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Section I: My Name is Asher Lev

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Asher’s Creative Process

Asher’s creative process is somewhat inconsistent throughout the novel. Sometimes Asher is aware of what he is creating, sometimes he isn’t. Sometimes he has a planned idea of what he’s making, sometimes that idea comes to life after he starts. Sometimes he makes several drafts, sometimes his work is one-and-done. One consistency is that when Asher is painting or drawing, he is completely consumed. Just thinking about drawing or painting leaves him unable to even hear people around him. There is no multitasking for Asher Lev. After drawing the Rebbe in his Chumash, Asher had a serious meeting in the mashpia’s office. During this meeting, Asher was completely unable to stay with the conversation, and unable to fake it.

The mashpia was saying something about Vienna but I would not listen. The darkness was gone from the street and I could see the trees beneath the lashing rain. The rain moved in waterfalls across the asphalt. The curbs were flooded with rushing streams of water. Oh, if I could paint this, I thought. Ribbono Shel Olom, if I could paint this world, this clean world of rain and patterns of glass, and trees on my street, and people beneath the trees. I would even paint and draw pain and suffering if I could paint and draw the other, too. I would paint the rain as tears and I would paint the rain as waters of purification (pp. 134 - 135).

I think this type of absolute focus is really interesting in the context of creativity. Today we have a million things crossing our minds at once - how much more productive would we be and how much higher would the quality of our ideas be if we really eliminate distractions? Our innovation groups have so far been meeting for just 20 minutes per week. With such a small window, we need to absolutely maximize our focus, and we certainly aren’t. I’ve seen members, myself included, take a quick glance at their email, read a text message or periodically zone out thinking about lunch, other classes or whatever else. It used to be that multitasking was a skill, but now it seems more of a challenge to stop multitasking. While Asher employs this laser focus involuntarily, we can still learn something from his process of intense undisturbed thinking and try to be more aware of the distractions we allow to hinder our productivity and creative thinking.

Interlude: Flow

I think Asher’s ability to completely block out distractions when thinking about and carrying out a project is an example something we haven’t yet talked about in class but something I am really interesting in: flow. Flow is characterized by hyperfocus and an increase in positive energy. I was a strong basketball player in high school and played for two years on Wellesley’s varsity squad. There are times that I remember being shocked  after games when my dad told me that someone had yelled something or screamed in a silent gym during my foul shot because I never heard it. Similarly, we had announcers at our games that narrated into the gym speakers who had scored, fouled, etc. Despite scoring 800 points in high school, I could never tell you after a game if there had been an announcer there or not. Apart from this hyperfocus, I would describe my experience of flow as feeling like I was in an alternate universe or dream where I had complete control over the situation, where my reaction time was faster than everyone else’s and I had no knowledge of a world beyond the court, almost like a video game. Interestingly, I only ever felt flow in games, never in practice or doing drills on my own, so I think there may be an intensity factor at play. These days, I’ve been trying to reach this feeling of flow in my running, but haven’t been able to yet. I wonder if running is not a dynamic enough activity to exercise creativity, if there aren’t enough moving parts or junctures to make decisions. I also wonder if to achieve flow you need to have extensive experience performing the activity. I had been playing for over eight years before I began to feel flow in basketball games. Similarly, Asher had been drawing for many years when he began to experience this all-consuming creative process.

It impressed me throughout this novel how Asher seemed to paint entire canvases in one go. Of course, Asher is telling this story by looking back in time and recalling his experiences, so it’s possible that more drafts happened that were not included in his recounting of events. Nevertheless, when the different drafts of a piece were described, it stuck out. One of Asher’s first truly creative works, the portrait of Rivkeh that used cigarette ashes for shading, was the product of several successive failed drafts. Other times, Asher’s drafting process wasn’t so linear. In these cases, the idea of an incubation period where ideas are given time not just to be tweaked but to transform and generate entirely new ideas, comes to mind. Shortly before his painting of Brooklyn Crucifixion I, which was really just a draft of Brooklyn Crucifixion II, Asher began to build and experiment with some of the themes that these eventual masterpieces would stand on.

… I drew the Pietà from memory, and discovered that the woman supporting the twisted arm of the crucified Jesus bore a faint resemblance to my mother. I stared at the drawing in horror, and destroyed it (pp. 314).

It’s difficult not to make the connection here to one of Asher’s main inspirations, Picasso, who described his masterpieces as a “sum of destructions”. This word, “destructions”, always sticks out to me in how violent it makes the drafting process sound. Why were Asher and Picasso so angered by a miscalculated attempt? Jacob Kahn would say it is because both artists drew on their true emotions. As Asher closed in on his ability to convey the anguish of his mother, he also became more sensitive about his work. Leading up to his final show, Asher, for what seemed like the first time, became anxious about other people’s perceptions of him and his work, especially his family. According to Kahn, this was the price he would have to pay to be a great artist, to escape the easier route of becoming a mere “whore” to the art world.

Interlude: Asher’s use of the Muse

Historically, many creatives have been known to have a muse or person who is the source of their creative inspiration. I think Asher had at least two muses, his mother being one. Since he was a little boy, Asher always drew his mother. As he grew older and his relationship with Aryeh became more and more strained, Asher grew closer to Rivkeh. In his teenage years, he developed a special sensitivity to Rivkeh’s pain. By the end of the book, Asher seemed to feel her longing and anguish deeply within himself. While there are a lot of places one could take this in terms of the novel’s literary themes, in the context of creativity, it suggests something of the importance of emotion in creative work. Big C creativity, it seems, must be a product of passion.

Asher’s other muse, in a different sense, was his mythic ancestor. He often saw and portrayed this ancestor, his father’s great great grandfather, as a towering, demonic character. In my eyes, this character, too, represented several of Potok’s literary themes, one being the dichotomy and clash of good vs. evil. Asher’s gift was often said to be a gift from the Other Side, and his pursuit of art a continuous dance with the devil. On his first meeting with Jacob Kahn, Kahn told him, “There is something demonic about such a gift, Asher Lev. Demonic or devine, I do not know which” (pp. 263). This dichotomy often reminds me of the Spider Man quote, “With great power comes great responsibility”. People with power or a gift or fame have influence over others, and this influence must be executed with caution. Some of the world’s most evil people are also the most intelligent, like the Unabomber, for example. A similar “dark side” exists in the creativity field. Malevolent creatives use their gifts in a way that is intentionally harmful. By the end of the book, Asher was certainly a malevolent creative in the eyes of his Brooklyn community. To them, there was no other explanation for his actions than his intention to hurt his community, which led to his being asked to leave. This brings up a problematic question of who gets to determines what malevolent creativity and benevolent creativity is. Throughout history, our ideas of what is good and bad have evolved drastically and different values, temporal contexts and cultures largely determine these characterizations. Like other instances where we make value judgments, the judgment of malevolent creativity must be taken with a grain of salt. 

