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Archive for the ‘creativity’ Category

How we learn – teaching and training

Posted in creativity, education, from the reading room on February 2, 2008| 4 Comments »

Pick the Brain has a great post about teaching and learning. It’s called The Movie Director’s Guide to Effective Teaching. In it, Victor Stachura, the author refers to William Glasser’s theories. Well, this is new to me. I’ve never heard of William Glasser. If you have, what do you think about his ideas and his suggestions? There’s a William Glasser Institute and my little browsing there so far has interested me. I want to find out more. Victor Stachura highlights something he read about learning and teaching from studying William Glasser –

“We Learn . . .
10% of what we read
20% of what we hear
30% of what we see
50% of what we see and hear
70% of what we discuss
80% of what we experience
95% of what we teach others.”

I don’t know about you, but that seems intuitively correct to me. I might take issue with the actual figures used and I also think it doesn’t allow for the processing preferences highlighted from the work of things like the NLP approach which helps us to understand that we are different and some process auditory information better than others, some visual information, and yet others kinesthetic information. However, with that in brackets, the overall thrust of this seems right.

If you are involved in teaching this is an important observation and if you want to learn, it’s equally important. It certainly highlights the importance of what is known as active learning. Sitting attempting to learn passively by just listening or just watching something isn’t easy. But when you have something to read, something to see and to hear, and then you discuss it, you will learn so much more. The challenge beyond that I think is to experience and to teach. I don’t know if you can experience much in a classroom, can you? Don’t you need to get out and actually live what you’re learning? I certainly think that’s true of medical training. Can’t see how you become a good doctor without actually doing it! That last step of teaching so works for me! I find that almost every time I teach, not only in the preparation stage, but also in the delivery, I learn something new myself.

I ran a training day based around characters in Lord of the Rings last week and not only did it convince me that I’ve learned more about my subject than ever, but the feedback from the students was about the best I’ve ever had. The day involved film clips from the Lord of the Rings movies and various small and plenary discussion groups. It was active and interactive all day long.

If you teach, how much do you use movie clips? I use them a lot. I find that not only do they combine the auditory and visual stimulation we need, but they are great for getting discussion going and, fundamentally, they provide the group with an experience – usually something involving both thought and emotion.

To return to the blog post which has seeded this one – the main focus of the piece refers to the “primacy-recency” phenomenon – the finding that we remember the first and last things in a sequence better than the things in the middle. Victor Stachura recommends we deal with this in teaching not just by putting important information at the beginning and the end, but by breaking up the lecture every 15 minutes with some audience exercise, or discussion, to keep attention from waning. He points out that good movie directors know this and change the pace of the movie frequently to achieve a similar effect.

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The importance of story

Posted in books, creativity, from the reading room, life, narrative, philosophy on January 30, 2008| 39 Comments »

The people who come to see us bring us their stories. They hope they tell them well enough so that we understand the truth of their lives. They hope we know how to interpret their stories correctly. We have to remember that what we hear is their story.

Robert Coles in “The Call of Stories”.

Stories have always fascinated me. I love them. Every day when I sit in my consulting room patients tell me the most amazing, fascinating and unique stories. As a medical student I was taught how to “take a history” – I hate that phrase actually – who’s doing the “taking” and what exactly are they “taking” and from whom? Doesn’t seem right to me at all. Instead I prefer teaching medical students how to listen to patients’ stories. However, the point is that this is the beginning of all diagnosis. To a certain extent listening to the patient’s story is a diminished art. There’s an over-reliance on technology and a lot of doctors just don’t seem to be able to make a diagnosis without a test these days. Diagnosis is a form of understanding. It’s a process of trying to make sense of somebody’s experience.

If stories are so important in clinical practice, then how can I learn to handle them better I wondered? There is a developing area of medicine known as “narrative-based practice”, with associated “narrative-based research” methodologies, but materially-orientated, reductionist scientists look down on narrative. They prefer data. So, when I started to study narrative (which, technically is the story AND the way that story is told), I couldn’t find much work from a scientific perspective. I had to turn to the humanities.

One of the books which I really love in this area of study is “On Stories” by Richard Kearney (ISBN 9-780415-247986). Not only is it a fabulous exploration of the place of story in human life, but it’s written completely beautifully. Richard Kearney is a philosopher but he’s also a magnificent writer. This one book taught me more about the importance of story than any other.

