[Eagleman] Human creativity adds the color to our world.
It's our crowning glory as a species.
But it's also deeply personal.
I think creativity-- it's a desire. It's-it's a need.
True creativity is about existence and being
and giving of yourself and being honest-- true creativity.
[Eagleman] Where does this unique human ability come from?
How can we harness it in our lives?
I've spent the last 20 years of my life
studying the human brain,
how it makes us who we are.
Now I'm going on a journey
to unlock the secrets of creativity,
to reveal how we can all tap into the neural processes behind it,
and transform our lives for the better.
I am somebody that I never knew I could be now.
[Eagleman] With the help of some of the most creative minds out there...
Second sticks.
[Eagleman] ...we'll find out what makes them tick...
If someone's like, "That's weird", I'm like, "Yes!"
And that's always kind of what I'm trying to do.
[Eagleman] ...how they struggle...
[Nick Cave] You're engaged in-in a kind of battle--
It's not like you kind of sit around on a silken cushion
and ideas kind of come down. That doesn't actually happen.
[Eagleman] ...and how we can all unleash our own creative potential.
You have to understand that failure is your friend
that you can learn from.
[Eagleman] Because creativity isn't the preserve of an elite few.
Creativity is what human brains do.
[Eagleman] If you visited this forest a million years ago,
it would be essentially the same.
The animals here haven't really changed their ways.
Generation after generation,
they're doing the same kinds of things.
They're living the same lives they always have.
But in the comparative blink of an eye...
humans have transformed our world...
and the engine driving all of this is human creativity.
Someone having an idea,
making something, inventing something.
This strong suit of the human brain has propelled our ancestors
from cave dweller to space explorer...
...and has given us the modern world.
When we talk about creativity,
you might assume I'm talking about the arts,
but it's so much more than that.
Take science.
I think science is inherently creative.
I think you have to be to be able to discover something new
that other people have not discovered already.
[Eagleman] So, this is your lab here?
[Michelle] Yeah, welcome to my lab. We're excited to have you here, guys.
Thank you.
[Eagleman] Today, all the revolutionary technology
in Dr. Michelle Khine's lab...
springs from a creative leap she made 15 years ago...
a leap that also saved her career.
What bought me to the point of creativity was desperation.
[Eagleman] At that time her nanotechnology research
required specialized equipment
so that she could work in a microscopic scale.
But the lab her new job had promised her
was still under construction.
I was like, "I don't understand
how I'm gonna be able to do my... my work."
After you've exhausted all of the known routes
to get what you want, then you have to start thinking,
"Of well, what else can I try
if I want to salvage my career?
[Eagleman] This desperation led her to get creative.
She remembered a toy she loved to play with--
Shrinky Dinks--
...in which sheets are shrunk into small hard plates in an oven
without altering their shape.
-Fabulous. -Fantastic.
Could she use the same material for her nanotechnology creations?
So, this is a Shrinky Dink,
so it's a good old-fashioned children's toy,
and you can draw on it
or you can put a thin layer of metal on it...
-Okay. -...or a material on it,
and then we shrink it down in our little tester oven.
This is the shape I want out of metal,
but I want it to be smaller.
I don't have the tools to make it smaller,
so I'm just gonna put it on that,
-shrink it down and then peel it off. -Yeah.
The beauty of this is that all of that surface area
gets squished into this tiny little footprint,
and we can make it much smaller than this,
but you retain all of that surface area.
That's unbelievable.
Michelle's creative genius is to avoid working
at the tiny scales involved in nanotechnology,
by starting big
and shrinking everything down--
a simple and elegant solution
to an otherwise expensive technology.
I'm on a journey to understand creativity,
and one of the reasons this caught my eye
is because of how creative it is
to take a child's toy
and do something with that to make a-a beautiful scientific instrument,
and that's the beauty of this,
and why it captured everybody's attention
in the scientific community.
