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Today on Something You Should Know, something to be aware of if you do important work while sitting on an airplane. Then, waste. We waste a lot, and a lot of that waste is getting into the environment, like plastic. Plastic is showing up in newborn babies' poop. These are newborns who have yet to actually consume a meal out of the womb, and yet they have plastics in their systems. That horrifies me.
Also, do your kids eat the same food you eat at dinner? I'll explain why that's important. And creativity, what it is and how creative people actually get creative. All creative artists, I think what they have in common is they emphasize discipline, they emphasize ritual, setting time apart to write, to paint. And what they all have in common is practice to make sure that no dust settles on it, right? All this today on Something You Should Know.
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Hello there. Welcome to Something You Should Know. Here's a question for you. When you travel by air, when you're on an airplane, what is it you tend to do to occupy your time?
I know a lot of business travelers in particular like to use that time in the air to catch up on work, to write a report or analyze some data. Well, research suggests that working on an airplane could be a really bad idea.
You see, in flight, our brains don't work like they do on the ground. According to Professor Gradwell of King's College in London, he says our thought process becomes impaired at high altitudes due to the reduced air pressure and reduced oxygen levels. Long flights are a good opportunity to catch up on sleep or reading, but we're better off making important decisions with our feet on the ground. And that is something you should know.
It comes as no surprise to you, I'm sure, that we waste a lot. A lot of food goes to waste. There's a lot of wasteful product packaging. And I suspect people think that because we recycle plastic and cardboard and whatever else you put out on the curb in your recycle bin, that we are doing something about the waste in the world. But we're not.
But today I want to dive in a little deeper on this topic because there are things about waste that I wasn't aware of until I spoke to the gentleman you're about to hear. And there are perhaps things you're not aware of either that are quite interesting, not in an alarmist sort of way or, you know, if we don't do something, the world's going to end kind of way, but really some interesting and sensible things to consider that may change the way you look at the waste in your life.
Here to discuss this is Edward Humes. He is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist who has written extensively on the topic of waste and garbage. And he is author of 16 books. His most recent book is called Total Garbage, How We Can Fix Our Waste and Heal Our World.
Hi Edward, welcome to Something You Should Know. It's great to be here, thanks. So what is your big message? What is it you want people to understand about waste in the world? You know, basically the planet has an arch-villain and it's our waste.
We literally live in the most wasteful civilization in history, way beyond what we roll to the curb each week. It's what we eat and drink. It's how we cook. It's the main thing you pay for in your monthly utility bill or at the gas pump is for the energy that gets wasted, not for what you use. It's our waste that's literally killing us. It's embedded in our daily lives so thoroughly that we think it's normal when we think about it at all.
And it's the one thing people think, yeah, I could do something about that. Everybody recognizes waste as a loss and a cost. And fixing it actually isn't necessarily about giving up stuff we love, which is what people always seem to associate with doing the environmentally good thing. It's actually, in many cases, upgrading to stuff we're going to love more. And it's healthier and gives you better.
more value for your dollar. Well, let's get specific here because that all sounds good, but by doing things like what? And I know one of the things you talk about is about not cooking with gas. And I remember when I first heard this, that some states or cities were going to ban gas stoves, I thought, here we go with some do-gooder idea that isn't going to do anything. And if you don't cook with gas...
What are you going to cook with electricity, which still requires burning coal to power the electricity? So what is this all about not cooking with gas? I met two chefs while I was working on this book, and they're trying to convince their colleagues and the home building industry to stop cooking and heating and making hot water with gas. And the conversation is not only about our health and saving the world, it's about
cooking faster and better and more cheaply and serving more people faster. And the way you do that is to get rid of the gas stoves, which waste 70% of their energy.
energy, heating the room and heating the entire stove and heating the cooks trying to make their living in 130 degree heat, which is not unusual in a commercial kitchen. And switch to an induction stove, which uses magnets to cook, which sounds like wizardry, but it really isn't. It's the same thing that your wireless phone charger uses to wirelessly move
energy from your wall outlet into your phone battery. But when you use it to cook, the heat isn't an accidental byproduct of the process. You know how your charger gets warm. It is the product and that magnetic field creates heat inside a pan or a pot that's made out of ferrous metal, you know, steel or iron, something that a magnet will cling to. And it doesn't heat anything else in the room, not even itself.
