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Problem Solving | Idea Generation | Training and Education | News and Information
| Thinking Young | |
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A group of first-graders and a group of adults were seated at a basketball game. They were asked to count the number of times the players passed the ball. Which group do you think came up with the more accurate count? I don’t know. Probably the adults. That wasn’t the point of this test conducted by Emory University researchers. These creative researchers had something else in mind. During the game, a woman in a white dress carrying a parasol, crossed the court and exited the arena. After the game, the subjects were asked if they had noticed the woman. The results should make you think: 75-percent of the first-graders and none of the adults said they noticed her. We could call the low adult score the result of their superior powers of concentration, but don’t you think something as bizarre as an oddly dressed woman walking through the middle of a basketball game should have caught everyone’s attention? I found this experiment and its results difficult to believe until I took this video test and... Well, see for yourself: What explains missing the obvious in the video and at the basketball game? Could it have something to do with the fact that some adults fail to recognize the potential in unexpected, out-of-bounds ideas? Why do some adults immediately reject foreign concepts. Does it have anything to do with the adult practice of doing what we’re told? Business Week reported once that 90-percent of a child’s creativity is destroyed by age seven. At 40, the report continued, we’re about two percent as creative as we were at age five. This fact became one of the starting points of the book Think Naked: Childlike brilliance in the rough adult world. The book goes on to provide techniques for putting your four-year-old spirit in charge of your adult capacities. These techniques won’t make you younger but they will help you think young, act more like a kid, have more fun, and maybe even see the unexpected and recognize its value. Thinking is one part of the aging process you can reverse. Try it. And to see how well you’re doing, try describing your job to a four-year-old. If you can’t make it sound like fun, maybe you should change careers. See also:
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