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The Role of Anna Schaeffer

Anna’s role in Asher Lev’s story is really interesting. She comes up relatively infrequently, but her impact on his life and success is immense. Anna’s connections and influence in the art community get Asher, who she coins “The Brooklyn Prodigy”, art shows, publicity, buyers and through them enough money to continue working on his craft. In class, we’ve talked about art ‘big-wigs’ and SoHo gallery owners like Anna Schaeffer’s character somewhat negatively. These few people get to, seemingly arbitrarily, make the careers of some artists and in the wave of a hand silence the careers of others. In this way, critics, collectors and distributors informally form the group of appropriate judges that Amabile describes for the consensual assessment of art. The Consensual Assessment Technique is used formally and informally all the time in situations from beauty contests to boxing matches. In the case of the value judgement of art, this system certainly does not cultivate creativity or reward artists who take a shot in the dark. In fact, it begs the question of whether an artist should strategically stifle their creativity and instead try to predict the market or paint what is popular to get a foot in the door and, once recognized, only then create the art that has been true to them all along. Fortunately for Asher, he did not have to answer to these judge’s standards directly. Asher had the luxury of inheriting Anna’s trust for Jacob Kahn, and was just about guaranteed her promotional support as long as he worked with Kahn. Had a mentor like Kahn with connections to the art business world not been assigned to Asher, I don’t think he would ever have been able to afford to continue painting and this entire story would have turned out very differently. The reason I don’t think that Asher would have been able to break into the art world on his own the way Andy Warhol did in Who Gets to Call It Art? is because Asher’s work in his first couple shows was less than awe-inspiring, and this just does not cut it. Worse, poor critic reviews even early in an artist’s career can severely disadvantage their future success. It seems that it wasn’t until Asher’s last show in this book, featuring the Brooklyn Crucifixion II, that his paintings reached a next level worthy of real recognition. I argue, though, that Asher would not have been able to paint Brooklyn Crucifixion II without leaving Brooklyn and the confines of his Hasidic community or without the psychological cushion of knowing that he didn’t need to worry about the public’s perception of his work in order to eat.

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The Press on Asher Lev

Asher’s living situation changes continually throughout the novel. Beginning with his parent’s apartment where he lived with Rivkeh and Aryeh to living there with only Rivkeh, then to his uncle Yitzchok’s, Jacob Khan’s in the summers, and later moving to Europe on his own. In each, he experiences drastically different authoritative dynamics. Asher’s father is the most authoritative, constantly restricting Asher’s world and reprimanding him for his art and lack of concern for school. The two hardly communicate, much less collaborate. If you think of Aryeh’s father role as similar to a managerial role, Aryeh does not exhibit a single one of the six managerial practices that Amabile claims encourages creativity. In fact, he strictly disallows for four of them: freedom, resources, supervisory encouragement, and organizational support. While of course Asher is a fictional character, his hiatus from drawing for some years in his childhood after strict management under his father is true to Amabile’s findings.

Asher’s creativity was rekindled when his father moved to Europe, maybe because Rivkeh, who feared conflict, was a much less demanding manager. Rivkeh actually demonstrated three of the major creativity encouraging practices: showing encouragement to Asher by complimenting his drawings and going to the museum with him, giving him freedom by allowing him to go to the museum after school each day, and eventually providing him money (resources) to buy his supplies.

When Rivkeh joined Aryeh in Europe, Asher’s creative environment improved again at his Uncle Yitzchok’s house. Yitzchok had always encouraged Asher’s gift, telling him he would someday buy the prodigy’s paintings, and provided Asher with a larger work space, the attic, to master his craft. Up through this time, Asher had never collaborated in his art, never felt a time pressure and had never been expected to present his work to anyone for evaluation. This all changed when the Rebbe assigned Jacob Khan to be his mentor.

Jacob Khan is the ideal leader for a creative. He praised Asher, pushed Asher, exposed Asher to new theory and techniques, took Asher to different museums and galleries, gave Asher ample autonomy to become his own artist, provided Asher with industry resources like Anna Schaeffer, and most importantly, Kahn was a great motivator to Asher. Despite this new dynamic where different ideas and expectations were being imposed on Asher’s creative works, his intrinsic motivation to become a great painter intensified. Asher would sometimes be given small homework assignments and eventually the daunting deadline of his own show. In these situations of time pressure, his work environment was consistent with the only conditions that Amabile reported to lead to high creativity under high time pressure in Creativity Under the Gun. These conditions lead the subject to feel that they are on a mission, and ensures that the subject feels positively challenged, sees their work as important, and  “... can focus on one activity for a significant part of the day because they are undisturbed or protected.”

Interlude: Asher’s Protected Environment 

It could be that Asher’s greatest advantage in his creativity compared to the other people in his life (and people in our lives) is his almost complete disregard for others’ opinions. Throughout his schooling, Aryeh, Asher’s teachers, the mashpia and even the Rebbe urged him to focus on his studies and divert his attention away from his drawings and art. Knowing he was hurting the people he loved, knowing he was straining his relationships with his family, he refused. Asher’s fierce and primal protection of his craft at the expense of everything else is his life is his most unrealistic feature as a fictional character. I wonder if this profound protective ability was developed as a reaction to the strict constraints of his Othodox Jewish community, or if Asher was simply born with this gift to disregard. Part of me thinks the latter since he repeatedly defends himself to Aryeh  by saying, “I can’t help it, Papa… I have a will, Papa. It makes me want to draw…. I can’t fight it, Papa” (pp. 176). Additionally, in several instances, Asher “wakes up” from a daydream or sleep and finds that, without having had any conscious awareness of it, he had drawn something. Often, as in the case of the evil looking Rebbe drawn in one of the pages of his Chumash and the red crayon drawing of his mythic ancestor on his bedroom wall, these subconscious creations are his most creative and provocative. Asher’s ability to protect the creative environment within his own mind is a gift in and of itself and, in my opinion, his greatest advantage as an artist and creative.

It isn’t until a summer with Jacob and Tanya Kahn in Cape Cod that Asher first experiences living outside the often confining framework of his Brooklyn Hasidic community. Here, he begins to grow aware of just how different he is from the “goys” outside Brooklyn. While he continues to eat kosher, he starts wearing a fisherman’s cap and tucking his side-curls behind his ears. Eventually, he will cut his side-curls completely. Maybe this is predictable adolescent (and really just human) behavior to be concerned with physical appearance and fitting in, but these changes, I would argue, are just an outward reflection of changes happening within Asher at this time. He has at this point been drawing nudes for at least a year, painting Jesus and copying crucifixions, studying and imitating non-Jewish artists and seeing in Jacob Kahn an example of a “middle ground” - a Jew who, to Asher, lives the best of both worlds. Asher, despite his very strict upbringing, is enchanted by this other way of life. 

Today, especially in the political realm, it is extremely difficult to change people’s innate ideas, the ideas that their parents taught them and the assumptions that they have operated under their entire lives. In many political conversations, both sides are completely frustrated and little progress is made because neither side is willing to change the views they brought to the discussion. This lack of flexible thinking is the same reason stigma is so hard to shake. Asher, on the other hand, is extremely observant and analytical, and willing to evolve his ideas about who he is as an artist, what it means to him to be a Jew, and the importance of his craft in the context of his world. At the same time, he does not blindly alter his ways even when they are against the grain. Keeping kosher, following the Rebbe’s orders to take French at Brooklyn College and observing Jewish holidays while abroad are examples of Asher staying true to the aspects of his religion that he believes are important. At the end of the day, this self-centered evaluation of everything is Asher’s key to adapt and is at the heart of how Asher manages to keep his creativity alive despite outside pressures and dissuasion. 

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Do you know what it’s like for something to be incomplete? 

Throughout Book One of My Name is Asher Lev, there is a recurring theme of internal struggle and pain caused by incompleteness. Time and time again, the turmoil caused by unfinished business acts as a catalyst for major decisions and severe behavior. First, when Rivkeh is sick after her brother’s death, she repeats, “Who will tell me about the fox and the fish? Yaakov, you had to go? You left it unfinished...” (pp. 21). Yaakov’s unfinished business is the reason Rivkeh decides to go back to school to study Russian and political affairs and she tells Aryeh that leaving Yaakov’s work unfinished is a victory for the sitra achra. Rivkeh again uses this driving force when explaining to Asher why Aryeh must move to Vienna and continue the Rebbe’s father’s incomplete mission. For the second time, she asks the powerful question, “Do you understand what it means to leave a great work incomplete?” (pp.118).