In order to advance science, you have to be creative,
because otherwise, you're just creating the same things
that have already been created,
and you're thinking about things
the same way everyone else has thought about it.
[Eagleman] Michelle's clever problem solving
showcases the creative ability of human beings...
that allowed our ancestors to take what they knew
and to build on it--
to improve it...
to forge a new path into the future.
So, what's so special about the human brain?
It all starts with our unique wiring.
Well, when you look at the brains of other animals,
you find that the input and the output
are right next to each other.
There's a direct path between the two.
So, when a hamster sees food,
it leads to an instant reaction.
The input "see food" connects directly to the output "eat food."
There's little in between.
But humans, we can do something more.
Of course, when it comes to food, we can simply eat it,
but we can also disengage our instincts
to see food as something
beyond its basic purpose.
We can see food as art,
tools or even weapons... why?
Because during our evolution, there was an expansion
of the brain regions between input and output.
So, in our brains seeing something doesn't necessarily
lead to an automatic response.
Inputs can mix and collide with what's already there.
Our brains can forge new pathways,
make new connections.
We can chew on ideas and think about things
and consider possibilities.
The complexity of our brains allows us
to process information
in almost limitless ways.
And the innumerable pathways through these networks,
this is the foundation of our creativity.
The expansion of the human brain
gave us one other important creative advantage.
With the enlargement of the human cortex
came the expansion of this part behind the forehead,
the prefrontal cortex, and this it turns out
is the wellspring of human imagination.
[man] So what's happening in here, Shaun?
[Eagleman] Bjarke Ingels is one of the most visionary architects
of his generation.
He's spent the last 20 years defying convention,
and his imagination is his stock and trade.
[Ingels] I try to materialize as many aspects
of the design process as possible.
So, you pin up things on huge boards,
'cause if you have tons of material to work with,
then you can really give the imagination
something to build with.
So, what if we don't change the bridge,
where we just eliminate that diagonal guy?
[Eagleman] Bjarke has designed some of the world's
most innovative buildings in recent years,
and he's now working in New York
designing two World Trade Centre.
[Ingels] The ideas that you have,
the concepts that you have acquired in one way or the other,
are tools that will empower you to do more than you could without them.
Before the Empire State building was built,
someone imagined it, then they built it,
and now it's part of the-the real world.
And of course, that is what creativity is,
that we actually have the power
to imagine the world... that isn't our world yet.
[Eagleman] Bjarke's ability to imagine is a superpower that we all possess.
The prefrontal cortex allows us to imagine
what's not directly in front of us.
It does this by unhooking from the present place and time
and travelling elsewhere.
To try out new ideas,
to consider what doesn't yet exist.
So, the expansion of the human brain during our evolution
gave us the ability to rise above our instincts,
to consider our options before we decide what to do.
And it gave us our imagination
setting us apart from other animals
and making us uniquely creative.
So, given that we're all wired for creativity,
what are our brains actually doing
when we engage with the creative process?
The first clue to the nuts and bolts of the creative process
comes from this man--
OK. So in here.
[Eagleman] Nathan Myhrvold--
who excels in any field he turns his hand to.
Bill Gates once described him as the smartest man he knew.
Well, I always have difficulty describing myself,
because the sort of things that I do are unlikely enough
that putting them together,
just is credibility reducing.
You know I write big cook books,
and I invented a new kind of nuclear reactor.
I do research on dinosaurs and on asteroids.
This is our chandelier.
One of the things that is a spark of creativity
is taking ideas from one place and applying them another place,
maybe in an utterly different context.
This is a new camera system that I designed, and we're building.
[Eagleman] Nathan's trick for coming up with this outpouring
of new ideas is to surround himself
with many different influences and inputs.
It's always easier to be a critic than a creator,
and if you don't fashion an environment
where creators and originators can get things going,
you won't have any new ideas.
It's really simple.
Cool.
[Eagleman] Nathan's focus on taking in new information
and combining it with what he already knows
gives us an important clue
to the brain's creative process.
It all goes back to those inputs.
The richer and broader they are,
the more the brain has to play with.
The human brain owes its creative success to the fact
that inputs are constantly being smashed together with other inputs,
so sights and smells and sounds
and conversations and ideas.
These are constantly reconfigured in the brain.
Every second of your life,
inputs from the world are being rocked on and combined
with what's already there.
Creativity isn't about one region of the brain,
instead it emerges from the interplay
of billions of neurons sending trillions of electrical impulses--
sights and sounds
are mixing with memories,
thoughts, emotions, new and old.
So, every experience you have
is raw material for your brain to create with...
...and all these inputs get fashioned
into new ideas... but how?
The brain takes in inputs,
and then it bends those to make something new.
So take the concept of a building.
The idea for it seems straightforward.
It's a box,
but a building can be bent
in countless ways.
Variations on a theme,
and even broken to make new versions.
A building can also become a blend of different ideas,
like Bjarke's blend of a Lego with a house...
or his blend of a ski-slope with a power plant.
It's often in the combination of seemingly mutually exclusive ideas
that if you find a way to combine them,
you actually get a third entity that combines
aspects of both into something that doesn't seem composite,
but actually, it's the synergy of the two.
Creativity doesn't mean inventing something out of nothing,
instead it's about refashioning what already exists.
Phil Tippett is an animator and monster maker
who breaks concepts and refashions them
into some of cinema's most imaginative creatures,
from Star Wars to Jurassic Park.
This is the kind of like things and ideas room.
All this stuff is just junk that I've just picked up,
that has caught my eye over the years.
Things I found at the beach or things my kids made.
It's just random stuff, blah-blah-blah, you know?
[Eagleman] He's figured out a way to organize some of his stuff
into an ingenious ideas generator.
[Tippett] These were a series of books that I put together.
This one is dated in 1987,
and this was a-a thing that I came up with
to just kind of break what I was thinking.
I would just randomly cut out these pictures
and just glue them into this book,
and then you'll see like a feeling
or you will feel something that's like,
"I've got it. I've totally got it. I'll try that".
[Eagleman] His scrapbooks are a visual representation
of what's going on in his brain.
They allow him to take disparate inputs,
break them apart and put the ones together that he finds useful.
Once you start looking for it,
you'll see that bending, breaking, and blending,
it's happening all around you.
And it's even at the heart
of one of the most dynamic musical traditions...
...jazz.
Robert Glasper is a Grammy Award winning musician.
Jazz is a mutt.
It's a music made of a bunch of other music.
[Eagleman] In his own remixing of jazz,
Robert builds on the traditional,
adding in R&B and hip hop.
[Glasper] A lot of people have said,
"You can't add hip hop to jazz. That's not the tradition".
Hip hop wasn't around when jazz was born.
But do you know what was around?
Boogie woogie was around.
Classical music was around, the blues was around,
gospel music was around.
All those things that were around
were infiltrated into jazz.
The jazz wasn't made by spontaneous combustion.
Jazz is a reflection of the time.
The tradition of jazz is actually that it always changes.
[jazz music playing]
If you stop changing it, if it stops growing,
now you're not following the tradition.
But if you keep adding to it, it keeps changing,
and the people in the last decade are saying, "You can't do this".
Then you're doing it right.
[Eagleman] And Robert isn't only repurposing musical influences,
he's remixing ideas and inputs from his own life.
[crowd cheers]
[Glasper] All of my experiences off the piano
have something to do with what I'm doing on the piano.
If I didn't have any life outside of the piano,
I'm afraid to know what I would sound like,
you know what I mean?
[indistinct]
[Eagleman] Understanding that our brains endlessly remix
existing inputs...
overturns a commonly held myth about creativity.
Being original is not
about generating something out of nothing.
