The Nobel laureate Barbara McClintock used to talk about developing a “feeling for the organism” so profound that she felt she had become the genes inside the corn plants she studied: “I found that the more I worked with them the bigger and bigger [they] got, and when I was really working with them I wasn’t outside, I was down there. I was part of the system.” Joshua Lederberg, another Nobel laureate, stressed the importance of learning how “to become an actor in a biological process, to know how [to] behave as if I were a chromosome.” Albert Einstein wrote about mental experiments involving visual images and muscular feelings. And the mathematician Stanislaw M. Ulam said that he used mental images and tactile sensations to perform calculations, replacing numerical values with the weights and sizes of imagined objects.
Those descriptions of scientific thinking may surprise you. Many people are unaware of the secret hiding in the cognitive closet -- that, as Einstein repeatedly stated, “No scientist thinks in equations.” In addition, as we discovered in the research for our book Sparks of Genius, no scientist thinks in words. Nor, it turns out, do most creative people in any discipline.
For many authors, writing comes not from verbal formulations but, as Isabel Allende says, from “somewhere in my belly.” Gary Snyder says writing starts with “visualizing and revisualizing,” and Stephen Spender speaks of manipulating the “logic of images.” The novelist and painter Wyndham Lewis noted that his art got him in the “habit of thinking of things in plastic and pictorial terms” when he wrote. Vladimir Nabokov credited his drawing teachers with developing his ability to meet the “camera-lucida needs of literary composition.”
Such statements make writers sound like visual artists. Yet, the painter Susan Rothenberg describes her process of painting not as visual but as “really visceral. ... A lot of my work is about body orientation, both in the making of the work and in the sensing of space.” Similarly, Henry Moore’s sculptural ideas emerged not from what he saw, but from “try[ing] the positions oneself” so as to imagine “the form pressing from the inside trying to burst.”
The imaginative processes of those writers and artists bear an uncanny resemblance to the way McClintock, Einstein, and other scientists solve problems. Indeed, they all use the same mental tools.
Creative thinking -- the kind of thinking in every discipline that generates and conceptualizes new insights -- relies on what the philosopher Michael Polanyi has called “personal knowledge": images, patterns, sensual and muscular feelings, play-acting, empathizing, emotions, and intuitions. Those forms of knowledge have almost no place in our universities, where thinking is almost universally presented as if formal logic were its basis, and words and mathematics its languages of choice. New ideas, however, originate in nonlogical and nonverbal modes that are translated only later into symbolic languages. By slighting those preverbal forms of thinking, we stifle the inventive capacities of many students.
Students should practice and master different kinds of thinking, and some innovative professors have come up with ways to teach them how to use mental tools that are new to them. For instance, to enhance understanding of the mathematics of physics, the physicist and amateur actor Jacob Shaham suggested having students treat equations as if they were the text of a play, and learn how to act them out. Just as Shakespeare’s or Brecht’s lines are cryptic abstractions of actions and events that can be brought to life only by staging them, equations and natural processes also can be dramatized.
The entomologist Catherine Bristow teaches by means of classroom theater how DNA produces proteins, allowing students access to the interior worlds frequented by McClintock and Lederberg. Bristow assigns her students roles as DNA bases, transfer RNA’s, and amino acids, and asks them to figure out how they must act in the drama of gene expression. The students embody their formal knowledge, developing a feel for the system from the inside out. Historians and anthropologists have staged similar re-creations, gaining new insights by acting out parts rather than passively reading about them.
Both artists and scientists learn imaginative skills by building things with blocks and making models, and students can do the same. Such exercises develop an awareness of form and of the relationship among shapes that is useful whether one needs to imagine the interactions of molecules or the structural stresses of an architectural design. Visual thinking can also be taught, as Woodie Flowers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Robert McKim at Stanford University have done for years, by giving students simple exercises that involve making objects and drawing them from memory.
