I would like to recommend a TED talk by Ken Robinson: "Do schools kill creativity?"

This presentation points out to a crucial issue which is mostly overlooked in society: Does our education system encourage creativity? A main conclusion of this talk is that we have to rethink our view of intelligence, which is an essentially diverse quality. This leads to a reconception of the richness of human capacity.

To motivate you to watch Robinson's talk I extracted some quotes from the talk:

"Creativity is as important in education as literacy...
If you are not prepared to be wrong, you will not come with anything original. But by the time kids get to be adults most kids have lost that capacity [of not being afraid of making mistakes]... we estigmatize mistakes.

We get educated out of creativity.

How many presentations have you given during the last year? -not only at conferences but also informal ones- If you are like most scientists the number will be somewhere between ten and sixty - that' s quite a lot. And what if I ask you how many presentations have you attended during the last year? Chances are that the number is this time one order of magnitude bigger - that means without doubt quite a lot of time. But, how many of these presentations do you remember to some extent - let' s say, only the subject and the key points? and how many were particularly good?

The reality is that we attend to(o) many presentations but only a few stick in our minds. This seems like a kind of paradox if we think how much is at play when we present our research: spreading our ideas, establishing a rapport with other scientists, getting a promotion or a better job, and the list continues.

In this post I would like to provoke some thoughts based on a story. Here it goes.

On a cold day of February 2008, I was at the spring meeting of the German physical society. It was early in the morning and I was attending Andre Geim's plenary talk. Anyone who attended one of his talks knows that he is an outstanding speaker. He is also an exceptional scientist, one of his most celebrated achievements being the experimental demonstration in 2004 of graphene, a single layer of carbon atoms arranged in a honeycomb lattice (a material that, due to stability arguments, was not supposed to exist at all in nature!). That day his talk was entitled "Graphene: Exploring carbon flatland". At some point, when addressing the possible applications of this new material, he told a story more or less in these words:

"On a trip to Florida, I was on a boat watching dolphins, and they were jumping out of the water, allowing people to nearly touch them. Everyone was mesmerized by these magnificent creatures. It was an extraordinary romantic moment"- short silence —"well, until a little boy shouted out: "Mom, can we eat that?" Well, it's a similar matter here, okay, we just found this extraordinary material, so we're enjoying this romantic moment, and now people are asking if we can eat it or not. Probably we can, but you have to step back and enjoy the moment first."

Just imagine, you are there in the auditorium listening to a physics talk, your brain is getting tired and starts to ask for a break. Then, suddenly, the speaker, who seems to have heard your brain's prayer, makes a break taking you to the marvelous world of dolphins. You can almost see these sea creatures jumping graciously on the water. The moment is marvelous; your attention is now fully with the speaker, waiting for the next word and then the child asks "Mom, can we eat them?" A hearty laugher spreads all around the auditorium. Through the story the speaker not only conveys a message -which is enhanced by the concrete and emotional story- but also gives a timely pause to keep people awake.

In the The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, Nassim Taleb points out an anecdote about the writer Umberto Eco. According to Taleb, Eco owns a very large and impressive personal library of about thirty thousand books and his visitors split into two main categories: the ones who say "Wow, Signore professore, how many of these books have you read?"; and the others who understand the library not as an ego-boosting vitrine but as a research tool. Taleb stresses that a library should contain as many things that you do not know as you can afford, and he calls this collection of unread books an antilibrary.

The main point is that we should focus more on what we do not know, something which seems to be contrary to what society tells us to do. As Taleb say, imagine someone running around with an anti-résumé telling what he does not know. In this sense, although mostly discouraged in everyday life, acknowledging and embracing the unknown is a crucial ingredient for any creative enterprise.

After many conflicting reports Bernd das Brot, the talking loaf of bread that became famous in the German children's channel Kinder Kanal, was released yesterday after many days of captivity.

The Kinder Kanal star was kidnapped in Erfurt by the so-called "129 A-TEAM" on January 21st "to protest their eviction from an occupied building". The tension increased when his image was broadcasted in a home-made video. After the video was released Bernd's creator, Tommy Krappweis, voiced his concerns that Bernd could be experiencing Stockholm syndrome and could be turned over by the captors. Fortunately, the Police found the cult figure in a cellar in Thueringen last Sunday, thereby bringing his captivity to an end.