Michael Chabon is regarded
as one of the most original novelists writing today,
and yet for him,
the concept of originality holds no weight.
[Chabon] I think originality is bunk.
Um, I think it's-it's nonsense
that there never has been such a thing as true originality.
It's in the play with convention that originality arises,
it's not in the rejection of convention, to me.
[Eagleman] He's a Pulitzer Prize winner
who's unafraid to take his ideas from anywhere.
[Chabon] Imagine, I'm gonna write a novel
about a-upper middle-class family
struggling to maintain order in a chaotic historical moment,
and you know immediately you bump up
against 25 of the greatest novels ever written, right?
The strategy at that point ought not to be
how am I gonna differentiate what I'm doing
from what Tolstoy did or what Thomas Mayne did?
The thing to do at that point is to say,
"How can I use what they did?"
I'm going to allow my knowledge of these--
my predecessors and their work--
to inform and help shape what I'm doing.
Not because I'm trying to copy them,
but because I know my unique experience on life
is gonna inevitably intervene
to help me produce a work
that is not like its interceding in some way.
[Eagleman] For Michael and for all of us,
what we create is unique,
because our life experiences are unique.
So, it's not about waiting for the lightning to strike
or the muse to whisper the next great idea into our ears.
Creativity is about getting out into the world,
using what's around us
to generate new concepts, new designs, new perspectives.
[Ingels] A big part of creativity is to create
the extraordinary out of the ordinary.
So, you take a lot of elements that are-
that are known to many,
but by putting them together
in a yet unseen combination,
you actually create something extraordinary.
[Eagleman] And though the creative process
often involves making something...
it also has the power to remake our lives.
When Ehren Tool returned from the Gulf War,
he was deeply shaken by what he'd seen.
[Tool] The outcome was kind of vast and tragic,
and it's been difficult for me to deal with in some ways.
After the Gulf War I knew that being a gun slinger wasn't really for me,
so I went to school, took class after class,
trying to find something I could do for the rest of my life,
and it just kind of happened with ceramics.
[Eagleman] Today, he creates ceramics
that address difficult themes--
death, war, and loss.
[Tool] I have my stories about what the cups mean
and what the images on them represent,
but I'm always surprised at how people respond to them
and the connections that they have with them.
[Eagleman] This creative outlet allows him to channel his feelings,
to start a conversation, to feel connected.
[Tool] And I resisted for a long time the idea of art as therapy,
but now as I'm coming up on 20,000 cups
that I've made and given away, there might be something to that.
[Tool chuckles]
[Eagleman] This healing power of creativity
can also be seen here,
in a place seemingly devoid of it.
[man] I'm in Seattle,
and I made a horrible decision to first pick up--
pick up on drugs at that time.
I was addicted to Suboxone
which was the worst detox I've ever come off of.
It was worse than heroin or anything.
I'm here 'cause of myself,
you know, I don't wanna blame nobody else-- society or anything.
[Eagleman] Here, at La Fayette Correctional Centre in Louisiana,
inmates are taking part in a ground-breaking program
run by writer Zachary Lazar.
[Lazar] And when I was six years old, my father was murdered.
There's two ways you can respond I think,
one would be to have a feeling of vengeance.
As I grew older I realized that that wasn't gonna bring anybody back,
and I had to start thinking more about why things like that happen.
Five years ago now, I went to Angola Prison as a journalist,
and I thought that I was going there
to find out something about my father's murderer.
I felt this connection to a lot of the people I spoke to,
um, that surprised me.
And... that's why I'm here.
-Hi. -[woman] Hi.
How's it going?
There was a huge abundance of creative people in that prison.
It just seemed so obvious to me
that part of the way to prevent people from being in prison
is to harness that creativity somehow.
Final projects--
-they're due tomorrow. -[man 1] Yes.
-We all good with that? -[man 1] Yes, sir.
-Yeah? -[man 2] Yes, sir.