The stove makes no heat, it makes magnetism. So you can literally rest your hand on a full-on induction cooktop set to high and feel nothing. Think about cooking in that environment where only the food gets hot. It lowers all your costs, it makes for cool kitchens, very little ventilation, there's no indoor air pollution.
There's a 42% higher risk of childhood asthma and respiratory ailments in kids and vulnerable adults
when you have a gas stove in use in your house. One of the things with this whole discussion about gas stoves and certain government agencies wanting to ban gas stoves is they want to ban gas stoves. And my sense would be if these induction stoves are so great...
Put them out there and let the market decide. If they're so great, they will rise to the top and people will get rid of their gas stoves. But banning them takes us down a whole other rabbit hole.
Absolutely. Oh, yeah. I don't believe in bans. I think that just upsets people and it's counterproductive. This technology sells itself. There is a movement in the restaurant industry for economic reasons as well as fire safety reasons because in suction cooking, basically, it's almost impossible to start a fire with it. The economic benefits, particularly in commercial kitchens, are just – it does sell itself.
The kitchen stayed cool. The ventilation needs are much less. It's a money saver and it improves the service in a restaurant. And chefs are very skeptical. They're really trained that blue flame has, you know, you've got to have it. But when they try it out, when they see Chef Chris Galarza, one of the
He's based in Pittsburgh, one of the real advocates for this new technology in kitchens. He pulls a pan out of the freezer, puts it down on the stove, and within seconds, he's sauteing in that pan. No preheating. It is instantaneous. It looks like science fiction, but it's not. Actually, it was demoed, this technology, in the 1930s at the Chicago World's Fair. And the way they demoed it, they called it cool cooking.
I like that name. It sounds better than induction, which is kind of wonky. But what they did was they had the induction top and they put a hardcover book down on top of it and then the tea kettle on top of the book and then turned it on and the water started boiling. And the guy made tea, the demonstrator, and he picked up the book and started reading it while he was having his tea. And all the spectators are watching this at the World's Fair. And the book was perfectly fine because the magnetism travels harmlessly through time.
the book and into the metal pan, metal kettle and heats the water inside. One of the things that I'm certainly concerned about, and we've talked about it before on this podcast, and that is plastic. There is so much plastic. It doesn't go away. And I know it's a big part of the waste problem, right? Plastic has become a part of our diet. It's in our food. It's in our water. It's in the air. It's being found in
heart patients inside their hearts, in the plaque in our arteries. Plastic is showing up in newborn babies' poop. These are newborns who have yet to actually consume a meal out of the womb and yet they have plastics in their systems. That horrifies me.
And the data just keeps getting worse. We are consuming about a credit card's worth of plastic a week in America. And it's because we have, in a fairly short amount of time, gone from a relatively plastic-free daily existence with literally no disposable plastics in our trash in the 1960s to it being the biggest part of our waste stream, being an enormous waste
pollutant in our environment and part of the reason for that is we've been sold not only the idea that disposable plastic products made out of a material that does not occur in nature and that nature can't handle and really can't be effectively recycled in most cases we've been
We've been sold a bill of goods that it's a great idea to use it once and throw away product out of this stuff. And it's not a good idea. And that's why, you know, in the space of 50 years, it's become a new food group and not a healthy one for us. But there's a problem that seems impossible to fix because plastic is everywhere. It's everything. Where would anybody even begin to start plastic?
to get rid of it? This is the kind of thing where actually what we do as consumers and taxpayers matter and can drive change, but also where we need top-down solutions, which we are getting. So if you go back to this, I'll break this down for you. Go back to the 60s and before, we had a lot of reuse systems in place.
beer bottles, all those would be returned, washed by the manufacturers and refilled and resold. You could have a glass Coke bottle, for instance, and it would be used 50 times before it started to be unusable. And then it would be ground up and recycled into new bottles because glass, unlike plastic, is infinitely recyclable.
And that was the business model. And that business model goes back to the colonial days. It was the system we've always had.
We were in the aberration moment, not the normal moment now, by getting rid of that in the 1970s when someone finally invented a plastic bottle that didn't explode when you put a carbonated beverage in it. Previous attempts had exploded, so we stuck with the glass for a long time. Now we have this new system. And what happened? These plastic bottles come into use. It's marketed as a convenience. Look, you don't have to bring it back.
