Representing Neurons

Last year several websites posted articles about the research of David B. Hay and co-researchers (Darren Williams, Daniel Stahl, Richard Wingate) who published a paper investigating the drawing styles of undergraduates, trainee scientists, and leading neuroscience researchers when making drawings of neurons. The following image shows the three sets of drawings. 

The upper line was produced by undergraduate students and shows a close adherence to textbook diagrams whilst the mid line was produced by PhD students and postdoctoral researchers more familiar with neurons under the microscope. The lower line of drawings was produced by expert neuroscientists and shows the greatest variety of approaches to the task.

The research of Hay et al claims that:

“The analysis strongly suggests that a willingness/ability to hybridize extant brain cell knowledge with imaginative conjecture grounded by experience of experimental plausibility gives rise to drawings that are recognized as being ‘expert signatures’ by all classes of participants.”

In other words there was general agreement that the drawings of expert neuroscientists were more “creative,” and on the back of this conclusion various visualization techniques were employed to encourage undergraduate students to be more inventive with their visualisations of neurons. Apparently at the end of this process the drawings of the undergraduates were indistinguishable from the drawings of the experts.

The ability to visualize ideas on paper (and increasingly on screen) is a valuable means of stimulating theories, testing hypotheses and communicating ideas. It is also an important tool in science education - and education in general in fact - because it allows concepts to be digested quickly and efficiently thus optimizing learning and often making it more enjoyable in the process. I’m sure I wasn’t the only child to have wished that physics, biology and chemistry could have involved a lot more drawing and visualization. But what is often missed in the drive towards optimal learning is the value of lateral approaches to concept generation. Students are often treated as inert vessels that need to be crammed full of facts and it is assumed that once these facts have been assimilated that other more lateral skills will emerge of their own accord – or more worryingly - that such skills are superfluous to the advancement of science.

Clearly the work of Hay et al intends to counter such narrow-mindedness and for this reason it should be applauded. Nonetheless, I have several reservations about the way that the study interprets the theory and practice and drawing and the conclusions it makes about creativity in both educational and expert settings.

Different kinds of drawing serve different kinds of purposes and it is vital to understand that these differences have nothing to do with ‘expert signatures.’ When undergraduate students draw neurons the reference material they are given tends to be diagrammatic - usually diagrams in which certain details have been exaggerated in order to make them more informative for a wide variety of applications. When these students draw a neuron they are expected to copy the diagram. Strictly speaking, when a student copies a diagram they produce a predominantly matching representation of the predominantly symbolizing  illustration. So, what they end up with - and few people ever acknowledge this subtle but obvious fact - is a drawing that represents two things simultaneously: a neuron and a diagram of a neuron.  And in either case the strategy of representation is significantly different.

When a PhD student or postdoctoral researcher draws a neuron seen under a microscope they are most likely seeking to produce an image that closely resembles what they see. Even if they are asked to draw a neuron from memory, they are likely to attempt this form of simulating representation. Equally, if their branch of research isn’t concerned with observing neurons under a lens, then it is likely that their drawings will be more like those of an expert neuroscientist, as several of the drawings confirm.

When an expert neuroscientist draws a neuron they are clearly not interested in simulating what neurons look-like. They are probably more interested in how neurons function and their drawings tend to be more schematic because they intend to symbolise what they believe to be salient neuronal processes.

So, when Hay et al ask undergraduate students to experiment with alternative methods of representing neurons they are encouraging different ways of thinking about the features and functions of neurons. This is good. But when they assume that expert drawings are more “creative” they make an important error that is easily exemplified. When a doctor scrawls a prescription, even if it is perfectly legible to the pharmacist, this is no evidence of creative flair and we are right not to seek to encourage aspiring doctors to develop similarly idiosyncratic writing styles. Where information is concerned the style of communication is completely irrelevant. What matters is the purpose.

If experimentation with different forms of representation leads to insights then it is obviously important to exploit this practice. But if the representations produced are uninformative, or worse still if they lead to bad medicine, then there is little point in promoting them, no matter how creative they are claimed to be.

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Thanks to James Atherton for posting the link.

Anatomy of Creativity

If you look up books with the word “Creativity” in the title on Amazon you’re likely to discover as many as 9000 results. These books advise us to wear different ‘thinking caps’ or shift our furniture around or brush our teeth with the other hand. They suggest that we cultivate the state called ‘flow’, find our ‘element’ or engage in all manner of novel or ridiculous activities and states of mind. You name it, there is probably some argument to persuade you that it could make all the difference to your creative life.