[Eagleman] Zachary works with the inmates
to nurture their creative writing skills.
[Lazar] From what Oscar was just telling me about it,
all that writing has also helped him think differently about things,
think differently about himself, think differently about people.
Um, and that's the most important thing I think.
I don't care about virtuoso technique
as much as I care about what's being transmitted.
[man] I find myself when I write, you know, uh--
I create a whole another world,
the world that I'm supposed to be living in.
[Lazar] They are in a very concrete way doing things
and reading things that show them that they're important,
that they're-- that their lives matter,
um, and that other people are paying attention to their lives.
I'm 60 years old, and there's a whole lot in my life
that has, um-- it's a blur.
My pregnancy at the age of 15 whilst still in school
changed my life forever.
And when I write, I'm able to...
to put things in-in order,
uh, so to speak.
♪ Woke up early this morning ♪
♪ Just to see your face ♪
Once I got interested in, you know, crime and punishment
and how that-- those narratives work and how they reduce people,
um, you know they reduce people to the worst thing they've done,
um, I find that unacceptable.
When I write, my pen just starts to move,
and I can't control myself. It just writes itself.
[Lazar] It's allowing people to see themselves
and... appreciate themselves.
[stutters] It's hard for me to talk about it,
because I really? I think it is deep.
♪ You're the reason ♪
♪ I'm alive ♪
[woman] Because of this experience in my life,
I was able to be reborn inside,
and I am somebody that I never knew I could be now.
[Eagleman] Transforming prisoners' lives through creativity...
Second sticks.
[Eagleman] ...is something of great interest to Tim Robbins.
He played a prisoner in The Shawshank Redemption,
and today runs acting workshops with prisoners in California.
The human potential in prison is extraordinary.
The creative minds in prison-- extraordinary--
but we don't think about that.
We don't wanna think about that. "They made a mistake,
so therefore, for the rest of their lives
they have to be defined by their mistake.
And they have nothing to offer us."
Well, that's not true.
They have a lot to offer,
and having been through what they have been through,
they have something to offer from a perspective
that very few of us understand.
How do you know that
having the creative education helps when they're--
I know it because I've seen it first-hand.
We witness on a regular basis the transformation of human beings
by their involvement in the creative process.
By them being told, for the first time some of them,
in their lives, that-that voice inside,
the emotions that they are suppressing are legitimate emotions.
That they are legitimate people,
that they have a right to express those emotions,
that they are not, um, in this room that we work in,
they are not defined by their crime.
They're defined by who they are as human beings.
And given that situation, given that environment...
amazing transformation can happen.
[Eagleman] And this transformation has a real-world effect.
Prisoners who take part in creativity-based programs
are up to 80 percent less likely to reoffend,
and these gains aren't just for prisoners.
[Robbins] Pretty much every person that is involved
in a creative process will tell you
that they feel whole when they're in their, um, creative--
uh, at their creative best.
I think everyone is like that,
regardless of what you do for a living,
creativity and the creative part of your being
is essential to your happiness.
I wonder how many people know that,
maybe what that empty feeling they have
or the depression they're going through,
maybe it has something to do with a lack of...
creat-creative sparks.
[Eagleman] Given creativities power to improve our lives,
how can we harness it?
How can we become more creative?
Coming back to how our brains work,
there are three ways we can take advantage of how we're wired.
First, it turns out that being creative
means fighting a fundamental quality of the human brain.
The human brain weighs only three pounds,
but it takes up 20 percent of the body's energy.
Because we're mobile creatures that run on batteries-- food--
we have to act as efficiently as possible,
and as a result the brain is always gonna go for the easiest thing first.
It's gonna choose the most obvious answer.
It takes the path of least resistance.
[Eagleman] Our brains naturally default
to the neural pathways that represent what we've done before.
Creativity emerges when we get off the path of least resistance.
All of the good ideas are in there,
but you have to dig deeper into your neural networks.