Nobody wants to talk about though, when this first came out, what happens to that material. What the big brands like Coke and all the others that are filling our pantries and our supermarkets with plastic bottles did was offload the expense of dealing with the end life of their products, which they had always been responsible for, and foisted it off on consumers and taxpayers.
Oh, well, you know, that stuff could be recycled. You guys take care of it. You know, somehow they managed to convince us. And we've been stuck in this model ever since subsidizing a waste that is really impossible to recycle well and to repurpose. Or even when it is recycled, it has low value and very few viable uses. Only about 9% of our plastics get recycled in the world. And it's even less in the U.S., about 6%.
That's a horrendous record. So the solution from the bottom up is stop buying stuff in single use plastics. We don't need it. There's other alternatives. If you have to have a, have a soft drink or a single use beverage of any kind, buy it in a can, buy it in glass. You don't need plastic wraps and bags when you have free with your peanut butter, a glass jar. It's great for storing stuff. I, uh,
I talked to an author named Anne-Marie Bonneau who blogs as the zero waste chef and she says, "I don't use plastic. I keep these containers. I wash them. I reuse them. If I have leftover salad, I don't put it in a bowl with a plastic wrap over it. I put a plate on top of that bowl and put it in the refrigerator. It works great. It keeps everything fresh without the plastic."
You are eating 100 times more plastic than when you store food in plastic than if you store it in a substance that doesn't constantly shed itself into the food, which is what plastic does. We're talking about waste and recycling, and my guest is Edward Humes. He is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and author of the book, Total Garbage, How We Can Fix Our Waste and Heal Our World.
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So, Edward, isn't it interesting how there doesn't seem to be as much concern about all the plastic in the world, for example, that people hear things like we're eating a credit card's worth of plastic every week or this stuff will never go away and we're just going to keep piling up wasteful plastic. And yet...
There are alternatives because we used to use glass bottles and we used to use aluminum cans and still do. But why not focus back on that? That's what other countries are doing. They say, why are we making all this waste when we can make things we can use over and over again? You know, an aluminum can is infinitely recyclable and it uses 95% less energy to do it that way than mining oil.
virgin aluminum. Why would we use plastics when we have such better options like that? It's crazy. And the plastics are killing us. They're making us sick. Forever chemicals, you've probably heard of those. Those are compounds that are released into the environment and they're related to plastics and they are in our water. They're getting into everything. And it's not just from the obvious sources, but things like
Fake grass are like spewing these harmful forever chemicals into our ecosystem, into our waters and into our food. And it's almost unchecked.
One thing that really kind of gets me going is the problem of food waste. And you know when you walk, you leave a restaurant and you walk through on your way out the door, you look at tables that still have plates on them, and there's so much food left on the tables. I hate that. It's just, there's so much, and that's just in restaurants, plus all the food that goes bad at home. We waste so much food, and what do we do about that?
I think it's really interesting, a nonprofit in Los Angeles going, it's called Crop Swap LA. And his answer to waste in our food system is to make it more local and to also make it healthier and fresher.
and he thinks the secret to nutritious plentiful and affordable local food that cuts waste and lowers emissions is to replace our lawns with vegetable gardens and urban micro farms now i know what you're thinking that's ridiculous it sounds impossible but actually there's precedent for it during world war ii
Nearly half of the nation's produce was raised in home vegetable gardens because we needed it. And they called them victory gardens and everybody got into it big time. And the results are incredible. Almost half of our produce in people's yards.
So this is sort of the 21st century take on it. CropSwap LA is converting lawns in Los Angeles's food deserts in neighborhoods where it can be really hard to get fresh produce and fresh fruit. And what he does, he can take a thousand square foot
plot of grass and convert that to an organic regenerative micro farm and send weekly bags of produce to up to 40 families a week from these little tiny farms. His motto is why mow your yard when you can eat your yard? And, and they're beautiful. They're not like eyesores or something. I, you know, aesthetically they're, they're kind of gorgeous to look at.
Well, I don't know a whole lot about that, but it does seem like a bit of a drop in the bucket to the problem of food waste throughout the world. There's no one solution to any of our problems. And I don't think we should think that way. What people can do is actually make small choices and small changes that they have power over.
And the additive power of that, starting small but building momentum, that's powerful. I mean, no, of course not. There's not one thing you can name that's going to fix any problem. It takes just a different way of thinking about things. All right, yeah, I can't.
give up everything made out of plastic because it is everywhere, but I can start using less of it. I don't need plastic wrap. I don't need plastic bags to put my kids' sandwiches in. I can wrap that to send to school. I can wrap that in something else. I could use a cloth napkin and wrap...
right? The sandwich in that. And then it becomes the kid's placemat while he's eating. And then he wipes his face with it. And then he brings it home and I'll wash it and do it over again. What's so hard about something like that? Make one little change. It adds up. That's the great thing about reducing waste. Those reductions add up. You can't solve everything in one fell swoop. That's our problem. That's what we're waiting for, for the change.
check gods of Silicon Valley or something to descend and say, aha, here it is. This is going to suck all the plastic out of the water. This is going to suck all the carbon out of the atmosphere. If we wait for that, we're all going to be waiting a very long time. What's really cool is that there's a lot of good enough solutions and
things that work better and create less waste and more quality of life and more value. And we embrace those where we can, when we can, and that does add up and that will save the world. You know what I wonder is why with the plastic issue, why we didn't see it coming, why the people who made plastic and they made it because it's so durable didn't
Why we didn't see this problem coming that if we keep using lots and lots of plastic there's there's nowhere for it to go and it's going to be a problem. In fact the inventors of plastic they never envisioned it being used 100 years ago when these materials first came online. That it would be used to make ridiculous throwaway items that people only touched once used once and threw away like chip bags.
They wanted to build durable, beautiful, and useful things. And everything from billiard balls, making it out of plastic instead of ivory or piano keys, to the early infrastructure of our then nascent electrical grid. All that was made out of long-lasting, durable plastics. And the allure was that it could be
any shape, any color, and serve a lot of different purposes where natural materials were not easily adapted. And the selling point for plastic is it didn't decompose. Bacteria didn't break it down. It didn't rot. Natural forces that break down natural materials didn't apply.
Why in the world would you take that something designed never to be absorbed by nature and turn it into a disposable product and throw it everywhere? I mean, that is insanity by definition. And the people who vented plastic never, never intended that.
Well, this is something that really, it affects everyone. I mean, if we're all eating a credit card's worth of plastic every week, it affects everyone. And like you say, there isn't going to be one solution to all of this, but if people...
do what they can do, then collectively it may make a real difference. I've been speaking with Edward Humes. He is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist who's written 16 books. His latest book is called Total Garbage, How We Can Fix Our Waste and Heal Our World. And there's a link to that book at Amazon in the show notes. Appreciate you coming by and talking about this, Edward. Thank you. I really appreciated your interest in having this conversation.
The concept of creativity is one that's always interested me, not just from the point of view of the creator, but also the recipient. What is creativity? Is it really important to the average person to be creative? Are we driven to create, or is it enough to appreciate other people's creativity? Are there ways to up your own creative abilities?
Well, here to discuss all this is Anna Abraham. She is a professor and director of the Torrance Center for Creativity and Talent Development at the University of Georgia. And she's author of a book called The Creative Brain, Myths and Truths. Hi, Anna. Welcome to Something You Should Know. Thank you for having me. So if you had to, it's probably a hard question to answer. Well, maybe it's not. If you had to define creativity, what is it?
I would define it as our ability to have ideas or create products that are in some way novel or surprising, as well as satisfying to some end.
Ooh, that's a really good and different definition. And I guess almost everybody has the capacity to be creative. But what interests me so much is those people who are just so driven to be creative, who must write or paint or invent things. What is that? What is that engine that pushes them?
I think that is really the million dollar question if you want. We tend to look at creativity from the outside and look at people who do these amazing things that fill us with wonder and joy and awe. We understand very little about the internal processes and I mean really that this drive, this energy that we have to do the things that we really care about because it's hard work. It takes a lot of effort, it takes a lot of discipline.
to reach the heights of creativity. And we know very little about what exactly those of us who do it have very differently from the others. A lot of it stems from just getting a lot of meaning and joy in doing that activity. That's where you feel your purpose is, right? So there's all of these aspects of creativity,
From an empirical standpoint, are less well studied. This discipline, focus, this need to do this and not that. Why am I moved to do this one activity? Our deep individuality is involved there, which is what makes it hard to study because it's easy to study things that are general and common to all of us. It's much harder to study things about our unique interests and our unique proclivities.