Six months ago I wrote a post about an insight I’d had into the nature of creativity. My claim was that innovations are a by-product of variations in human engagement with the world. Broadly speaking, all creativity can thus be understood as a process of variation, in the Darwinian sense, where the fittest innovations survive whilst the weakest are discarded, lost, forgotten or superseded. I still think this idea has a lot of explanatory potential but I have nonetheless become somewhat dissatisfied with its inability to explain why people can be so creative in some areas but not in others.

We tend to think of creativity, like intelligence, as a broad but singular entity that applies to a vast range of fields. But perhaps rather than seeing it as this grand all-encompassing embrace it might make far more sense to think of it as a multitude of different (and not necessarily related) processes of mind that are required in different proportions and combinations depending on the particular creative fields in which people work and even at different points throughout any given creative process.

Why bother thinking this way about creativity?

Well, first of all, because if creativity is indeed all-encompassing then no matter what aspect of creativity you focus your attention on you will find that the improvement is applicable to each and every creative task you encounter. This is patently not the case. What creative processes I employ in order to best solve a coding problem have questionable applicability for solving a problem in teaching or in creating a media installation or writing a blog post even.

I think it’s safe to say that when we engage in any creative activity we utilise a range of different thought processes which, no doubt, correspond to entirely different parts of the brain in just the same way that we use a variety of muscles to perform what we often perceive to be the simplest of actions like, for instance, picking up a pencil. But, just as we use different groups of muscles (but not every muscle) to perform different physical tasks, it seems just as likely that we employ different combinations of brain processes to perform different creative tasks.

If creativity were applicable equally to all tasks across all fields (art, science, engineering, maths etc.) then it would make no difference what activity we perform in order to improve our overall level of creativity. But if different tasks require specific combinations of brain processes, then being able to focus our attention upon these combinations would allow us to maximize the processes necessary for any given creative skill or sub-skill. Furthermore, if we wish to consolidate or deepen specific specialist skills it makes little sense to train a generality of brain processes all loosely associated with creativity across a broad range of unrelated fields.

If we abandon the idea that creativity is a generalised skill applicable equally across all fields and instead think of it as a multitude of different skills which are demanded and applied in different ways to different tasks (some of which are completely unnecessary to certain fields), then we can begin to see why there is such a disparity in the ways that creativity is understood and evaluated in different fields and even within the same field. More importantly, this might also suggest new ways to focus on those very specific skills or skill combinations that are most effective at particular stages in particular tasks and within particular creative fields. And lastly it might help explain why those 9000 books offering to make us more creative are so incredibly muddled, inconsistent and ultimately unhelpful.

Art Gymnasium

I’ve been invited to be one of a group of artist contributors to a current exhibition ("Atelier Public") in Gallery 3 of the Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA) in Glasgow, due to finish on the 17th January 2012. I’m working in collaboration with a good friend, Peter McCaughey, and so far we’ve spent two afternoons working (playing) in the space and we’re planning to spend a few more before the end of the show.

The exhibition takes the form of an open studio where everyone (both invited artists and general public) is encouraged to create artworks in a freeform accumulating installation. A selection of materials etc. are available and there are various means of display as well as furniture for working, reading and talking. It’s not a new idea but if you know my views on “newness” or “progress” then perhaps you’ll understand why I don’t think this is a significant criticism.

I heard today that one of the other invited artists was taken aback when they found the space so filled with other people’s work. It’s not surprising really since it’s already bristling with stuff. As a backdrop to anything subtle it couldn’t be worse and I’ve often found myself looking for a quiet spot to photograph things out of the range of other work, so I can certainly see why other artists would be completely put off by this environment. But despite my misgivings I’ve noticed something which seems unexpectedly positive about the whole event. Today I had the realisation that the gallery isn’t a gallery in the conventional sense at all but has been transformed into a kind of creativity gym. People are turning up in surprisingly large numbers and getting stuck in and are genuinely enjoying themselves. They’re staying not for what they can see but for what they can do. And whilst for the invited artists this is unlikely to be a major motivation (because it provides neither a stage nor an isolated garret), for the general public it’s an opportunity to exercise skills that probably haven’t seen the light of day since school.

Perhaps a few more of such workout spaces would be a good thing for the 'creative economy' that we so often hear that we are part of.

