Creativity, a baby's world, and happiness.

Occasionally I get behind in my blog reading, and sometimes this creates fortunate coincidences. Like, now.

First, an article in Scientific American about how babies see the world. (both SciAm and the Shambala Sun articles are off Integral Options Cafe.)

"As adults when we attend to something in the world we are vividly conscious of that particular thing, and we shut out the surrounding world. The classic metaphor is that attention is like a spotlight, illuminating one part of the world and leaving the rest in darkness. In fact, attending carefully to one event may actually make us less conscious of the rest of the world. We even know something about how the brain does this: connections from the prefrontal part of the brain both enhance our perception of the attended event and inhibit our perception of other events. And there is a chemical basis for this, too. When we pay attention to an event certain brain chemicals called cholinergic transmitters make a small part of the brain more flexible and “plastic”, better at learning, and simultaneously other inhibitory transmitters actually make irrelevant parts of the brain less flexible.

If you look at baby’s attention you see a related but very different picture. Babies and young children are much worse at intentionally focusing their attention than adults. Instead, they seem to pay attention to anything that’s unexpected or interesting – anything they can learn from. We say that children are bad at paying attention but we really mean that they’re bad at not paying attention – they easily get distracted by anything interesting. And young brains are much more generally “plastic”, more flexible and better at learning than adult brains. Young brains are bathed in the cholinergic transmitters that enhance attention in adults, but the inhibitory transmitters that damp consciousness down haven’t yet come on line. If you put all that together it suggests that babies consciousness is more like a lantern than a spotlight – that it illumines the entire world around them.

Finally, you can think about what adult experience is like when we put ourselves in the same position as babies. When we travel for instance, we are suddenly surrounded by an unexpected new world and, instead of just focusing on the important things, we take in lots of information at once. That actually makes us more vividly conscious of our surroundings, not less. I think that for babies, every day is like first love in Paris."

Also, on play and pretending:

"...they seem to use their imagination the way that creative scientists do. One of the big new ideas about how babies learn is that they use what computer scientists call “Bayesian inference”. That means that you imagine lots of different possibilities and test how likely each possibility is.

When we have a theory of the world, we can not only say what the world is like now, we can also explore what would happen if the world was different. We can ask what would happen, for instance, if there was a rocket that traveled close to the speed of light. In fact, the ability to imagine these possibilities is one of the biggest advantages of understanding how the world works. Because we imagine, we can have invention and technology. Its actually play, not necessity, that is the mother of invention."

In a second article from Scientific American, researchers look at a way to increase creativity, and find that making something psychologically distant from oneself (anything not happening here, now, and to oneself is psychologically distant) increases creativity around the problem, which makes sense. How playful would you feel if you were trapped in a room slowly filling up with water? You'd probably be freaking out.

It also accords with the candle study, explained in the video below from TED talks:

Basically, people have to figure a simple task out. There are two groups, one given money if they complete it quickly and one not given any money. Classically, you'd expect the group given money as a reward to do better, but they do worse. See, the task they have to do involves some creativity. Giving people money apparently takes away some of their playfulness. (The talk is actually on motivation and the twenty-first century work place. I might talk about it in a later post, it's good.)

One more from TED: something I've put up before:

Finally, an article from the Shambhala Sun on happiness.

Now we can get to the point. It seems to me that the mode of consciousness described in the first article is not unique to babies, we're just educated out of it, at least when we're facing concrete and tangible problems, but we have access to it at anytime, and can certainly train to enhance it (the guys on "Who's Line is it Anyway"come to mind). Of course, the restricted, focused consciousness is just as important, we'd never become adult without it, but we're losing something when we ignore it, something that (as the first video explains) is increasingly needed in our world, and which might be linked to happiness. Or perhaps over-reliance on the focused method of consciousness, the "get-the-loot" consciousness, as the article puts it, causes us to ignore those million little things that are uplifting in the day.

Indeed, though the article in the SS doesn't present it in this light, we need both of these kinds of consciousness to be successful, and in meditation are training both: a simultaneous rigid focus on an open and innocent ("virgin", the article says,) state-of-mind. This could be why both the first and the last article are concerned with paying attention. Children are paying attention to everything, and if you're unhappy, maybe you're just not paying attention.

But children are not enlightened, nor are they all-in-all more conscious than adults (well, healthy adults.) The combination of the two is something attained through growth. As the SS article says, the "get-the-loot" mindset is always looking for something exterior, an experience or thing, while happiness comes from the inside. Babies don't have this, they aren't differentiated from their environment yet.

Remove the pillars of your belief in this world and look around a little bit, at least every once in a while, I guess is the take-home message.