Michele Marie Root-Bernstein

Michigan State University | MSU · Department of Theatre

POLYMATHY AMONG NOBEL LAUREATES AS A CREATIVE STRATEGY—THE QUALITATIVE AND PHENOMENOLOGICAL EVIDENCE by Michele Root-Bernstein and Robert Root-Bernstein Abstract and Reprint Link: Previous statistical studies found that polymathic networks of vocational and avocational interest predominate among Nobel Prize winners, discriminating them from le...

One of the ongoing challenges for gifted and talented education is that the measures used to select students for advanced educational opportunities rarely identify those most likely to make creative contributions later in life. The smartest students are rarely the most inventive. Conversely, extremely creative people are often overlooked as average...

Polymathy may be defined as the productive pursuit of multiple endeavors, simultaneously or serially, across a lifetime. As such, polymathic breadth of interest across knowledge domains characterizes Nobel laureates in the sciences, literature, economics, and peace, though interest patterns vary between groups. Economics laureates, like science lau...

An updated review of literature on imaginary worlds, aka paracosms, and worldplay.

Previous studies of science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medical (STEMM) professionals have identified a common “mental toolkit” composed of 13 “tools for thinking” that STEMM professionals use in their problem raising and problem solving. The present research surveyed a convenience sample of 225 STEMM professionals to investigate whe...

It’s a good thing I broke my foot in the summer of 2017, because all the time I would have spent gallivanting around, I devoted instead to organizing an exhibit of haiga for the Residential College of Arts and Humanities (RCAH) LookOut! Art Gallery at Michigan State University (MSU). The idea for Haiga: The Poetry of Images, aka Between Word and Im...

The goal of educating for creativity must be active understanding rather than passive knowing. To understand is to have the capability to re-create, which trains the ability also to create. The ability to create requires problem-finding as well as problem-solving. It requires practice. Best practice involves the emulation of creative people and the...

A practical look at how close to far "copy-change" can enhance the learning of haiku craft and inform a strategy for creating in this art form. Includes a look at the haiku tradition of honkadori and recent examples of allusion and emulation by contemporary poets as well as the author.

I first “met” Eve Luckring in the pages of A New Resonance 6, where her haiku were presented as “thumbnail sketches for short stories,” alive with introspection and self-discovery.1 Bumping into her again, in the pages of haiku journals, in an online kukai, I found myself relearning her lineaments, for her poetry, it seemed to me, headed rapidly fo...

For many years I have taken interest in the invention of imaginary worlds. In childhood, worldplay, as I call it, often begins in those special places where persistent make-believe happens: a woodland glade, perhaps, or a Lego block house, or a hand-drawn map of a treasure island. In adulthood, imaginary world invention is highly (though not exclus...

How can parents, educators, business leaders and policy makers nurture creativity, prepare for inventiveness and stimulate innovation? One compelling answer, this book argues, lies in fostering the invention of imaginary worlds, a.k.a. worldplay. First emerging in middle childhood, this complex form of make-believe draws lifelong energy from the fr...

An effective educational framework is necessary to develop the engagement of children and adults with nature. Here we show how the tools for thinking framework can be applied to this end. The tools comprise 13 sensory- based cognitive skills that form the basis for formalized expressions of knowledge and understanding in the sciences and arts. Thes...

By and large, polymaths are the understudied cousins of gifted prodigies and other remarkable achievers. Yet close examination of a wider range of individuals reveals other, if less well-understood, patterns of creative development that are broader and more versatile. The (a)vocational polymath makes two or more different kinds of things (poems and...

Governments, schools, and other nonprofit organizations are engaged in critical budget decisions that may affect our economic development success. The assumption is that arts and crafts are dispensable extras. Research suggests, however, that disposing of arts and crafts may have negative consequences for the country’s ability to produce innovative...

At the Fifth Haiku Pacific Rim Conference, held Septem-ber 5–9 in Pacific Grove, California, participants had the priv-ilege of attending a reading by the well-known Japanese poet, Akito Arima. Author of thirteen books of haiku and haiku master of Ten'i, one of the most prominent haiku groups in Japan, Arima has served as president of the Haiku Int...

Creativity develops through age-related stages. Children and adolescents explore ranges of creative skills, but rarely contribute professionally to any discipline. Disciplinary creativity is often dependent on prior childhood play and learning, but is manifested mainly in maturity. Total creative productivity tends to increase until middle age and...

In this chapter we examine the fundamental role of intuitive thinking skills in creative endeavor across the arts and sciences. The imagination manifests itself in a set of 13 non-verbal, non-mathematical, non-logical thinking tools that innovative individuals in all disciplines say they use: observing, imaging, abstracting, recognizing and forming...

T he study of creativity is my passion. Pen a few lines on your imagi-native skills or compositional habits, and I'm peering over your shoulder, wide-eyed and wondering. I don't think it makes much sense to explore creative processes, however, without also experiencing them from the inside out. So some years ago I decided to immerse myself in an ae...

Creative potential in childhood, of a kind bearing fruit in maturity, reveals itself in imaginative play, the most complex of which is the invention of imaginary worlds (paracosms). Worldplay often includes the generation of stories, drawings, etc., that provide evidence of little c creative behavior. Historical examples (e.g., the Brontës) suggest...

The childhood invention of imaginary worlds or paracosms may prepare for creative endeavor in adulthood. To test hypotheses concerning the incidence of childhood worldplay and its connection to mature work, this study queried MacArthur Fellows, selected for their creativity, and compared them to Michigan State University (MSU) students. Whereas pre...

The literature comparing artistic and scientific creativity is sparse, perhaps because it is assumed that the arts and sciences are so different as to attract different types of minds, each working in very different ways. As C. P. Snow wrote in his famous essay "The Two Cultures," artists and intellectuals stand at one pole and scientists at the ot...

The imaginative and compositional processes of Martha Graham and other dancer-choreographers are explored in order to test the relative merits of Gardner's Theory of Multiple Intelligences and the Root-Bernstein's tools-for-thinking approach to creativity. Gardner's focus on bodily-kinesthetic intelligence as both a means of communication and cogni...

To investigate the nature of creative thinking in biomedical science with specific applications to molecular pathologies and DNA technologies. Accounts of breakthroughs and inventions contained in autobiographies, biographies, interviews, and archival sources. Discoveries that have altered, or may yet alter, basic textbook accounts of biomedical sc...

Objective.—To investigate the nature of creative thinking in biomedical science with specific applications to molecular pathologies and DNA technologies. Data Sources.—Accounts of breakthroughs and inventions contained in autobiographies, biographies, interviews, and archival sources. Study Selection.—Discoveries that have altered, or may yet alter...

We maintain that there the production of novel ideas is distinct from the ways in which ideas manifest themselves publicly. Thus, contrary to Howard Gardner, artists are not primarily visual thinkers; scientists analytical thinkers; dancers kinesthetic thinkers; poets thinkers-in-words; etc. Rather everyone in every discipline uses a complex, non-s...