At the time, Asher did not know. But he would later find out. At two major points in the novel, Asher felt anxiety and agony over unfinished work, and this struggle sparked some of Asher’s most creative feats. While Rivkeh was sick, Asher drew her sleeping and was having trouble drawing her face accurately with the correct shading. After erasing and trying again several times, he started over with a new piece of paper:

I left the face blank for a while, then filled in the eyes and nose and mouth. I did not want to use the pencil again. The drawing felt incomplete. It bothered me to have it incomplete. I  closed my eyes and looked at the drawing inside myself, went over its contours inside myself, and it was incomplete (pp. 34).

That’s when Asher opened his eyes, saw the ashtray on the table and used the cigarette ashes to shade her face. This use of a totally new material, one he had never seen used in drawings and one whose conventional purpose is so different, reminded me of what we’ve said in class about intelligence and creativity. Intelligence has been thought to be exemplified by one’s ability to build bridges between separate ideas and make connections across domains. Similarly, creativity has been tested using J.P. Guilford’s Alternative Uses Test by seeing how many different, unconventional uses someone can come up with for a simple object. While it’s tempting to assume that Asher would have done well on an Alternative Uses Test because of the connection he made between cigarette ashes and pencil shading, what he really did was perform the Alternative Uses Test backwards. Asher started with a use, or job, and then came up with an object to carry it out. It would certainly be interesting to administer this sort of inverse Alternative Uses Test and see how results compare to the original version. 

Interlude: Asher’s Intelligence

As talked about in Guilford’s 1950 APA address, for a long time, creativity researchers and psychologists have thought that a prerequisite for creativity is intelligence. While that may be changing today, Asher Lev provides an interesting example with added complications. While evaluating Asher’s creativity according to measurement and definition is another (probably many other) blog post entirely, for now we will take the stand that Asher is highly creative (we know creativity when we see it, right?). The question is now: Is Asher also highly intelligent? Well, if Asher’s grades and school performance are any indication, no. While in grade school, Asher didn’t study, regularly zoned out in class, forgot about his algebra tests and failed many assessments. His teachers repeatedly reprimanded him to no avail. Their approach was very reminiscent of the 1990 study mentioned by Hennessey and Amabile in the Creativity section of the 2010 Annual Review of Psychology where elementary school teachers and even prospective teachers were significantly more likely than college students to rate creative children as more disruptive than their more “average” peers.

“In U.S. schools, creativity is not always seen as a desirable trait.” - Hennessey & Amabile

Certainly, Asher’s creativity was not being manifested in the classroom, nor was his intelligence being communicated there. However, outside the classroom, Asher was studying - just not algebra. Asher studied painting at the museum, he read books about artists, and he constantly practiced in his own sketch books. In this sense, Asher was a great student. This brings me to Howard Gardner’s idea of multiple intelligence, but with a twist. Gardner’s theory is that every individual possesses a different strength for the seven distinct intelligences. Asher certainly demonstrates a strength in art as opposed to algebra or Hebrew, but is this strength innate, as Gardner suggests, or simply a result of different interests? If Asher, theoretically, loved algebra, he would spend his time studying it, practicing it, and maybe one day provide highly creative insights to new algebraic or calculus problems. So a new question arises: are the strengths and weaknesses of distinct intelligences a product of innate, nature-based abilities or more nurture-based affinities? 

While this may not be the case for all creative work, in the example of painters like Asher Lev, I think intelligence and highly creative work does go hand-in-hand. Asher’s best work, and according to Jacob Khan, all artists’ best work, is work that communicates true pain. Asher needed to have a high level of social intelligence and perception to ever be aware of and feel his mother’s anguish, and from that initial intelligence (and an education in painting technique from Jacob Khan), Asher was able to exercise creativity in his creation of Brooklyn Crucifixion I & II. 

Continued thoughts on incompleteness: Book Three

In Book Three, the agony of incomplete work reappears after Asher’s painting of what became Brooklyn Crucifixion I. 

I had brought something incomplete into the world. Now I felt its incompleteness… Yes, I could have decided not to do it. Who would have known? Would it have made a difference to anyone in the world that I had felt a sense of incompleteness about a painting? Who would have cared about my silent cry of fraud? … Only I would have known. But it would make me a whore to leave it incomplete (pp. 328).

The sense of incompleteness of Brooklyn Crucifixion I is the catalyst for Brooklyn Crucifixion II, Asher’s most influential painting in the novel. This time, not only does Asher feel the uneasiness associated with leaving his work unfinished, but he actually questions the consequences if he does. Who will care? Ultimately, only Asher. But he completes it anyway, and it results in creative greatness. This connects well to what Amabile suggests about intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. She argues in How To Kill Creativity that intrinsic motivation is essential to creativity and says, “... people will be most creative when they feel motivated primarily by the interest, satisfaction, and challenge of the work itself.” It seems this satisfaction aspect is Asher’s main motivation. He feels the need to portray through paint the strong feelings of his mother’s anguish, and this need has nothing to do with Jacob Kahn, Anna Schaeffer, potential art collectors or critics. Even when Asher is visiting the art museum regularly after school, he never aspires to one day having his work displayed there. Ironically, it is this approach that actually leads Brooklyn Crucifixion II to be purchased by a major museum. As for his personal motivations, Asher goes as far as to say, “No one says you have to paint ultimate anguish and torment. But if you are driven to paint it, you have no other way” (pp. 326). This suggests that the choice to focus on intrinsic motivations and block out the extrinsic really isn’t a choice at all. I think, on the other side of the coin, there is some truth to the claim that people who are bogged down by extrinsic motivators and expectations similarly feel little choice. It seems like some people are more hardwired to be susceptible to outside expectations, social recognition and critique, and a need to please. People who suffer from chronic anxiety and clinical depression often have what is called an external locus of control, which I imagine is very connected to some of the same susceptibilities as for extrinsic motivation. As a Wellesley student, it can be hard to fend off both an external locus of control and extrinsic motivation because our day-to-day activities are to an extent determined by our professor’s assignments and our motivations are often less for enjoyment or understanding as grades. Yet some students manage to maintain an intrinsic motivation, exercise an internal locus of control and perform more creatively than others. Whether these susceptibilities come about genetically or from childhood experiences, I see them generally as enduring personality traits. A weird example of this “hardwiring” is my dog, who is a purebred border collie. Her breed was originally bred for performing jobs like herding. Even today, breeders tell potential buyers to have a job planned before purchasing a border collie because without a task to perform and the opportunity to please its owner, the dog will suffer. At least in the border collie breeding community, a hardwired genetic predisposition for external motivation and recognition seeking is believed to exist. Of course, dogs and humans have a lot of important differences, especially in the context of creativity, but the idea that some people may be advantaged or disadvantaged toward creativity based on their susceptibility to value outside expectations and external motivations is worth considering.

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Section II: Body and Soul

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Mental Illness, Creativity & Inheritance  (NEW)

Several of my classmates are doing their final papers on the connection between creativity and mental illness. Leah found that there wasn’t much concrete evidence to draw conclusions about causation based on correlation (seems a familiar concept after my paper topic). Ruixi and Empress were similarly hesitant to make any concrete claims, but all three said a connection could not be ruled out, and that there was a ton of research on the topic.

