(Key points: A creative mind needs to have a strong curiosity. Curiosity is an intrinsic character that can show in everywhere and at any moment. Creating new knowledge begins from human’s curiosity toward nature.)
One of the goals of our education system is to nurture as many creative minds as possible. There are hundreds of thousand articles and books on how to be more creative. For example, when one searches the Amazon web site by using key words “creative mind”, there are 394 titles popping up. Some of those titles have a large number of reviews. You may think it is so easy to find an effective guide book so many of us could become a more creative mind. That’s why some people are looking for a quick and easy fix to enhance our creativity through some methods such as drinking coffee, just as claimed in one popular book. The truth is there are really not so many creative minds around. Many people believe that it is not an easy task to be real creative mind when we seem being embedded in so many trivial things in our daily routines.
Perhaps there are many characters of a creative mind. To dissect those characters may help us to follow the success paths some great creative minds took. One of those perspectives is curiosity. We know how our kids show their curiosity. When we talk someone and he/she shows curiosity, we immediately detect that message. But what’s curiosity and how it happens? Curiosity is a mystery, just like why we sleep so long every day. As David Weeks, a clinical neuropsychologist, said in his co-authored book “Eccentrics: A Study of Sanity and Strangeness”, the curiosity is the premier driving force for the creative mind of many eccentrics. They have extreme degree of curiosity. But this is also a most neglected character for many adults because they fear being labeled as “immature” or “childish”.
Curiosity is an intrinsic character and can show up at any time and any environment. I still remember when I was a boy, I always curious about why airplane can fly so high. It is a magic for such heavy giant to take off, few of them can reach 250 tons!! Later on I learned the principles of aerodynamics. I made a lot of paper airplanes and competed with other kid to see who can make the most far. Even today whenever there is a plane flying over, I always give an extra glance.
The everyday life is full of wonders and calls our neglected curiosity. If I pass a tree which is growing on rock, I always wonder how those roots from the tree reach so deep into narrow gap between rocks. The tip of a root just has a cluster of few plant cells. What’s powerful mechanism for them to open a new world for the tree in the dark underground?
One of my most curious objects is ant, those tiny creatures underneath our foot and everywhere. I know that they use pheromone to mark a road so their fellow ants can find food or gathering place. I sometime make a prank just to see how fast they can rebuild a new path for a known destination. When I joined one university years ago, it has more than 13 libraries. The books about ant, more precisely myrmecology, scatter in different places. I read most of them. In particular, I admire one expert, Dr. Edward O Wilson, a Harvard professor who studied ants for several decades and earned a title “Lord of the Ant” as in a PBS’s NOVA program. There were some most beautiful pictures about ants appeared in an article in the National Geographic written by him. At present the ant study is well beyond its niche field, it has been applied to social science and more. One of the initial motivations for Dr Wilson was curiosity. So it may be confident to say that to have a strong curiosity is the beginning of gaining new knowledge.
(This article is the first in a series of “Being a Creative Mind” essays. It is published on 9/14/2011.)
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