.

– A variety of learning opportunities for the child. This should include direct teaching, group teaching (for older children), independent practice, incidental teaching, generalization to other people and situations, and repeated practices.

– All teaching activities should be meaningful.

What are the Long-Term Goals of Intervention?

In terms of priority for goal setting, personal skills are the most important and form the foundation for skills building. Both parents and professionals place independence as the long-term goal for individuals with autism spectrum disorder. This is followed by intellectual skills and interpersonal skills.

Conclusions

We believe Asperger syndrome to be part of the autism spectrum disorder. The diagnosis is often missed by parents and teachers because children with this condition have normal to high intelligence. Nevertheless they have difficulties socializing, and may have some learning difficulties. Using visual cues to assist in their learning, giving them social skills training, can be most helpful to them.

This article by Vera Bernard-Opitz, Kenneth Lyen, Lam Chee Meng, first appeared in Rainbow Dreams (2002).

Too Many Tests

Too Many Tests Spoil the Learning

The Advisory Committee on Mathematics Education (Acme) recently published their report on mathematics tests for 14-19 year olds in England. They concluded that too many tests damaged students= enthusiasm for maths.

“There is a danger that this can lead to an ‘exam mentality’ – for both pupils and teachers – where learning is just about passing tests,” said the report. Indeed they point out that the number of candidates applying to sit for A=level maths has fallen in the past few years.

The side effects of too many tests is not new. On the one hand tests can be used to motivate students to study. However, when the results are worse than expected, a student=s morale and self-esteem can plummet.

I remember that in my youth I was terrible at tests. Some days I could fare brilliantly, and on other days, I could fail miserably. Many a time I was careless, sometimes not reading the questions properly, sometimes completely missing out an entire page of problems.

The trouble is that teachers take test results far too seriously. We students get branded at worst as “useless”, and at best as “lazy”.

I have often campaigned against exams, but this is a battle I have lost totally and utterly. Schools in Singapore seem to have more exams nowadays than when I was a student. Principals and Ministers of Education keep on telling me that “exams are a necessary evil”. I never believed them.

The proof of the pudding is that the standard of performance, right across the board has not improved. Indeed the standard of writing has worsened in recent years. This observation, albeit anecdotal, seems to resonate not only among employers, but also among teachers.

The Acme report called for a cut in the “overall volume and frequency” of tests.

I would agree wholeheartedly.

Mind Games

Take Two Virtual Reality Games And See Me in the Morning

We have explored the lands of the earth. We have explored the seas and oceans. We have even explored the moon, Mars, and Saturn’s rings. The last remaining unexplored frontier is the human mind. Finding out how our mind works is the next major challenge facing mankind.

Sigmund Freud gave us the concept of the subconscious. He also showed that psychotherapy, a form of treatment where talking to the patient and focusing on past events, can be used to treat certain psychiatric problems including neuroses and phobias. BF Skinner demonstrated that we can modify behaviour using operant conditioning, where a desired behaviour can be trained by linking it to a system of rewards or punishments.

Both psychotherapy and operant conditioning work by inducing biochemical changes within the brain. With the development of functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) and Positron Emission Tomography (PET) scans, the effects of psychotherapy and behavioural therapy can be monitored.

Recently there have been reports using virtual reality (VR) computer games to treat pain, phobias, and post-traumatic stress disorders. By getting the subject to play selected virtual reality games, one can reduce the pain following a burn or during dental procedures. The game can also be used to treat phobias, including the fear of public speaking, fear of heights, and the fear of spiders. Victims surviving the World Trade Centre attack on 9/11 who suffer from a post-traumatic stress disorder can also be treated by virtual reality games. The responses before and after treatment are mapped out on functional magnetic resonance imaging. This confirms the changes are real, and probably reflect an underlying biochemical response to the treatment.

The precise mechanism of action is open to speculation. We believe that virtual reality games work in pain reduction by distracting the mind. They reduce phobias and post-traumatic stress disorders through operant conditioning.

We are just scraping the surface. Future potential for their use in other psychiatric disorders remains unexplored.

Hey, Nintendo, Sony and other VR game-makers, I’ve got this headache….

Predicting Your Future

When I was one year old, I was subjected to my very first multiple choice test. My parents placed four objects in front of me, a pair of weighing scales, a gold coin, a toy hammer, and a book. My future career depended on the choice. If I chose the weighing scales, I would become a lawyer; if I chose the gold coin, I would be a businessman; if I chose the toy hammer, I would be a labourer; and if I chose the book, I would be a scholar. Well, I chose the book, which explains why to this day, I remain a poor scholar. The origin of this Chinese custom can be traced back to the Northern and Southern Dynasties (AD 386-589), and it persists to the present day.

Throughout our lives we are set a myriad of tests which can determine our future. Daniel Goleman devised the Marshmallow Test. A four-year-old child was given a marshmallow by the tester. The kid was informed that the tester would leave the room for a few minutes. If, when the tester returned, the marshmallow remained uneaten, the child would be given an extra marshmallow as reward. Many such children were tested and followed up all the way to high school. It was found that those children who could restrain their desire in favour of the greater reward later, were far more successful both socially and academically, compared to those kids who needed instant gratification.

Harvard psychologist, Jerome Kagan, developed a new test for four-month-old babies, as reported by the Boston Globe of 29 August 2004. Kagan showed over 450 children a series of colourful new toys for twenty seconds at a time. Their reactions were noted. There were two main groups of responses. The first were the babies who cried madly and shook their arms and legs, and were referred to as the high reactive infants. The second group consisted of rather subdued children and were dubbed the low reactive infants.

These children were followed up until they reached junior high school. The high reactive group was more likely to have serious anxiety with social interactions. These individuals were shy, sensitive to criticism, preferring to stay at home rather than attend a school dance, and would generally be unhappy with life. Such children were more likely to become brilliant solitary researchers or melancholic poets.

On the other hand, the low reactive infants who just stared sedately at the toys, would grow up to be calm on dates, but they would also be at slightly greater risk of becoming delinquent, because parental threats would not intimidate them. They would become Clint Eastwood types.

The 5th Century BC Greek physician, Hippocrates, identified four temperaments: Choleric, Melancholic, Sanguine, and Phlegmatic. Kagan’s two groups would best fit into the Melancholic and Sanguine categories. It appears that the blueprint for temperament is established at a very young age and determines behaviour for many years, perhaps for life.

Can you imagine a brave new world where your future can be predicted by a test at the age of four months? Are you destined to become a worker, a drone, or a queen bee?

At the age of one year, I already made up my mind that I would be a scholar. What if I had chosen differently? Would I be happier? But these questions are irrelevant because in reality I had no choice. Everything is predestined!

The Mozart Effect

My aunt introduced Mozart to me at the age of three years when she started to teach me the piano. I had no idea that she may have been instrumental in increasing my spatial-temporal intelligence.

In 1993 Rauscher, Shaw and Ky reported in Nature their discovery of an improvement in spatial-temporal reasoning. They took 84 college students and had them listen to either a Mozart Sonata for two pianos in D major, a relaxation piece of music, or just sat in silence for 10 minutes. Mozart caused a transient improvement in their spatial-temporal intelligence, lasting only 10-15 minutes. The phenomenon was named The Mozart Effect.

This triggered an explosion in public interest. Not unnaturally, everything became sensationalized. Amadeus’ music shot into the pop charts, and pregnant mothers blasted Mozart into their unborn babies’ ears.

Rauscher and her colleagues replicated their findings in another set of 79 college students in 1995, as did other investigators, including Rideout in 1996, Wilson and Brown in 1997, Nantais and Schellenberg in 1999, and Martin and Sword in 2004.

The last two investigators found that the improvement in spatial-temporal intelligence was not limited to Mozart. Nantais and Schellenberg discovered that Schubert or Yanni’s music, or even just reading a story, could have the same effect as listening to Mozart. Martin and Sword showed that Bach’s music could do the same. Hence they suggested that the Mozart Effect was a general effect resulting from listening to something enjoyable that enhanced one’s arousal.

In 2003, Ivanov and Geake showed that they could obtain the Mozart effect in primary school children. Playing either Mozart or Bach could both equally improve 10 to 12-year-old children’s spatial-temporal abilities.

Rauscher and Li Hong Hua (2004) demonstrated that rats exposed to Mozart could negotiate a maze better than one that listened to white noise instead. They went on to show that there was “increased expression of genes responsible for stimulating and changing brain cell connections. “Smart” genes encouraged by the music included c-AMP Response Element Binding Protein, a learning and memory compound; Brain-Derived Neurotrophic Factor, a nerve cell growth factor; and Synapsin I, responsible for synapse formation. Levels of these compounds were increased in the hippocampus, a brain area linked to learning and memory.”

In 1998, Johnson, Cotman, Tasaki, and Shaw studied the effects of Mozart and 1930s songs on a set of twins who were both suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. They showed that Mozart led to better performance in social and spatial tasks.

John Hughes played Mozart to epileptics (2003) and found that the music quietened their electrical activity, even in a comatose patient.

In 1999, Muftuler, Nalcioglu, Bodmer and Shaw used functional magnetic resonance imaging to study brain activity in three subjects played music by Mozart and Beethoven. Both composers activated the temporal lobe of all 3 subjects, but only Mozart increased activity in their prefrontal cortex, and in one of them, there was also occipital cortex activity during the Mozart.

Thus, there seems to be a substantial body of evidence in support of the Mozart Effect. However, there is a small but influential group of skeptics who question the validity of this phenomenon. Christopher Chabris of Harvard University, Kenneth Steele of Appalachian State University, and John Bruer, president of the James S. McDonnell Foundation in St. Louis, have looked at the experimental evidence for the putative Mozart effect, and concluded that it is not a true effect. There are some well-designed studies showing the absence of this effect.

Unfortunately in 21st century science, it takes about 10 negative papers just to disprove one positive publication. Hence the views of these critics will probably be neglected for quite a while.

I think the problem arises from the fact that we are confusing two issues. The first is whether or not Mozart’s Sonata for two pianos in D major can improve spatial-temporal reasoning. The second is whether or not music in general can have positive effects, such as helping one study better, or soothing one’s nerves. While the first aspect is controversial, no one will deny that music can calm the savage breast, as well as help one mug for exams.

It seems to me that the Mozart Effect is less the raising of spatial-temporal intelligence, but more the effect of mass media in stampeding a herd mentality. Yes, the Mozart Effect is the making of a mountain of wild promises out of a tiny molehill of equivocal experimental data.

But there are some positive aspects out of all this. For one, it will be much harder for the authorities to scrap music programs in schools to cut costs. For another, more children can benefit from being taught to play Mozart.

You ask me what skill does high spatial-temporal intelligence confer? Well, ummm, ummm, origami, yes origami. Actually, I’m hopeless at origami. Sorry, Mozart, you’ve not been as useful as I hoped!

Rise of the Creative Class

When Richard Florida’s book, The Rise of the Creative Class, was published in 2002, it touched a receptive nerve, and became an instant bestseller.

Florida’s chain of argument goes as follows: “The truly big changes of our time are social, not technological.” The social changes revolve around an increasingly important group of people, called “the creative class.” This includes occupations that encompass science and engineering, computers and their programs, architecture and design, education, arts, music and entertainment. In short, it embraces anyone who works creatively, and is paid to create, rather than to perform a task. It is this category of people who are driving our current economic growth. Within this group is a “super-creative” core of people who are the inventors, the thinkers, the scientists, the entrepreneurs, who create exciting new ideas, new products, and new industries. The creative class as a whole earns more than the other classes, and they tend to be more heteroclitic in dress, behavior and lifestyle.

Furthermore, creative people are often quite fastidious. They prefer to live in places that tolerate diversity in lifestyles, where troublemakers, weirdos, eccentrics, and deviants feel perfectly at home. Florida has evidence to show that cities preferred by the creative class, are coincidentally the same cities that harbor a higher proportion of Bohemians, and have a higher rate of gay marriages.

Whereas in the past, workers move to places where jobs are located, in the age of information technology, jobs move to places where requisite employees can be found. Florida cites Lycos, an internet company, that started in Pittsburgh, but moved to Boston when it discovered that they could more readily recruit programmers and other creative people there. In other words, the job mountain moves to Mohammed.

Based on these observations, Florida posits that in order to attract the creative industries, cities have to try to attract creative people. What the latter want is a more tolerant society, low entry barriers, with friendly, easily accessible outdoor activities such as cycling, jogging, and night cafes and eateries.

Florida asserts that cities which are more liberal tend to have more creative industries and people. This has led him to postulate a causal relationship between the two. Cool, trendy places attract creative types. Therefore, he recommends that governments or local authorities should not “waste” money on expensive prestige projects like sports stadiums or huge concert halls, because they do not attract young creative people. Instead, authorities may find it more beneficial to “throw” money at projects that will attract the creative class. This includes supporting community arts, building jogging and cycling tracks, creating places like cafes, where casual nightlife can occur.

Florida’s thesis is very bold and seductive. It challenges our current orthodoxy. In classical thinking, all things being equal, people migrate primarily to places where they can find jobs, rather than to a liberal city with only a blind faith that they will find employment. Jobs exist because highly creative people built them. It is this elite group that are the strongest magnets pulling other creative people to them, rather than to the city per se. Workers are drawn to companies started by creative giants, like Walt Disney, Steven Spielberg, Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard, Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and so on. If the companies they started were situated in an inhospitable place, people would nonetheless still throng to them, probably.

However, Florida challenges all this. Wouldn’t it be nice that if you can transform a hitherto stuffy conservative place into a kinky liberal enclave, attract a whole bunch of creative people who will create new products, new industries, and voila you have a thriving city.

Is it really so simple? Doesn’t it sound too good to be true? Does it work for all cities in the world?

Before I express my qualms about Florida’s theories, let me disclose that fundamentally I’m sold by his thesis. I consider myself part of the creative class, and his prescriptions are tantalizingly alluring. I accept at face value his idea of a creative class, which he claims amounts to 30% of our population. The numbers are staggering. Nevertheless, this is quite an innovative way of classifying people involved in the creative and thinking industries. I see no point quibbling about whether or not it is a legitimate class, who belongs to it, and how many people there are. Florida is an academic, and he has a solid body of evidence to back up his claims.

His second assertion is that creative industries are driving our modern economy. You don’t have to be a genius to realize that innovation is a major driving force in our new economy. We watch new shows, we wear new fashions, we upgrade our computers or handphones, we buy new gadgets, we benefit from advances in medical and other technologies. The list of new ideas and products is almost infinite. You may even have noted that innovators tend to cluster in certain cities or centers. University towns like Harvard, Cambridge, Stanford, and geographic locations like Silicon Valley and Hollywood, or large companies like Apple, Sony, or Ikea are places that regularly produce exciting new ideas and products. It has almost become a truism that the more innovative a company, institution or country, the greater its competitive advantage.

My reservations in accepting his theory wholesale arise from a few personal observations. Unfortunately I do not have the research data to back up my rather anecdotal evidence. Still, I have this gut feeling that Florida’s thesis may need further refinement.

The first observation concerns two thriving creative industries, sited in two cities that are quite different from San Francisco or Austin, Texas, examples used by Florida as liberal cities that attract gays and Bohemians. The two cities are Helsinki and Seoul. Nokia is one of the largest and profitable companies in Finland, churning out a stream of innovative cellular phones. I am told that some foreign workers who have transferred to the Nokia headquarters, complain that Helsinki is an inhospitable city with relatively little arts and culture, and the favorite night life seems to be drinking in the pubs. The same applies to Seoul, which is perhaps only marginally more diverse than Helsinki. Seoul is certainly not known for its gay, Bohemian, or liberal lifestyle. Once again, foreigners living there find it a difficult city to like. Yet companies like Samsung manage to attract a very creative workforce. Its electronics products are challenging well-established firms like Sony.

It did occur to me whether there was a subculture within Nokia or Samsung that provided an enclave for socializing and letting one’s hair down. But I am informed that the answer is “no.” Therefore these remarks made me wonder if Florida’s hypotheses were applicable globally. I’m the first to admit that the evidence I provide is both anecdotal and totally subjective. But on the other hand, it does not necessarily invalidate it. [Helsinki is ranked 16, and Seoul ranked 61, as best cities in the world for expatriates to live in for 2002.]

The next observation comes from Singapore. The government is aggressively trying to convert this country into a powerhouse in biotechnology, information and communications. It is spending billions of dollars building a new center which will be a city within a city, with up-to-the-minute technologically advanced laboratories, transportation, shops, theaters, and housing. It is headhunting the world’s top researchers in these areas, luring them to Singapore. Despite the fact that Singapore is an illiberal conservative city, largely intolerant of deviant behavior, with an extremely small Bohemian population, it seems to be succeeding in creating active research centers. Does Singapore defy Florida’s postulates? The answer may be the same as that for the next city.

Las Vegas, a city known for its casinos and service industry, is rapidly growing both its economy and population. It has been cited as an exception to Florida’s rule. However, I think that gambling puts a whole new spin into the equation. As shown in Singapore, one can spend one’s way into generating economic growth. Las Vegas is transforming into a family holiday resort and entertainment center, largely because of the revenues generated by the casinos.

This leads me to the final and perhaps most fundamental question. Which came first? The liberal cities tolerating a diverse lifestyle, or the creative persons, who then catalyze the city into a more liberal and diverse environment? Is the thriving city a chicken giving birth to the creative class, or is it the egg born out of the creative class? This question cannot be dismissed out of hand, because there is an unspoken assumption in Florida’s recommendations that the cause and effect is unidirectional, namely liberal cities have a gravitational pull for creative types.

Judging by my observations of Helsinki and Seoul, it appears that the city may not be that important in a creative worker’s choice, although this can be debated. Creative people will go wherever the jobs are. From the experience of Las Vegas and Singapore, it seems that creative people will go to where the money is.

In the final analysis, while I think Florida may still basically correct when applied to places like Hollywood, Silicon Valley, and Austin, Texas. However, I think his theories, as they now stand, are not universal, and do not apply across the board or across international borders. There are exceptions to his thesis, and more research needs to be undertaken to determine what additional factors repel or attract the creative class.

Florida’s book is extremely well written, his theories are tightly argued, and backed up with a wealth of research data. It is mandatory reading for those interested in creativity, and in city development.

Perchance to Dream

Have you ever been stumped by an unusually tough problem, your mind blank, and no solution in sight? It happens to me a lot.

Here’s what I do. I go to sleep. I kid you not. But before going to bed, I make sure I’ve spent a reasonably long period of time fully immersed in the problem, reading up everything I can about it, and stuffing myself with information until I’m at bursting point. I try very hard to solve the problem when compos mentis. If I fail, I sleep on it. Literally zzzzz.

In the middle of the night I might be rudely awakened by the answer trying to break free from my subconscious. Sometimes when wafting in that twilight zone of half wake half sleep, the solution bursts unceremoniously into my hebetudinous mind. Occasionally, I might be taking a stroll, having a shower, chatting with friends, or sitting on my throne performing royal duties, when quite out of the blue, a bolt of lightning strikes.

The common denominator is that when the solution comes, it comes. It almost always arrives unexpectedly, without warning, like a terrorist. And often when I am most relaxed, not thinking any thoughts, non compos mentis. Fortunately I don’t take long baths, so I don’t have Eureka moments where I leap out of the tub and run down the streets naked.

Archimedes (287-212 BC) had just gotten into his bath which had too much water because it overflowed, when a small region in the right hemisphere at the anterior superior temporal gyrus lit up with electrical activity. He suddenly realised that water displacement could be used to work out the volume and density of the king’s crown. Archimedes shouted “Eureka” (I have found it), and forgetting all sense of decorum, ran home naked, whereupon his wife gave him an earful.

Psychology professor Richard Wiseman found that 89% of people obtained their top ideas outside the office. Most when in a relaxed state of mind, such as waking up from sleep. Wiseman, said: “These new results illustrate how our minds are often most creative when we relax and take time away from everyday pressures… In our dreams we produce unusual combinations of ideas that can seem surreal, but every once in a while result in an amazingly creative solution to an important problem”. He pointed out that his ressearch showed the relative ease with which ideas are produced, but suggested that bosses should alter the employees’ working habits to aid creativity.

I would second that! “Boss, let me sleep on the problem a bit longer!”

The Joys of Stress

Writers have the most stressful job in the world. Pardon? Oh, very well. Comedians and writers have the most stressful job in the world.

How so? Well, I’m very good at procrastination. I can always find an excuse to put off doing today what can be done tomorrow. The problem is that sometimes tomorrow can be forever.

Not unnaturally I suddenly find myself facing a deadline that was once several months away, surreptitiously sneak up behind me and pow!!!! The deadline jumps up in front of you, and it’s tomorrow.

“Yes sir, I know tomorrow’s the deadline. No extension? No problem. I will have it ready for you by tomorrow.” So I have this 100 page screenplay to finish by tomorrow. And I have only written the first 50 pages. So what do I do? Simple. I panic!

I do what I’ve always been doing since time immemorial. I waste more time. I’m a past master at this. I can make myself a cup of coffee, read the newspaper, surf the net and read all the bulletin boards, SMS friends, answer my e-mail, write my blog, and voila! I have wasted an entire morning.

Comes lunchtime. I still haven’t written anything. I panic again. Never mind. I’m hungry. I go to the hawker stall and order some Szechuan red chilli chicken, Hakka tofu, mixed vegetables and rice.

After lunch I go to the bookshop and buy a book on time management. Yes, there’s a chapter on how not to procrastinate, which will undoubtedly be most useful. Except I’ve already bought a book on the same subject last year.

The second cup of coffee fails to keep me awake. So I fall asleep sitting at the computer. Suddenly it is 4 pm. I still have 50 more pages to write. Damn!

I watch a bit of CNN and BBC news. Surely that must have something inspiring. Nope. nothing. I have a flash of inspiration: “intelligence in the hands of the unintelligent degrades itself into stupidity.”

Okay. Dinner time already. It’s seafood. Some steamed fish, prawns, and healthy green vegetables.

Back to the computer. Shit! My brain remains constipated. I watch a bit of Discovery Channel. Back to work. Yes. I’m starting to write. After a while, I take a break. Have some unhealthy potato crisps. Back to the computer. I type some more.

Bloody hell. I’ve only written up to 66 pages. How on earth can I write another 34 pages?

Okay, I say to myself. Maybe I can use a larger sized font. Maybe double the spacing between each scene. Maybe narrow the margins of each page. Add a few more transition instructions, like “cut to”, “dissolve”, etc.

Well, that got me an extra 4 pages. So I’m up to page 70. Perhaps I could tell my producer that my writing was very compact and that my one page was equivalent to more than one minute of screen time. Much more. So perhaps if I handed in less pages, would it be all right?

You can see I’m really desperate now.

I cheat. I add in a prologue and epilogue. Not absolutely necessary, but it does buff it up a bit more. I insert 6 essential (= unnecessary) scenes. Great. I’m now up to page 73. I further reduce the margins of my script, and increase the font size even more. Yes, this is working. I’m now on page 75. Damn. What more can I do to pump up my script?

I get another call from my producer. I lie. “Yes, yes, yes, I’ve finished my script. Just tidying up the formatting. Yes, I shall e-mail it to you. When? As soon as I finish formatting. Now? Give me 5 minutes.” I write 5 more pages furiously.

Oh dear, only 80 pages. I just have to write some excuse why I couldn’t quite reach 100 pages. Hell and damnation. I shall just have to grit my teeth when I receive a phone call from my producer, pointing out the obvious shortcomings of my script.

Anyway, nothing I can do now. Too bad. The 80 pages are e-mailed. I must remind myself to buy a book on how to write good excuses.

I glance at this week’s Time Magazine. There’s an article on stress. It says “Not all stresses are created equal. A new study finds that some may even be good for you.”

Great! Thank goodness for that study! I can now be thankful for the joys of stress!

Intelligence

Our understanding of intelligence is somewhat limited. We know that it has something to do with mental functioning. It is presumed that the more intelligent a child, the more successful this child will be in school and in job performance later on in life. This may be generally true, but not necessarily so. Other factors such as diligence, motivation, interest, encouragement and opportunity also play a big part.

INTELLIGENCE QUOTIENT

Sometimes we speak of intelligence and intelligence quotient (IQ) in the same breath as if they mean the same thing. They do not. IQ is a mathematical abstraction derived by dividing the child’s mental age by his chronological age and multiplying this by 100.

Through a test, a child’s mental age can be obtained. His score will be compared to the average score of children of the same age. Thus if a nine-year-old child performs like most other nine-year olds, his mental age and chronological age would both be nine and his IQ would be 100. We can say that a child with an IQ of 100 is of average intelligence compared to his peers.

However, if both a six-year old and a 10-year old have a similar IQ of say, 110, they are not equally intelligent. The older child will most certainly outperform the younger in many intellectual tasks.

INTELLIGENCE TESTS

An intelligence test can measure a child’s performance in a range of tasks such as arranging a series of pictures to tell a story, matching the signs, giving meanings of words and orally repeating an increasing sequence of numbers.

However sophisticated, an intelligence test merely samples a narrow range of a child’s abilities. Since the results depend on the child’s performance, it is important to have test conditions kept to an optimum. The type of test used in one country may be unsuitable for use in another. Needless to say, IQ tests should be conducted by qualified persons who are trained to administer them and to interpret the results.

Because of the inherent uncertainties of the testing conditions and other problems, ideally results should not be given as a single score but as a range, e.g. 105-115.

MAKING SENSE OF A GIVEN IQ

In a normal population, the IQ is expected to be distributed in a bell-shaped curve. It is found that 68% or slightly more than two-thirds of a population will have an IQ ranging from 85 and 115. Slightly more than 2% of the population will have an IQ of below 70 and another 2% above 130.

TYPES OF INTELLIGENCE

It may seem strange, but there is no common agreement of what intelligence really is. Some believe that there is a basic general capacity – a “g” factor – that certain people have more of than others. Such a view is not very helpful since we do not really know what this “g” factor is.

Others believe that there are seven or more distinct multiple intelligences: linguistic, logical-mathematical, visual-spatial, musical, bodily kinesthetic, interpersonal and intrapersonal.

Linguistic intelligence refers to special facility with language.

Those with superior logical-mathematical ability are good with numbers and logical thinking.

If you have no problems understanding architectural plans, have a memory for shapes and forms, or can find your way around a complicated shopping complex, you probably have a spatial intelligence which is above average.

People with high musical intelligence can carry a tune in their head long after they have heard it for the first time and can reproduce complex rhythms without much trouble. Others cannot carry a single line of melody without going off pitch.

Gymnasts and dancers are supposedly highly intelligent in the bodily kinesthetic sense. So are boxers, jugglers, surgeons and skateboarders.

If you find that you have a special way with people, that you make friends easily and seem to know the right things to say and do in any given social situation, you are probably more interpersonally intelligent than others who feel uncomfortable interacting with people.

People who can empathise with others and have deep spiritual feelings have good intrapersonal intelligence.

There is a great deal of overlap in these types of intelligence. They are areas of ability that are not easily measured, but can be of great importance in determining a person’s career path. Observe your child’s interests and provide opportunities for him to pursue them.

There are two other ways of looking at intelligence. One distinguishes between fluid intelligence and crystallised intelligence. Fluid intelligence is reflected in general reasoning ability, attention span, memory and problem solving. It is what an individual is born with. Crystallised intelligence is acquired through learning and experience, of which a person’s vocabulary and general knowledge are examples.

The second approach to intelligence considers the human brain as a very sophisticated computer which organises, stores and retrieves information. The more intelligent a person is, the more efficient these processes are.

INTELLIGENCE AND CREATIVITY

There is a difference between intelligence and creativity. What we normally refer to as intelligence and what is normally assessed in intelligence tests is convergent thinking – reasoning from the general to the specific.

Creativity is characterised by divergent thinking, that is, thinking that derives many plausible solutions from a given problem.

If you ask a creative child what he can do with a cup, he is not likely to just say that you could drink from it. This child may say that you could display it, break it and scratch somebody with it, cup a spider with it, stretch a balloon over its mouth to make a drum or step on it to gain extra height.

Notice that this child does not merely have many ideas, but each one of them is distinct from another. Moreover, some of these ideas are rather unusual. In creativity, we look for the number of ideas and the degree of originality.

Many people argue that in today’s complex world, it is not enough to be a convergent thinker. We need to think divergently. It is interesting to note that when children are encouraged to think divergently, their scores of creativity increase. This suggests that children can be encouraged to be more creative, given the right environment.

Unfortunately, because creative children may be more independent and non-conforming, they may be seen as more troublesome. Whether at home or in school, our insistence on the “correct” way to do things may unwittingly discourage creativity. Playfulness, humour and fantasy seem to be common characteristics of creative individuals. Parents and teachers should not be too quick to discourage such qualities.

HOW TO RAISE AN INTELLIGENT CHILD

Intelligence and creativity need the right emotional climate at home for their proper development. The child must feel emotionally secure in a mutually rewarding relationship with a caring and responsive adult.

Children are strongly encouraged by adults who show interest in and are willing to be involved in what they do. Parental interference is very discouraging to children.

By all means, communicate your expectations to your child, but avoid pressurising him. Fear, anxiety and stress generated by parental pressure will curtail exploration and interfere with the child’s learning. When learning ceases to be fun, a child is robbed of a precious ingredient of success in later life.

Encourage your child to develop a wide interest by talking to him and providing him with varied experiences, including the toys and books that you buy, the places you bring him to, the things that you do with him in and outside the house.

For example, there is much to be learnt and fun to be had by digging into a patch of earth, growing a plant, observing ants in their activities or attempting to repair a broken telephone.

Whenever possible, allow your child to explore with all his senses – to see, listen, touch, smell, taste. Children learn more by doing than through formal instruction.

Encourage your child to find answers to his questions; do not be too quick to give him the answers.

Some children like to finish whatever they are doing quickly so that they can go on to another activity. Encourage them to attend to details.

Persistence, absorption and intensity of effort are qualities of high achievers. You can encourage your child to develop such qualities through your own involvement, interest and example.

An intelligent child needs a chance to grow up and be treated normally. Sometimes, parents of intelligent children tend to have an unduly high expectation. Your child’s intelligence will not decrease if you treat him normally. The problem is applying too much pressure on the child which can make him over-anxious if he does not do well.

Parent-child conflicts such as a child resisting simple requests from parents, temper outbursts and, in severe cases, depression can result from undue pressure on intelligent children.

Value your child’s uniqueness and strengths, regardless of his intellectual abilities.

-(John Ang, Kenneth Lyen, Myint Myint Thein)

Rote, Rites and Rongs

In defence of memorization, Michael Beran argues that this is an important aspect of education that has too often been jettisoned in the name of creativity.

http://www.city-journal.org/html/14_3_defense_memorization.html

Memorization of words and poetry gives one the instruments of thought and imagination, and quite the opposite of suppressing imagination and creativity, can “unlock doors in the interior world of the soul… and give kids a language, at once subtle and copious, in which to articulate their own thoughts, perceptions, and inchoate feelings.” Beran says that memorization can “help awaken what was previously dormant, actualize what was before only potential, and so enable the young person to fulfill the injunction of Pindar: “Become what you are.”

The Chinese educational system, and the ancient civil service exam is well known for its emphasis on rote learning. Large chunks of texts are memorized and regurgitated for the exams. This ability helps select those who are best suited for the civil service, a largely administrative bureaucracy, superficially not requiring too much creative thinking. However, it could be argued that the success of the ancient Chinese administration is in fact due to the ability of its civil servants to be able to solve practical problems.

Because it is far easier to evaluate how much information you have memorized than to assess how original and imaginative you are, educationalists have tended to err on the side of constructing exams that measure rote learning rather than creativity. This perpetuates the old system.

Indeed the system of rote learning persists in Singapore. School children here memorize gigabytes of data only to disgorge them at exams, leaving their minds empty again, and thereby freeing them for refilling with yet more facts and figures. The system obviously works because Singapore scores quite highly on international comparative assessments of educational achievement, and Singapore students consistently gain top honours at universities throughout the world.

Michael Beran and generations of educationalists do have a valid point. Rote learning is an important aspect of education. One has to be careful not to throw out the rote learning baby with the apparently filthy bath water alleged to drown creativity and imagination. The problem is trying to achieve the right balance of memorization and cultivating problem-solving and inventive thinking activities.

In the past, educationalists have solved the problem by dividing a subject into two halves. For example we studied English Literature and memorized Shakespeare and other literary works. Then we went to another class to study English Language, where we wrote essays and other imaginative compositions. Sometimes we do not understand what we have memorized. However, the meaning slowly sinks in, and then at a later date, we have that sudden flash of insight. Hence it may not be so bad that we may not always immediately grasp the deeper meaning of stuff we memorize. So why fix a system that has not yet broken down, and has served us so well over the centuries?

Yes, I am deliberately being provocative!

Mistyping Personality

I hate being typecast.

Woody Allen caught my sentiment best in a quote from his film Annie Hall: “I love being reduced to a cultural stereotype,” which of course means the exact opposite.