One of the theories that (I think Empress) brought up supporting the idea that people with mental illness could be more creative centered on the idea that creative people are better at expressing interesting, creative ideas because they are more honest with themselves and feel a responsibility to be brutally honest in their art, where people who are not so honest with themselves are not able to create these moving expressions of themselves. I interpreted that the being not completely honest with one’s self is kind of a coping strategy in mentally healthy people, and the fact that mentally ill people may lack this coping strategy could explain their mental illness. 

I wonder if Claude had this coping skill or not. He often remarked on how he felt weak, and how he thought he would be weak without music: ”Cadbury graduate or no, he knew that, thus far, without music he was nothing. Without music he would be that vague, weak child again, as insubstantial as a wisp of smoke” (pp. 262). Was he able to put this insecurity in the back of his mind and block it out for most of his life, or did he think about it often? It wouldn’t have occurred to me for the vast majority of the book that Claude has any time of mental illness. Then again, mental illness is probably not be a static trait - when we get the flu, we are ill, but we aren’t always ill because we got the flu. After Weisfeld passed away, Claude fell into a depressed state that was only made worse by Lady leaving him. He did not create during this period. It reminds me a little of how we talked about the Maslow Hierarchy of Needs in relation to suffering some trauma - people can’t create during the experience of the trauma, but can create afterwards once they feel safe and no longer overwhelmed by this huge strain. Similarly, Claude couldn’t create while in the depths of the strain that was his depression, but after it had passed a bit, he was able to. By this point, he had transitioned to composing music.

I think it’s important to consider too here that his mother is likely mentally ill, and also musically talented. I always thought that some of Claude’s ear for music was inherited from his mother, though thinking about it now, I really am not sure if creativity is inherited. Genetic lines of creativity are not really  something we talked about this semester. I’m not 100% sure on this, but I think it has been fairly well established that mental illness, at least in some cases like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, is often inherited. I’m guessing because these are illnesses that have neurological (physical) existences. (I am not saying depression and anxiety don’t have physical existences, (for example, something that would show up in an fMRI), but I’m just sort of brainstorming here. The research may not be there yet, I really don’t know enough about the topic. But what I’m getting at here is that it is possible that Claude inherited some kind of susceptibility for mental illness from his mother, and if mental illness and creativity (or specifically, musical talent) are correlated, maybe he inherited some type of mental illness AND creativity susceptibility... I feel like I am walking a tight line here trying not to say that he was lucky for possibly inheriting a mental illness. 

Anyways, speaking of inheriting things - - it would be impossible to finish this post without addressing the fact that Claude’s biological father, we found out at the end of the book, is Lord Lightning, a Jazz pianist in London. (This just occurred to me, but looking back, I wonder if Emma’s discomfort with coming to Claude’s shows had to do with him following in his father’s footsteps, which may have been in some ways painful for Emma to see). Anyways, whether I subscribe to the idea that creativity or musical talent can be inherited or not, Conroy definitely intended for us to believe that Claude would inevitably be a great pianist based on his parents’ (mostly his father’s) gifts since Claude was not raised by his biological father. The way the truth came out at the end of the book made it seem like the reader was supposed to be like, “Ooooooohhh, so THAT’S why Claude was so good. I get it now.” It has interesting implication for the questions I’ve asked in previous posts about the designation of prodigy. Was Claude destined to be a great piano player? Did he inherit the skill or the work ethic? Would he have been just as good at the trumpet, drawing or some other artistic craft?

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The Meaning of Catherine  (about half is NEW)

Catherine’s character, and her contrast to Claude’s, is full of literary insights. Some of the conceivable themes her character illustrates are:

Class tensions - because of Claude’s talent, he is often mingling with high-society like Fredricks, the Fisks, Lady (niece of Senator Barnes), and more generally the people privileged enough to closely follow the classical music world. This leaves him constantly feeling like an “other”. Catherine represents this un-achievable status, almost another world, that may motivate his efforts, but ultimately, he will never be a part of. Catherine likes to tease Claude as she did when she took him to her school’s formal, which afterwards only makes more clear that she (and the old-money, upper class) will always be out of reach. All of the opportunities and attention that Catherine receives without having to earn is the antithesis of Claude’s life. At the same time, Catherine would describe herself as an other, too. 

Women as Emasculating (?) - in his childhood, Claude’s relationship with his mother made him feel weak and powerless - both physically and emotionally. Catherine, in a different way, also represents something that makes him feel that he has no control, and her family’s status and their hiring him to work with Peter but them and Catherine in a position of power relative to Claude. Catherine’s beauty, body language and behavior seem to leave Claude unable to say no to her, or to stop wanting her, despite often feeling insecure after being around her (eg. after she said his tie was too shiny and after her formal dance). He is always the one being vulnerable, not her... It will be interesting to see if these relationships remain consistent throughout the rest of the book.

Fantasy vs. Reality - because Catherine maintains a considerable emotional  distance from Claude, she is able to remain mysterious. Sometimes when you haven’t really met someone, or you just met them and haven’t gotten to know them, (I’m thinking specifically of a “crush”), we construct fantastical versions of them that they could never live up to. This putting someone on a pedestal and then being let down (or maybe relieved) illustrates the maybe more underlying theme of perception vs. reality and the consequence of snap, or surface, judgement.

Other ideas to watch and see how they play out:

mental illness? Catherine is so closed off and dismissive of other people. If it isn’t a teenage phase, it would be curious to see if she has some kind of mental illness (depression? eating disorder?) or some other root of her cold demeanor - or maybe that’s just the way she is!

Catherine as representing evil? temptation?

After Finishing the Book:

Towards the end of the book after we are lead by Conroy to believe that we will likely never see Catherine’s character again, she comes back in a surprising way. Claude was under the impression that Catherine had eloped, and ignored his last letter, years ago when she spotted him in a hotel. The ended up starting an informal romantic relationship. 

Revisiting the Class Tensions theme I discussed before: 

This time, Catherine was the lower class person of the two - a huge change from when they were kids. Catherine also had a child, and was at the mercy of her ex for child support and money. This power shift was noticeable, and I’m not sure if this humbling position is responsible for her change in demeanor or if she had just matured a bit over time, but Catherine was certainly not the snob she once was as a teenager. She respected Claude, for his talent and for his humble beginnings (”You come from nowhere” (pp. 288)). She said, as she did when they were younger, that he was “different”. If there’s any major take-away from this 180 degree change of roles, it could be that our class, for better or worse (pretty much just worse, though) informs our behavior. 

Revisiting the Fantasy vs. Reality theme (and mental illness) discussed before:

In the beginning of the book, I felt so bad for Claude. I just wanted to tell his sad heart that Catherine wasn’t that great - that he shouldn’t be so hurt by her ignoring him and playing with his feelings - that he shouldn’t put so much stock in her actions. I always thought he would realize this over time, and that if she had let him get to know her, if he had been given the opportunity to date her and become close with her, he probably would have realized that reality could never match up to his fantasized version of her. 

This idea ended up getting put to the test at the end of the book, and my hypothesis was pretty much wrong. He really fell back in love with her, and this time it was the real her. Though, I would argue, the woman he fell in love with at the end of the book was still not the same young woman he loved and fantasized about in the beginning and middle of the book. 

It was also seen at the very end of the book with Weisfeld, who turned out to have this whole story and sad life that Claude never knew about... 

The idea of appearances vs. reality came up in other ways too. When Frescobaldi admitted to having stage fright, Claude mused, “How strange people were, he thought, subject to all kinds of invisible forces, dealing with hidden devils and all the while keeping up appearances. He wondered if he was capable of that kind of bravery” (pp. 305). 