Telling stories is as basic to human beings as eating. More so, in fact, for while food makes us live, stories are what make our lives worth living.

This sets stories at the heart of human existence – not optional, but essential.

Aristotle says in “Poetics” that storytelling is what gives us a shareable world.

The key word there is “shareable”. It’s through the use of story that we communicate our subjective experience and its through the sharing of subjective experience that we connect, and identify with others.

Without this transition from nature to narrative, from time suffered to time enacted and enunciated, it is debatable whether a merely biological life could ever be considered a truly human one.

Beautifully expressed. Sets narrative at the heart of what it means to be human and stands it against those who would take a materialistic view of life which they claim can be reduced to data sets and DNA.

Every life is in search of a narrative. We all seek, willy-nilly, to introduce some kind of concord into the everyday discord.

This is one of my favourite lines in the whole book. This is exactly the power of story – it enables us to “get a handle on” life, to bring some kind of order out of chaos.

What does Richard Kearney mean by story then? Well, I’ll finish this post with two more quotes from his book which make it very clear and very simple.

When someone asks you who you are, you tell your story. That is, you recount your present condition in the light of past memories and future anticipations.

This shows that story collapses time, bringing the past and the future into the present. Story telling requires memory, imagination and expression.

Every story requires –

a teller, a tale, something told about, and a recipient of the tale.

Nice and simple, but what profundity lies in there. For every story, there is a unique human being doing the telling, there is the story itself and its subject matter, and, very importantly there’s the recipient – the listener or the reader. Story is, as Aristotle said, a way of creating a shareable world. That’s the greatest potential of blogs, I reckon. By sharing our stories we create a shared world. Yes, sure, stories can divide as well as connect, but without stories, there is no potential for connection, no potential for compassion and no potential for the creation of a meaning-full, and better world.

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When you look at something from another angle, it completely changes

Posted in creativity, from the viewing room on January 29, 2008| 1 Comment »

I just came across this ad. It’s clever.

Watch it right through. Then watch it again.

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Burns Day. A Man’s a man, for a’ that

Posted in creativity on January 25, 2008| 4 Comments »

It’s Burns Night. Robert Burns. Another of my local heroes. Well, not  Stirling man, but a Scot.

I think it’s good to have at least one poet as a hero!

Robert Burns

Here’s a voice thread of me reading Burns.

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An ocean of memories

Posted in creativity, life, photography, writing on January 7, 2008| 4 Comments »

A mind like the sea

Atlantic

Imagine life is like a ship sailing over the ocean. Every experience you have makes a mark on the sea. As you travel through the world you leave a wake behind you, a white foam, a swell and a pattern of waves. These are your short term memories. If you look back behind you, you’ll see traces of what you’ve just done, of where you’ve just been, but the wake doesn’t last long. It soon dissipates and settles and becomes indistinguishable from the surface of the ocean again. But some experiences are heavier. They make a bigger impact and they leave objects floating on the water. The flotsam and jetsam of daily experience, lasting longer than a wake, but still floating away, scattered, unanchored. Memories like little fragments of material, boxes, or bottles, washed white in the sea and the sun. Possibly to be recovered some day when they come floating by again, or because you find them lying, unexpectedly, on a desert island somewhere, or someone else picks them up and brings them back to show you. Some sink deeper below the surface and turn into fish or sea creatures with a life of their own, coming up near the surface from time to time, flashing silver or rainbow colours in the water as they swim by. Some become sharks and scare you every time their fins break the surface of the conscious sea. Some become dolphins or whales and leap up joyfully and thrillingly. You can go looking for some of them if you know where they live. Some sink even deeper and become coral and wrecks on the deep sea bed, rusting, encrusting, growing and changing ever so slowly, imperceptibly. You only find them if you dive for them.

