When asked, “Are you creative?”, perhaps few people can answer with confidence, “Yes, I am.”
However, you are undeniably creative; you simply haven’t been blessed with the opportunities to unleash that ability or even realize your own creativity.
Human history began the moment someone shattered a stone to craft a hand axe. That, in and of itself, is truly the history of creativity.
We’d love to hear your thoughts. Feel free to share your comments!
Profile
Yati Obara
Editor-in-Chief, Scientific Montessori
Based in Japan, born in 1989. CEO of Motherhand and Co-Director of the nonprofit think tank Polymath Research. Holds an M.Eng. and is an AMI-certified teacher. Focused on Montessori developmental theory and AI. Mother of two.
Hiro Obara
Publisher, Scientific Montessori
Based in Japan, born in 1990. Works as a software developer and a weekend farmer. Father of two.
Use your hands and think deeply. That is what true intelligence is.
Yati
This episode’s theme is creativity. I’d like to start with a definition: what is creativity? I think when most people hear “creativity,” they picture something like art.
Hiro
First of all, creativity is something we’re born with. It’s innate.
Yati
That sounds connected to the Montessori idea that children are born complete. So what do you mean?
Hiro
The way I see it, creativity is the hand. Humans are born with hands, so our very existence is creative.
Yati
You mean making things with your hands?
Hiro
I mean the hand is a tool for manipulating the environment, the world outside yourself. You act on the environment, and the environment comes back to you as a different environment. To get a little technical, there’s this thing called a “symbol.” Say there’s a stone lying here. Just by shifting this stone a little, the environment changes. If the stone was blocking some water, now the water can flow through. If there’s wind, the way the wind passes changes. Maybe a little bird was sitting here, or an earthworm was resting underneath. Maybe a centipede was resting there. Maybe someone would have tripped over this stone. Maybe the sunlight casts a shadow there. Even a single pebble is an environment.
Yati
I see.
Hiro
So a stone is, in the end, a symbol. We name it “stone” and say, “This is a stone,” but strictly speaking, it’s a mineral, right? And “mineral” is also just a name, a symbol. Depending on its composition, there’s mica, metamorphic rock, basalt, all kinds of things. If you look closely, there’s zeolite, quartz, and so on. But we lump them all together and call them “stone.” We call a hard lump of elements a stone. So what do you call water droplets falling from the sky?
Yati
Rain.
Hiro
Right, we call it rain. There’s big-drop rain, small-drop rain, all kinds, but we lump it all together and call it rain. In the same way, we treat the things we manipulate as grouped-together symbols. This is epistemology, the study of how we know things. In computer science and interface design, it’s the most basic of basics, and it’s the most interesting part of the study of software.
Yati
That’s interesting, but how does it connect to the idea that creativity is manipulating the environment with your hands?
Hiro
This might be more about intelligence than creativity. Intelligence means being able to act on things, affect the environment, and remake it into the environment you want. Here’s something interesting from recently: cows use tools too. People thought cows didn’t use tools, but they do. For example, they’ll push a fence with their nose and move it aside a little. And they use that to be mean to sheep and such, like blocking them so they can’t get through. They do things like that.
Yati
That’s pretty smart.
Hiro
Having intelligence ultimately means being able to manipulate an object so that it has the effect you aimed for, so the environment becomes what you intended, and actually getting that effect.
Yati
Recently, there was news of exactly that, a cow using a tool. The cow used the two ends of a deck brush differently to scratch its body. Cows have even been potty trained, and one of the people who trained them said, “People tend to think of farm animals as dirty and not very smart, and that affects how they’re treated. If people realize these animals are smarter than we thought, maybe they’ll care more about treating them better.” That reminded me of when Maria Montessori discovered a new picture of the child. The point is to respect that both children and cows have intelligence.
Hiro
Right. It’d be great if pasture raising became the norm.
Yati
That was a bit of a tangent, but back to animals using tools. To give the scientific side, there are three conditions for something to count as tool use. First, the tool acts as an extension of the animal’s body. Second, the tool makes possible something that would be very difficult without it. Third, the animal orients the tool so that it does its job. That’s why things like a crow using a stick to pull bugs out of a hole, or a monkey cracking nuts with a stone, are recognized as tool use. And you were telling me before about an interesting study with chimpanzees, right? The one about using tools in two stages.
Hiro
Yes. In the first stage, they put a banana just barely within reach of one stick, and first have the chimpanzee do a test where it can get the banana by using the stick. Then they put the banana somewhere one stick can’t reach, but two sticks could. If the chimpanzee does what it just learned, it can’t reach. So what does it do? It figures out that joining the two sticks together lets it reach. But if you skip the first stage and only give the second stage, they can’t solve it.