Part of Catherine’s “realness” came from the way she opened up to Claude at the end of the book, telling him something she had never really told anyone - that she had been taken advantage of by Dewman Fisk, her stepfather starting when she was 13. This abuse, which she kept a secret, explains a lot of her “off” behavior when she was younger, what I called earlier in this post “closed off and dismissive of other people”.

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Flow?  (NEW)

One scene that really stuck out to me as a turning point in Claude’s career, and probably in his life in general, was when he performed with Frescobaldi, and for their encore, Frescobaldi suggested they play a song they’d never played on stage before and had only practiced once. Claude was completely out of his comfort zone (in fact, that’s a huge understatement), saying, “It’s too dangerous” (pp. 313). 

This high risk lead to high reward. Conroy describes the song: “He [Claude] played it almost without knowing what was happening.” And after: “Claude was astounded. It took him several moments to rise to the roar from the audience” (pp. 313).  Claude was basically feeling high on life afterwards, and during the song, he stopped thinking and was amazed at what his body did. He went form highly anxious and nervous about what was about to happen, but it happened so fast and he immediately switched into this relaxed, almost zen state in which his brain was just turned off. I think Claude really experienced flow here. 

This excerpt actually really reminds me of a study I looked at but didn’t end up using for my final paper that was about the “Runner’s High”. It was argued (and I think this argument is pretty appealing in this example of Claude too, that the Runner’s High is caused by increased adrenaline excretion because the brain is essentially telling the body that something threatening is about to take place (in the runner’s case, it’s extreme exertion; in Claude’s case, it’s public humiliation). The adrenaline causes runners to lose their normal awareness of their bodies, and specifically their pain. This is why often runners will finish a hard race in which they are doing well and feeling great only to finish and be shocked by their seemingly out-of-nowhere pain, dehydration and mental fatigue. I know that Mike C. said people experience flow in activities that aren’t easy, but are also not too challenging, so maybe the idea of adrenaline and flow cannot coexist since it seems like adrenaline is only excreted in extremely challenging situations. So maybe Claude experienced something related to adrenaline and not flow?

This instance reminded me a lot of our discussion about prodigies in class. In that discussion, I brought up the question: “Are you still a prodigy if you put in your 10,000 hours?” Is there something about long and consistent hard work that takes something away from the designation of prodigy? Is a prodigy supposed to be naturally skilled? Or can they be any one of us that is willing to put the time in? The conclusion we seemed to settle on in class was that it is a mix: prodigies likely put in a great amount of time into their craft, but they also have some sort of “it” factor that not just anyone has. For example, Catherine’s little brother Peter put in time, but he had no ear for the music; some things cannot be learned or taught, or so we argued. 

Much of Claude’s expertise was in his playing of music that he had heavily rehearsed. This instance, however, where he played something he was only vaguely familiar with, and on a huge stage no less, was a real stray from this trend. It shows that he does have both characteristics: 1) the learned technical skills and 2) the unteachable feel for music, which I think speaks really to his creativity in this case. 

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Differences in Assessment  (NEW)

Claude and Asher were highly successful in two very different fields - piano and painting; music and art. In turn, they were assessed very differently. I want to take a look at the specific ways they were assessed and how this relates to our interpretations of their skill and creativity, and even their (possible) categorization as a prodigy.

Interlude: Some Discomfort with Assessment in General

 We have talked, especially in the first half of the semester, repeatedly about the impact different assessment techniques can have on the end results for creativity. We have the Consensual Assessment Technique (CAT), which relies entirely on the judgement of others to assess creativity, the RAT, which like has limitations of language, and many divergent thinking tests. These tests are making a huge leap, one I have thought about a lot as my innovation group starts thinking about presenting our body of work and trying to convey the creativity of our work. The question is: do we need creativity assessments? In other words, is something only creative if an assessment says so? This is complicated by the fact that creativity tests may not test what we want them to test exactly. But the heart of this question is: Is something is creative if the person behind the work or process truly believes they have done something creative, but it does not stand the tests of creativity, or is not deemed creative by the CAT’s appropriate judges? In the example of the CAT; why does it matter if other people think it’s creative? The devil’s advocate might say well first of, appropriate judges in that field will know what has already been done and will be able to judge someone’s work against what has been done. Okay, well if the creator doesn’t know about that field and the make, say an innovation like the plane in a place that doesn’t know about plane’s, is that creative? Maybe it can be still if some of (or all of?) the judges are from that place without planes. Anyways, my point is judging others’ creativity subjectively or less subjectively in written tests can be complicated if not problematic.

 In Body and Soul, Fredericks assured Claude that he should not be concerned with other people’s opinions (pp. 339):

Sure it’s natural. It’s also not very important. What you are looking for is authentication, Claude. But you’re looking outside, to the system, and that’s the wrong place to look. Bad music gets played every day and good music gets ignored. Everybody knows that. Forget about authentication. When it comes to writing music, all you can do is sign on for a way of life, and do the work. Do the work for its own sake. 

Yet Claude was still assessed by many, and their opinions mattered. Without finding himself in the good graces of the maestro, he would not have been given the trust fund and consequently would not have been able to afford to tour. 

Some of the pivotal instances he was assessed in were:

When Claude first played for Mr. Weisfeld after completing the Bluebook 

Claude auditioning for the music director at the private high school he attended after dropping off the book he found at the movie theatre

Playing the part of the person who had too much pre-performance anxiety at the Summer orchestra concert 

Claude was assessed by a CAT-like system. (Asher was too).

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Trauma and Creativity

Asher Lev dealt with some trauma in his mother being sick at the beginning of the story and, more pronounced, his inner struggles to remain a pious Jew despite his seemingly uncontrollable and threatening gift. The biggest conflicts seemed to be in his relationships with others - his father, his teachers, other kids - and the turmoil in those relationships was almost always a direct consequence of his own actions. For example, his father and teachers couldn’t understand Asher’s lack of effort in school or his need to paint and draw so obsessively. His mother was also greatly effected by the role Asher put her in as a mediator constantly torn between siding with Asher and Aryeh. In essence, while you could argue that Asher had no control over his need to create, he was still in many ways the source of the tumultuous and traumatic relationships in his life - he had the power, theoretically, to reduce these tensions.

Claude, on the other hand, faced trauma that was completely out of his control. He was a victim of trauma of neglect, which was not a consequence of his actions. In the beginning of the book, Claude’s mother, Emma, seemed to suffer from alcoholism and was not a particularly involved or interested mother. She essentially left Claude to fend for himself from a very early age while she was at work driving her taxi or at home drinking. In his early years, Claude seemed to fear her and her volatile behavior, and she made him feel unwanted and invisible. Later on, when Claude was in middle school and high school, his connection with Emma seemed to improve slightly, until she, after some sketchy work with potential criminals (which I still do not fully understand), was sent into a period of declining mental health. At one point, Claude saw her protesting in the street and tried to talk to her, but she was so consumed in shouting her message that she didn’t even recognize him (pp.117):

She was wet, her hair plastered down and water running over her face. She held out a limp leaflet to Claude. “It’s all here. Take it.”

Claude moved forward. “It’s me.”

She looked at him, but she didn’t see him... “Unless the people act to stop - ”

“It’s me!” he shouted. “It’s me!”

Other traumas suffered by Claude that were also out of his control were poverty and a lack of a father, though you could argue that Mr. Weisfield became much like a father figure to Claude. However, apart Emma’s story about Claude’s father having died in war (which I don’t think Claude really believed), his lack of a father likely contributed to traumatic feelings of abandonment and low worth. While his piano mastery later afforded him great opportunities and connections, including private school, high-society friends and prestigious concert appearances, his childhood trauma would never leave him. This lingering, sometimes repressed feelings seemed to be both a curse and a blessing for Claude in terms of his creativity.

