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Spatial Ability a Predictor of Creativity In Science
HonorPoncaCityDotCom writes "The gift for spatial reasoning — the kind that may inspire an imaginative child to dismantle a clock or the family refrigerator — is sometimes referred to as the 'orphan ability' for its tendency to go undetected. Now Douglas Quenqua reports that according to a study published in the journal Psychological Science, spatial ability may be a greater predictor of future creativity or innovation than math or verbal skills, particularly in math, science and related fields. 'Evidence has been mounting over several decades that spatial ability gives us something that we don't capture with traditional measures (PDF) used in educational selection,' says David Lubinski, the lead author of the study and a psychologist at Vanderbilt. 'We could be losing some modern-day Edisons and Fords.' Spatial ability can be best defined as the ability to 'generate, retain, retrieve, and transform well-structured visual images.' Some examples of great inventors who have used their high levels of spatial ability to innovate include James Watt, who is known for improving the steam engine, and James Watson, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA. Nikola Tesla, who provided the basis for alternating current (AC) power systems, is said (or fabled) to have been able to visualize an entire working engine in his mind and be able to test each part over time to see what would break first. Testing spatial aptitude is not particularly difficult but is simply not part of standardized testing because it is considered a cognitive function — the realm of I.Q. and intelligence tests — and is not typically a skill taught in school. 'It's not like math or English, it's not part of an academic curriculum,' says Dr. David Geary. 'It's more of a basic competence. For that reason it just wasn't on people's minds when developing these tests.'"
Dozens of posts will be made in this discussion where people will manage to mention that they have well above average spatial reasoning skills.
I know this will happen because of my highly developed spatial reasoning skills - it gives me great insight into human behavior.
#DeleteChrome
You can easily measure them. Getting people to agree on what the measurements mean in practical terms is where we fail.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
I have seen a correlation as well. I have always had a knack for spatial relations, and some of the best IT folks I know do as well. I know it is anecdotal, but a large collection of anecdotal evidence is called data. :)
I'll expand on this.
What can you do with two sticks and a string?
Someone who is creative can take the sticks and string and make a variety of things or use them in a variety of ways.
Someone with spacial abilities doesn't need to actualize those things or uses, they can visualize them in memory and then describe them (assuming they have language to do so - which is typically where formal education enhances existing abilities).
Try it yourself. First get the supplies though. You may find that you are creative with them in your hands but may struggle to come up with ideas in memory. Children are especially better at handson creativity and struggle with spacial abilities.
Some ideas.
Tools, toys, art, machines, instruments. Don't forget that sticks bend and can be broken. Also you could make a component of something more complex.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
Wrong. The master skill is laziness. The desire to automate everything so you can sit back and read a good book or use spacial abilities to hack on your home automation Arduino kit, so you can sit back and read a good book.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
As a visual thinker myself, the quantum world is very anti-visual, at least in terms of the everyday physics we know and love. While it may have served science well in the past, it may not in the future as the big mysteries are increasingly in the quantum realm.
Table-ized A.I.
Is good spatial ability because of / or an indicator of creativity?
Or, is creativity because of good spatial ability?
If spatial ability has some sort of causal effect on creativity then LEGOs (and no, I don't work for them! :) should be required part of every childhood. (How many science Nobel prize winners used LEGOs/tinker toys/wooden blocks when they were little?).
Also it would be an interesting to see what effect watching movies or even playing video games have had (looking at images on a 2D surface) have had. Maybe that explains the term "couch potatoes" (looking at 2D images exclusively might make the brain very UN-creative). Perhaps 3D video games like FPS would more than make up for this and games like minecraft even more so. Still this is another reason why fully immersive virtual reality can't come soon enough (that is if we don't all get sick from vertigo)!
I wonder if the stock price if LEGO has changed due to the findings from this study?
Isn't this "spatial reasoning" the same as the knack, as described in the classic Dilbert cartoon? Doctor: "Your son has 'the knack'" Mrs. Dilbert: "can he live a normal life?" Doctor: "No. He'll be an engineer."
Ok, well clearly you are a genius. And let's explore that --- because it's important ...
... well ... it isn't easy to define gifted so lettuce not go there and ok thanks!
Schools are targeted for the middle of the bell curve -- they have to be! -- and even the gifted classes are targeted for the bell curve of the gifted students --- which
A. Creativity cannot be taught.
B. Talent is in the context of the time. It isn't fair, but it is true.
C. The educational system never knows how to detect --- let alone help --- talented young people. Welcome to the shark tank --- the game of top dog with no rules.