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The Water Experience

Posted in creativity, from the dark room, from the music room, from the viewing room, movies, music, video on November 22, 2007| 2 Comments »

A big part of the debate about homeopathy centres on the issue of ultra-high dilutions of medicines. One of the explanations wheeled out is something called ‘the memory of water’ – it’s a catchy phrase but very problematic. Does water have a memory and if so, how does that work? The anti-homeopathy campaigners say it can’t be explained. In short, they say it’s implausible. More than that, they say that the difference between a starting substance and a highly diluted remedy is the difference between ‘something and nothing’. But still, I think it’s more reasonable to say it’s the difference between something and something else. One of the commenters here, Andy, asked ‘does the water retain a memory of everything else it has had in solution since the dawn of time? Or just the things that the homeopath wants it to remember?’ I rather liked that question. It got me thinking…..and I’m still thinking! But amongst the things it got me thinking about were how memory isn’t physical but water is, about how human beings are meaning-seeking/meaning-creating creatures and how we enrich our physical world with meaning, how we use language, symbolism, memory and imagination, to create an incredibly powerful presence in the world, and how experience is more than physical, more than can be measured.

So here’s the non-science bit – first off, some photos of my own. I love water and water imagery and it amazes me how diverse and complex it is. Have a browse through this slide show. I wonder how these images of water will feel to you? I wonder what they’ll mean to you?

Here’s the slide show

And then, here are some of my favourite water songs. Let’s start with Rain

I can show you that when it starts to rain, everything’s still the same

When it rains and shines it’s just a state of mind

Patty Griffin next…..

Sometimes a hurt is so deep deep deep
You think that you’re gonna drown
Sometimes all I can do is weep weep weep
With all this rain falling down

Strange how hard it rains now
Rows and rows of big dark clouds
When I’m holding on underneath this shroud
Rain

And, the fabulous Eurythmics –

Here comes the rain again
Falling on my head like a memory
Falling on my head like a new emotion
I want to walk in the open wind
I want to talk like lovers do
I want to dive into your ocean
Is it raining with you

It’s amazing how much the rain can change our emotions, our state of mind, and our mood, isn’t it?

Let’s spend a little time by the river! Rivers are so important to us. How many towns and cities grow up around rivers? Think how we use metaphors like “river of life”. Here’s Alison Krauss set to a lovely montage of BBC nature videos.

A complete change of musical genre, but keeping a religious theme, with Good Charlotte,

Baptized in the river,
I’ve seen a vision of my life,

My favourite river song about the importance of place – really, a song that gives us a real understanding of psychogeography! (the way place fashions a sense of self)

And, finally, with Christmas coming, here’s Sarah McLachlan’s version of Joni Mitchell’s The River

I wish I had a river
I could skate away on

Which paintings, photos, songs, films, poems or stories come to your mind on the theme of water, and what do they mean to you?

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knot on wood

Posted in creativity, from the dark room, photography, Uncategorized on October 25, 2007| Leave a Comment »

knot on wood, originally uploaded by bobsee.

This was a log I walked past on Skye.
It caught my attention.
What did? Well, the hole did actually! It looked like a keyhole, or a secret, very small doorway, or maybe a wormhole in the universe? (Hey, you’d be amazed how the imagination can be stimulated by a walk in the country!)
Anyway, after the hole caught my eye then the swirling lines of the wood entranced me.
Take a look. You can look at this for a LONG time I think. The patterns, the colours, the sense of energies straining and twisting and bending the fibres of the wood and how they all swirl around a space…..and into that space, we can dive, deeper and deeper and deeper.
What do you think you might find, if you let your mind slip down this hole, like Alice, falling down the rabbit hole?

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How paper extends our minds

Posted in creativity, from the reading room, life, personal growth on October 24, 2007| 4 Comments »

I read a couple of great posts about how people use paper. Across on 43folders. wood.tang’s post about the backs of envelopes  was inspired by Merlin’s post entitled Making friends with paper. (really great little video embedded in that post by the way). Both these guys are making the point that they still use paper preferentially for certain tasks despite being keen on technological solutions. They make the point that there’s something different about interaction with paper. Read the comments from people to both these posts – they are also very interesting and inspiring.

This fits with a point being made in a book I’m reading at the moment – it’s Andy Clark’s Being There. He describes a concept of the extended mind. What he shows is how our physical interaction with the environment allows us to develop and use cognitive functions that our brains either just couldn’t do alone, or certainly couldn’t do so well. One simple example he gives is doing a jigsaw. We pick up the pieces, twirl them round in our fingers, hover them over different spaces and our brains, which are good at pattern-spotting, work with these movements and actions and our hands and brains then work seamlessly to solve the puzzle.

