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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…

Art from our very own Wendy MacNaughton is gracing the cover of 7×7 Magazine this month! She created a whimsical map of San Francisco for their July neighborhoods issue. You can purchase a signed, limited edition copy of the map here or from one of the bookstores mentioned on the link.

Not only is the map beautiful, but it comes in handy! Case in point: I was dining with a friend in SOMA a few days ago, and our cute waiter asked me where I lived. I pulled out Wendy’s handy map and proudly pointed out my neighborhood. Moral of the story: Wendy’s map might help you get a date!

Read the 7×7 profile and interview with Wendy, where she discusses how she likes to draw people on public transportation. She also likes to draw her colleagues in staff meetings, and I can tell you from experience that if you ever catch Wendy drawing you, you will feel a bubbly rush of joy and vanity. I highly recommend it.

There is absolutely nothing funny about the oil mess BP (and some would argue all of us who depend on oil) has created.

except this.

BP spills coffee

Here are Julie, Irene, and I gearing up for the first ever hebdomadal Underground lunchtime run. We endured five minutes of unseasonable rain and one inflamed iliotibial band through six miles of gossip and glory, and we all lived to tell about it. If this sounds like your idea of fun, join us next week! E-mail Lindsay@undergroundads.com and I will hook you up with the details. While you’re contemplating our invitation, check out this cool mapping tool and see the route we took.

If you’re even reading this it’s probably because you were already hook, lined, and sinkered by the musings of Underground*s own Lindsay Meisel - who has written a bunch and some of these thoughtful UA blog bites. And if you didn’t know yet, she’s sort of a big deal (in a very petite frame).

Well, I mean, it’s because of Lindsay that I have to look up words like hebdomadal.  When I first joined team UA, I profiled all the people here  (of course you do this type of recon too when you’re the newb). Lindsay is the first one in the office. She walks around in socks. She has the best, most colorful lunches (that she prepares herself) and ritualistically eats in the conference room where the light is more enormous than any other spot in the office but most importantly where she is away from the liquid crystal of her flat screen canvas where her work day word play happens as Underground* Ads Copywriter. “Lindsay is bar far, the most, no bullsh!t writer* I’ve worked with;*by rule, writers are full of it. she does drink a lot though”, describes John G., UA’s Artistic Director.

Underground* has gotten a lot of rad clients in the front lines of the  green //  climate // energy  discourse which makes Lindsay a whole person at her desk - the coalescence of things she is passionate about: words and environment. And very recently, Lindsay was featured as Breakthrough Institute’s Fellow of the Month, where you can read more about her here.

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