Thinking Young
By Peter LloydA group of first-graders and a group of adults were seated at a basketball game. They were asked to count the number of times the players passed the ball. Which group do you think came up with the more accurate count?
I don't know. Probably the adults. That wasn't the point of this test conducted by Emory University researchers. These creative researchers had something else in mind.
During the game, a woman in a white dress carrying a parasol, crossed the court and exited the arena. After the game, the subjects were asked if they had noticed the woman. The results should make you think: 75 percent of the first-graders and none of the adults said they noticed her.
I found this experiment and its results difficult to believe until I took this video test and... Well, see for yourself. We could call the low adult score the result of their superior powers of concentration, but don't you think something as bizarre as an oddly dressed woman walking through the middle of a basketball game should have caught everyone's attention?
What explains the adult oversight? Could it have something to do with why some adults fail to recognize the potential in an out-of-bounds idea? Why we immediately reject foreign concepts. Why as adults it's so much easier to do what we're told?
Business Week reported once that 90 percent of a child's creativity is destroyed by age seven. At 40, the report continued, we're about two percent as creative as we were at age five.
This fact became one of the starting points of the book Think Naked: Childlike brilliance in the rough adult world. The book goes on to provide techniques for putting your four-year-old spirit in charge of your adult capacities. These techniques won't make you younger but they will help you think young, act more like a kid, and have fun.
Thinking is one part of the aging process you can reverse. Try it. And to see how well you're doing, try describing your job to a four-year-old. If you can't make it sound like fun, maybe you should change careers.
Peter Lloyd is co-creator with Stephen Grossman of Animal Crackers, the breakthrough problem-solving tool designed to crack your toughest problems.