Yati
So they just go, “Can’t reach it,” and give up.
Hiro
But the ones that have succeeded once can get there.
Yati
That’s fascinating.
Hiro
It’s like the experience of success lets them apply what they learned.
Yati
So is that what creativity is? It’s not necessarily about making something.
Hiro
Right. For humans, the most controllable tool of all is the hand. A cow can only shift a fence. Pigs and wild boars dig holes with their snouts, and dogs and beavers carry things in their mouths, but the hand is by far the most free. What is the hand? It’s an externalized brain. Using a tool with your hand is a two-stage task.
Yati
Thanks to our hands, we can use all kinds of tools as if they were extensions of our own bodies.
Hiro
And what I was getting at is that there are symbols, and computers let us use a GUI, a graphical user interface. For example, there are icons like the trash can, or folders. A computer works through a repeating cycle: you click on something, you get a response, and you act on it. Click a file and it opens. Move a file to the trash and it’s thrown away. What you’re doing is changing the environment inside the computer depending on what action you give to an object.
Yati
I see.
Hiro
But what’s actually happening inside is just zeros and ones being processed as pipelines and calculations. We use metaphors to bundle it all up so it’s easy for humans to understand, so everyone can operate it without getting lost.
Yati
To sum up so far: the hand is the source of creativity. Nobody really thinks about it, but by manipulating outside things, our hands remake the environment. And that same thing now shows up inside computers too. That was the analogy.
Hiro
Exactly. Originally, computers used a command line interface, where you typed commands. So only programmers could use them. Then they became graphical, with things represented on screen. You could see icons for files and folders, open them, and work with them. That was the evolution. From there we went from the mouse to touch, and then to voice.
Yati
And now in the age of AI, we’re kind of going back to the command line, aren’t we?
Hiro
Yes. We went from the command line to graphical and now back to the command line. AI generates and edits text at incredible speed, and basically we operate it through chat, which means through commands. That’s the same as how early programmers used to have something like a conversation with the computer through commands. You write a program, compile it, and the results come back as text too. You read that and program again. It was basically chatting.
Yati
That’s true.
Hiro
Now AI can understand and speak human language, and people say it’s gained intelligence, but this isn’t real intelligence. Today’s AI is an extremely good autocomplete, but it’s not intelligence. Intelligence is when, through experience operating on things, you get better at operating, and you become able to make a better environment. Through lots of trial and error, you get better and better at making a better environment. And an environment that’s only good for you doesn’t count. It has to be good for all kinds of agents, meaning good for other people too. When you think about it, that’s what truly wise people are like in human society. People who can create a good environment not just for themselves but for those around them and for others, those are the wise ones. Someone who builds an amazing environment just for themselves isn’t called wise.
Yati
Right. And that’s true of other living things too. If you trace the history of life, like the Timeline of Life in elementary Montessori, amoebas, insects, small animals, birds, microbes, they’ve all been shaping and improving the environment. And among them, humans, with our hands, can affect the environment the most.
Hiro
To give the scientific side, there’s a theory called cybernetics, developed by Norbert Wiener. Basically, it’s about how to get machines to behave like living things, and the answer is to loop behavior through feedback control. In other words, the results of what you did come back to you, and that changes your own behavior and improves it. Then you act again, and feedback comes back again. The cycle keeps going around and around. By repeating this, you learn through trial and error. Ages 0 to 3 are exactly that period of trial and error. Kids try lots of things, and if adults get in the way at this point, creativity gets lost, or rather, basic intelligence doesn’t develop. Movement and the senses don’t fully develop either.
Yati
So everything 0 to 3 year olds do day to day is connected to creativity, in the sense of manipulating the environment.
Hiro
You often see little kids pouring a drink, like juice, from a big container into a cup, spilling a lot, but somehow managing to pour it and drink it themselves. In Montessori, they do this themselves with a pitcher and a small cup, but I don’t think other kinds of education talk much about why that matters.
Yati
Right. And no other approach thinks of something like that as creativity, either.
Hiro
People call things like making something out of clay, or art, or building something in the sandbox, “creativity.” But bringing the water you want to drink, pouring it yourself, and drinking it yourself? I think that’s really creative.
Yati
And from there, after pouring for themselves, they learn to properly prepare drinks for other people, carry them on a tray, lay a place mat on the table and serve, or arrange flowers. That’s usually not considered creative, but it’s incredibly creative. The tables of creative people are so well arranged and beautiful. Every single detail is in high resolution.
Hiro
What’s fundamentally different is that they’re enjoying it. First, they enjoy pouring their own drink into a cup, and they’re using their hands. Holding the cup properly with both hands. They enjoy using their hands in the first place. So maybe enjoying using your hands is what being creative is.
Yati
That’s an interesting definition. Just like when kids paint or make clay art, we should respect the creativity in pouring water into a cup and watch over them.
Hiro
It’s hard to get anything right on the first try, isn’t it? You find your way while trying things out, like “No, that’s not it.” So “trying” really matters. It’s where creativity starts. If you’re not allowed to try, creativity never begins. That also means being allowed to fail, and having your will respected. It also means having your human rights properly recognized.
Yati
Here I want to add a word of caution. I think there’s a misunderstanding about creativity. In Montessori, we’re taught not to intervene if a child is doing something from a good motive, and to intervene if not. For example, if a child is holding a serving spoon differently from how it was shown, but they’re trying to serve rice, we don’t intervene. But if they’re squishing the rice into a mess and playing with it, we do. Some people see that as sensory exploration or creativity, but I don’t think it’s creativity, because its effect on the environment isn’t a happy one.
Hiro
So you’re saying define creativity in more physical terms. Simply put, creativity is syntropy, the opposite of entropy, creating order. Increasing syntropy. In other words, locally reducing entropy. How’s that?
Yati
That’s very physical. Basically, it’s putting things in order. That fits the earlier example of setting the table too.
Hiro
So physically, making a mess is easy, because entropy, the scattering force, is at work across the entire universe.
Yati
Like the example of pouring into a cup.
Hiro
Leave it alone and it spills. This suddenly gets into philosophy, almost cosmology, but everything in this world is dynamic. Nothing is fixed. In this world, if you leave things alone, any ordered state gets broken down. That’s the physical principle at work in the universe, and putting things in order is incredibly hard.
Yati
So being creative was about putting things in order. What Steve Jobs did was creative because he was putting things in order.
Hiro
The iPhone, the iPad, and the MacBook let you handle huge amounts of information with little cost and little energy.
Yati
This is going to sound really harsh, but preschools and schools are losing to entropy, and they’re becoming less and less creative.
Hiro
What is real education? It’s improving intellectual ability. “We’ll look after your kids while you’re at work” is childcare, right? That’s babysitting, not education. That’s getting swapped out more and more. It’s being replaced. What used to be education is turning more and more into babysitting.
Yati
What do you mean by improving intellectual ability?
Hiro
Purely learning about the universe’s physical laws through your own trial and error, and deepening your understanding of the universe based on what you want to do. For example, say you’re learning about fish, and you spend a 50 minute class period with a textbook and pictures drawn on the blackboard.
Yati
Use the real thing already, right?
Hiro
Catch a real fish, hold it in your hands, dissect it yourself, and you go, “Oh, so that’s how it works,” or “It’s slimy and gross,” or “But the insides are actually kind of beautiful.” You make so many discoveries in a short time.
Yati
Schools used to do dissections. They’re losing to entropy.
Hiro
It keeps moving toward less and less hands-on experience. People give all sorts of reasons, like not having money, but not having money is itself a case of losing to entropy. For example, in a cold region like Iwate, in northern Japan, it used to be normal for school PE to say, “Let’s ski during the winter,” and now they don’t ski. And in summer, kids used to swim in the ocean, and that became the pool. In Japan, most public schools have their own pool.
Yati
And now there’s no money for upkeep, so when the pool breaks, that’s the end of swimming class.
Hiro
Inquiry through hands-on experience keeps disappearing.
Yati
The elementary school in our neighborhood used to have a garden that was like a little zoo and botanical garden, and now it’s been completely torn down.
Hiro
In the past, families took care of chickens, horses, or cows at home, right? Now you can only do that if you go to a farming school. And lighting fires, too, you used to be free to have a bonfire. People did it in their yards whenever they liked. But that got banned too, all of it. Nowadays many parks in Japan ban ball games, so you’re not even allowed to play baseball in the park. Like this, if you leave things alone, nothing stays real. The system collapses. Things drift toward the easy way, the easier way, toward doing nothing. Everyone should know that if you do nothing, entropy makes things scatter and break down.
Yati
These days, about the only place you can have a bonfire or ride a horse is inside a video game.
Hiro
Exactly. And in response, saying “Yes, we’ll do a botanical garden,” “We’ll go skiing,” “We’ll dissect fish,” “We’ll go to the ocean,” “We’ll make salt,” saying yes, let’s do it to everything, that’s our school, Polymath School. While the existing education system keeps breaking down, we’re trying to take back everything educational that it has lost. So yes, we’re creative. Guilty as charged.