So, the first way to get more creative
is to dig deeper,
to get off the path of least resistance.
To try something new...
...like changing career...
[singing]
My name is Kelis, and I am a singer, songwriter, chef.
[Eagleman] Having gained international acclaim
as the singer with hits like Milkshake,
Kelis Roger's completely changed creative tact...
...when she retrained as a chef.
[Kelis] You know, when I went to culinary school,
I was already an adult,
and I had already put out huge records,
and here I was standing in a room
of people who were striving for something, that felt cool.
And then it's really humbling, because I didn't excel here yet.
[Eagleman] Changing direction
gave her a whole new creative challenge.
Music, you can tell me you don't like it,
but you can't tell me it's wrong.
Food is different.
You can completely mess it up,
like it can be absolutely wrong.
It's beautiful.
So I think if you're able to step out
of what you're comfortable and what you know,
you would be shocked at what it will bring
to everything around you.
I never felt like I had to choose one thing
on anything.
[Eagleman] Walking away from our jobs isn't always possible...
but there are other ways we can try something new,
by learning a new skill.
[Myhrvold] The world rewards specialization,
but specialization comes at a cost.
You learn more and more about less and less
until you know everything about nothing.
[Eagleman] Not being bound by specialization
has allowed Nathan to make discoveries
in a wide variety of fields--
physics...
energy,
and even cooking--
but he's the first to acknowledge
that learning new subjects is not easy.
[Myhrvold] Part of that learning is you have to be confused.
So, I'm very often frustrated and confused
and think of myself as being really stupid,
because I'm not getting it.
I guess it kind of looks pretty on the inside.
To be creative, to think outside the proverbial box...
Getting close.
...you have to be willing to be wrong.
Let's see what we have here.
You also have to be willing to be right
and yet have everyone think you're wrong.
And so-- here we go.
[Eagleman] So, while forcing our brain
to try something new
can make us more creative,
there is another facet of the brain
that can interfere with our creativity.
Our brains are novelty seekers.
They crave what's new and exciting,
because what's old and familiar becomes less and less stimulating,
so creative ideas have to exist in a balance
between the familiar and the new
which brings us to the second way we can become more creative.
We have to push boundaries.
[man over radio] The eagle has landed.
The challenge is, there's no easy way
to tell exactly where that sweet spot lives,
because if you do something that's too boring,
the world's gonna pass you by.
And if you do something too crazy,
no one's gonna follow you there.
The trick is to explore the range of possibilities,
pushing boundaries everywhere
to figure out the limits of what works.
Pushing boundaries is something Nick Cave has done
consistently during his 30-year career.
As a musician who has won every major award
from Best New Album to Songwriter of the Year.
♪ You fell from the sky ♪
♪ Crash landed in a field ♪
♪ Near the River Adur ♪
[Cave] What I am genuinely pleased with
is that we've continued to make records
that are dealing with-with different sorts of things
and different styles of music,
um, and gone on all sorts of paths,
where the audience has to really rethink
whether they like Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds all over again.
[Eagleman] Pushing audiences into new musical territory
is what keeps his music fresh.
[Cave] Our new record, the timing is terrible,
it's out of tune, because it's basically improvised.
For all its mistakes,
people responded to that, you know.
Now, if we were to say, "Wow, that kind of thing
about playing really out of time and all that sort of stuff,
the kids love it. Let's make another record like that,"
it would be a disaster,
and, um, the thing is we need to turn our back on that
and to go-go--
just to go somewhere else.
[Eagleman] And this need to go somewhere else,
to push boundaries...
...also defines the music of Claire Boushey.
She's developed an alter-ego called Grimes
that allows her to push the limits of her creativity.
♪ I got in a fight ♪
♪ I was indisposed ♪
♪ I was in despite All the wicked prose ♪
♪ But I'm only a man ♪
Hey, I'm Grimes. I'm a musician and artist.
