The nature of intelligence and creativity

While roaming around Ted - Riveting talks by remarkable people I came across a great talk by Sir Ken Robinson. He makes an entertaining and profoundly moving case for creating an education system that nurtures (rather than undermines) creativity.

What does Sir Ken do? Well, a visionary cultural leader, Sir Ken led the British government’s 1998 advisory committee on creative and cultural education, a massive inquiry into the significance of creativity in the educational system and the economy, and was knighted in 2003 for his achievements.

There are two great quotes from this talk that I would like to identify. The first illustrates the willingness to take chances:

What we do know is, if you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original. If you’re not prepared to be wrong. And by the time they get to be adults, most kids have lost that capacity. They have become frightened of being wrong.
The more our world changes, the less we can look to the past for clear answers. Success in the future will be far more dependent on our ability and willingness to creatively apply the knowledge we have to new situations that lack a precedent of action.

The next rather extensive quote talks expressly to the nature of intelligence and creativity in people:

We know three things about intelligence: One, it’s diverse, we think about the world in all the ways we experience it. We think visually, we think in sound, we think kinesthetically. We think in abstract terms, we think in movement. Secondly, intelligence is dynamic. If you look at the interactions of a human brain, as we heard yesterday from a number of presentations, intelligence is wonderfully interactive. The brain isn’t divided into compartments.

In fact, creativity, which I define as the process of having original ideas that have value, more often than not comes about through the interaction of different disciplinary ways of seeing things.