The Filter Bubble - Eli Pariser [39]
Duncker’s test gets at one of the key impediments to creativity, what early creativity researcher George Katona described as the reluctance to “break perceptual set.” When you’re handed a box full of tacks, you’ll tend to register the box itself as a container. It takes a conceptual leap to see it as a platform, but even a small change in the test makes that much more likely: If subjects receive the box separately from the tacks, they tend to see the solution much more quickly.
The process of mapping “thing with tacks in it” to the schema “container” is called coding; creative candle-platform-builders are those who are able to code objects and ideas in multiple ways. Coding, of course, is very useful: It tells you what you can do with the object; once you’ve decided that something fits in the “chair” schema, you don’t have to think twice about sitting on it. But when the coding is too narrow, it impedes creativity.
In study after study, creative people tend to see things in many different ways and put them in what researcher Arthur Cropley calls “wide categories.” The notes from a 1974 study in which participants were told to make groups of similar objects offers an amusing example of the trait in excess: “Subject 30, a writer, sorted a total of 40 objects.... In response to the candy cigar, he sorted the pipe, matches, cigar, apple, and sugar cubes, explaining that all were related to consumption. In response to the apple, he sorted only the wood block with the nail driven into it, explaining that the apple represented health and vitality (or yin) and that the wood block represented a coffin with a nail in it, or death (or yang). Other sortings were similar.”
It’s not just artists and writers who use wide categories. As Cropley points out in Creativity in Education and Learning, the physicist Niels Bohr famously demonstrated this type of creative dexterity when he was given a university exam at the University of Copenhagen in 1905. One of the questions asked students to explain how they would use a barometer (an instrument that measures atmospheric pressure) to measure the height of a building. Bohr clearly knew what the instructor was going for: Students were supposed to check the atmospheric pressure at the top and bottom of the building and do some math. Instead, he suggested a more original method: One could tie a string to the barometer, lower it, and measure the string—thinking of the instrument as a “thing with weight.”
The unamused instructor gave him a failing grade—his answer, after all, didn’t show much understanding of physics. Bohr appealed, this time offering four solutions: You could throw the barometer off the building and count the seconds until it hit the ground (barometer as mass); you could measure the length of the barometer and of its shadow, then measure the building’s shadow and calculate its height (barometer as object with length); you could tie the barometer to a string and swing it at ground level and from the top of the building to determine the difference in gravity (barometer as mass again); or you could use it to calculate air pressure. Bohr finally passed, and one moral of the story is pretty clear: Avoid smartass physicists. But the episode also explains why Bohr was such a brilliant innovator: His ability to see objects and concepts in many different ways made it easier for him to use them