However, most of us enjoy playing games and sorting our friends into different personality pigeonholes. She’s an ogre, he’s a coward, she’s warmhearted, and so on. It is even more enjoyable when the person being typecast is someone like George Bush.

All would be well were it not for a fact that so many people take personality typing too dead seriously, and use it to determine future careers, marriages, and even potential travel destinations. Indeed some 15 million people are tested on the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) each year in the USA alone. Furthermore, 89 companies in the Fortune 100 use the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) to ascertain which job applicants would be most suitable for employment.

With such profligate use (or misuse) of personality assessments, it is not surprising that these tests are coming under intense fire. Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) once said, “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.”

Are personality tests the genuine article with some basic integrity, albeit flawed? Or are they one grand hoax fooling millions of unsuspecting suckers worldwide, worse than any corporate scam ever perpetrated?

Let us look at the criticisms leveled against these tests. One such attack is made by Walter Mischel (1930- ). He found that the results of personality tests, such as the MBTI, are not consistent. Up to 47% of testers end up with a different personality type when retested. He argued that if there is reasonable stability in personality traits, then the wild fluctuations in typing must be due to a flawed test.

Defenders of the MBTI test claim that people with more emotional personality traits, like aggression, are naturally prone to considerable fluctuations, depending upon the circumstances. There is nothing wrong with the test. Indeed it is great that it is sensitive enough to reflect a person’s changes in personality. After all, we behave differently when we are at school, in our office, in a party, with our parents, or at home, don’t we? The problem is not in the test, but that people get bored with repeated tests, that they become rather capricious with such tests, and some may even sabotage them. Conscious and unconscious factors which can affect the expression of different aspects of personality, especially during testing, are not taken into account with these studies.

The second attack leveled against personality testing is that personality is like a huge metaphorical elephant. We do not fully understand the nature of the beast. And the current state of the art in testing is still in its infancy. Thus each test conducted is rather like a blind person feeling a different part of this proboscidean. People are too readily labeled as “individualist” or “challenger” or ESFJ or INTP, or something else. But we do not really know what the labels mean. Nor can we or should we use the labels to predict future behavior. Until we gain a much better understanding of personality, it would be too presumptious to use these tests to determine someone’s entire future livelihood or marriage. I think this is a fair statement.

A further problem is referred to as The Barnum Effect. The term is used in psychology to describe the tendency for people to be rather gullible, and accept vague descriptions of themselves as accurate. This is best seen in astrology, graphology (handwriting analysis), palm reading, psychometric tests, as well as personality profiles. It is named after PT Barnum, a circus showman in the 19th century who had the talent of making others believe whatever he said, whether true or not. The problem with personality profiles is that people are placed into broad categories that overlap considerably. Most of us will fit into several of these pigeon holes. As there are no independent means of assessing the veracity of personality tests, reliance upon one’s own assessment is fraught with hazards of mistyping, due in part to an inherent self-deception.

Hippocrates (460-377 BC) suggested that human personality consisted of the blending of four humors or temperaments, namely sanguine (courage), phlegmatic (unemotional), choleric (bad-tempered), and melancholic (despondent). This roughly corresponds with the four characters in Frank Baum’s (1856-1919) Wizard of Oz: the lion who lacked courage, the tinman who was unemotional, Dorothy who was upset because she had lost her way home, and the scarecrow who was sad that he thought he was witless and worthless.

Modern day theory has not moved very much further. Today we talk about the Five-Factor Model, which comprises the following personality traits: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.

Personality testing will always remain popular because we are thirsting to know the answer to such questions as “Who am I?” “What am I good at doing?” “With whom will I get along best?”

I detest being typecast because I do not consider myself a one-dimensional person. Perhaps it’s true that I have multiple personalities. I mold my personality to match the person I’m with at that moment of time. As for career advice, I certainly do not wish to be told that the best job for me is to become a garbage collector. Not that I have anything against this profession. Better that than to be a starving author! But still, I like to be given the freedom to make my own mistakes, thank you.

In the final analysis, until there is better validation of their results, personality tests should remain in the domain of party games, and not be used for any serious and less-than-trivial pursuits. Their interpretations must be taken with a ton of salt!

Beautiful Minds

Is there a link between genius and madness?

INTRODUCTION

In her book A Beautiful Mind, Sylvia Nasar writes about Nobel Prizewinner John Nash and describes how schizophrenia affected his thought processes. The biography reconfirms an age-old observation that “There is no great genius without a tincture of madness” (Seneca 3BC-AD65). The idea of a link between genius and madness has long fascinated people. There are still a number of contentious issues. For example how does one define “genius” and “madness”? The boundaries between normal, abnormal, and supernormal, are arbitrary and blurred, and there may never be a satisfactory resolution. What may seem eccentric behavior to one observer may be regarded as madness by another. A crazy nut to some may be considered a genius by others. And if a genius is too far ahead of his time, his brilliant ideas might not be appreciated except posthumously. The social and cultural environment plays an important role in interpreting what is genius and what is madness. It may be prudent for one not to be sucked into the quicksands that surround the definition of madness. However one could loosely define a genius as one who is highly creative and has made a significant contribution to mankind, often through challenging established orthodoxy and establishing a new paradigm. Some earthshaking ideas may have appeared insane when first proposed. For example, the concepts of Copernicus and Galileo’s solar-centric world, Darwin’s theory of evolution, Einstein’s space-time universe, or Picasso’s geometric paintings, all seemed quite preposterous initially. Furthermore, the revolutionaries themselves were considered by some of their contemporaries to be out of their minds as to so brazenly challenge established orthodoxy. However, one is not concerned with such matters in this article. The focus is whether or not geniuses have a propensity to psychiatric disorders, and if so, what is their impact.

IS THERE REALLY A LINK BETWEEN GENIUS AND MADNESS?
Studies in the United States have shown that up to one-third of its population will suffer from some form of mental illness during one’s life. The chances of developing a mental disorder, regardless of whether one is a genius or a mere mortal, are extraordinarily high. Is the link between genius and madness spurious and just a matter of pure coincidence? Proponents of a positive link will point to a number of research studies. Unfortunately nearly every one of them is flawed. Criticisms include ambiguous inclusionary criteria, the impossibility of validating historical data, the lack of control groups, small sample size, and the often unclear definitions of the highly creative (genius) and of mental illness. But despite all these shortcomings, there is growing support for the link between genius and mental illness. Research has generally followed two lines of approach:

a) Studying Creative Individuals

Eminent historical individuals have been studied by researching their biographies to see what percentage of them have psychiatric illnesses. In 1949, Adele Juda investigated 113 German artists, architects, composers and writers. She found that one third of these subjects suffered from a mental illness, which included bipolar disease (manic-depression), major depression, and schizophrenia. Colin Martindale in 1972 studied 42 English and French poets, and found significant psychiatric illness in 45% of them. Joseph Schildkraut and colleagues reported that about half of 15 American visual artists that they studied suffered from psychiatric illnesses. Arnold Ludwig (1992) in an impressive study of 1004 twentieth century artists and writers, found that 74% of them exhibited psychiatric symptoms at some stage of their lives, which compares with 32% for the national average. It must be admitted that labeling dead artists retrospectively with psychiatric diagnosis has raised many skeptical eyebrows, and hence this line of evidence has to be taken with a hefty pinch of salt. Fortunately, there are a few studies of contemporary artists, writers and musicians. In 1974, Nancy Andreasen from the University of Iowa studied 30 faculty members attending a writers’ workshop and matched them with 30 controls. She found that 80% of participating writers suffered from depression or bipolar disorder, compared to 30% of her controls. Kay Redfield Jamison in 1989 studied 47 distinguished British writers and visual artists, and found that 38% of them had been previously treated for a mood disorder, including bipolar disorder, which compares with less than 15% of the British general population. Arnold Ludwig studied a sample of 59 female writers attending a Women Writers Conference and found that psychiatric problems were higher in writers compared with non-writers:

DIAGNOSIS	WRITERS (%)	NON-WRITERS (%)
Depression	56	14
Mania	19	3
Panic Attacks	22	5
Eating Disorders	12	2
Drug Abuse	17	5
Childhood Sexual Abuse	39	12

The last category of evidence to support the link between mental illness and creativity comes from the US Bureau of the Census. The overall suicide rate among artists in the USA is three times the national average. These figures are broken down for each subcategory of artists (Figures given as number of suicides per 100,000 population):

ARTISTS	RATE OF SUICIDE (per 100,000 population)
Painters and Sculptors	43.9
Musicians and Composers	32.6
Dancers	29.4
Authors	24.1
Actors and Directors	23.5
National Average	11.3

b) Studying Individuals with Mental Illnesses

From the opposite standpoint, individuals with psychiatric conditions have been studied to see if they are more creative compared to the normal population. Hagop Akiskal of the University of Tennessee studied 750 of his patients with depression, bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. He found that among the more mildly affected patients, some 10% were creative artists and writers. A study of 33 bipolar subjects was conducted by Ruth Richards and Dennis Kinney in Denmark, and they found that creativity was significantly higher in subjects with bipolar disorder compared to their controls.