Short version: If you have talent ---> you have to develop further largely yourself, other people and the system don't even know HOW to help you.
Plus it ISN'T their fault --- talent is UNUSUAL and by definition this means nobody really knows how to feed your talent.
PROTIP: Take control yourself while listening, if you are special --- you are special in that others don't know best how to help because you are so awesome.
Priest: "Universe from nothing, no laws of physics, sped up time"+ huge discrepancies. Creationism? No. Big Bang Theory
Oddly, I *did* dismantle the family refrigerator when I was 12.
The parents were away, and the thing stopped working. This was an older units with a separate compressor and motor - a big belted wheel that turned a pulley on the side of the compressor.
I took off the front panel. pulled out the frame containing the motor and compressor, and discovered the relay wasn't working. I unplugged it, cleaned/sandpapered the contacts, and put it all back before the parents got home (and told them what happened).
I also did the clock thing. I modified a mantel clock to a) not ring the hour, and b) start ringing at 2:00 AM and not stop. I hid it under my sister's bed on her wedding night.
I strongly believe special traits can be developed, including spacial ability. If you believe Geoff Calvin, there's no such thing as talent or innate ability. Everyone who is identified as an expert in their field (Mozart, Tiger Woods, Jerry Rice &c) had put in enormous amounts of practice before becoming expert. For instance, Mozart was composing at age 4, but didn't write anything particularly good until his twenties (IIRC - may have gotten the ages wrong).
Feynman, for example, believed that geniuses are common, but due to lack of education, lack of encouragement, poor education, or lack of leisure time they have no chance to blossom. (Meaning: genius-level people are too busy with a job and family to really sit down and create things.)
The literature and current studies indicate that, barring physical deformity, anyone can become an expert in just about anything. They only have to practice long enough and hard enough.
Now for the story. As a bad kid I was locked up. During that year I went though many psychological tests and IQ tests but it wasn't my first encounter with them. Having been labeled a smart kid (reading college level in grade school), I was somewhat of an outcast because A grades were so simple for me. I think it was simple really, I had read beyond the classes so the material was sometimes below me. I wasn't afraid to ask questions but I have had one lingering demon - math.
Something about the rote memorization bothered me, the lack of proof of how things worked. I dropped out of caring about it once they introduced imaginary numbers. Without understanding the formulas or using them, I have to come up with my own ways to make math work for myself. I could fake it well enough in trigonometry by memorizing the formulas and applying them but I swear to you I just can't put those into real world problems for the life of me but I can get an A on your final. Each time I've tried to read into algorithms I always get lost by the math symbols that aren't explained so I expect that in some ways this works for and against me. For me because I have to solve a problem with my own brain, against me because others won't see me doing it the way they were taught or how it's "supposed" to be done. I imagine that it takes me longer too since I'm reinventing the wheel. Where I get back time though is on visualizing a complex system before it exists and keep all the parts in my head. I'm good at figuring out where bottlenecks or potential problems will be. I think this helps me with making accurate time proposals and debugging the work of others. I've become the local 'goto' person in this company even for things I don't do daily. Eighty percent of the messages I get for work now are looking at something broken somewhere else. I could offer them that high spatial makes for a good debugger perhaps.
Back to the kiddie topic.
I was constantly watched and tested even in advanced classes. These classes gave me a social stigma I couldn't handle once I became a teen so I refused to go to school and rebelled intensely, after all, everyone around me was constantly saying I was smart. It was time to put down smart and work on my impossible social life because smart was under control. This led to a commitment to girl's school indefinitely for refusing completely to attend high school. In one door and out the other each and every day. Inside lockup their tests also quantified where my skills were and I can't forget how high my spatial ability came out. I kept the paperwork for it but the odd part was that the careers they suggested to me where nowhere near what I derive enjoyment from. They suggested judge, lawyer, and something medical. Only the lawyer sounded appealing because you could argue nonstop. None of them sounded to me like what I wanted, to turn the pictures in my head into reality. I can do that with programming. What I get out of programming is a desire to improve. When I want to feel creative lately I turn on 'Daft Punk - Technologic' to spin my juices. The song is fast and tech oriented, it goes through all the phases of usage and reminds me why speed matters to users and how products are lines away from being trash or replaced.
