This means we are not only children longer, we are childlike longer, and that
has made us by far the most creative and adaptable creatures ever. We are not
a computer that follows routines laid down at birth, Jacob Bronowski once
observed. If we are any kind of machine, then we are a learning machine.
This is why child's play and creativity are so deeply linked. Play has
multiple meanings depending on whether you are an anthropologist, psychologist,
parent, or child, but among its hallmarks are the simple joys of pushing
boundaries, expanding limits, randomly galumphing around to see what happens
just for kicks. Even long-faced philosopher Martin Buber had to admit, Play is
the exultation of the possible.
At the heart of playing is the strange phenomenon of curiosity. You really
can't have one without the other. One theory about curiosity is that we are all
born infovores, and in that curiosity we crave new knowledge and experience
in something like the way we crave food. It's a kind of mental and emotional
hunger that requires ongoing feeding and satisfaction. Old knowledge doesn't
satisfy our curiosity because it is familiar; we have eaten it before. So how
do we know when something is new? Because it surprises us, because it's
different from what we are used to, fresh.
Every creature has an evolved talent for identifying what is surprising or out
of the ordinary for one simple reason: it's central to our survival. Those that
fail to tune into the change around them, those that aren't sensitive to
surprise, soon join the legions of species no longer with us. It's a talent
that reaches bank hundreds of millions of years.
For modern humans like you and me this makes curiosity a way to gather new
information that has survival benefits, but also a process for gathering the
building blocks out of which we assemble entirely new experiences and new forms
of knowledge. One of the behaviors that makes us different is our affection for
playing around randomly, joining this with that or that with another thing with
no particular reason except to create more surprises that satisfy our
curiosity, which in turn results in still newer experiences, new inventions and
insights. Innovation and originality are by-products of our lifelong, childlike
love of goofing off!
-Chip Walter (LAST APE STANDING)
Henri Matisse:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fOldcM7zubU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fOldcM7zubU