Claude had buried (but not, of course, completely extinguished) the memories of his early childhood - the vague nausea, the loneliness, weakness, and vulnerability. Fear of those old ghosts drove him, without his knowing it, into dependency on ritual, and into a highly compartmentalized way of life. If there was anything remotely like a center to his existence, it was Weisfield and the studio below the store, but his mother was separate... (pp. 170). 

Claude’s rigid lifestyle, exemplified by his strict adherence to schedule and to rules, was a coping mechanism and escape in reaction to his unpredictable childhood in which he had no control. Even in college, he adhered to this lifestyle, getting up at 5:00 A.M. to practice the piano. He protected this regime intensely, not allowing anyone to interfere or distract him. In this protectiveness, Claude and Asher find common ground. Their different types of trauma and reactions to trauma, however, show stark contrasts. The trauma in Asher’s life seemed to be a result of his creativity while for Claude, it was the other way around. For both, somewhere deep down they needed to work on their craft, but for reasons vastly different. 

Interlude: Resilience

In Sawyer’s chapter called “The Creative Personality”, he discusses the effects of several specific traumas on a creative person’s development. What stood out in thinking about Claude is what Sawyer calls the orphan effect, or the phenomenon of a disproportionately high amount (between 1/3 and 1/2) of eminent creators who lost a parent before the age of 21. As an aside, I would hypothesize that this proportion is even higher in athletes. LeBron James comes to mind as an extremely high achieving person with that never-satisfied mentality who was also raised by a single mother in poverty. Sawyer offers two hypotheses for the orphan effect, the first being that children become high achievers to emotionally compensate for a parent’s absence. The second hypothesis, which I personally put more stock into, centers on a psychology buzzword going around a lot today - resilience. Sawyer suggests that “... loss of the parent forces the child to develop a resilient personality simply to overcome the obstacles that face a life with only one parent” (pp. 69). I think that in Claude’s case, this is right on the money. Claude was forced to be a resilient person from such an early age that when the task came to learn something new on his own like the piano, to figure out a way to fish for coins in sewers to make money for lunch, and getting up at the crack of dawn to commute to his lessons, he had the tools to handle it. The most successful people are the most resilient, and Sawyer even goes as far as stating, “If a person grows up in a happy, financially stable family, he or she may just have it too good in childhood to be driven to greatness” (pp. 69). I’m not a parent, but this does make me question in almost a perverse feeling way if there is a certain amount of difficulty that you should allow, or force (?) your child to go through - the epitome of “tough love”. In class, we talked about hover parents and how, despite the best of intentions, they may be hurting their children in more than obvious ways.

 In viewing this trauma-creativity relationship, I find it useful to think about Maslow’s Hierarchy because, as you said in class, people are usually only able to be creatively productive after a certain trauma - not so much during. This makes sense if you think about creative processes as an “extra” that cannot exist until basic needs, like safety, are met. It seems natural that this trauma/resolution/creativity timeline is different for everyone according to their personal levels of resilience, but that it is somewhat universal for people who see resolution of their trauma. Claude, to an extent, actually exemplifies this in his latching on to the piano when he was a little bit older, more accustomed to his mother’s behavior, less fearful of her and more independent and accepting of his situation. When he was really young, as described in the opening scene of the book, I think he was too inundated with feelings of confusion, loneliness and weakness to pursue a creative activity.

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Claude vs. Asher: Creative Personalities

What jumped out at me, for whatever reason, as the biggest difference between Claude and Asher’s behavior was their difference in the outward expression of their sexuality. Asher, on the one hand, really never appeared to be interested in girls or guys. My first thought was maybe this is due to his religion, but when his mother and father tried to get him to meet a girl who they wanted him to marry, he disappointed them time and again with his complete lack of interest. Even while he was living in Europe and mostly away from any potential embarrassment or pressures that he might feel in Brooklyn, he seemed to have lived very much as a loner, presumably by choice. Claude, on the other hand, is definitely interested in girls. I was surprised by the confidence and almost predator-like way he went after two friends at the movie theater on page 196. This reminded me of the Csikszentmihalyi reading, The Creative Personality, in which we see (for I think for the first time) a mention of sexuality in creatives. Csikszentmihalyi says that the first trait often present in creative individuals is a great deal of physical energy (but, of course, they’re also often quiet and at rest). This energy, he claims, can be manifested as sexuality. “They [creatives] seem to have quite a strong dose of eros, or generalized libidinal energy, which some express directly into sexuality” (pp. 38). Interestingly, when Asher was ever in a real creative phase, he was often able to run on very little sleep - staying up at night worrying about something and then creating the next day, which may be another manifestation of this energy.

Generally, I think Sophie was completely right in her comparison in class of  Csikszentmihalyi’s contrasting, both-ends-of-the-spectrum-at-once traits and horoscopes. I think it would be easy to place anyone as a creative on these terms - which may be a good thing! To illustrate this, I’ll try to put my dog, Auggie, within the first few of Csikszentmihalyi’s trait descriptions.

1. Creative [dogs] have a great deal of physical energy, but they’re also often quiet and at rest.

Auggie definitely has her moments of both. Since she is nine now, I would say the resting predominates these days. Csikszentmihalyi writes that, “The important thing is that they control their energy; it’s not ruled by the calendar, the clock, an external schedule. When necessary, they can focus it like a laser beam...” (pp. 38). Auggie, too is very autonomous in her energy exertion. When I take her for a walk and she doesn’t want to go any further, she will lay down in the middle of the road as if to say, “You’ll have to literally drag me by my neck if you want me to go any further. I doubt you’ll do that.” She also has intense moments of hyperfocus, like when we get a package delivered to the door, when we are preparing her food in the kitchen, or when she is chasing a ball.

2. Creative [dogs] tend to be smart and naive at the same time.

Auggie is a pure bred Border Collie, which is a breed consistently and unanimously rated as the “valedictorians of the dog world”. According to Stanley Coren, who wrote the book The Intelligence of Dogs, Border Collies “can learn a new command in under five seconds and follow it at least 95% of the time” (”The Top 25 Smartest Dog Breeds”, Good Housekeeping 2017) . Csikszentmihalyi supplements this smart/naive balance with a mature/childish one. Auggie definitely fits the bill here for both. She is at times extremely smart and sneaky - she waits until my dad closes his eyes to sneak into the kitchen and eat cat food and knows a command called “speak” in which she right on cue produces this weird, non-bark “har-ooo” sound that we imagine is something like her voice. (It is completely useless other than as an entertaining party trick) At the same time, she is childish in that she is afraid of our Amazon Echo, and it has gotten to the point that she runs for the basement whenever any of us say the word “Alexa”.

3. Creative [dogs] combine playfulness and discipline, or responsibility and irresponsibility. 

I feel like this one pretty much goes without saying for Auggie. She is at times extremely playful with her toys, and at other times quite serious. When we lived in New Hampshire, we had chickens and her “job” was to herd them. She took this job very seriously, and would not stop until all of the chickens were in the coop. Other times, she behaves quite irresponsibly, trying to bite the wheels on bikes or chasing a bunny into a pocket of poison ivy.

