What I'd like to talk about this morning are the conditions for creativity and look at some of the research that supports that, especially as we're considering how to unstructure our classrooms and our learning environments. I also want to tap into an ancient theory that I think makes it all possible. Before doing that, though, what I'd like to do is tell you a story related to counseling. He was once in a while an English teacher or a visual arts teacher will send me a piece of student work just to see what I think about it and whether I should do something to follow it up. When this came in, from one of our grade six boys, the teacher sent it to me, followed up and sat down with a student and just said, you know, in a profound way, what can you tell me about this portrait? And he said, oh, and I was expecting you to resist inserteers, but what he said was, yeah, Mr. Clark, I'm pretty disappointed in that one. I said, really, disappointment. He says, yeah, he's like, take the face color, for instance. He goes, I was sketching for so long that by the time I got to painting, everyone else had been painting for like half an hour. I thought this color would work, but it was the only one that was available for me. He's like, seeing it here, yeah, it just doesn't have the impact that I wanted. Okay, well, how about the tears then? He goes, oh, yeah. He's like, well, Mr. Welk, the art teacher. He said our portrait should have a motion. And I had just painted the face so I couldn't make any changes there, so I figured, well, I can do some tears. So I added those. I said, okay, but how about that splattered back wall? He said, well, Mr. Welk, he said that we should have some texture in our backgrounds. And I still had some orange paint on the paintbrush from the face painting, so I put that on the back, and then my friend had some red paint on his brush. I borrowed that and I painted that in. And so that's how I got the texture on the back wall. So now we had a longer conversation, and I could be relieved that yes, this didn't in fact reflect his well-being at the time that he did the portrait. And he could also see that it wasn't all for not. Actually, this did have some pretty valuable impact. But it wasn't what he intended. And it raised a question for me, like, what are the optimal conditions for creativity? So yes, what are the optimal conditions for creativity? So I did a little research. One of them is the idea of space or openness or light. This is George O'Keefe's studio in the southwest of the US. From light, we get these valuable details that we can work with. From openness and space, we have the comfort to settle into longer projects to develop momentum. They did a study, a FMRI study, on freestyle rappers. And they found that their neurological states, when we're in that creative flow, are very similar to our sleep patterns, which are characterized by lower self-awareness and higher levels of the feel-good neurotransmitter dopamine. They also found that light heightens our emotional experience when we're in different moments. And that can be useful for finding out what's significant about that or finding inspiration. That's the study from the Carlson School of Management. And actually, that same study, they found that light can do just the opposite. It actually increases our feelings of self-awareness or inhibition. Think about why dance clubs might be dark as opposed to brightly lit. They also found that light can provide sort of distractions. And so by reducing light, we're able to focus more. And what they did was they looked at groups that were studying in lower light conditions. They found they were better at problem solving. They were better at lateral thinking. And they displayed greater levels of insight with their analysis. Also studying great groups, very few great groups that do amazing things actually have all the resources that they need. And, veribly, there's some obstacles that they need to work around. So restriction is also valuable. Next one came out recently from the University of Minnesota. You may have seen the headlines. If you want to be more creative, work at a messy desk. And they found that that was true, actually, with the group that worked in a messy environment. And then we're put to a creative task with ping pong balls. Their ideas were judged to be more novel and more innovative than the control group that was working in a neat environment. But the group working in a neat environment, despite displayed wiser decision making, looking at the long-term outcomes, they were less impulsive. And they were able to maintain focus for longer periods of time. Arguably, that's just as important as innovation and novelty. CS Lewis, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Wolf, Andy Warhol, F. Satt Fitzgerald, a number of famous artists have taken vast advantage of creative groups and the inter-pollination of ideas that occurs there. In fact, one study at Harvard University found that we don't even actually need to interact with the people that we're working with. If we perceive that the people around us are on the same team that we are, we get the advantage of really it's equivalent of the home court advantage in sports, and we play closer to the top of our game. We also know that our minds need time to connect with itself, to make new ideas with other new ideas, to make new ideas with previously existing concepts or memories. We also need time away from our projects and our problems to allow those innovative and novel ideas to mature and percolate to the surface. Perhaps most surprising to me and some of the research I did was that we actually benefit from provocation. Our brains benefit from being overwhelmed at certain times. It causes a neurological equivalent of fight or flight, and that causes us to step out of those well-worn pathways and try new ways of thinking and doing. So what do we do with Turekensile, the different piece of advice or the different evidence that is produced in the research? I think the answer lies in not looking at them as mutually exclusive or antagonistic, but really as two sides of the same coin. In Japanese Zen, this is called Gigi Muge. And from Gigi Muge, what we realize is that there are really no rights or wrongs, but just different forms. Oh, sorry. Let me go back. So with the opposites that were presented with, each one could be an ally, or each one could be an enemy in the creative process. It depends on what our needs are and what stage of the process that we're in at that time. So what I would do is encourage us, as we experiment with different ways of doing things and run to creative roadblocks, is rather than thinking about what am I doing wrong or what do I need to do it right? Is to think about where are my conditions maybe too narrowly focused, so if I broaden those out to an opposite or to another extreme, there may be some possibilities that lie there. So I'll leave you with a Japanese proverb, which reads, in the landscape of spring, there's neither better nor worse. The flowering branches grow naturally, some long, and some short. Have a great day, everybody. Thank you.