You may be surprised! Take the fun quiz underground* made for the Union of Concerned Scientists and learn who’s got the power!

When I came to Underground and people started referring to me as a “creative,” I felt very validated. I mean, I’ve always felt like I knew a thing or two about creativity. I hung out with the cool artist kids, smoking our disgusting clove cigarettes and posing for figure drawing. We didn’t associate much with the math and science geeks playing Magic in the cafeteria.

But a Newsweek special this week showed me that a lot of what I thought I knew about creativity is wrong. To wit:

Creativity is a right-brain function.

That’s only half the story. Creativity is about the two sides of the brain working together efficiently. A well-tuned creative mind approaches a problem both by coming up with all sorts of outlandish ideas (right brain), AND mining these ideas for hidden patterns, alternate meanings, and high-level abstractions (left brain). Individuals who are able to switch back and forth between these two modes are the most creative. So it doesn’t cut it to just be prolifically weird and wacky, you actually have to do something productive with the weirdness and wackness. Which reminds me of a kid I knew in high school, of whom it was said: “all cosmic sense, no common sense.”

Creativity is just for artists.

Nope. Not even a little bit. According to the Newsweek story, researchers compared engineering majors and music majors on a whole host of exercises designed to measure creativity, and their scores laid down on an identical spectrum. Creativity is about how you think, not what you think about.

Creativity can’t be taught.

Actually, it can. What a delightful surprise! Programs that “alternate maximum divergent thinking with bouts of intense convergent thinking” measurably improve creative problem solving skills over time.

Creativity can’t be measured.

Wrong again. The Torrance test (no, not this Torrance), a 90-minute series of discrete tasks, administered by a psychologist, is the gold standard in creativity assessment. And while nobody is saying it works perfectly, it is a shockingly accurate predictor of creative accomplishment—three times stronger than IQ. Below is an example of part of the test:

So creativity can be measured, and unfortunately it’s been undergoing a steep decline since the 1990s. There are a lot of theories about why—too much TV? The Internet? Miley Cyrus?—but whatever the cause, it’s a bad thing, because the world has a lot of big problems that will require the best creative minds working overtime (although apparently thinking on their own, rather than brainstorming).

So if you want to be a part of the creative revolution, you should drop what you’re doing and go hang out in a fantasy world for a while. Seriously. Pretend you and your friends are mermaids or something. It’s called a paracosm, and creating paracosms was found to be a common practice among most MacArthur “genius award” winners.

Except that the peak time for this kind of activity is ages 9-10, probably not you if you’re reading this blog. I guess that’s the age when all those science geeks were playing with their lame magic cards. Wonder what they’re doing now…

Not to toot our own horn, but…

The rest of the world will find out in April when HOW Magazine publishes its 11th Annual Interactive Design Award edition, but YOU, dear Underground Blog Reader, get the low down skivvy on the inside tip:

WE WON! WE WON! WE WON!

(Not that we care about that kind of thing.)

But we are rather proud that StopSoot.Org – the video, website and ad campaign we created for EarthJustice – was selected out of over 700 entries to receive one of handful of merit awards.

Congrats to everyone who worked on the project and EarthJustice for a super successful campaign.

You can see big winner here:
www.stopsoot.org

Regularity in effect. Underground promises, Underground delivers. Each and every day a little bit of somethin’ somethin’ to contemplate, peruse, perchance, perhaps – a tiny bite of je ne sais quoi to add to your daily thinking on things like the role of advertising to help non-profits achieve their goals, the resurgence of the handwritten letter as a form of effective communication amongst friends, the responsibility of co-passengers on public transportation to warn one another of unknown substances on plastic seats, or the underestimated role that something as seemingly silly as soot plays in global warming.

That’s right, people. Soot.  AKA Black Carbon.

Soot is responsible for 25% of global warming.

Bet you didn’t know that.

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