Overrated

Back in March I attended a presentation by Sir Ken Robinson in Glasgow and subsequently became involved in a lengthy discussion on this blog about Sir Ken’s message. Since I had not read any of his books it seemed appropriate to see what he had to say for himself in his latest offering “The Element”. I bought the book in March and have been struggling to finish it ever since. Today I decided terminate the struggle and to commemorate this with a review on Amazon:

Is this book right for you?

Like many people, when I saw Sir Ken Robinson’s first video on Ted.com I was inspired. He seemed to get right at the heart of the problem with present day education and his focus on creativity spoke directly to some of my most deeply held and cherished values. There is no doubt that he has some important things to say and he clearly possesses a prodigious skill with storytelling but the more I consider his message the more I feel that he is playing on a whole swathe of unexamined assumptions and vagaries about the nature of creativity, human capacity and achievement.

Surely nobody would wish to be LESS creative than they currently are. But the consequence of this modest truth is that any respected person who proposes to offer us a way to enhance our own, or our children’s, creative potential is likely to command our attention to a far greater degree than might otherwise be the case - especially if they themselves communicate with intelligence and creative flair.

There are two questions that you need to ask yourself before buying this book:

1: Does everyone possess a unique creative talent?

2: Could there be a universal formula for maximising this creative potential?

If your answer is “yes” to both of these questions then you will love this book. If you are unsure then you will probably like this book. If your answer is “no” to both of these questions then you will find Sir Ken’s evangelism absolutely insufferable.

An Insight into Creativity and Innovation

Following on from an earlier discussion of the theories of Donald Brook and applying some elements of this (though avoiding his memetic theory for the moment) to an emerging trajectory within a number of posts on this blog I’d like to put forward what seems to be a radical new understanding of creativity and innovation that finds support in the work of Wasserman and Blumberg (here). I realise that this is a grand claim so until it can be more extensively tested and debated I offer it up here simply as a conjecture.

Ordinarily we think of discovery and innovation arising as the consequence of human ingenuity and creative engagement with the world. But imagine if this were a wholly inaccurate representation. Imagine instead that innovation arises as an epiphenomenon, side effect or by-product of variations in human engagement with the world. Imagine also that creativity is no mystery of talent and divine ability but is simply a process of multiplying - of varying - the physical and cognitive approaches we apply to problems, materials and relationships and that the consequent variety of outcomes and perceptual perspectives results in an increased probability of innovation and discovery.

How different would this world appear to us?

In such a world there would be numerous people engaged in a vast multitude of activities, from fearsome risk-taking to mindless repetitive drudgery, from feats of unutterable beauty and wonder to acts of unspeakable immorality. Far from being a chaos of variation though, such a world would have to carefully monitor and guard against all forms of exploitation and criminality to ensure that these did not infringe or impede the more general impetus toward cooperative engagement and variation. Similarly there would be a need to avoid unintentional harm or obstruction of the free flow of variation. Laws and codes of practice would therefore have to be instituted and on occasion these processes of regulation, legislation and policing would themselves slow and even halt the progress of variation in some quarters.

It will already be obvious that this description bears all the hallmarks of exactly the world we inhabit. What is most striking about this hypothesis is how snugly it fits all situations to which it is applied. But it isn’t simply a case of a convenient fit or a congenial alternative view but more importantly that the outlook it affords makes clear a whole range of what were previously murky and confused ideas about creativity and innovation. It explains why notions of creativity are mired in the hocus-pocus of genius and talent peddled by such people as Sir Ken Robinson, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi or Eric Booth. It explains why so many so-called geniuses rarely have more than a single major insight in their lifetime to which they return in endless variety. It explains why other geniuses (perhaps the only ones who deserve the title) only arrive at further insights via a mountain of hard work and failure. It explains why using FMRI scanners to locate the neurological core of creativity is a wasteful and futile quest for the most impossibly wild goose, a goose that is in fact no more than a phantasm. It explains why all forms of regulation are a hindrance to innovation and why highly regulated cultures exhibit such a paucity of innovation. It explains the unwavering tension between tradition and innovation and how science’s lack of concern for tradition propels it forward with far greater momentum than art. It explains why innovation will continue to consume ever-increasing quantities of natural and human resources. It explains why there can never be a "calculus of discovery or a schedule of rules by the following of which we will be lead to the truth" and why the notion of "the" scientific method is a myth. It explains how the desire for specialist expertise is very often a desire for access to a territory of greater opportunity. It explains the tension between learning (as a form of pattern recognition) and discovery (as a form of play). In short, it corroborates and deepens the vast majority of the principal insights I have shared on this blog in the last 2½ years.

