Neuroscience & Creativity: New article

by | Friday, August 18, 2017

The next article in our series Rethinking Technology & Creativity in the 21st Century for the journal TechTrends was just published.This article features an interview with Dr. Arne Dietrich, professor of neuroscience at the American University of Beirut in Lebanon. He describes himself as a “tour guide into the bizarre world of brain cells and human behavior.” He has written a textbook on consciousness as well as a more popular book on the neuroscience of creativity. In this interview Dr. Dietrich was quite skeptical…

about what neuroscience offers to complex sociocultural concepts, such as creativity. Dr. Dietrich reminded us that creativity is a complex social phenomenon that is, above all, a created construct. Creativity is difficult to relate to other social constructs, such as certain types of thinking or intelligence, without further reducing it to the mechanisms that make it happen. His reductionist approach may seem ironically positivistic for a topic like creativity, but its repercussions are, in the end, deeply humanizing.

Complete article and citation follows:

Mehta, R., Henriksen, D., Mishra, P. & The Deep-Play Research Group (2017). The Courageous Rationality of Being a Neuroskeptic Neuroscientist: Dr. Arne Dietrich on Creativity and EducationTech Trends (61)5. 415-419. DOI 10.1007/s11528-017-0217-x

Topics related to this post: Art | Creativity | Learning | Psychology | Representation | Research

A few randomly selected blog posts…

TPACK commercial II, Mastercard “Priceless”

Here is the second of the two commercials created specially for our ISTE Radio/Video show. The first one (a take-off on the UPS/Whiteboard commercials can be seen here). Enjoy. As always, the director’s commentary is provided below....

Unlocking education… news story

Our very own Leigh Wolf is quoted in a story in today's State News. Check out, Education unlocked: MSU professors use open courseware to provide class materials for students Leigh manages to bring in the MAET program in to the picture (why am I not surprised?) and how...

Academic novels

I have been reading Moo by Jane Smiley, off and on for a while now. It is a satire of academia set in a fictional Mid-western university called Moo U. It has been suggested that Moo U is a stand in for Iowa State, an university I know well since Smita went to school...

Guest blogging for Nashworld: TPACK video

Sean Nash over at Nashworld asked me to guest blog for this week while he is out with his students doing some really cool stuff. Here is a link to my posting: A TPACK video mashup!. I end the post with a couple of videos, one a commercial and the other my mashup...

Best of SkyMall

I love browsing through the SkyMall catalog when I am flying. I never cease to be amazed by human ingenuity - the range of things we have built, irrespective of how useful (or useless they may be). Anyway, someone has now listed the 10 best (or worst, depending on...

Children & the Internet

Warren Buckleitner, Ph.D., is a graduate of our Ph.D. program. He is editor of Children's Technology Review, a periodical covering children’s interactive media and founder of Mediatech Foundation, a nonprofit technology center based in New Jersey. He also runs this...

New Delhi, update

I have been at Delhi for the most part since coming to India, meeting people, developing project ideas, catching up… The only breaks have been a short trip to Nagpur (to visit my in-laws) and, coming up, another short trip to Bhubaneswar (to visit my parents). In...

Bollywood meets Guitar Hero

Over the Christmas break my daughter and three of her friends got together to make a music video. The idea was simple, what if there were a version of Guita Hero (Sitar Hero anyone?) for Bollywood songs. Out of this idea emerged a 5+ minute long music video - with a...

Two new photosets

I just uploaded two new photosets onto to Flickr. They are: Best of 2007 A photoset documenting the past 12 months (mostly family related stuff) Matt & Punya There was a recent article in the New Educator about the work Matt and I do together (the TPCK stuff). Here...

0 Comments

Submit a Comment

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