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>O2 MONITOR >> Are we the Center Of The Universe?

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We Are The Center Of The Universe

Roll Over Copernicus! It Turns Out We Are The Center Of The Universe

 
by Adam Frank
Astronomers observing the center of the Milky Way from the European Southern Observatory in Chile fire a laser into the heavens. The Laser Guide Star (LGS) is used as a reference to correct the blurring effect of the atmosphere on images.

Yuri Beletsky/ESO
Astronomers observing the center of the Milky Way from the European Southern Observatory in Chile fire a laser into the heavens. The Laser Guide Star (LGS) is used as a reference to correct the blurring effect of the atmosphere on images.

For the last 500 years humanity has suffered one humiliation after another at the hands of the cosmos.
First Copernicus showed us that the Earth was not the center of the solar system. Then we found out that the sun was not in a special position within the galaxy. The galaxy, we then discovered, was not special either, but one of an uncountable number in an infinite universe. Now some physicists tell us that the universe may not be unique but may exist as part of a vast, infinite multiverse. All this Copernican overturning is enough to give a species a severe set of self-esteem issues.
Worse, it’s enough to make us wonder what place and what meaning in the cosmos we are meant to inhabit.
Well today, my friends, I am here to tell you that Copernicus, or at least a reflexive Copernicanism, is wrong.


  I am just about to press SEND on the final version of my new book, called The End of the Beginning: Cosmology Culture and Time at the Twilight of the Big Bang. It’s a cultural history of cosmic time and a cosmic history of cultural time. I’ve spent the last two years tracing the path of humanity’s cosmological imagination and, after giving the issue A LOT of cogitation, I think we’re ready to ready roll Copernicus over and tell the cosmos the news.
We are, it turns out, the center of the universe and it’s anything but meaningless.
For this claim to be true there is no need to insert your favorite, or most hated, religion. There is no need to demand a deity exist or posit that it fine-tuned the cosmos to give us a warm, safe, cozy home. To see our vital, central role in the cosmos you need only look out from your own perspective and understand that is all you, or anyone else, will ever get.
Because it’s all about perspective.
We like to believe we can study the Universe (with a capital ‘U’) as a thing in itself. But in truth what we actually get are universes (with a lower case ‘u’). We only ever get glorious but partial views of the ever-greater “whole.” Science, in this perspective, is not a means to a “final theory” but is, instead, our most extraordinary means of continuing a never-ending dialogue with the world. That dialogue, formed through science and art and all forms of culture make us co-creators of the universes we inhabit and they are always suffused with meaning
There is the old story of a group of blind philosophers studying an elephant. One feels the tail and declares an elephant is like a snake. Another feels the ear and declares the elephant is like a palm frond. A third feels the foot and declares the elephant is like a tree. The relationship between the universe in-and-of-itself and the universe each culture, each instantiation of science, invents for itself is much like that between the philosophers and their elephant.
Perhaps it is time to see the universe as an infinite elephant or, better yet, as a diamond with infinite facets. Different facets come into view as culture and science change. We gain a deeper understanding even as the universe in-and-of-itself remains ultimately larger than all our accounts.
In the end, it is our dialogue with the universe that matters most. Acknowledging the intertwined evolution of culture and cosmic vision does not diminish the power of science; it allows us to see more clearly our role as participants in the universe.
To put it bluntly, we can never be taken out of the narrative of creation. We are always, in some partial but essential way, its co-creators. In taking this perspective we make the most radical step of all. We begin to move away from a reflexive Copernicanism that made human being irrelevant in the cosmos and recognize that there is vital place for us. It’s a life at the center of the universes we manifest through the creative act of being human, creating culture and practicing science.

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>O2 MONITOR >> Is this the "Holy Grail" you seek? > The Dancing Universe

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Cover of "The Dancing Universe: From Crea...

The Dancing Universe: Chasing The Big Three Origins

There is no better place to illustrate where science and religion intersect than when we ponder the “Three Origins”: that of the universe, that of life and that of mind.

 

Is this the “Holy Grail” you seek? 
Unfortunately, no. 
The Grails we seek are metaphors for the understanding of life, the universe and everything (apologies to the late Douglas Adams).

Hundreds of creation myths from all corners of the world have, over the past few millennia, tried to provide some explanation to these three mysteries. In The Dancing Universe, I explored some of the common threads in these myths and how they intersect with ideas in science, in particular in cosmology.


