Mind(ful) Wandering & Creativity: New article

by | Wednesday, June 22, 2022

Illustration by Punya Mishra

We have covered a wide range of issues related to creativity, technology and learning in our almost decade-long series that we write for the journal TechTrends. Over the past few years we have conducted almost 30+ interviews with some of the top scholars in the field. Over the past few issues we have focused our attention to the relationship between mindfulness and creativity, particularly in educational contexts. Our first article set the stage for a deeper dive into this relationship, which the second was an interview with Dr. Viviana Capurso and her work in this area. For our third article we spoke with Dr. Jonathan Schooler, Distinguished Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences at the University of California Santa Barbara.

Dr. Schooler directs the Memory Emotion Thought Awareness (META) Lab, which they study a wide range of issues and questions related to human cognition. His own research on explores topics that intersect philosophy and psychology, like how fluctuations in people’s awareness of their experience mediate mind-wandering and how exposing individuals to philosophical positions alters their behavior. He is also interested in the science of science (meta-science) including the replication crisis in the social sciences, understanding why effect sizes often decline over time, and how greater transparency in scientific reporting might address this issue.

As always we covered a lot of ground in our conversation (from mind-wandering to mindfulness; from meta-consciousness to living in a technology-mediated world, and most importantly on the positive and negative aspects of curiosity). In fact, my previous blog post “The darker side of curiosity” was partly prompted by our conversation. And the funny thing is that there were still so many things we did not have time to get into. The article based on our conversation is now published and a citation and and link to the article is given below.

Mehta, R., Henriksen, D., Richardson, C, Gruber, N. & Mishra, P, (2022). Creativity & the Mindful Wanderings of Dr. Jonathan Schooler. Tech Trends. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11528-022-00747-4

Incidentally I have been playing with some AI based image creation programs and thought that I may try and see what AI comes up with if given some verbal prompts. Below are 4 images generated by different freely available AI programs when prompted with words related to creativity and mindful wandering.

Illustrations created by various AI programs when given the prompt “Creative mindful wanderings”

A few randomly selected blog posts…

AI’s Honey Trap: Why AI Tells Us What We Want to Hear

AI’s Honey Trap: Why AI Tells Us What We Want to Hear

Leon Furze's blog post about AI sycophancy popped into my feed yesterday and got me thinking. In his post (worth reading in full) he pointed to some striking research from Anthropic showing how AI systems tend to agree with humans, even when the humans are wrong. The...

Designing learning futures through reflective practice: 2 of 2

Designing learning futures through reflective practice: 2 of 2

This is the second of two posts on the topic of bringing principled innovation practices to designing learning futures. In this post (by Cristy Guleserian & Punya Mishra) we dive deeper into how these practices of PI connect with our model of design. In particular...

Designing the futures of STEM education

Designing the futures of STEM education

“What knowledge is of most worth?” is a question asked over a 100 years ago by the English philosopher, Herbert Spencer. His unequivocal answer was—science. This question (and his answer) resonates even today, though the context within which it is asked, and how we...

Spring break 2008

Our first family vacation in over three years! New Jersey to visit relatives, Delaware to visit friends, and New York city for the big city excitement! Hectic but great fun. I took over 500 photographs, got back home and deleted around 200 of them - the remaining are...

The Reluctant Fundamentalist

An essay by Mohsin Hamid (titled My reluctant fundamentalist) about the process of writing his novel "The reluctant fundamentalist." What stands out in this piece is an excellent description of the extended and often painful act of creation - in this case a novel. I...

Learning Games & TPACK @ Drexel: Video now online

Back in January I was invited to speak at the Drexel Learning Games Network (DGLN) seminar series. As I had written in my original post (TPACK & Games @ Drexel), DLGN is the brainchild of  Aroutis Foster, former graduate student, now rising star academic and...

EPET at SITE 2015

The annual SITE conference is an fixture in my life in the spring semester. This year is no exception. What is interesting is the manner in which the EPET program at MSU has been increasing its presence at the conference. Above is a screen-shot of my calendar of from...

Seeing in the dark

All of us have walked through a sun-dappled forest. However, few of us have noticed that underneath are feet are thousands of little perfect circles. This is often difficult to see because these little perfect circles often overlap into irregular globs of sunlight....

0 Comments

Submit a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *