To err is human; to create, diverge


21st June 2010


For those of you who didn't catch it in The Straits Times.


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It’s like my eyes and I don’t talk any more.

Headline from an article in The Straits Times: ‘More teacher assassins for classrooms’.

Assistants, not assassins. Assistants.

For more than two years, my eyes haven’t been reading the way they should. They swop letters, drop them and turn assistants into assassins.

Line from an ST article: ‘China hopes to hit its key targets of creating nine million turban jobs and…’

Urban, not turban. Urban. My eyes also add letters that have no business being there. And all this misreading doesn’t just happen with the papers.

Line from a writer’s blog: ‘on Saturday I did an enjoyable panel on graphic towels with Nicki Greenberg and Queenie Chan’.

Novels, not towels. Neil Gaiman is known for his graphic novels. For his towels, rather less so.

To be able to write, you have to be able to read. If I were a chef, I’d be losing my taste buds.

So – time for a brain scan?

And then I encounter lines like this one from a New York Times piece: ‘Two men are pursuing a lawsuit to stop scientists from using a giant panda accelerator, claiming it could create a black hole that may eat up the Earth.’

Particle, not panda. Particle. But just think – a panda accelerator!

So my eyes are on the blink and my brain may be packing up too. But when you’re shown visions of accelerating pandas, it’s hard to mind.

‘On a lush green hillside that dips into a river, dozens of labradors are busy building a dream getaway…’

Labourers, not labradors. But what if labradors really were building a dream getaway? What would it look like? And how would a labrador – perhaps with a graphic towel slung around its neck – operate a cement mixer?

Every mistake is an open door. Whether we go through depends on whether we avoid failure or explore it.

But even on the other side of the door, the roads we take will not be the same.

An article run last month in The New York Times examined different ways of thinking about creativity. One was put forward by scientist Rex Jung, a member of a team studying the neurology behind the creative process at the Mind Research Network in Albuquerque.

Their research suggests that creativity and intelligence don’t take the same route. When it comes to intelligence, the brain seems to be ‘an efficient superhighway that gets you from Point A to Point B,’ said Dr Jung. ‘But in the regions of the brain related to creativity, there appears to be lots of little side roads with interesting detours, and meandering little byways.’

It’s easy to tell which route you’ve taken: Just check what sort of questions you’re asking.

Let’s say that your eyes no longer do what they’re told and feed you headlines like ‘Banks adopt tougher sheep’ when it’s tougher steps that the banks have adopted.

Is there a physical problem with the eyes? Or the brain? Does the computer position need adjusting? How about taking more vision breaks?

These are the efficient questions, asked by the greyhound mind racing after a solution.

There’s another kind of question: What if banks really did adopt sheep? Why sheep? Why adopt? What’s wrong with just hiring them? And why do they have to be tougher? First line of defence against the accelerated pandas coming through the walls?

Psychologists call this divergent thinking. To measure creativity, they pose questions such as ‘What if clouds had strings?’ or ask test subjects to come up with as many uses as they can for, say, a rock.

The greyhound mind tends not to enjoy questions like these; it dismisses every route in which it cannot see a hare. Even an open field will look like a dead-end.

The creative mind is one that can give up its attachment to the hare. Freed from the imperative of the chase, it can ignore the routes others have taken, routes known to lead to hares, to come up with one of its own.

It may fail. In fact, it probably will, racking up a depressing number of errors along a path that may or may not lead to a hare.

But it’s worth remembering that the word ‘error’ comes from the Latin errare – to stray, to err, to wander. Every error is a step off the greyhound’s track; every error is an invitation.

One last headline: ‘Lawyers hit by falling trees’.

Fees, not trees. Fees.

But what if trees really were falling on lawyers? Did the trees fall or were they pushed? Can a tree be sued? Could the lawyers have avoided injury if they had adopted sheep? Or were their sheep simply not tough enough?

Think about it.

And err.



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Afterword: The evening news recently had an item about US basketball. A player bounded across the screen, celebrating some triumph. The letters on the back of his shirt said, Briyani.

As I marvelled over a US basketball player having the same name as an Indian rice dish, the letters reorganised themselves in my brain.

Not Briyani, Bryant. Kobe Bryant. Well. Of course.