We seem to have a deeply ingrained need to understand where we come from, and know that our origins are enmeshed with the origin of the cosmos itself: since we are thinking chunks of stardust, to understand where we came from we need to understand where stars came from, how dust got assembled into living matter, and how living matter became thinking matter.
Creation myths are pre-scientific attempts to come up with explanations of the natural world, which assume the existence of supernatural powers capable of performing what appear to be impossible deeds. Much of the perceived conflict between science and religion is due to the tension between these very different explanatory modes and the belief that these deeds are impossible and hence require the aid of entities that defy the laws of nature.
Can the three origins be explained by natural mechanisms, without the interference of supernatural entities? If they could, religions that rely on deities that exist beyond the laws of Nature would have to undergo a deep revision.
Of course, this doesn’t mean that understanding the three origins would eliminate our spiritual connection with nature and with each other. On the contrary, our understanding of the world should only strengthen our spirituality. The belief that explanations of the natural world remove us from it has no foundation. Rationality and spirituality are complementary aspects of our humanity.
If we are to look for common ground in the scientific and religious modes of understanding, it is in the fascination we all share with the mystery of creation. Religious or unreligious, we ask the same questions.
  Science has come a long way toward elucidating many of the mechanisms behind all three origins. In the past 400 years we have learned a great deal about the universe, about life and about the mind. These are very exciting times, when progress along all three questions is happening very fast. But we should also add that we still don’t know how to answer any of them. This should not be seen as a defeat, but as an ongoing challenge.
Science thrives on open questions.
Modern cosmology has shown that the universe had a very hot infancy, and that it has been expanding and cooling for the past 13.7 billion years. Astronomers have found incontrovertible evidence supporting the big bang model, in the form of a widespread radiation that permeates space, a relic of the cosmic hot and dense past. We can confidently reconstruct the cosmic history from about a second after the “bang” onward, not too bad.
We have revealed life’s genetic code and how inherited traits trickle down from generation to generation. We can go backwards and identify our last common ancestor as being a single celled organism that roamed the primitive oceans billions of years ago. But, as with the cosmos, we still can’t go all the way back to the origin. In fact, the very notion that we can understand exactly how life originated on Earth may be faulty; unless we can provide conclusive evidence that there is only one possible pathway for nonliving matter to self-organize into living matter, we may never know what happened here; we may have to be content with a plausible mechanism, reproducible in the laboratory.
Even less can be said about the brain, this remarkable assembly of some 100 billion neurons that creates our sense of who we are and constructs what we call our sense of reality. However, we now can map the seats of many different areas of brain activity, using magnetic resonance imaging and PET scans. We can see that neurons in different parts of the brain seem to act in tandem, firing in resonating patterns as if playing in an orchestra without a conductor. But brain sciences are the youngest of the three and present some formidable and wonderful challenges. Given the current pace of discovery, within the next few decades we will know much more.
How far down can we go in understanding the three questions is material for future posts. Hidden here are questions on the nature of knowledge and the limits of what we can know. But to deny our progress is a terrible mistake. In fact, open questions should be presented as the reason why we need more scientists, why a child should be interested in becoming a scientist. So many mysteries so little time.
The three origins hang up there as the Holy Grails of science.
What matters is what we find on the way.

“Sweeping through twenty-five centuries, Gleiser examines 
how mankind’s discovery of the connections between mythology, 
philosophy, and science brought about new cosmological insights.”—Natural History

Available again, with a new preface, a physicist’s “exceptionally clear summary 
of 2,500 years of science and a fascinating account of the ways in which it often 
does intersect with spiritual beliefs” –Kirkus Reviews

Marcelo Gleiser refutes the notion that science and spirituality are irreconcilable. 
In The Dancing Universe, he traces mystical, philosophical, and scientific ideas 
about the cosmos through the past twenty-five centuries, from the ancient creation myths 
of numerous cultures to contemporary theories about an ever-expanding universe. 

He also explores the lives and ideas of history’s greatest scientists, including 
Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Newton, and Einstein. 
By exploring how scientists have unlocked the secrets of gravity, matter, time, and space, 
Gleiser offers fresh perspective on the debate between science and faith.

Click here for TABLE OF CONTENTS

Awards/Recognition:
Winner of Brazil’s Jabuti Award for the best nonfiction book of the year.


MARCELO GLEISER is Appleton Professor of Natural Philosophy and Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Dartmouth College. He is also the author of The Prophet and the Astronomer: A Scientific Journey to the End of Time (2002).
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>O2 MONITOR >> Mind-Blowing Supernovas

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Blowing Up Stars: A 50 Year Old Question Goes Down?

 
by Adam Frank
The Crab Nebula is the remnant of a massive star.

NASA/JPL-Caltech/R. Gehrz (University of Minnesota)
 
The Crab Nebula is the shattered remnant of a massive star that ended its life in a supernova explosion.

