VIA natehagens Drawing on research showing that creativity and imagination scores have been declining for decades, author Rob Hopkins argues that our collective inability to vividly picture a better future may be the deepest barrier to building one.
"This study written by a researcher in the U.S. called Kyung Hee Kim was called the creativity crisis. She looked at something called the Torrance Test for Creative Thinking, which is a measure of divergent thinking. That's the closest thing we have to an imagination test basically, which has been done with huge data sets of people all the way back till the 1950s. Her conclusion was that imagination and IQ had risen together until the mid-90s, at which point IQ kept rising and imagination started to decline. So in her paper, she attributed it to three things. She said it was due to the decline of free unstructured play in the lives of our children. Okay, that makes sense. It was due to the rise of screens in our lives and it was due to the rise of testing in schools. I think we also would say that spending less and less time in the natural world is a key cause for that. Sitting outside and looking at the birds and the trees and imagining is a real privilege these days. Like so many people never get the time to do that. Like that ability to live an imaginative life in that way is not evenly distributed at all. Albert Einstein always said he got his best ideas when he rode his bicycle in the forest, but people spend less and less and less and less time in the natural world now."
💬 Discussion
VIA natehagens Drawing on research showing that creativity and imagination scores have been declining for decades, author Rob Hopkins argues that our collective inability to vividly picture a better future may be the deepest barrier to building one.