So to reiterate the main thesis: innovation arises as a by-product of variations in human engagement with the world. And what makes some people stand out from the crowd is that they are in the right place at the right time and/or that they have worked damned hard to get where they are - simple as that.

Lives of the Artists

“Skill is fine, and genius is splendid, but the right contacts are more valuable than either.” - Arthur Conan Doyle

Last September I wrote here about a disparity in the way that theory and practice are graded in art schools and the potential inequality this raises for students. Since joining Facebook last November I’ve become all the more aware of a related anomaly that pertains to the way that courses acknowledge - or largely ignore - the engagement of students beyond the confines of the institution.

It has always been the case that some students are more engaged than others - that will never change. But whilst for a proportion of students, studying is very much a 9 to 5 affair undertaken in order to gain a qualification, for many others their chosen discipline is an integrated and consuming part of their daily life. When these students walk out of the door at the end of the day they continue to engage in communities, discussions and creative cultures that stimulate and inspire them and they in turn contribute back to these cultures: as musicians, DJs, VJs, voluntarily working in galleries or community arts projects, submitting for competitions, attending exhibitions and openings and generally participating in a wide variety of creative opportunities and contexts.

Very often these are the students that excel and continue beyond art school, undoubtedly because the ethic that such engagement engenders becomes a self perpetuating habit. Their hard work doesn’t even feel like work because they are doing what they enjoy and immersing themselves in it as much as they can.

Unfortunately though, when it comes to marking students, it’s already hard enough to fully acknowledge this kind of engagement because the criteria that degree courses use rarely have much space for kinds of engagement that are not a direct consequence of structures instituted and controlled by the institution.

It might be argued that these engaged students will necessarily be more confident and experienced and therefore better able to achieve good grades anyway. To a large degree this is true but there are others whose involvement in such extracurricular culture is more intangible, perhaps more discursive, less visual but nonetheless inventive, playful, thoughtful, and significant. Sometimes these students are brilliant catalysts: not so productive or surprising in the things they create, but rather in the situations or discussions they generate, nurture or promote. Such individuals are an indispensible part of the kinds of critical and creative cultures upon which progressive societies are founded and it is extremely fortunate that the drive to be involved, for such individuals, is intrinsic to the role because certainly the support and acknowledgement they receive from academic institutions is paltry at best.

And I’m not talking about a tiny sub-group of students here either. Over the years, I’ve observed many such individuals on numerous occasions and since I’ve joined Facebook I’ve noticed their engagement even more. If, during the past, it was possible for such individuals to join, for example, a pub discussion and throw in a few well aimed remarks and light hearted volubility across the table in order to keep the discussion flowing into ever more insightful territory, now they are armed with a vast reservoir of links, articles and media that pepper their communications and inform their social presence. Yes, much of what is posted on facebook is inane rubbish and yes it’s often haphazard, but considering the sheer volume, the engagement, the enthusiasm and the evidence of awareness, surely we can do better than to completely ignore the vital participation and contribution that such individuals make to a thriving creative culture.

The Aesthetics of Crime (and a petty misdemeanor)

According to the stats, my post entitled “How to Cheat the Word Count” is one of the most visited on this blog, searches for “cheat the word count” apparently being fairly popular on Google. No surprises there then. Now, I’m all for the creative bending of rules and inventive alternatives to unexamined orthodoxies but borrowing other peoples hard earned deceits is surely a bit rich. Coming up with an innovative cheat is one thing, but stealing one simply heaps subterfuge upon swindle and lacks even the controversial virtue of guile. No honour among thieves indeed!

Seriously though, whilst I’m critical of unimaginative pilfering, the idea of dreaming up novel ways to cheat the system is by no means wholly distasteful to me. Moreover, the notion that creativity is somehow universally positive is clearly mistaken. Creativity’s dark side finds expression in fraud, computer viruses, terrorism, fakery, counterfeiting and many other familiar, and not so familiar, crimes. I’m certainly not about to condone such acts but it’s surely inconsistent not to be curious about, and sometimes even to admire, the human ingenuity that often lies eerily close at their heart.

A book on the aesthetics of crime would seem to be long overdue but perhaps the significant challenge for such a text would be to disentangle the principles at work in beautifully planned and executed crimes from their inherent immorality, the danger being that crime becomes unwittingly elevated to the status of art form. But there is no doubting that certain crimes have something strangely sublime - in the Burkian sense - about them that makes them all the more horrifying, and this horror emerges directly from the profound discord between the aesthetic and the moral. The same fascination can be seen in such films as Silence of the Lambs in which the character of Hannibal Lecter is portrayed as an inordinately creative but depraved monster.

As I say, this is a potential subject for a book (but not one that I’ll ever write) and is perhaps a little too ambitious for a blog post, so instead I’d like to relate a story on a much smaller scale.

Recently I was requested to attend some “staff development” training consisting of several online tasks, an online test and a day of workshops. I hate online tests, I’ll do almost anything to avoid them, and when it comes to assimilating information that has doubtful relevance to me or the things that I value, I’m also a good deal less than enthusiastic about sacrificing time that I could devote to more productive work (I’m sure I’m not alone in this respect?).

Since the online tasks were provided as independent study material, I decided to complete them as quickly as possible, which meant that I would have to devise an efficient method of cutting corners but at the same time gather the necessary data to pass the test (in education theory this is disparagingly termed “Surface Learning” but it’s something in which I consider myself to be something of an expert!).

One of the tests was audio based and required listening to an account of a fictitious event and answering questions based on information recall. I tried it once and failed. Being dysgraphic the task of keeping notes is quite a challenge for me, especially if I have to do it quickly, so this conventional solution really wasn’t applicable. How else to capture the audio then, so that I could refer back to it? My mobile phone of course! And since I’d taken this leap into the sneaky utilization of technology it was only a small step to open up each of the online learning materials in a separate window on my computer and to use this to directly access the answers to the required questions. I probably could have achieved a 100% score but that would have taken more time – I was trying to do this quickly remember – so a few incorrect answers were perfectly acceptable to pass the test.

Was this cheating? It certainly felt like cheating, but then, it also felt like being creative and in some ways the two are indistinguishable. Creativity is a process of improvising, of inventing solutions and transforming imagination into form. It frequently involves illusion (which itself is a form of deception), corner cutting and the exploitation of resources. If our ancestors had never evolved this formidable array of skills, including both their positive and negative aspects, it seems extremely unlikely that we would ever have descended from the trees.

So was it unethical to use technology to short-cut the test? If the information that needed to be assimilated was vital to my job then the answer is “Yes.” Am I therefore admitting to unethical behaviour? Not exactly. Some individuals are very good at retaining information and some are simply not – not unless it’s interesting to them that is – I’m obviously of the latter category. When we lesser mortals are tasked with the job of retaining information we often resort to tools and familiar methods: pen, paper and note taking for example, since it’s cheap and easily available.

My dysgraphia aside, why should the use of a technological form of data retrieval be more unethical than the conventional practice of note taking? I’d argue that it doesn’t. The only thing that made my use of technology ‘sneaky’ was the fact that this wasn’t envisaged by the people who put the online staff development materials together. Presumably it was their intention that these materials would slow down the process and force participants to take notes and assimilate the information at a slower rate. Slower does tend to correlate with better retention, but this begs the vital question: is information retention really necessary when technology provides us with readily available repositories of rapidly accessed information that effectively extend our cognitive capacities?

“Knowledge is of two kinds: we know a subject ourselves,
or we know where we can find information upon it.” -Samuel Johnson

Last February Francesca Gino and Dan Ariely published their research into the correlation between creativity and unethical behaviour in which they claim to have “found a robust relationship between creativity and dishonesty”. If the findings stand up to scrutiny and further research in a wider variety of settings then this would seem to create a genuine dilemma for employers in how to weigh up the potential gains as opposed to the potential losses of employing creative people in their businesses. The findings also present a dilemma for creative people themselves in evaluating their own ethical behaviour since, as Gino and Ariely point out, creative people are also more likely to come up with ingenious explanations to justify their unethical behavior.

Ah… perhaps I should go and do the staff development test again!

Design Thinking: Myth or Meme?

I attended a research seminar yesterday entitled: ‘Design Thinking - Myth or Magic’. I assumed it was a straw man argument staged to provide an opportunity for a thorough demolition but, to my surprise, it was actually being seriously considered by the presenters, even in the face of sagacious criticism in a cited online article by Don Norman.

I’ve suggested in the past that certain kinds of materials and procedures can be understood to engender certain kinds of cognitive processing that would otherwise be inconceivable. It might be thought then, that I’d be sympathetic with the idea of Design Thinking. On the contrary though, I find the term vaguely offensive.

In many ways the notion of Design Thinking sits in a netherworld between the general category of ‘Creativity’ and the more granular but nonetheless further dividable disciplines of, for example, Product Design; Illustration; Film, Graphic Design; Architecture and so on. If certain processes and materials do indeed engender certain kinds of thinking, then it seems unlikely that these different kinds of thought processes could easily be placed under a single rubric, and certainly not one as arbitrary and easily contestable as Design Thinking.

Cognitive neuroscience tells us that we’re only just beginning to understand how the brain functions, so even the term ‘Thinking’ is riddled with complexity and uncertainty. Equally the boundaries of Design itself are so nebulous as to give us serious pause when asserting a definition of what truly constitutes Design as a practice. Many languages don’t even have a word that directly translates as ‘Design’ and even the current definition of the term is surprisingly recent in origin.

No, the idea of Design Thinking simply doesn’t stand up to even the most superficial scrutiny, though, as Don Norman also points out, it might serve a useful function as a public relations tool and, let’s face it, if anyone is able to make a bankable meme out of something as abstract and indistinct as Design Thinking, then who better than designers?

“Art Thinking” just doesn’t do it somehow does it? And that probably tells us about as much as we need to know about how disingenuous the idea of Design Thinking really is.

The Co-Creativity of Hand and Mind

The following is the text portion of a presentation I made at a staff research meeting (a “pecha kucha” in fact) held a few days ago at Gray’s School of Art. The theme of the meeting was “The Co-Creativity of Hand and Mind”:

“Nothing ever conceived of, was made by thought alone.”

I found myself saying this during a tutorial recently in an attempt to encourage a student to take more risks and learn from the process of making rather than simply thinking about making. There are forms of thinking, one might argue, that are only possible when we work with certain materials in certain ways. We literally think differently when physically engaging with materials and processes such that when we cease to use those materials and processes we become divorced from their associated forms of imagination.

But with the rising costs of materials and the increasing financial pressures upon students, is it any wonder that they seem ever more unwilling to learn from the messy and uncertain arena of experiment, failure and discovery? And is this process of making, of testing, of production - and by association - of acquisition, consumption and disposal as benign and impartial as we might ideally wish it to be?

It strikes me that whilst our thoughts and imaginings - these ephemeral products of consciousness - are an undoubted gift, in this culture of objectification and quantification we’re often unsatisfied with - and even distrustful of - the intangibility of imagination. We seek externalizations and evidence: measurable, concrete, palpable realities. We’re unconvinced by ideas without form, by words without effect, and this sets up a challenge for all of us who consider ourselves dreamers as well as makers: what manner of impact do we desire upon the world and what price are we prepared to pay for it, or rather; what price are we prepared for the world to pay?

When we speak of the co creativity of the hand and mind, of course the hand is simply a metaphor for describing our interactions with the world and our manipulations of it. We touch on things and we are, in turn, touched by them: by the impress of the world. We feel our way through a sensory and somatic landscape that subtly and profoundly registers our presence and invites our contemplation. Our minds are formed and informed by nothing but sensory impressions and our manifold meanderings through memories, dreams and imaginings. Embodied Knowledge is the only knowledge we will ever truly know, for our bodies are the only interface we possess.

Much of what we create can be divided in two ways: as an extension of our senses or as an extension of our capacities. These two impulses are by no means the same. We extend our senses in order to gather data and to locate ourselves in the world more precisely. The extension of our capacities takes the form of toolmaking and our manipulations of the environment, to bend it to our will and to locate ourselves in the world more comfortably. Our senses reach out into the world in order to perceive it for what it is despite our presence. Our capacities, on the other hand, reach out into the world to make our presence felt. Our senses gather what comes to them unimpeded, whereas our capacities reach out to grasp, to manipulate, to possess and to consume. What our senses take makes no impression save on our minds. What our capacities make is nothing but impression, influence and impact. The impress of the world upon our senses is as intangible as emptiness, whereas the impress of our mind upon the world can be seen and felt in the entire constellation of existences that live and die by the hand of man.

But there is, perhaps, another less sinister and therefore more hopeful aspect to our capacities: we have the ability to give, to share, to transform and probably most importantly of all, to protect, to defend, to heal and to nurture.

And these thoughts raise another more encompassing question: in a context where learning emerges in large part through the consumption of materials, energy and resources, where should creativity and pedagogy reside within this fragile ecology of hand and mind?