Dasha Creativity project

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Don’t let my friend’s smile fool you. Dasha would like nothing more than to take a slice out of your brain.

Meet Dr. Darya Zabelina, PhD. She’s conducting clinical research to unlock the mysteries of creativity. She was kind enough to explain (slowly) the critical role of the anterior cingulate cortex in creative thinking. Who knew?

Dasha is headed for England flush with a $200,000 grant from the John Templeton Foundation. Hers is one of the winners out of 350 submissions.

Here’s what she knows:

“A-ha moments” can happen anywhere. The manager of a short-order kitchen may be as brilliant as a pioneer heart surgeon. Preparing an omelet can be a benchmark of genius.

To earn the 5 light-bulb award an idea has to be useful — finger paintings by kids might be inventive but so what? Passion and patience are important. People sometimes play with variables for years before they have an “instant” epiphany.

Dasha’s team uses EEGs and FMRIs to grab digital images (slices) as the brain lights up during creative challenges, all the while she is capturing quantitative data.

Is smarter better? Yes and no. Increases in creativity flatten out with above-average IQs. And while you do need knowledge and experience —you want to be careful, over-learning can actually dull the imagination.

Are mad scientists and tortured playwrights more creative than you and me? Emotional problems make it harder to be productive. Alcohol can give a sense of creative euphoria that disappears the next morning. (I’ve done research on that myself.)

Dasha immigrated from Bishkek in north-central Kyrgystan when she was 16 and later earned her doctorate at Northwestern University. Her recent paper to the American Psychological Association was extremely well received.

I asked Dasha if creativity rubs off. Does she have to brush ingenuity off of her clothes before she leaves work? Has exploring imagination made her more imaginative? She couldn’t say, but the Templeton crew obviously thinks so.

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3 generation krafft family

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When friends responded to my email asking for comments for Fathers Day, one thing became obvious. Losing a father at an early age changes just about everything.

Our local coffee joint is something of a petri dish. You can observe that when new friends begin to explain who they are, they often mention that they had lost a father or mother at an early age. It was a powerful, recurring theme for Dickens and Twain. Poor Harry Potter.

Maybe that’s why finding three generations of fathers and sons (Eric, Andrew and Eric) sitting together is something worth noticing.

Eric will emerge from under the tables where spelunkers his age love to explore, and climb onto the lap of his father, Andrew. Eric will lock an arm around his father’s neck, lean over and whisper something important to his grandfather, the man for whom he was named.

One of the three is a survivor of the Holocaust, one flew combat missions in Iraq and Afghanistan, one of them Is just now getting himself ready for kindergarten

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Ramen, Theoretical Math

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If you want to understand the nature of elegance, you could do worse than having coffee with a theoretical mathematician.

I asked my friend, Ramin, to explain the idea of “beauty” in mathematics. Simplicity is a big part of it, he said. An expression is elegant when not a single element can be added or removed without screwing up its functionality.

But that’s no enough. To be truly breathtaking an expression needs to be unexpected. It has to knock our heads together and change how we see things. The works of Isaac Newton, Watson and Crick, and George Carlin come to mind. Carlin wasn’t a STEM guy but the same principles apply to comedy, music and do-it-yourself plumbing projects.

By the sixth grade Ramin had his sights set on chemistry but thanks to his success in math competitions in Iran, his future was hijacked. He won a Silver Medal in the International Mathematical Olympiad in Moscow in 1992 and later was admitted to John Hopkins. He went to do postdoctoral training at Princeton.

Ramin believes calculus is one of the great conceptual leaps of mankind. As a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, he teaches from the same textbook he used as an adolescent and that pleases him. He warns we shouldn’t be lulled in complacency about calculus — its integrity is being reduced to a “bag of tricks.”

Ramin revealed his age as 40.999999999999999999 on a recent Facebook post but he’s seems at least .999999999 younger than that in person.

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Alejandro

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Several years ago my friend Alejandro discovered accounting “errors” that involved Pacific Rim capital intersecting with road-building contractors in Latin America.

He fled to the U.S. to seek asylum. He couldn’t work, drive, apply for a credit card or rent an apartment. He didn’t speak English well. (That’s how we came to know each other.)

A proudly independent lawyer in his late 30’s, Alejandro moved in with his brother’s family. They were generous and welcoming but his presence complicated things.

During those years in the wilderness, a neighbor asked if he would do manual labor. Alejandro spent an day working in the guy’s basement and was paid $20. The search for asylum is a nightmare. Delays are rampant. When a judge goes on vacation, deadlines are postponed and time runs backward.

Last year Alejandro’s work and perseverance finally paid off. His request for residency was granted. A green card followed. He landed a short-term gig that led to a full-time position in the not-for-profit healthcare sector.

When we met this week he brought along his new licenses, credentials and clippings of his accomplishments. We’re lucky to have him.

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Coffee shop ettiquette

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It doesn’t take many visits to pick up on the finer points of etiquette at this little coffee place close to campus.

In Cultural Anthropology 101, we learned to identify rules of behavior as “norms.”

So here’s a norm.

Maybe it’s something they put in the coffee but people here go out of their way to make lifelong introverts feel popular— even if they don’t want to be popular.

Here’s another. Bragging is perfectly acceptable as long as you do it outside at a distance of 25 feet from the door. Second-hand bragging annoys people and stays in their clothes for days.

People who sit in the windows and never say a word are not rude. Their backs are to the room because they want to work. You can mutter a brief hello or God-bless a sneeze but then it’s good form to let them get back to work.

The room has a soft, nougat-filled center reserved for regulars who sit and enjoy the exact same conversation with the exact same people every time they meet. It’s like saying the rosary or humming an ohm. It’s an early agrarian ritual that satisfies a primal need without requiring any of us to decorate our genitals.

And finally, everybody here assumes the person they’re talking to is smarter than they are. But wait, you’re thinking, that’s a statistical impossibility! You’re right of course.

See how that works?

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