I wonder if the satisfaction of being creative is being creative or the reward that comes after, the payoff, the satisfaction, the accolades, whatever it is. Is that what drives creativity or is it just doing it? I think a lot of it is what comes in the moment, in the process. So we can think of reward as
in terms of phases that it comes in. So there's a lot of joy in the process of creating. So you're sitting there at the, of course, with a lot of frustration, but when the ideas start to flow, when the words start to chime and do what you want it to do, that is an immense experience to have in and of itself, the moment of creation.
The other aspect of the reward is what happens when you put it out there in the world. So we should distinguish between two phases of the reward, if you want to call it the reward process. One is the joy of the moment, the fulfillment even. Let's say maybe joy is too light of a word. The fulfillment of the doing, the meaningfulness of what you get when you're doing it as the creator, the explorer. And the
The other part of it, which is how does it reach people? Is it falling well? So even if, let's say, you've created what you think to be an amazing song, when you created it, it was wonderful for you. But if a lot of people don't listen to it, it doesn't mean anything was compromised about your process. You still had an engaging, positive, meaningful, fulfilling moment in the moment of creation.
Do you think creativity is subjective? That you may look at something and say, boy, that's so creative. And I may look at it and go, that's horrible. Yes, it is certainly very subjective. It also seems that time, because there are plenty of works of art that did nothing at the time. But later, in fact, in a more recent example, I just watched an interview with Jerry Seinfeld who recounted
How the first few seasons of his TV show were completely trashed and didn't do well in the ratings. Critics called it horrible. Now it is this iconic, every season of that show is iconic television that is going to go on forever. But at the time, it really wasn't much.
I think there's a distinction to be made between things that are really in a quiet taste. And we have this even for the music. This is where I've experienced it the most. You know, there was certain types of music that just seemed dissonant and noise-like to me when I was much, much younger that I would gladly listen to now, you know. It's almost like we have to evolve our sensibilities for certain types of mediums.
So some things are more complex to grasp than others. Some things feel beautiful immediately. You look at anything, you know, and it's a kind of fluency there. It works well with things that are
sort of not jarring at all in any sense. There's a lot of symmetry, there's an expectancy there. There is another completely different path to understanding aesthetic pleasure, which is sometimes you look at, let's say, a work of art and it's not immediately obvious to you what might be being depicted there. And then you work it out almost. So it takes some time. It's slightly more temporally distended phenomena.
And then you have what has been referred to as almost like an aesthetic aha. It comes to you a little later because it's a little more complicated. It's a little more like a puzzle that you need to work out. Do you ever stop and think, as I do, how many great books, inventions, ideas, stories,
stories, plays, movies, TV shows, works of art. How many did we never get to see? Because some gatekeeper said, no, no, sorry, that's not going anywhere. So that's the end of that. And we'll never know.
Absolutely. I agree completely there. You know, we probably live in an age now where we have a lot more exposure to things, where the gatekeepers are becoming, have maybe a little less power because of social media and the internet and people having, you know, websites and so on that where they can just put up their own work.
But it's still there, of course, who people will still go to galleries and exhibition spaces to that's that's the marker of achievement. Right. So and there are that's completely dictated by the gatekeepers and what they are willing or able to see, you know, as being groundbreaking and so on. That's the problem with creativity as well, because.
You know, the appearance of something new can seem very, very jarring because it's not easy to sort of assimilate that into what you already know. So a lot of really good new ideas can get rejected because...
Because they're new. They just seem perhaps nonsensical and so on. It's so far beyond what the status quo is seeing as okay that they're not even going to entertain it. So that is the problem for creativity because it relies on some recognition on the part of the recipient. But what the recipient can recognize is really based on what they already know and what they're open towards as well. Do you differentiate...
these two kinds of creativity. The singular creativity, the guy who paints a painting and wow, that's fabulous, versus making a movie kind of creativity where there's lots of people who are very creative, all of whom played a part, but there's no one creativity.