All forms of nonsymbolic thought require an awareness of sensual and emotional feelings. Even people who express themselves in words recognize, as the poet E.E. Cummings said, that "[t]he artist is not a man who describes but a man who FEELS.” Thus, the methods of the great director Stanislavsky are of great educational value. His cultivation of attention to inner as well as outer experience is as important to the sciences and humanities as it is to acting or other arts.
Historians, sociologists, and even biologists develop an understanding of the people or animals they study through empathy. Mathematicians and physical scientists achieve visual, muscular, and tactile intuitions by paying attention to the feelings that problems and patterns evoke. The philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell stated that problems always emerge into consciousness through a feeling of discomfort, and the cyberneticist Norbert Wiener suggested that "[i]f there is one quality which marks the competent mathematician ... I think it is the power to ‘operate’ with temporary emotional [and sensual] symbols and to organize out of them a semipermanent, recallable language.”
In Paris, a group of physicists choreographed and performed a dance to explore how it felt to interact as electrons -- a truly physical form of research. Conversely, the dance group Pilobolus is famous for transforming basic principles of balance, torque, and centripetal force into novel movements. The dancers’ knowledge of physics allows them to meld visceral with intellectual insight.
If the skills of playwrights and actors can help mathematicians and biologists to empathize with their subjects, then clearly those disciplines should speak to one another. If both poets and chemists need to be able to imagine a series of events that they will transform into emotional or chemical reactions, then obviously they would benefit from similar -- perhaps shared -- exercises in sensual imaging or visual thinking, or even drawing classes. If physicists can dance their understanding of electrons and dancers can embody basic physical principles, then those disciplines can be explored in unison.
Exploring ideas in nonverbal forms is only the first step, however. Students also need to practice translating between imaginative tools for thinking and the formal languages of communication. Einstein wrote that after he had solved his problems visually and kinesthetically, “conventional words or other signs have to be sought for laboriously ... in a secondary stage.” The sculptor Louise Bourgeois says, “I try to translate my problem into stone.” Georgia O’Keeffe described her paintings as the “equivalents” of her ideas, just as T.S. Eliot said that, in his poems, “I now have the equivalent in words for much of what I have felt.” Things discovered sensually, emotionally, intuitively, and privately must be transformed into public expressions using the language of one’s discipline.
Logic, numbers, and words are ends, not means. If we want to educate students capable of invention within their chosen fields, we must do two things: first, provide them with a rich repertoire of creative mental tools, such as imaging, abstracting, empathizing or play-acting, kinesthetic thinking, analogizing, and modeling; and second, train them in the skills needed to translate what they learn through those tools into formal, symbolic languages such as words, dance, music, or mathematics.
We are not calling for a revolution in education. The inclusion of nonsymbolic mental tools within the curriculum requires only minor changes. One is to emphasize the processes of thinking, along with their results. Every class in every subject could explain not only what we know, but how that knowledge was imagined or invented. Every teacher can draw on his or her own experiences, or those of exemplary individuals within the field, to describe nonsymbolic ways of thinking about the subject. The translation process into a symbolic language could be described explicitly and practiced through appropriate exercises. For instance, a professor could have students transform an image into words, or act out an equation.
Specialists in each discipline should agree to use a common language for describing thinking, pointing out where they use various mental tools in their work. Using terms such as “empathizing” or “imaging” in every class would automatically build transdisciplinary bridges. Such bridges could be broadened if, in addition, teachers explicitly stated that those imaginative-thinking tools can be used to understand anything. As a century of research has shown, material that students learn in one disciplinary context tends to be used exclusively in that context, whereas material that is described as having broader applications is often used in other contexts.
The most successful people in every field share an ability to think in ways that we seldom teach in the classroom. We owe it to our students, and to the world that can benefit from their creativity, to teach them how to recognize and use those mental tools.
Robert S. Root-Bernstein is a professor of physiology and medical humanities at Michigan State University. Michele Root-Bernstein is a writer and historian. They are the authors of Sparks of Genius: The Thirteen Thinking Tools of the World’s Most Creative People (Houghton Mifflin, 1999).
http://chronicle.com Section: Opinion & Arts Page: A64