Slashdot Mirror
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.
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?
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.
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
And who brings on the brighter kid, handicapped by his dull team-member ?