That's a great question. I don't know of any studies that have compared them, you know, it's kind of really interesting. They're obviously very different. A painter, a lone painter doing her work by herself is very different from a director who has to direct, you know, who has to have, it's almost like a, had to direct an orchestra of people who are doing work.
very different things. You know, let's say a director, she would have to have a vision for what the sound should be like, what the set design has to be like, what the actors are doing, what the cinematography should look like. And a painting is just...
you know, an object that you can have an immediate access to and it's a few seconds perhaps of your attention, maybe minutes if you spend a lot of time examining it, and then it's over. Whereas for something like a film, it's, you know, several minutes and sometimes several hours. And so this temporally extended type of
a creative output what is the process there involved is like things that we know very little about do we have a pretty good idea of what goes on in the brain when someone is in that creative mode in other words have you ever you know hooked up sensors or whatever to to the brain of somebody when they're writing or painting or performing or whatever they're doing
And compare that to like when they're eating a sandwich and see what the difference is. What we see in the brain is that multiple networks, brain networks are involved depending on the task in question. So the way to think about it, I think, is to think about what's happening in your mind when you're, let's say, reading a poem compared to when you're reciting a poem from memory compared to when you're
or writing a poem from scratch. And if you just think about how our minds work in each of these three situations, with reading, it's pretty easy. It's so automatic. And we know exactly the systems that are involved. When it comes to the memory aspect of it, we also know a lot about how conceptual knowledge is stored and how we recall that information and which networks in the brain are involved in that.
When it comes to the creative side, let's say you and I are both trying to write a poem about something, and we can have even a topic that we agree on. Let's write a poem about a pen. The way you use your brain networks will be very different from the way I use it because we are drawing on different sources of information. We have some things in common. We have some common associations with the word pen.
but we have associations that go well beyond like, oh, the pen is used for writing and it's similar to a pencil and so on, right? So all of our associations start to diverge after a while. So what we see in brain imaging work
these dynamic interactions between multiple networks. Because what you're trying to do when you're trying to be creative is to not do the predictable thing, to not go down the path of least resistance. You're trying to go away from it. So you have to use the networks that you have in place that follow the path of least resistance in their own specific domains.
to sort of co-opt them to do different things. That's what changes about the creative brain. You have this dynamic coupling between different networks, and that might look slightly different when I'm doing it compared to you're doing it, even though we're trying to do the same task, so to speak. Is a big part of creativity
practice? Seems like it is. That if I'm going to write a poem and I've written 50 of them, the 51st is going to, the process is going to be more efficient, less wasteful. It's going to be a better process than the first one was. Absolutely. And it's actually sadly one of the least understood aspects of the creative process from a scientific standpoint, at least. All creative artists are
I think what they have in common is that they have, they emphasize discipline, they emphasize practice, they emphasize ritual, you know, setting time apart on a regular basis to write, to paint, to do all of these things.
And what they all have in common is practice, is this constant need to perfect, improve, and just keep, let's say, their motor systems engaged, whatever modality they're looking at, to make sure that no dust settles on it, right? So that's what's really unusual about the fact that when we think about the creative process, we're so drawn to all the magical stuff, like
flow and insight and all of these things that seem so mystical somehow. Inspiration. Exactly. We tend to pay far less attention to the grind, you know, the fact that
If you're going to write a book, you're going to have to spend a lot of time sitting at your typewriter or your computer or your book, whatever you might be using, to get those words out. If you're going to be working on a piece of music, you're going to have to spend a lot of time just thinking up what kind of sequences of melodies you want. You have to keep trying things before you find something that resonates. It takes time. It takes practice. It takes discipline.
And a lot of the time can seem like wasted time, like because it didn't work, but it's a necessary step in the process. If you don't go through that, you never get to the good stuff.
Absolutely. Yeah. It's just the process is the preparation. The trying is an intricate part of the process, even though after the end of perhaps months of work, you have just like a song or two, right? All of those tries are very much, even the ineffective ones, even the ones that didn't lead anywhere, still told you where you didn't want to go, let's say, or still told you that, oh, this character development was not perhaps the best one. So I'm going to have to
kill my darling, so to speak. And so that's all part of the process of creation. But is there any sense of other than just sit down and give it a whirl? Is there any sense of a process to be creative or it's just too individual and there's too many different kinds of creativity to, that's not even a question.
I think there is the process is that people must figure out their own process. So all creative people tend to emphasize a practice of some sort. So but what the specifics will look like are very different from person to person. So some people will write every day. Some people write three times a week. Some people will have a whole morning devoted for it. Some people will have just two hours devoted.
and so on. Some people will have to cut themselves away from the world for a few weeks. Others don't do that. And also, this can differ from person to person, even during their lifetime. So you might be someone who has a particular practice or style or ritual, let's say, to get to essentially access your creative mind to work creatively when you're younger, and it changes when you're older, when your life circumstances change, and so on. So
What's also really common to all of them is that they exercise a lot of metacognitive abilities. So they're always thinking about what works for them. They're very in tune with what seems to work for them. And if something's not, they know that they need to change it. So they reflect a lot on their process.
And so they're always sort of listening to themselves, making sure that they're putting themselves in their right space, creating the conditions that will allow them to get into the state of flow, have those ideas, do productive things that are very fulfilling for them.
The person who's trying to write the book or be a painter and they look at the masters, because when people talk about creativity, it's very easy to gravitate to the masters and talk about them. But is there any sense of what it is they have that I don't have? Or is it like your example of the athlete that some people just have it and some people don't, but it doesn't mean you're not good. It just means you're not the very best.
It's the confluence of factors. Even the great masters started as novices. They didn't know much, right? They started just like we all did when we learned how to write, right? What do we start with? None of us knew how to grasp a pencil. None of us knew how to make the shapes.
When we think about creativity, we think about it in terms of the magnitude of what people are showing. So everything starts with mini C, as we call it, which is the subjective exploratory space. We see it a lot with very young children as they're exploring the world. As you practice and you get better, you go into this little C, let's say it's a little more objective space.
I like to write poetry, for instance, and I know that I've gotten better at it compared to when, you know, what I write recently is probably, I think, better than what I wrote two years ago. Right. So you start to develop a more, let's say, objective from a personal standpoint lens about where you're going, where you're progressing, etc.
And further on you go, you get to pro C, which is like professional levels, people who are very talented, very motivated, decide to pursue it as a kind of profession. And finally, when your outputs are reaching to the extent where that it really changes the world in some way or has a significant impact, that's when you've reached what's called big C creativity. So we know that this is, even the masters had to work from a phase of being
not knowing to being incredibly accomplished. And so that nobody is just born accomplished. The second thing to keep in mind is very often they've been in environments that are conducive to this. They had someone recognize this when they were young, right? Or just little, the environment does matter that you're in an environment where they're capable or able to create. Mozart is usually the one who's pointed out as, you know, the epitome of
talent galore, right? That he, you know, his earliest compositions were by the age of five. What people don't really realize, and this is really well captured in a wonderful book by Twyla Tharp called Creative Habits, is that, you know, he was born to his father, who was an accomplished composer and pedagogue, and who really trained up and sort of seeing that his child was so capable and interested in
made sure that he got all of the exposure and training that he needed and gave him like the best opportunities in the world to develop that interest. So
One side of the story is what you're naturally, you know, vacillating to in terms of your interests and what you want to do, what gives you purpose and meaning and fulfillment and where you want to channel your energies to. And the other side is having people around who or an environment or society, whatever it might be, that.
provides you the opportunities to hone those abilities. Without that kind of influence, it's very hard. The talent will just go, will get wasted. Yeah, well, that's one of those other things to ponder is, you know, how many great painters never sat down to paint? So we'll never know how many great composers never sat down to compose music.
and we'll never know. I've been speaking with Anna Abraham. She's a professor and director of the Torrid Center for Creativity and Talent Development at the University of Georgia. The name of her book is The Creative Brain, Myths and Truths. And if you'd like to check that out, there's a link to it at Amazon in the show notes. Thank you, Anna, for coming on and talking about this. Thank you so much, Mike. Thank you for the opportunity. It's been a real pleasure. ♪
You've probably seen this or maybe done this if you have kids where you make a meal for yourself, but the kids eat something else. They eat mac and cheese or chicken nuggets or pizza. Well, according to a study, that's a bad idea. Researchers determined that children who ate adult meals...
were significantly healthier than those kids who ate meals that were dumbed down for them, with things like chicken nuggets, mac and cheese, and pizza. It robs them of a balanced diet, and it robs them of developing healthy habits. And it wasn't just the food that factored into the study. How and where the kids ate made a difference, too. Kids should be required to sit at the table with the grown-ups and not be allowed to eat or snack in front of the TV or in the backseat of the car.
And that is something you should know. How about leaving us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, CastBox, wherever you listen. We'd appreciate it if you would let people know what you think of the show and hopefully give us a five-star review. I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know.
Talmor is my home. My family have worked the land for generations. My gran says the island does not belong to us, but we belong to the island. And we must be ready, for a great evil is coming. And death follows with it.
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