Those careers suggested seem very bound to rules to me. Had I listened to their assessments of my strengths I wouldn't be posting here or continued my reading in this direction. Especially if I had listened to the people who told me you NEED math skills to be involved with programming. Since I've had so many tests and been through intense counseling I don't think they know at all what makes people tick or at least they don't take enough factors into their decisions. What it all has really done though is make me aware of what I'm good at and what I'm not, that let me choose a path that suited myself.
Art has nothing to do with creativity. Design has nothing to do with it either.
Writers are creative. Musicians are creative. Engineers are creative. Even politicians are creative. Creativity is the act and process of making something new. It is composed of existing parts and pieces whether those are paint, words, ideas or bits but the arrangement is new and unique (until it is copied - which is not a creative act, unless the process of copying is itself new).
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
Yep, all five of them.
Violence is like duct tape. If it doesn't solve the problem, you didn't use enough.
Hold on there cowboy...I got this far into your response...
Yeah see, the Bell Curve is not accepted in modern science, especially by people like Chomsky.
Even those who would disagree with Chomsky...drop whatever school or scientist you want, the idea is defunct.
It's important to also understand *why* because it's a good introduction to high level statistical analysis and how it can be weilded incorrectly.
A good analogy is to the work of Freud. Practically everyone knows Freud in some way as a famous Psychologist...anyone who has *studied* Psychology at virtually any level can tell you his basic theories, and they'll tell you, as I'm sure you know, that most of his theories have been debunked and now sit in the history's museum of archaic science.
Archaic but foundational to be sure.
The 'Bell Curve' is a concept not a scientific law or observed phenomenon. It was constructed using the language of statistics, but an idea or concept nonetheless. It became 'popular' because of its presentation and the general emergence of data analysis in daily life due to changes in technology.
Put your three claims to a similar level of rigor...you'll see easily that they are all logical fallacies:
Data and yes even test scores can tell a trained educator a lot. However...and if anything, take away this **one** truth from this post.....even the **best** data (and 'Bell Curve' is based on severely flawed methodology) is only as good as the person who is interpreting and reporting it.
Thank you Dave Raggett
>What can you do with two sticks and a string?
The only answer is Nunchucks.
God spoke to me
I looked at these tests and tried to figure it out for a bit but unless I actually cut those things out and folded them up there is just no way I could figure those things out.
Visualizing unfolded parts is a skill that improves with practice. Anybody who does sheet metal work sees such problems routinely. There are programs for this, such as eMachineShop or Autodesk Inventor. Rectangular sheet metal design is not that hard. Origami, though...
There's a higher level of visualization than this. I used to develop high-end animation software, so I met pro 3D animators. I've seen one draw a head by drawing a series of 2D cross sections freehand, then skinning it. I can use the 3D animation program, but I can't do that.
Sculptors have that skill, too. There's a classic line: "The story is told that the Pope visited Michelangelo in his studio one day, and on seeing him sculpting his statue of David, the Pope asked, "How do you know what to cut away?" The great artist's response was, "I simply chip away anything that doesn't look like David."'
That is not a joke. There are people whose 3D visualization is that good.
This may be inherited. I know a good artist whose drawings have hung in the Smithsonian. She has that kind of visualization ability. So do her son and daughter, although neither works as an artist.
A. Creativity cannot be taught.
While true, ...
Says who? Creativity can and is taught. I teach it all the time. I work with kids in after school programs. We do science and robotics stuff. I have taught the kids to better visualize moving 3D parts by practice and exercises. I have also taught them how to come up with creative ideas. There plenty of ways to do this. If you pair a dull kid up with a brighter kid, he will learn by example. I teach the kids that, instead of starting with a conventional solution and working forward to something innovative, do it the other way around: think of the craziest thing you can, and then work backwards toward something that is actually workable.
Creativity can and is taught. I teach it all the time.
You can stand up and "teach" it, but is it learned?
I work with kids in after school programs ..... If you pair a dull kid up with a brighter kid, he will learn by example.
You are part of the problem - trying to normalise everyone. In the UK there has been a theory of socialist origin that everyone has exactly the same ability, but opportunities differ. So they abolished Grammar schools (which were selective) and put all kids in the same "comprehensive" schools with, like your theory, the idea that the [apparently] bright kids would pull the [apparently] slow kids up to the same high level. What has happened is that everyone has ended up mediocre. Goes a lot to explain why the UK has fallen from being world technical leader to just saying "wow" when they see a new gadget from Taiwan.