There are some critical, crossroads problems in science that just refuse to go away. They linger like ghosts haunting researchers for decades and eluding all attempts at resolution. Entire careers are spent searching for an answer and sometime entire lifetimes go by without that answer found. But every so often one of those vexing problems on which so much depends falls to human effort and ingenuity.
Today may be one of those days.


Supernova, the apocalyptic explosions of massive stars, are the brightest most energetic events in the Cosmos second only to the Big Bang which birthed the Universe itself. Visible from across the Universe Supernovae result from the self-immolation of stars. More than fireworks supernova matter acting as nuclear forges that create many of the heavy elements on which life depends. But living at the heart of these beasts is a mystery that 50 years and untold effort has been unable to solve. Until perhaps today.
When a massive star (more than eight times the sun mass) reaches the end of its life it runs out of nuclear fuel. With no visible means of support against its own titanic gravity, the star comes crashing down on itself squeezing tremendous amounts of mass into an ever smaller space. In less than seconds, a kind of nuclear alchemy occurs in the compressed center. A giant hyperdense core (a proto-neutron star) forms like a hard rubber ball that can only be squeezed so far. The dense core resists further compression. As the outer layers of the star that are still freefalling inwards slam into this nuclear brick wall a rebounding shock wave forms that blows the star apart.
At least that was the story.
The problem was the story never really worked. For 50 years, astronomers have been trying to find some variation on this theory –- the story –- that could make a massive dying star blow up. The added rotation, included the effects of ghostly particles called neutrinos, thought about jets and magnetic fields forming at the ultra dense core. Some of these ideas almost work, or work in some cases. But when explored in detail, they never produced a convincing, universal mechanism for creating the supernova that we know exist. It was a great and grand puzzle. Now, perhaps, the puzzle has been solved.
Jason Nordaus is a post-doctoral student working with Professor Adam Burrows at Princeton University. In a paper that has just appeared today, Nordhaus may have found the key to nature’s most extreme fireworks. Now you will have to excuse me for being a bit proud as Nordhaus got his PhD in our theory group at University of Rochester and we love our graduates going on to do great work with other scientists. If this result holds up it will be very important for astronomy. More importantly the answer Nordhaus found goes beyond science and directly touches our beloved Cosmos & Culture theme.
Using very high performance computers Nordaus ran simulations of exploding stars that focused on one key piece of physics. Squeezing matter produces lots of particles called neutrinos. The absorption of these neutrinos near the shock wave had already been suggested as a way to power it up and blow the star to bits.
What mattered for Nordaus was the ability to simulate the explosions — in detail — in 3-D. Lacking the computational power many previous studies were forced perform simulations in lower dimensions. That means imagining the star to be highly symmetric limiting the ability for neutrinos to deposit their energy in the gas and blow the star up. By tracking the full lumpy, bumpy, 3-D behavior of the collapsing star and the neutrinos Nordau’s found he could consistently get his model stars to explode.
The answer to this 50-year-old mystery turned out to be “nothing more” than our inability to explore detailed physics in its detailed 3-D behavior. That is where the link between Cosmos and Culture emerges.
Nordhuas’ result was simulation at the “Peta”scale frontier. PetaBytes means a million, billion bytes. PetaFlops means a million billion computations a second. That is the edge computational science is now crossing. With it comes our first real shot at virtual reality. Things are going change at Petascale domains in everything from video games to immersive computing (you don’t drive your car, your car drives you for example).
As we cross this frontier in machine power we can expect explosions in a lot more than model stars.

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Welcome to GBN O2HUB! This Global Business Network Hub is designed to INFORM & ENTERTAIN | GLOBAL ISSUES |CURRENT ECONOMY & FINANCE AFFAIRS| HUMANITIES | ART | MUSIC | SCIENCE | HEALTH & WELLBEING | CULTURE | ENVIRONMENT | O2 > Boost your Personal & Organizational Performance > Explore ‘EXCEL MINDSET’ Best Practice BUSINESS MANAGEMENT insights of GSMI – STRATEGY DYNAMICS Systems Thinking Solutions & Tools – MONITOR Nexus Global Business Consulting Network Diagnostics & Directives – IDC Knowledge Transfer Networks Research & BOSTON BUSINESS SCHOOL of MANAGEMENT Executive Education (Excel Mindset 2020 Vision Series) for BOOSTING your LEADERSHIP OXYGEN in critical topics: > Strategy Dynamics > Organizational Change, Streamlining & Transformation > Executive Decision Making > Performance Management > Risk Management > Leadership & Alignment > Business Intelligence & Analytics

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>BOOST O2 >> Don’t Fire Your Customers, Yet

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Times are tough. There’s too much work to go around and some days it seems like you’re spending all your time trying to please customers who never seem happy. If this sounds familiar, reading Seth Godin’s more, More, MORE! could put you over the edge:

“Firing the customers you can’t possibly please gives you the bandwidth and resources to coddle the ones that truly deserve your attention and repay you with referrals, applause and loyalty.”

