So, let's talk a little bit about ordinary thinking. I actually thought we'd do a little university humor. So, humor me. A mathematician, a physicist, and an engineer are riding a train through Scotland. The engineer looks out the window, sees a black sheep and says, "Hey they've got black sheep in Scotland". The physicist looks out the window and corrects the engineer. Well, "There's at least one black sheep in Scotland". The mathematician looks out the window and corrects the physicist, "At least one side of one sheep is black in Scotland". Oh, I get it right. Parking order here in the university. That's actually really insightful joke in the sense that, it really conveys the idea that we can't adopt every single possible perspective on any given issue. We actually have to make choices, and in doing so we lock ourselves into a particular perspective. But is that always a bad thing? It's not always a bad thing. You're going to miss things. Right? Right. You know. Did you see this one? Yes. I mean. Voting cast. If you're so focused on one thing, you're not going to see something else. But, we don't really have a choice. I mean if you don't focus on anything, if you don't take any perspective then you can't really think at all. We have to make assumptions, because there's so much to think about in the world and we only have our poor little brains to do that thinking. There are days when I'm lucky. If I can just start of walking and chew gum at the same time. How is it then, that we can actually do anything intelligently, let alone actually creatively. So, let's try something quick. On the screen, you're going to see a few items. Right. A triangle, a square, a parallelogram. See them? Okay. Now they're gone. Can you remember them? If you had to draw what you just saw, could you do it? I mean, I hope so. It was only three items and that's usually within our ability to remember. Let's try this again. Now what about these three items? Take a look. Can you remember these, could you draw them? My bet is that you couldn't remember them fully, and couldn't draw them out fully either. All right you could stop the video. But forget that. Why not? It was only three items just like three items before. Well, these three items were complicated and new. So, each one required you to work hard to understand each one and hold on to each one and multiply that times three, we quickly go beyond our capacities. All right, we're going to do this one more time. Take a look at these items. Can you remember all these and draw all of them down? Now, psychology studies tell us that we can only think about five to seven ideas at a time. That's about it. We've hit our limit. We call it a Working Memory Capacity. Given that, you had 14 items to remember individually. That's usually well beyond our working memory. There's no way we can hold all that in mind at once. However, let's imagine re-arranging those items. Right? So, we could take those 14 items and turned it into a horse and a cat. So, if we re-arrange them and now we see a horse and a cat, then at this point we only have two items to remember and that's well within our capacity. So, what is all this really about? All of this is saying that in order to take in the amazing array of information in the world, we make assumptions about how things fit together, and how we can draw them in and use categories we already know, knowledge we already have to interpret, make sense, to pull together, and to hold on to. So, we had our horse and our cat and that allowed us to remember 14 items and when those 14 items were taken individually, we couldn't hold on to them in memory. But when they were a horse and a cat they could. Now, the problem is, having committed to thinking about them as a horse and a cat. We can remember them all but we can only remember them really as a horse and a cat. We could re-arrange those items completely, and end up with say I don't know, a camel and a fish. Right. If we have a camel in a fish, now that is a totally different way of remembering all 14 items. But it's different than the horse and the cat that we had before. So, when we are taking an enormous amounts of information, the only way we can hold on to all of that information, is if we make some assumptions, not just one assumption or two. But a system of assumptions that pulls everything together and then commit to that. So, if I know I've got a horse and a cat, or a camel and a fish, or whatever and I hold onto them in that way, well then I can think about all kinds of information. But I can only do that if I commit to thinking about them in a particular way. So, imagine you come over to my house, you see something furry, it starts to bark at you. You're not completely confused it's probably my dog. You have taken in that potentially confusing array of information, and assembled it into something obvious, right. It's my dog, it's barking at you. And so, we pick up a ball and we throw it and the dog fetches it, brings it back to me, the owner. So, now, we're thinking about a small story. Where we have a dog and a ball we're playing fetch with me, the owner. But we've put that together again in a particular way. It's not that I throw the dog and the ball fetches me, the owner. It's that we threw the ball, the dog fetched it and brought it back to the owner. So, assumptions are not only about what things are, but also how they relate to one another. Together more generally, we gather knowledge that we have and we put it together in particular ways to tell stories. The owner threw the ball, the dog fetched it, brought it back to the owner. It's a stupid little story but think about all the knowledge that just came together to form that story. Now imagine larger and larger stories. Inevitably, our stories are incomplete. We can't have every bit of information about a dog, every bit of information about an owner, every bit of information about a ball and so forth, we just have enough to put those together into stories. Because we're only taking a fraction of what we know to make our stories, inevitably our stories have to take a particular perspective. This story was from the perspective of me the owner and not from say the perspective of the dog, or the neighbor, or the pet organization, or whatever it might be. You know, 'cats forever' who hate to talk, whatever it might be. So inevitably, we take a perspective, and that perspective colors our interpretation. But we don't have a choice. We've been saying that creativity is about changing our perspectives. So, it's important to understand that a perspective is useful that we have to take a perspective otherwise we won't be able to think about anything at all. But every perspective we build is only a model. It's one way of thinking about the information that we have. It's a map not the territory itself. Right. So, we use stereotypes, or categories, or all kinds of piecemeal bits of information that are critical for going about our daily lives but have to leave out some information. The trouble that we get into is that we use this knowledge in a perspective to think about what's going on, and we commit to it in order to remember that whole story, and in order to think and reason from here about a complex array of information. So, we forget that we made the mazes, that we wander in our minds and we often solidify those mazes and because we've walked them so often, we commit to them we assume their reality, and we forget that the map is actually not the territory that maybe there is a new entrance or exit out of that maze, and that's what we're talking about when we're talking about changing our perspective. We all make assumptions just to get through our day but sometimes the assumptions we make can prevent us from seeing what's really right in front of our nose. So, I'm here at the beautiful Observatory at the University of Illinois, to tell you a story about seeing stars. But are you supposed to see stars, or you are supposed to notice something else that's even more crucial? Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson went on a camping trip. After a good meal and a bottle of wine, they lay down for the night and went to sleep. Some hours later, Holmes awoken, nudged his faithful friend. "Watson look up at the sky and tell me what you see?" Watson replied, "I see millions and millions of stars. What does that tell you?" Holmes asked. Watson pondered for a minute. "Astronomically it tells me that there are millions of galaxies and potentially billions of planets. Astrologically, I observe that Saturn is in Leo, or logically I deduce that the time is approximately a quarter past three. Theologically, I can see that God is all-powerful, that we are small and insignificant. Meteorologically, I suspect that we have a beautiful day tomorrow. What does it tell you?" Holmes was silent for a minute then spoke, "Watson you idiot, somebody stole our tent". Funny joke, right? But I think, it actually really reveals the key insight about creativity, which is that it involves changing perspectives. Like Watson, many of us are sort of, locked into particular perspectives like astrological perspective on the issue and the time perspective on the issue, and the other grand theological questions in that. Because of that, we're actually unable to notice something that is completely obvious that's right in front of us and then maybe, perhaps even more important. So, to be creative we have to actually change the way we view issues and change our perspectives. As we go about our day, as we do work, we are drawing on knowledge to form and advance stories. Because we only use a small portion of our knowledge, because we only think about a small portion of what's happening in the world, we necessarily end up taking a particular point of view, a perspective. We don't have a choice. The only way we can think about more than a couple simple ideas is to take a perspective and start forming a story. The perspectives we take then influence where we think to take our stories. This is incredibly practical and helpful. Just think how awful it would be to wake up each morning and have to decide what morning is, what clothes are, what it means to eat something, what breakfast is, and so on. It would be a disaster. Habits of mind are the foundation of all intelligent action. Most of what we think and what we do, we think and do something a lot like we did yesterday. It's incredibly efficient that way. It allows us to be experts at something and do incredible things. Think about going to a doctor, they seem to have a name for every aspect of our bodies and what can go wrong with them. There's no way that they could practice medicine if they had to start with what you and I know and learn it all over again from the beginning, every day. Or a carpenter. Most of us would just hurt ourselves with all the saws, and hammers, and boards, and everything, but they make incredible things. Most of the time that we want to take our existing knowledge and our typical perspectives and apply them to form stories so that we can get things done. That way we know what we're doing, and we know how to think about what we're doing. We know how to make progress and the kinds of progress that it's possible for us to make. Now, we always have the option of changing our perspectives, drawing on different knowledge, or learning new knowledge, and directing our stories in new kinds of ways. But usually, we don't. That's okay. We have to balance between exploiting the knowledge and perspectives we already have, and exploring for new perspectives that might allow us to tell new kinds of stories. We don't want to be creative all the time. We only want to be creative some of the time. So, the ordinary way we go about things is pretty consistent day to day and task to task. That's a good thing, right? How also we function without those. I have to learn how to tie my shoes every morning. I would take a while get out the door. Never get out of the door. But we always know how the opportunity we think though. I mean that's not inevitable that we're sort of locked in. Yeah. I guess that's the thing. By our habits are their habits of mind their, or we use our ordinary perspectives to tell ordinary stories. That gets us through the day. But nearby we have the chance to change and rethink. Yeah. That allows us to tell new kinds of stories.