Uh, that kind of sums it up.
♪ B-E-H-A-V-E Arrest us ♪
♪ Italiana mobster Looking so precious ♪
[Grimes] I think whatever Grimes is, it's definitely not me,
it's definitely something else, but it's kind of good,
because it's a vehicle for doing things
that I feel uncomfortable doing.
Like, I think Claire wants to make, like, aggressive noise music
and I think Grimes wants to make, like, pop,
and I think, like, they can meet in the middle.
[Eagleman] To discover what works,
she's continually pushing the boundary
between the familiar...
and the weird.
[Grimes] To me, like, when I show people things they think it's weird,
it's just 'cause it's just something they're unfamiliar with,
which-- that is good,
if someone's like, "That's weird", I'm like, "Yes!", you know.
'Cause it means they don't know it,
they're unfamiliar with it,
and that's always kind of what I'm trying to do.
For me a lot of the time I'm trying to, like,
do something that feels wrong or feels bad,
because I know I'm pushing myself into a new direction.
[Eagleman] Pushing at the boundaries of comfort is risky,
but it can also be the most rewarding.
There's a-- there's a spectrum between things that are too familiar
and things that are too far out and wacky
and there's sort of this-this border of the possible.
So how do you know when you're near there?
That's a good way to-to express that really.
There is a knife edge certainly that we're-we're moving on.
The line that's really exciting is the shameful line,
or the line like, "I really can't say that,"
or-or something that genuinely starts to make you feel uncomfortable.
Writing a song is agonizing and excruciating,
because you never know until the end, if it's any good.
The amount of times I've written a lyric
that I think is just the greatest thing,
and I take it into the studio,
and the whole thing falls in on itself,
and it never makes it as a song.
[Eagleman] Creating something can be agonizing and excruciating,
because we risk failing...
which takes us to the third way
our brains can interfere with the creative process.
Failure feels awful and so we often avoid it...
but we need to do the opposite.
Don't be afraid of failure.
The reality is that most people's successes rise
out of the ashes of their previous failures.
Someone who knows all about this is the co-creator
of one of the most successful shows of all time...
Game of Thrones.
What is the role of failure in your creative process?
Well, I failed very consistently for-for many, many years.
The sort of the bedrock of my life process.
If you subtract the air date of pilot of Games of Thrones
from the day I graduated college and the number you get,
that's the failure portion, for me.
Sometime after college, it started to dawn on me
that I saw myself as someone who did this thing,
I saw myself as a writer, but I wasn't very good.
And so that... that freaked me out,
and I was very attached to the words that I wrote,
because I wrote them.
It's like a part of me. If I don't like these,
I-I don't like me.
[Eagleman] For Dan, the key was to be less worried about failing.
But I gradually slowly came to the realization
that it doesn't really matter what you type into the computer
and they are words,
and you can type new ones into the computer just as quickly.
All the failures contribute
to your overall ability to do this thing.
[Eagleman] And "to do this thing,"
it still involves a degree of failure when he's scriptwriting.
And something that seemed great to you
and that you were willing to go to the mattresses floor
and really fight to protect, you'll read six weeks later and say,
"What is this shit and who wrote it?'
And then you'll, "Oh, yeah, that was me, I wrote it.
Okay, well, that's terrible." And no one would ever say that.
[Eagleman laughs]
[Eagleman] So, to be more creative
we need to try something new
and challenge ourselves to get off the path of least resistance.
To push boundaries...
to create something that's not too new or too familiar,
but somewhere in between.
[Myhrvold] 'Cause it kind of looks pretty on the inside.
[Eagleman] We need to not be afraid to fail...
and by doing that we can all learn to become more creative.
[cat meowing]
So, giving creativities importance
and our ability to cultivate it,
shouldn't we all be taught to embrace it from the beginning?
Well, that's what they're doing here at this school in Vermont.