There is a small body of epidemiological evidence to support a link between creativity and bipolar disorders, but this is not the same as saying between genius and madness.

WHAT SPECIFIC PSYCHIATRIC DISORDERS HAVE BEEN LINKED TO GENIUS?

Without much hard evidence many authors have credited famous people to have suffered from one or more mental disorders. Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder is notably missing from the list below because it is a condition which is hard to diagnose, and the evidence linking it to creativity is least convincing.

Dyslexia

Dyslexia is a learning disorder characterized by severe difficulties in recognizing and understanding written language resulting in reading, writing, and spelling problems. It occurs in persons with a normal intellectual capacity who has had adequate instruction to read. It affects boys three times more commonly than girls. There is a tendency for it to run in families. Currently it is believed that the primary contributing factor to dyslexia is an auditory language deficit. Eminent people thought to have suffered from dyslexia include Albert Einstein, Thomas Alva Edison, Walt Disney, Pablo Picasso and Lee Kuan Yew.

Bipolar Disorder

Also known as manic-depressive psychosis, bipolar disorder is characterized by mood swings between euphoria and depression. Many may also show such psychotic symptoms as delusions, hallucinations, paranoia, or grossly bizarre behavior. Unlike unipolar disorder (depression only) which affects females predominantly, bipolar disorder affects males and females equally. The etiology of bipolar disorder is still uncertain. Neuroimaging studies have demonstrated a larger third ventricle but smaller cerebellum and temporal lobe. Bipolar disorder is inherited as a dominant gene, and the chromosome responsible is thought to be number 11. During manic episodes, there appears to be greater noradrenergic activity. Bipolar subjects have reduced levels of key substances involved in intraneuronal signal transduction (protein kinase C, marcks protein). Famous people thought to have bipolar disorder include Winston Churchill, Edgar Allan Poe, Sylvia Plath, Robert Schumann, Vincent Van Gogh, Tim Burton and Francis Ford Coppola.

Schizophrenia

Schizophrenia is a severe psychiatric disorder characterized by hallucinations, delusions, blunted emotions, disordered thinking, detachment from reality and withdrawal into the self. It affects males and females equally. There is a strong genetic component. While the etiology is still not fully established, the current favorite biochemical theory revolves around disordered dopamine metabolism affecting certain areas of the brain. The most prominent example of a genius affected by schizophrenia is John Nash.

Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder

Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder is a psychiatric condition characterized by obsessive thoughts and compulsive behavior, for example continual washing of the hands prompted by a feeling of uncleanliness. It can occur equally in males and females. Obsessions can also be a manifestation of bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. Famous persons who have displayed obsessive-compulsive tendencies in the absence of bipolar disorder or schizophrenia include inventor Nicola Tesla, film and airline magnate Howard Hughes, and entertainer Marc Summers.

Autistic Savant

About 10% of autistic people may have the savant syndrome in which they display outstanding talents in a certain area. This was well illustrated by the character played by Dustin Hoffman in the film Rain Man. Savant skills usually manifest within a narrow band of mental functions, such as lightning fast arithmetic calculations, calendar calculating, mechanical abilities, art (drawing or sculpting), and music (usually piano playing, perfect pitch). To date, none of the autistic savants have reached the rank of genius. However it has been conjectured that some university professors who display reclusive tendencies may be a manifestation of undiagnosed autistic savants.

Terminal Illness

Although not a psychiatric condition per se, terminal illness can precipitate tremendous emotional responses in people. John Stuart Mills suffered from tuberculosis, which was incurable and led a slow death. Upon diagnosis, he started writing the works that would make him famous. Other artists who suffered from tuberculosis included John Keats, Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, Maxim Gorky, Robert Louis Stevenson, Eugene O’Neill, George Orwell, Albert Camus and Edvard Munch. Stephen Hawking had motor neurone disease and when he was informed of the diagnosis, he was galvanized to start his researches. There seems to be no doubt that the realization of one’s imminent demise can focus the mind immeasurably.

Epilepsy

Again not a psychiatric condition, but many brilliant people have a history of epilepsy, and because it is a brain condition, it is relevant when discussing superior brain functioning. There are at least two theoretical possibilities why epilepsy may have a beneficial effect on one’s thinking. Firstly the electric discharges that occur during an epileptic fit may cause flashes of new ideas. Secondly, recurrent epilepsy or the transient hypoxia it can engender might fortuitously cause minor damage to those areas of the brain that inhibit thinking, and this disinhibition of thought processes may enhance creative thinking. Famous people who suffered from epilepsy include: Julius Caesar, Alexander the Great, Napoleon Bonaparte, Pyotr Tchaikovsky, Charles Dickens, George Handel and Hector Berlioz.

DRUGS AND ALCOHOL

A few artists have admitted to experimenting with drugs to enhance their creativity. These include Sigmund Freud and Thomas Edison. Alcohol addiction has afflicted a number of creative individuals, including Jackson Pollock and Eugene O’Neill. Are drugs or alcohol a manifestation or the cause of the psychiatric disorder? Or do artists take them because they find them helpful in enhancing their creativity?

HOW CAN MADNESS PROMOTE GENIUS?

Compensatory Adaptation

Just as the blind have a heightened sense of hearing and touch, and the deaf have increased sharpness of vision, certain types of mental disability may cause compensatory adaptation. The best candidate for this is dyslexia. If a dyslexic has difficulty with language, then he compensates by increasing his powers of visual perception.

Direct Effects of Mood Swings

Mild mania has some benefits. It is associated with quicker thinking, greater verbal fluency, play on words, increased self-confidence, and greater optimism. Severe mania, on the other hand, can be counterproductive and may result in loss of concentration and wild behaviors. Mild depression can act as a sort of editor to prune the excesses of mania. But severe depression can dampen all activities and thinking.

Knight’s Move Thinking

Certain mental disorders like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder are characterized by sudden jumps in one’s thinking. These leaps from one idea to another can be quite unexpected and illogical, and are referred to as Knight’s Move thinking. This way of thinking is important in creative thinking because it enables a person to make innovative leaps without being anchored to preconceived ideas or imprisoned by one’s sense of logic.

SHOULD MILD MENTAL ILLNESS BE TREATED?

John Nash is quoted by Sylvia Nasar as saying that he often refused to take medication for schizophrenia because it blunted his creative thinking. This sentiment is reflected by a number of artists and scientists suffering from mild bipolar disorder. The medical profession is therefore faced with a dilemma of deciding whether or not to treat mild mental afflictions knowing that medical treatment may smother creativity, while untreated, a percentage of patients with bipolar disorder might become worse, and commit suicide.

CAN GENIUS BE DEVELOPED?

This is the question that all educators would like answered. Biographies of many geniuses have shown that they were once child prodigies. Unfortunately most child prodigies that we hear about in the newspapers usually fade into oblivion and never achieve their early promise. The question is why some prodigies flower into geniuses, while others wither. Clues are given in biographies and autobiographies.

Parents

Parents play a pivotal role in the upbringing of their children. They are their child’s advocates, and they provide the milieu for their child’s development. A stable, loving environment seems to be a key factor. Nobel Prizewinner Norbert Weiner was a child prodigy, whose parents were academics themselves, and they recognized their son’s early talents. They introduced their son to other academics at Harvard University, some of whom were also Nobel Prizewinners. This is in contrast to another child prodigy contemporaneous with Norbert Weiner, Billy Sidis. At the age of 4, he taught himself Latin, and by 6 years old, he could read 8 languages, and 8 years old he had already written 4 books. He was admitted to Harvard University at the age of 11 years. However, from then onwards he petered out. The parents gave him the sort of accelerated learning that would not be out of place in a kiasu Singapore family. However, the parents were overprotective, and failed to allow him to develop his own independence. It was only by adolescence that he could clean or dress himself. Further more the parents tended to show off their son, and they allowed the press to gain access to him too readily, with the result that some of the articles written tended to ridicule his childish behavior. Furthermore the family was an unhappy one, with constant parental strife. They were unable to support their son emotionally. So despite having ample intellectual stimulation, he did not have an emotionally nurturing environment.