I know that since I started doing the morning pages about a year ago my own creativity and productivity has gone through the roof. This blog here is a good example of that.  Interestingly, I find I almost never ever go back to read anything I’ve written in those daily notebooks. That’s not how they work. It’s the act of writing longhand in a nice notebook which works with the brain to produce the end result – ideas, solutions, decisions etc etc.

How about you? What’s your relationship with paper these days?

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Poetry and health

Posted in creativity, from the consulting room, from the reading room, health, writing on October 22, 2007| 2 Comments »

When I was recently on holiday on the Isle of Skye I popped in to An Tuireann for a look around, a bite of lunch (had fabulous home-made, thick chunky oatcakes and crab pate), and to log on to the net via their free wifi connection. While uploading photos to flickr, and writing a post or two for this blog, I got chatting to Mark Goodwin, the Literature Development Officer. A delightful and gentle man. He gave me a few postcards from the Poetry Box and I read the poems on them. They were so good! Here are some extracts I noted –

from At The Shrink, by Angela McSeveny –

I can hear the whisper of his pencil

Against the paper

As he jots down notes.

The point jerks like a seismograph

Measuring the impact of my answers.

I blurt out some startling truth

And watch, baffled,

When his right hand doesn’t move.

Well, I can tell you, that little segment got me re-thinking how I take notes! Amazingly, it had never occurred to me, until I read this, that the movement of my pen on the paper of the patient’s case record might be having an impact on the patient. But more than that, these lines also highlight for me how we all discriminate, categorise and judge what we see, hear, experience. A patient tells their story. I listen, hearing some parts more clearly than others, interrupting, or leading this way or that, according to my interest, and in the process create my version of their story…….which turns out, hopefully, to be similar, but, for sure, will be new, unique and different, co-authored by the pair of us.

from…Night Sister, by Elizabeth Jennings

How is it possible not to grow hard,

to build a shell around yourself when you

have to watch so much pain, and hear it too?

………..

You have a memory for everyone

None is anonymous and so you cure

what few with such compassion could endure

I never met a calling quite so pure.

Reading this again just now, made me think again about that study which measured doctors’ responses to others’ pain. But the last line is the one which really struck me – ‘I never met a calling quite so pure’. You don’t hear much about ‘calling’ any more. Sadly, the current ethos is one of reducing every health carer’s job to a list of tasks and competencies, then assuming that any person who can tick all the correct boxes will be able to carry out exactly the same job. It’s not like that. People matter. The personality, the values and the motivation of a health care worker will shine through, for good or for bad! The new way of selecting young doctors for training posts in the UK uses a computer-based questionnaire system and does not accept the submission of a cv for example, and the candidates for GP training are referred to only by their numbers (to prevent prejudice on the part of the selectors from the candidates’ surnames). How many have a ‘calling’, and would any selector rate such a claim?

And finally, from Elma Mitchell’s, ‘This Poem” –

……even the simplest poem

may destroy your immunity to human emotions

All poems must carry a government warning

Words can seriously affect your heart.

Oh, so true! How a word can sting, burn, wound, comfort, move, excite, quicken or slow the heart! One of my favourite writers is Raymond Carver. He can write both poetry and prose in a way that you can be moved to tears by a tiny handful of his words.

So, what do you think about the relationship between poetry and health? Have you any experiences you’d like to share?

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Blog Action Day

Posted in creativity, life, tagged on October 14, 2007| 2 Comments »

Here’s my contribution to Blog Action Day. A little movie of some of my photos showing how beautiful the environment is. I’ve set it to ‘I Saved The World Today’ by the Eurythmics. This is a world worth saving, and it’s down to you and me (the zombies aren’t going to do it!)

We adapt to the changes in the environment around us but we can interact more powerfully if we do it consciously.

To adapt consciously, first you have to become aware, then you have the opportunity to make choices. Having chosen, you can then act. So, take a few moments today to ask yourself how you might live a more aware life. Without awareness, you won’t even know what choices are available to you.

A life of conscious choices is a creative life. It’s a life of growth and development.

A growing life is a more engaged life, more connected, more interactive, more active.

I hope today you’ll start to think how to consciously ADAPT, CREATE and ENGAGE.

Bloggers Unite - Blog Action Day

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