Ten years ago, H. R. Wheeler was on the verge of being shut down,
a school on the poor side of the tracks, it was failing.
We had the lowest test scores,
some of the lowest test scores in the state.
They were talking about closing our school.
[Eagleman] To save the school
they came up with a radical new approach,
to put creativity and the arts at the heart of every subject.
[Riley] When can kids learn? When they're engaged,
and when you focus on the arts
and the process of the artistic experience,
it allows children to blossom in very unique and special ways.
So, what we're focusing on is the process
of experiencing the arts or learning through the arts.
[Eagleman] Take a subject like math.
The children are learning geometry through the medium of abstract art.
[man] Today, for Math,
we're gonna start off with some visual thinking strategies?
And when you do it in a greater arts unit,
um, you're hitting on all those ways that kids learn differently.
Um, you know some are more visual,
some are more spacial, some are very cognitive.
Mateus?
It's not a realistic picture of like a person walking around.
Right. What more can we find?
You're hitting all those different avenues of learning that kids,
uh, are able to, uh, access information.
I noticed there's two shades of green,
it's sort of darker toward, um, the bottom part.
[Thibault] Great.
Even though I had my art work up on the board,
not a single kid created the same piece of art work,
and that's what's beautiful about our world,
and, uh, you know we need to do
a better job of teaching kids about that.
Here's what I recommend doing first,
but then you guys are such amazing artists.
[Eagleman] And it's not just math--
with creativity at the heart of every subject,
the children are learning a creative mindset.
[Thibault] Yeah. You're doing such a good job, buddy.
When you're teaching through the arts,
and the kids are really expanding their mind
and really critically thinking about things,
you're really pushing them.
Let's do a quick minute, you can walk round
and see where people are at, maybe you'll get an idea,
maybe you'll see something you like.
Go ahead... before we keep going on this.
[Eagleman] They're being taught
to get off the path of least resistance,
to push boundaries and that it's OK if they fail.
Remember, we're all taking a rest. We're all just trying.
We all make mistakes, but that's how we learn,
and you can't be afraid to take risks.
What do you have to do to be able to join in?
You have to-- I'm thinking of something specifically. Jacobi?
[Jacobi] You have to try your best.
You have to try your best, and you have to take risks?
-[Jacobi] Yeah. -Exactly.
[Riley] These fourth graders-- are they gonna remember
what their test scores were when they were fourth graders?
When they're adults, when they're our age? No.
So, I want you just to take one minute
to just look at what you see here.
[Riley] Are they gonna remember the process
that helped them develop their understanding of the world around them?
Absolutely, and that's the part that, um--
that really allows them to grow as human beings--
the skills that are embedded in the artistic experiences
are making them better people, more so than a standardized test
or some sort of assessment in math or literacy will ever do.
So, there is one...
and I'm gonna put this one over here for now.
[Eagleman] Empowered by this creative ethos,
the transformation has been astonishing
with improvements in test scores across the board.
And in math, they've more than doubled.
Now people wanna come here. We have a wait list of 80-90 kids,
and they wanna be in our school because of what we're offering.
[Thibault] I'm not gonna tell you how many angles.
You guys are the artists.
[Riley] The arts is empowering all of them.
It engages staff in a different way.
It engages students in a different way,
and it really changed our community in many positive ways.
[Thibault] Awesome job.
[Eagleman] Creativity belongs to all of us.
It's the most potent transformative tool
that we have at our disposal.
It can change people's lives.
It can transform the world...
and we now live in an era of unparalleled creative potential.
[Eagleman] We live in an explosion of creativity,
and the pace is only accelerating.
The jobs that will exist in 20 years from now,
we don't even have names for those yet.
To succeed in that future, we need to cultivate creativity
to proliferate options,
to get off the path of least resistance,
to take risks, and in this way,
we can take advantage of what it is to be a human,
to drink in the world and produce something,
anything, that has never existed before.