Teachers

Teachers can play an important role in a child’s development. They can provide the balanced in a prodigy’s distorted educational development. They can set challenging problems for their students to solve. Sylvia Nasar gives an interesting anecdote that when John Nash misheard his tutor and thought that his assignment was to solve some hitherto unsolved complex mathematical problems, he handed in the solutions to these problems the next day! Bertrand Russell and Stephen Hawking enjoyed solving mathematical problems, and both had read Euclid with great fervor, establishing their own proofs of these theorems. Great minds seem to like to tackle classic problems and to work out their solutions by themselves.

Mentors

Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein both had uncles who acted as mentors and helped develop their nephew’s early mathematical abilities. Half the Nobel Prizewinners had other Nobel Prizewinners as mentors when they were young. It appears that highly creative people know how to foster creativity in others.

Clusters of Excellence

It has been noted that people of genius tend to be found in clusters. For example ancient Greece produced Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. The Laboratory of Molecular Biology at Cambridge University produced 10 Nobel Prizewinners, and Bell Laboratories produced 11 Nobel Prizewinners. The fostering of centers of excellence is an important way of attracting and catalyzing talent, among whom may be found a few geniuses.

Age of First Significant Creative Achievement

It is well known that there is an optimal age at which certain disciplines can shine. Olympic swimmers and prizewinning pianists reach their pinnacle in their teens. Below is a list of scientists and inventors, and the age at which they made their first discovery or publication:

CREATOR	CREATION	AGE (years)
Louis Braille	Invented a system of printing and writing for the blind	15
Blaise Pascal	Formulated Pascal’s Theorem	16
Galileo Galilei	Discovered the laws of pendulum motion at the age of Law of falling bodies	17
Edwin Land	Patented his first polarizing light filter	19
George Westinghouse	First patent for a rotary steam engineInvented airbrakes	19
Guglielmo Marconi	Invented a system of radio telegraphy	21
Joshua Lederberg	Discovered bacterial conjugation	21
Thomas Edison	Invented automated relaying communications device	22
Carl Gauss	Proved the theorem of complex coefficients	22
John Nash	Published his theory of non-cooperative games	22
Brian Josephson	Predicted the Josephson effect	22
James Hillier	Developed the electron microscope	22
Isaac Newton	Calculus, principles of optics, elements of circular motion inverse square law of gravity	23
Louis Parker	Invented a low frequency receiver for radio waves	23
Srinivasa Ramanujan	Published his first mathematical papers	24
Satyendra Bose	Published is first statistical mechanics papers	24
Paul Dirac	Quantum mechanics for motion of atomic particles	24
Richard Feynman	Published his theory of electromagnetic waves	24
Walt Disney	Drew his first animated cartoon	24
Max Perutz	Crystallographic studies of glaciersApplied Xray crystallography to study hemoglobin	25
James Clerk Maxwell	Published first paper on electromagnetic lines of force	25
Enrico Fermi	Postulated his statistical laws	25
Earnest Rutherford	Discovered the alpha, beta and gamma radiation	25
George Eastman	Made commercial dry photographic plates	25
James Watson	Co-published his paper on DNA	25
Louis Pasteur	Discovered tartarate isomers	26
Henri Poincare	Created automorphic functions	26
Albert Einstein	Published 3 ground-breaking articles (including relativity)	26
Niels Bohr	Proposed his model of the Bohr atom	26
Werner Heisenberg	Derived his uncertainty principle	26
Nicola Tesla	Constructed his first induction motor	27
Linus Pauling	Laid down Pauling’s Rules	27
Lee Tsung-Dao	Discovered the decay modes of kaon	29

A large proportion of the top scientists and inventors throughout history achieved success while quite young. If one extrapolates backwards, the years preceding the discovery or publication would be crucial. This means that the late teens and early twenties are critical periods for the flowering of highly inventive scientists. Hence the importance of protecting and nurturing this creative period of their lives.

CONCLUSIONS

Yes, there is a link between genius and madness, but it is a complex one. It appears to be the result of a fortuitous convergence of a number of factors, including a minimum level of intelligence, the ability to join ideas from different domains, the ability to record these ideas, independence and flexibility of thinking, intense focus, self-discipline, perseverance, the right social and cultural environment, all conspire to create a genius.

A tantalizing question is whether or not one can create the right physical, emotional and educational environment to produce a genius. By studying the mechanisms, both biochemical and educational, that link mental disorders and genius, one may gain insight into factors that can engender creativity and kindle future potential geniuses. But even if this were possible, would a genius thus produced be recognized?

To sum up, here is a modified quote: “You don’t have to be mad to be a genius… but it helps.”

REFERENCES

Nasar S. A beautiful mind: the life of mathematical genius and Nobel laureate John Nash. Touchstone Books 2001.

Juda A. The relationship between highest mental capacity and psychic abnormalities. American Journal of Psychiatry 1949; 106: 296-307.

Martindale C. Father’s absence, psychopathology, and poetic eminence. Psychological Reports 1972; 31: 843-847.

Schildkraut J, Hirshfeld AJ. Mind and mood in modern art: The New York School. American Psychiatric Association Annual Meeting 1990; 255-256.

Ludwig AM. Creative achievement and psychopathology: comparisons among professions. American Journal of Psychotherapy 1992; 46: 330-356.

Ludwig AM. The price of greatness. Guilford Press 1996.

Akisal H & Akisal K. Reassessing the prevalence of bipolar disorders: clinical significance and artistic creativity. Psychiatry & Psychobiology 1988; 3: 295-365.

Richards RL, Kineey Dk, Lunde I, & Benet M. Creativity in manic depressives, cyclothymes, and their normal first-degree relatives: a preliminary report. J Abnormal Psychology 1988; 97: 281-288.

Jamison KR. Touched with fire: manic-depressive illness and the artistic temperament. Free Press 1993.

Hershman DJ, Lieb J. Manic depression and creativity. Prometheus Books 1998.

Gutin JA. That fine madness. Discover Magazine 1996.

Lyen KR et al. The education of highly creative people. Armour Publishing 1998.

Galaburda A. Neuroanatomic basis of developmental dyslexia. Behavioral Neurology 1993: 11:161-173

Mattis S. Dyslexia syndromes: a working hypothesis. In Dyslexia, edited by A L Benton and D Pearl. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978.

Soares JC, Mann JJ: The anatomy of mood disorders–review of structural neuroimaging studies. Biol Psychiatry 1997; 41:86-106.

Bowden CL, Koslow SH, Hanin I, et al: Effects of amitriptyline and imipramine on brain amine neurotransmitter metabolites in cerebrospinal fluid. Clin Pharmacol Ther 1985; 37:316-324.

Potter WZ, et al: Biological findings in bipolar disorders, in Hales RE, et al (eds): American Psychiatric Association Annual Review, vol 6. Washington, DC, American Psychiatric Press, pp 32-60.

Tyrone DC et al; The Genetic Epidemiology of Schizophrenia in a Finnish Twin Cohort. Arch Gen Psychiatry. 1998;55:67-74.

Sedvall Goran & Farde Lars. Chemical brain anatomy in schizophrenia. The Lancet 1995: 346, 743-749.

Rimland B & Fine D. Special talents of autistic savants. in The Exceptional Brain, New York, Guilford Press 1988.

Lyen KR et al. Creativity and education. Armour Publishing 1998.

Eysenck JJ. Genius : The Natural History of Creativity. Cambridge Univ Press 1995

Howwe MJA. Genius Explained. Cambridge Univ Press 2001.

Fitzgerald M: Autism and Creativity. Routledge 2004.

Fitzgerald M: The Genesis Of Artistic Creativity: Asperger’s Syndrome and the Arts. Jessica Kingsley Publishers 2005.

[This article first appeared in the Singapore Medical Association News

http://www.sma.org.sg/sma_news/3403/commentary_full.doc and can also be found in this website

http://www.lyen.net/gpage.html]

 

Creativity

In today’s highly competitive world, a country like Singapore can only survive if it can produce a continuous stream of innovative products or services. New ideas dominate the international marketplace. The lifespan of a new product becomes progressively shorter. For example, nearly every month there are new models of computers and handphones with increasingly powerful and sophisticated features. Last month’s models are fast becoming obsolete and the prices of yesterday’s products can plummet precipitously.

