For the uninitiated, credentialism is belief in or reliance on academic or other formal qualifications as the best measure of a person's intelligence or ability to do a particular job.
It's an issue of 'quantity and quality' -- the number of degrees one obtains and where they obtain them!
Most top firms apply this rule to recruit and to promote candidates. This is just how the world works. But a few people have been able to defy this odd, especially in the field of computers.
What, though, is the attraction for these elite jobs? I think a commercial propaganda that happiness would be found.
Sunday 1 May 2016
Thursday 31 March 2016
ADHD: The Other Side of the Coin
The following is an excerpt from Scientific American's "The Creative Gifts of ADHD":
In his 2004 book "Creativity is Forever", Gary Davis reviewed the creativity literature from 1961 to 2003 and identified 22 reoccurring personality traits of creative people. This included 16 "positive" traits (e.g., independent, risk-taking, high energy, curiosity, humor, artistic, emotional) and 6 "negative" traits (e.g., impulsive, hyperactive, argumentative). In her own review of the creativity literature, Bonnie Cramond found that many of these same traits overlap to a substantial degree with behavioral descriptions of Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder (ADHD)-- including higher levels of spontaneous idea generation, mind wandering, daydreaming, sensation seeking, energy, and impulsivity.
Research since then has supported the notion that people with ADHD characteristics are more likely to reach higher levels of creative thought and achievement than people without these characteristics. Recent research by Darya Zabelina and colleagues have found that real-life creative achievement is associated with the ability to broaden attention and have a “leaky” mental filter-- something in which people with ADHD excel.
Recent work in cognitive neuroscience also suggests a connection between ADHD and creativity. Both creative thinkers and people with ADHD show difficulty suppressing brain activity coming from the "Imagination Network".
The article continues:
Of course, whether this is a positive thing or a negative thing depends on the context. The ability to control your attention is most certainly a valuable asset; difficulty inhibiting your inner mind can get in the way of paying attention to a boring classroom lecture or concentrating on a challenging problem. But the ability to keep your inner stream of fantasies, imagination, and daydreams on call can be immensely conducive to creativity. By automatically treating ADHD characteristics as a disability-- as we so often do in an educational context-- we are unnecessarily letting too many competent and creative kids fall through the cracks.
In his 2004 book "Creativity is Forever", Gary Davis reviewed the creativity literature from 1961 to 2003 and identified 22 reoccurring personality traits of creative people. This included 16 "positive" traits (e.g., independent, risk-taking, high energy, curiosity, humor, artistic, emotional) and 6 "negative" traits (e.g., impulsive, hyperactive, argumentative). In her own review of the creativity literature, Bonnie Cramond found that many of these same traits overlap to a substantial degree with behavioral descriptions of Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder (ADHD)-- including higher levels of spontaneous idea generation, mind wandering, daydreaming, sensation seeking, energy, and impulsivity.
Research since then has supported the notion that people with ADHD characteristics are more likely to reach higher levels of creative thought and achievement than people without these characteristics. Recent research by Darya Zabelina and colleagues have found that real-life creative achievement is associated with the ability to broaden attention and have a “leaky” mental filter-- something in which people with ADHD excel.
Recent work in cognitive neuroscience also suggests a connection between ADHD and creativity. Both creative thinkers and people with ADHD show difficulty suppressing brain activity coming from the "Imagination Network".
The article continues:
Of course, whether this is a positive thing or a negative thing depends on the context. The ability to control your attention is most certainly a valuable asset; difficulty inhibiting your inner mind can get in the way of paying attention to a boring classroom lecture or concentrating on a challenging problem. But the ability to keep your inner stream of fantasies, imagination, and daydreams on call can be immensely conducive to creativity. By automatically treating ADHD characteristics as a disability-- as we so often do in an educational context-- we are unnecessarily letting too many competent and creative kids fall through the cracks.
Sunday 31 January 2016
For the Love of Languages
This is a pretty short post. How many languages do you speak? Do you think that languages can make you a better thinker, giving you a broader dimension in which to analyse and to communicate ideas? Well, you could explore adding more languages to your repertoire. See you on the other side of the tongue.
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