My son was exceptionally bright, so in a class of mixed abilities he got postioned into tutoring his slower fellow pupils (like in your classes), so for two years he learned nothing (except from me at home) and began to get dissillusioned with learning. That is not even to mention the distraction of the disruptive pupils, who tend to be the duller ones because it is the duller ones who are not interested in learning (cause/effect or effect/cause ?) so out of boredom they create havoc instead.
>>What can you do with two sticks and a string?
>The only answer is Nunchucks.
Bow and arrow. (Nobody said they all needed to be attached)
Whip (Nobody said you needed to use both sticks.)
A rocket launcher (If you are in the A-Team or MacGyver)
If you think nunchucks are the only way to kill somebody, you lack creativity. There is an article right here about it.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Competent programmers are a dime a dozen.
Programming is the easiest damn thing in the world. It's so easy that children can and do easily teach themselves!
Sure, some problems are hard. Luckily, you can sometimes avoid them altogether. Go read some of Chuck Moore's work.
Anyhow, how do you judge the quality of a programmer? There's only one way that I know: by the quality of their output. But that can't be right, can it? Some of the most incompetent code I've ever seen has been written by programmers generally considered to be brilliant.
Take a chunk of code known to work correctly. It won't take you long to find one developer to say that it's brilliant, and another to say that it's total garbage. Why? The first developer either doesn't understand it or sees some clever or interesting tricks. The second developer sees it as unnecessarily complicated, the same problem being solvable with a much smaller, faster, and simpler solution.
If you'd rather: Perhaps the code is fine and solves the problem well, but the second developer would have approached the problem differently. Maybe they disliked the use of a specific language feature or technique, choice of brace style, or selected language.
Programmers usually aren't well versed in the humanities and tend to think in absurd black-and-white terms. They constantly mistake completely subjective judgments for objective conclusions. They're also prone to believe absurd myths (mistaking common wisdom for objective fact) and tend to buy in to the latest industry fads. You'll frequently find them defending statements that they obviously don't understand. They've simply never questioned their favorite meme. How could it be anything other than pure fact? Programming is like math, right?
Code quality is highly subjective, obviously. I understand that there are objective metrics like size, speed, and memory use. However, we can only use those to compare two solutions to the same problem! Even then, subjective measures (like readability) will quickly come in to play, which some people will consider to trump this or that objective measure -- particularly when two solutions are close on objective terms.
That absurd black-and-white / right-wrong thinking makes each person think that their subjective opinion is objectively correct, and thus irrefutable. What else can they assume but that they're surrounded by incompetent morons?
Do you know who writes bad code? Everyone. The best developer you know wrote crap code last week. You wrote crap code last week. I wrote crap code last week. Not you, you say? You used the latest set of buzzwords? Remember this: Yesterdays best-practices are today's obvious mistakes. Sometimes they oscillate between bad and good. Pick damn near any topic and dig through both current and old articles and blogs to get a sense of how the common wisdom changed over time. (Nonsense "design patterns" are an easy mark. You'll find lots of back and forth on many of those.)
There are other reasons, of course. A big problem seems to be developers over-complicating problems. Sometimes going so far as to write an interesting problem that solves the problem they've been tasked with as a side-benefit. I replaced an 81k (1700 line) component with an 8k (300 line) component a couple weeks ago. Was the developer of the old component incompetent? Not at all. He just made the problem significantly harder than it was. I'd guess that it was to keep the otherwise dull project interesting -- or because he found the problem space interesting and wanted to explore it.
When I see stuff like this I can't tell if it's arrogance or just insecurity.
Required reading for internet skeptics
Spatial ability is testable. I took such a test to get into high school.It is explicitly listed on tests such as the ASVAB.
I also took such a test (called the "Eleven-Plus", in the UK years ago to get placed in a selective Grammar School), and I am suprised that someone says it is "untestable".
The Eleven-Plus consisted of three papers, Maths, English and Intelligence. The intelligence test included a lot of diagramatic puzzles such as being able to pair patterns that were both mirror-imaged and inverted. I hated the English test but loved those spatial puzzles - could do them at a glance. I am now an engineer and need to use those spatial abilities all the time.
And who brings on the brighter kid, handicapped by his dull team-member ?
The Bell Curve was published in 1994.
Well... most of them were published in the 90s, but a few were published in the 80s and 00s.
Dark Reflection