Creative individuals who have the ability to develop new products and services are assuming an increasingly important role in society. Indeed they may be crucial for their country’s future economic well-being. We must learn to cultivate creativity, recognise creative individuals, and encourage them to contribute to their country. Our educationalists must bear a large part of responsibility in achieving this.

How then can we best stimulate creative thinking?

Creativity means having the ability to produce original, imaginative and useful ideas. Other terms that have been used include lateral thinking, divergent thinking, and intuition. It involves a highly developed sense of imagination. Without that imagination, there will be fewer original ideas. Einstein understood its importance and said: “Imagination is greater than knowledge because knowledge is limited whereas imagination is infinite”.

Creativity is one of the highest achievements of mankind. For the young, creativity comes quite naturally, but as one progresses through the educational system, it is slowly but surely lost. Our educationalists must learn how to preserve a student’s sense of curiosity, how to encourage exploration and self-expression, and how to preserve one’s inner sense of drive, self-confidence and achievement.

In 1960, Roger Sperry, a Californian neurophysiologist, observed that the left side of the brain seemed to deal predominantly with words, numbers, logic, analysis, intellectual, commercial, and business matters. He therefore attributed academic or logical thinking to the left side of the brain.

In contrast, the right brain seemed to handle imagination, day-dreaming, music, rhythm, art, colour, space, and the ability to move through dimensions. He credited creative thinking , imaginative and artistic skills, to the right side of the brain.

This categorisation of the brain’s function is currently under attack. Most scientists believe this is too simplistic a picture. The new research using dynamic studies of brain function shows that imagination and creative thinking use both sides of the brain.

How do you measure creativity? This is the $64,000 question. Is a cook who dreams up new recipes creative? Is a pianist who gives a new interpretation to Mozart creative? And how do we compare one creative person with another?

CHARACTERISTICS OF CREATIVE PEOPLE

What are the characteristics of creative people? In general, they are people who display greater degrees of curiosity, independent thinking, autonomy, self-confidence and nonconformity. They tend to be more tolerant of complexity, contradictions and ambiguity. According to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the expert on creativity, these people harbour opposite characteristics. Here are some examples of their antithetical traits:

Energetic and Quietly Disciplined

The creative person can be full of energy and passionate about his interests, often staying awake all night on a project. Yet at the same time, he can sit back and reflect quietly and be extremely disciplined and objective about it, and completing the task.

Clever and Naive

Einstein is a good example of such a person, who could solve complex mathematical problems, and yet posses an innocent, childlike mind.

Imaginative and Realistic

Steven Spielberg, the film director, could take on a wide variety of imaginative subjects to film, and was realistic enough to make them commercial successes.

Yin and Yang (Female and Male)

Many creative individuals are extroverts, aggressively masculine, and can push their ideas to others. Simultaneously, they can be very shy and intuitive, and more “feminine” in their thinking.

Proud and Humble

On the one hand, creative persons like recognition for their achievements, and they bask in the limelight. On the other hand, they are aware of how small their achievement really is, and how much they owe their achievements to their predecessors. As Isaac Newton once said:“”If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants”.

Rebellious and Conservative

In order to introduce a revolutionary idea, the creative person breaks with tradition and becomes a rebel. But he or she would have mastered the earlier ideas or techniques in a traditional manner.

On the whole they are more willing to take risks and to work at overcoming obstacles. Above all they are intelligent persons. Let us look at some of these characteristics more closely.

ESSENTIAL FACTORS FOR CREATIVITY

Here are some basic factors that are essential for creativity to occur. They include:

Mastery of the Subject

You have to master your field of endeavour before you can become creative. This consists of finding and acquiring as much knowledge and skills as possible. For example a painter must know the paints and techniques of painting. A composer needs to have heard enough music to formulate music. Interestingly enough he need not play an instrument or read music, although it can be of great advantage. Famous songwriters who could not read music include Irving Berlin and John Lennon. A scientist must know about his subject before he can make any breakthroughs. Einstein had a good grasp of mathematics which allowed him to advance his revolutionary ideas.

Curiosity

You need to possess a high degree of child-like curiosity. You should always be asking questions, even when it may seem absurd or naive. Look at the world with a fresh pair of eyes, as if you are seeing it for the very first time. The Nobel Prizewinning scientist, Albert Szent-Gyorgyi said that “Discovery consists of looking at the same thing as everyone else and thinking something different.”

Divergent Thinking

Your thinking should diverge from the conventional. Edward de Bono coined the term “lateral thinking”, which means using unorthodox or illogical thinking to solve problems. Because creativity involves having an idea that is different or original, it means that you cannot follow the herd. To quote Alan Ashley-Pitt: “The man who follows the crowd, will get no further than the crowd”. Your path must diverge and you must deliberately set out to be different from the rest.

Take Risks

The proverb “nothing ventured, nothing gained” applies to creative thinking. You have to think or try out even the most illogical idea. As Einstein said: “Only those who attempt the absurd will achieve the impossible”. The creative idea is often quite outlandish when first conceived. Only later when it is absorbed into the establishment does it become orthodox. Original ideas can be dangerous. Throughout history, original thinkers were persecuted or ridiculed for their revolutionary ideas.

Motivation and Persistence

You must be motivated to pursue creative production for intrinsic or internal rewards such as satisfaction, rather than extrinsic or external rewards such as prize money. It is this inner passion that will drive you on, and prevent you from giving up. The search for solutions can take a whole life-time. Creativity is the only force that can keep you going for so long. For many, it is even more powerful than hunger or sex.

Serendipity

With every creative endeavour, there is a certain element of luck. Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin when he made a mistake and left his culture plates exposed to fungi. Goodyear accidentally poured rubber onto a hot stove and hardened it. Roy Plunkett screwed up his attempt to make a new type of Freon and invented Teflon instead. Being at the right place at the right time is crucial. But the mind must also be attuned to taking advantage of the serendipitous discovery. It was Louis Pasteur, the French microbiologist, who said that “Fortune favours the prepared mind”.”If Alexander Fleming had not been growing bacteria, he would not have culture plates to contaminate. If Goodyear had not been experimenting with rubber, he would not have spilt it. If Roy Plunkett had not been playing around with polymers, he would not have stumbled upon Teflon.

STEPS IN THE CREATIVE PROCESS

What are the steps in the creative process? Most of us who have had the experience of developing a creative idea would probably agree that there are at least five steps. They are:

Preparation

This is the stage when one needs to gather as much information about the subject as possible, or to learn a particular skill. This phase of the creative process may take the longest time. If you do not have enough facts, you may not be able to arrive at a solution. It is like searching the pieces of a large jigsaw puzzle. Unless you have enough pieces to form at least a partial picture, there is no way that you can make an educated guess at what the final picture might turn out to be. If you are an artist, you would need to learn the techniques of your art form. If you are an author, you need to learn how to manipulate words. It is only after you have become saturated with all the relevant information, or have become proficient with the techniques related to that art form, can you advance to the next stage, and that is when you “sleep on it”.

Incubation

By allowing the problem to simmer in your mind, your brain will attempt to fill in the missing information. Subconsciously, the idea is being formed.

Insight

The solution to a problem can strike you like a sudden bolt of lightning, or it can be painstakingly pieced together one bit at a time, like a complex jigsaw puzzle. Sometimes the answer can be staring you in the face, but you are blind to it, until a chance remark by someone else jolts you into realisation. You may remember Archimedes who jumped out of his bath shouting “Eureka!”, or Kekule who awoke from a dream that the benzene ring was like a snake chasing its own tail. That is when the idea is hatched.

Evaluation

This is the time when you have to decide whether the idea is any good. Many a time, what you thought was a brilliant idea in the middle of the night may turn out to be a loser in the cruel light of day. However, it is important that you do not toss out the idea too soon. It may be the right solution at least in part. Some further modification may transform it into an outstanding idea.

Elaboration

At this stage, the solution is fine-tuned, refined and polished. This is the hardest phase of the entire creative process. It is probably what Edison was referring to when he said: “Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration”.

If you can apply these principles, I am sure your mind will be set free to create many original ideas. Let me exhort you to venture forth, to “boldly go where no one has gone before”.”