Interlude: Contrasts in Frank Conroy’s Writing

For some reason, it took me until about the 70th page of Body and Soul to realize that the perspective kept changing. I was wondering why I would sometimes get confused about the way a section was being told, and then realized that paragraphs in Claude’s perspective, where the story was told in the first person, where directly before or after paragraphs in the third person of some narrator-type perspective. What was really catching me off guard was how there were no breaks or indicators of a new perspective between the two - unlike most books where different chapters have different narrators, or breaks and changes in narrators are “announced” with some kind of artistic symbol on the page. This contrast of two different things, right up next to each other, reminded me of Mike   Csikszentmihalyi’s contrasting traits found in creative personalities. By the way, I think this comparison is probably an example of divergent thinking because I connected two seemingly separate things - chapter/writing organization and personality traits. Yay, creativity!

I won’t keep going with this evaluation of Auggie because it is getting a bit off-topic from Body and Soul, but it is all just to say that these traits, and maybe the study of personality with respect to creativity in general, are pretty useless. At least in the context of creativity, the shift that we talked about in class away from personality psychology in the last ten years seems to make sense. I think the other problem I have with the “creative personality” is that since personality traits are thought to be enduring, it sort of implies that some people are creative and others just aren’t. In Creativity Research: Past, Present and Future from our first set of readings, Guildford said,

It is probably only a layman’s idea that the creative person is peculiarly gifted with a certain quality that ordinary people do not have. This conception can be dismissed by psychologists, very likely by common consent. The general psychological conviction seems to be that all individuals posses to some degree all abilities, except for the occurrence of pathologies. Creative acts can therefore be expected, no matter how feeble or how infrequent, of almost all individuals (pp. 36).

After rereading this quote a few times, it seems like Guilford is criticizing the idea that a personality trait determines creativity, but, by making almost every type of behavior fit into a creative trait, isn’t that essentially what Csikszentmihalyi is doing too, just in a sneakier way? It reminds me of when we were learning study habits in middle school and our teacher was telling us to highlight only the most important parts of our readings because, if you highlight everything, it’s essentially the same as not highlighting anything at all. By highlighting all personality traits/behaviors, Csikszentmihalyi essentially highlights none. In this full-circle way, he is sort of toeing the line between an anti-personality assessment of creativity and an extreme personality assessment of creativity.

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Section III: Innovation Group Commentary

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Wrapping Up (NEW)

So now we are in our final week of classes and final week to finish up our project. It still feels like we are not really done coming up with new ideas; in some ways I feel like we just started having really good ones. It again makes me think of the never ¨complete¨ essay. If we had infinite time, we would never stop evolving our ideas - we would probably never decide when the right time to hand in a finalized project is. So instead we are handing in what we have. That said, I think we are all really happy and proud with what we will be presenting. 

We have decided to combine some of our great ideas (at the expense of some others) into a Buzzfeed quiz-formatted information platform with links to the map of Boston school shuttles we created as well as events going on in those areas. While this implementation with links is maybe not the most aesthetically pleasing way to present information, it still incorporates all the things we found most important: one centralized place to have information about social events and the associated transportation. Even though we had some good ideas that we did not have a change to fit in, like pre-booking seats, an app and payment information, we see what we have now as sort of jumping off point and those as great future improvements in the product. 

This morning we met as a group and video chatted with Seungmin, who is in Korea, to sort of get on the same page about the finalization of our project. It was a worthwhile meeting because we all agreed that our product was cool, but it actually was not our most prideful aspect of this project. What we are most proud of and what we want to focus our presentation on is our process. In the beginning of the year (and again for this coming week) when we were to think about the definition of creativity and the four Ps, one was process. I think, and we also agreed as a group today, that our process was definitely creative. Our product would likely not be assessed as technically good, but maybe it, too, would be assessed as creative. 

Interlude: Would you want to work with this person again?

Another nice thing about this final meeting we had was that we were all able to really relax now that we knew we were at the end, and we could look back at this experience we had together and laugh at how much we stumbled along the way. I felt really close with my group members, and we all reflected on how well we felt we worked together, despite our sometimes floundering. This made me think of the evaluation I just completed of my group members, where for each I was asked to answer the question: Would you want to work with this person again? On the evaluation sheet, I said yes, but now that I feel like we have become pretty close, I am not sure. Bringing everything full circle, in my first posting for my innovation section, I  wrote about how I was not sure if our group was diverse enough according to criteria introduced by Sawyer. He argued that some diversity was good, and I felt like maybe the reason we were not brainstorming very successfully was because we were not diverse enough. I had thought that the more diverse you are (until a certain point), the better. This also, I thought, would mean that not knowing the people you are working with would be helpful. By this thought process, I figured while I really enjoyed working with these people, working with ¨fresh blood¨ would still be better. Now I look back at our process and it was only towards the end when we really felt comfortable with each other that we started presenting our most creative ideas. Imagine how creative and successful in terms of a final project we would be if we were starting an innovation group project now with this comfort that we now have with each other. It would be a really interesting experiment to see how creative, maybe determined by Consensual Assessment, final projects come out between groups of people who do not know each other prior to the semester and those that do. I am not sure what the outcome would be, but now I have a hunch that the group that did know each other would be more creative (at least in a time as short as one semester). In that case, YES! I would definitely want to work with each of my group members again :)

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The Positive Feedback Loop for Creativity Continues! (NEW)

This project and our process through it is always surprising me because just when I think that we have settled down and figured something out, we come up with seemingly better ideas. Just when I think we are on a really good, predictable path, we change things up by finding something we think is better.  It reminds me of writing essays, where if there were not deadlines I would probably write and revise, write and revise for the rest of my life always thinking that it could be a little better. 

In the last couple meetings, we have been expanding on our ACE transportation information platform, which we initially thought would be an app, and then we made into a Buzzfeed quiz. One of the ideas we had for quiz questions was where do you want to go? (and where are you coming from?). We were thinking of splitting up a map of Boston into four quadrants, just because that format fits best with the Buzzfeed template, and then the user could choose which quadrant they were going to to narrow down the choices. 

Sophie had a great idea, which I did not even know you could do - how cool!, to create our own Google Map with all the transportation from the ~10 Boston area schools that we want to include (Wellesley, Babson, Olin, Boston University, Harvard, Boston College, Brandeis, Northeastern, MIT, Tufts). A screenshot of this map is the header of this posting. Each school has its own color association. 

Interlude: Discovering or Interpolating?

My reading section for the Weisberg book (was this intentional?) was about creativity in science. This section covered two case studies: the discovery of the correct model of DNA by Crick and Watson (pictured above) and the formulation by Darwin of the Theory of Evolution through Natural Selection. The discovery of the DNA model brought up this question of whether creativity can really be involved in uncovering something that is already there. Watson and Crick did not invent anything, and they did not even discover DNA itself - they knew DNA existed and they were after figuring out its structure. They main way they went about this was by looking at X-ray photos of DNA and from them, discovering the underlying structures. Weisberg argued that it was not just by looking closely at the X-rays and finding whats there, like a ¨Wheres Waldo?¨ The answers were not obvious in the X-ray, at all. The real credit to Watson and Crick actually comes from their astounding interpretations of the results of these X-rays that lead them to the correct structure. These interpretations were largely based on their past experience, or expertise. 

Obviously its a huge stretch, but I sort of think of us looking at our map and Watson and Crick looking at X-rays as being similar. We came up with some non-obvious conclusions from looking at the map we had made, and they have pretty big consequences. First off, there were actually a lot of overlapping shuttle routes (not shown). The whole idea of this map is to give Boston-area students information about the transportation that is available to them - often times there is some type of bus, either a city bus or some school shuttle, that will take us where we want to go, we just do not know about it. The thing with these overlapping routes is that, similarly, students (and schools) may not know about other buses going where they want to go, and two buses get assigned a route when had there been more disseminated information it could have been just one. Spreading information about bus routes of neighboring schools and allowing any student to get on any bus could potentially eliminate the need for certain buses, thus taking some vehicles off the road and improving traffic but more importantly doing a justice to the environment. 

Another related thing we noticed looking at the map is that some routes are really parallel with the T. What is the point of this? In some areas it makes sense for there to be a T stop and bus stops, but we will need to think about how we want to decide whether we want to direct students on a route that takes a bus vs. the T. Some schools, like Northeastern and Emerson, do not even have buses because they simply subsidize their students´ Charlie Cards.

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Phase IV Continued...  (NEW)

So I have talked in these postings before about the concept of a pressure hangover that was brought up by Amabile, and she says that overwhelming time pressure can really kill creativity, but more importantly that having felt this pressure can kill your creativity afterwards, even when you are not feeling time pressure. This is the pressure hangover. I would argue that this week my innovation group felt the opposite of a pressure hangover, whatever that would be called - a pressure pay-it-forward? a creativity karma? I am not sure, but last meeting we made the momentous decision to switch gears and drop our Knoxville project idea, which we had been working on for weeks, and take on a social life at Wellesley theme. I think, even looking back a little now, that that was such a huge (courageous?) thing for us to do because it was so out of all of our comfort zones. We are all grade-driven, we are all overworked, we are all - at least in the beginning of this project - looking for a way to take a break, yet we still did the thing that was hard! It honestly is kind of amazing. Anyways, after doing this thing, which really hyped us up and got us exciting after a long dull-period, we had some even more great ideas today. What I am trying to say here is that it feels like we are in sort of a creativity positive feedback loop. This type of loop was actually something brought up in my final paper outline because one of the theories I talked about in the literature review talked about a positive feedback loop with mood and creativity (more positive mood --> more creativity --> more positive mood). I think for us its more of a risk/reward loop. Like we took a risk changing projects and we feel great about it, so it was rewarding, and now we are willing to take more risks and throw out a more diverse range of ideas that we ever did in our original brainstorming sessions (albeit we were not as comfortable with each other back then, which may have played a role).

One of the best ideas that we are going to run with came from Nicole. She brought her prior experience watching buzzfeed videos, which she often relates to things in class, and performed divergent thinking to combine the usefulness she saw in having a buzzfeed video serve a purpose in our Wellesley social life transportation plan. Her idea was to use a Buzzfeed Personality Quiz Template to make information available by clicking on “quadrants” of a map of Boston, or possibly a specific school (we have not quite hammered that out yet). Basically, the ¨quiz¨ will just be choosing where you want to go and the answer will be how to get there. What I think is so cool about the idea is we are using a quiz for something that we never intended to be a quiz, but actually just a centralized Information Platform with schedules, info on paying, possible prebooking. Now we are using a quiz to narrow down a search - you could say we found an Alternative Use for a Buzzfeed quiz.

Here are some of the questions we were thinking about putting in the template:

“Which school are you coming from?” list of colleges

“Where do you want to go?” map, areas of Boston

Question that asks if you want to pre-book

We also thought, since now our project centers around both public transportation and social life, it would make sense to combine the two in our product. Either by sharing direct links to the events, or adding a Facebook Events in that Area link, we will not only direct people to the best way to get to where they want to go, but we will also be giving people information about whats out there. This piece is actually pretty logical because people need to find something to do at a place (usually) before they go there. Sometimes I will go to Boston just to walk around (like maybe once a semester), but almost always I am going for some purpose. We will get more use out of our ACE system, and get more people enjoying themselves off campus, and more people from other schools enjoying themselves on our campus, if we have a centralized place to put information about those events as well as the logistical way to get there. 

[acahill2-blog]

Phase IV : Enhancing Social Life at Wellesley through Transportation  (NEW Interlude)

This time, we went further into thinking about Wellesley’s transportation,and solidified (at least temporarily) a main idea to center our work around that we all seem pretty excited to get behind. The general aim will be improving transportation to better facilitate social activities for Wellesley students, which usually means off campus. We thought this idea was important for a number of reasons, first being that if Wellesley isn’t going to invest in social life on campus, we need to, for our mental health (shout out to the mental health of college students innovation group!) facilitate getting off campus easily and affordably. The peter pan’s schedule is something that we all commiserated about together in our group, which only solidified that we’d picked a topic that is important and relevant to us. In our talking, we even dabbled with the idea that, if we come up with a really good idea or a system that is not too unrealistic, we might present it to the school and see if they bite. This introduced a new incentive for us that added to our motivation and brought our attention to a new facet of making a product that we hadn’t touched before: marketing. Everyone was really involved in our discussion - gone are the days of people checking email during our meetings, at least for now.

As we brainstormed, we decided one of the worst aspects of the Peter Pan buses were that their stops were so limited. Each of us were talking about where we usually go in Boston, and each of us had a different way of getting there. To go to Allston, I’d always taken the Peter to Hynes Convention center and then gotten on the green line, but Sophie said its faster to get off at Kendall at MIT and then taken a city bus straight to Allston because it make a hundred stops along the way on Comm. Ave the way the green line does. Nicole talked about how she uses the Harvard bus and apparently all Wellesley students are allowed to use the MIT bus. Personally, I’ve used the BU bus when I’ve been fortunate enough to see it, but the problem is I don’t really know it’s schedule. What we concluded as group is that our problem seemed to be not that there wasn’t enough transportation in Boston, but that we didn’t really have access to it (even though it does seem like none of these buses check IDs).  Wellesley already has “official” connections with Brandeis, BOW, MIT, but we thought it would be a great solution if all the Boston-area school buses formed basically their own MBTA system, except just for college students. That way any student from any Boston-area school could use the system and have a lot more flexibility. Additionally, it might actually reduce the amount of buses on the same routes (which means less vehicles on the road) and allow students to travel farther or more directly than their current buses take them.

Marketing:

What’s a transportation system without a catchy name?

ACE: Accessible College Exchange

The schools we could link up with are BU, Northeastern, Babson, Brandeis, MIT, Harvard, Berkelee, BC, and Tufts (and others!) .

Some features the ACE system might have:

pre-book seats for meeting/class (½ of seats are booked, ½ are free for all) to get rid of the problem of having to go to class or the airport and not being let onto the bus.

digital queue/app showing number of available seats - so you aren’t waiting an hour only to find out the bus for that hour never came or is full.

positive effects on rush hour traffic?

Our task for next time is to look more specifically at what the main Boston schools (Harvard, BU, MIT and Northeastern) have for transportation currently.

Commentary: Interestingly, in comparing what I broke up into Phase I, II, III and IV, phases I and III were really initial brainstorming periods and phases II and IV were more about idea development. This means our four phases so far have been really cyclical, which may tell us something about the creative process.

Interlude: The incubation period

Recently we have been talking in class about a concept brought up by Amabile in Creativity Under the Gun, as well as other creativity writers, called the incubation period. Researchers argue that this incubation period is really beneficial to creativity because it allows us to do exactly what we did - not be married to our first idea because of time constraints. Having the time, like we do, to move through ideas and not choose the “safe” boring one is a very important ingredient for coming up with creative ideas. It would be pretty rare, I would think, for the very first (or even first five) ideas someone has to be their most creative. Having an incubation period where we are even subconsciously thinking about the task at hands helps us come up with ideas while we are not just in the 25 minutes per week we spend with our innovation groups, but all the time - while we are on the Peter, while we are walking to class or having conversations in other classes.

Edit: Since working more on my final paper about exercise and creativity, the idea of mental flexibility related to creativity has been at the front of my mind. I think the two concepts - incubation periods and cognitive flexibility - are really related because you have to be flexible in changing your ideas in order to take advantage of the incubation period at all.