If you’re going to “fire” customers, how can you be be sure that you’re only dumping those customers you can’t possibly please? You could try to segment with price deals, but that could be a very bad idea.
In When Customer Loyalty Is a Bad Thing, Timothy Keiningham and Lerzan Aksoy tell us that “only 20% of a firm’s customers are actually profitable. And many — often most — of a company’s profitable customers are not loyal.”
The authors continue:

“Profitable loyal customers on the other hand are almost always driven by differentiating aspects of our product or service offering. The key to a successful loyalty strategy is to become crystal clear as to what these are, and to focus on tangibly improving these elements.”

Seth is right: You want to focus your energy on pleasing your truly rewarding customers. If it’s not clear exactly who they are, make sure you’re spending enough time on your core points of distinction.
[Thanks to Arie Goldshlager, who posted a link on Twitter that led me to the HBR articles]

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>BOOST O2 >> The Best Way to Improve Productivity and Morale

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A Low-Cost Way to Improve Productivity and Morale

Want a more efficient, happier office — but don’t have a big budget to invest in improvements?

According to a fascinating article in the current issue of Scientific American Mind, new research suggests that simply letting employees decorate their own office space yields quite significant benefits in productivity and employee well-being.
In the authors’ experiments, workers who could customize their office decor showed about a 30% improvement in productivity and well-being over those placed in undecorated office space. Not a bad return on office mementos! Meanwhile, people who worked in an environment that had been set up to include art and plants were 15% more productive than those in the undecorated space.
Bosses, however, should resist the urge to tinker unnecessarily with an employee’s decor if they’ve let the employee choose it. In the experiments, Scientific American Mind reports, productivity gains disappeared for “disempowered” workers who had their decoration choices overridden and their office rearranged — even though the rearranged office still contained art and plants. The Scientific American Mind article’s authors, S. Alexander Haslam and Craig Knight, conclude:

“Employees perform best when they are encouraged to decorate their offices as they see fit, with plants and ornaments, comic calendars, photographs of their children or their cats — whatever makes them feel most comfortable and in their element.”

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>BOOST O2 >> Beware of Multitasking

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How Multitasking at Work Can Slow You Down

At any given time, are you trying to juggle lots of projects at work? If so, you could be decreasing your output, recent research suggests.
Researchers Decio Coviello, Andrea Ichino and Nicola Persico studied a group of Italian judges who were randomly assigned cases and who had similar workloads, in terms of the quantity and type of cases they were assigned. The researchers’ findings? The judges who worked on fewer cases at a time tended to complete more cases per quarter and took less time, on average, to complete a case. (You can read more about the authors’ findings in their recent National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, “Don’t Spread Yourself Too Thin: The Impact of Task Juggling on Workers’ Speed of Job Completion.”)
That doesn’t mean all multitasking at work is ineffiicient. In earlier research into information-worker productivity in an executive recruiting company, Sinan Aral, Erik Brynjolfsson and Marshall Van Alstyne found that the level of multitasking matters. Their findings in that study suggested that, for the recruiters, working on more projects in one time period at first increased productivity, as measured by revenue generation. But as the level of multitasking increased, the marginal benefits of additional multitasking declined — and, at a certain point, taking on still more tasks made workers less productive rather than more so.
Aral, Brynjolfsson and Van Alstyne essentially suggested that excessive multitasking may result in the workflow equivalent of a traffic jam, where projects get backed up behind other projects much the way cars get stuck in traffic when there are too many on a highway at once. (You can read a brief summary of their findings in “What Makes Information Workers Productive,” an article from the Winter 2008 issue of MIT Sloan Management Review.)
So perhaps the real question to ask yourself is: Am I multitasking so much that it’s significantly slowing my completion of tasks?

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>BOOST O2 >> Boost Your Productivity (Tips)

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 Boost Your Productivity in Information Work

No doubt about it: Technology has changed the way knowledge work gets done.
But have you changed your work habits enough to get the most from information technology?

MIT Sloan Professor Erik Brynjolfsson

MIT Sloan Professor Erik Brynjolfsson

Researchers Sinan Aral, Erik Brynjolfsson and Marshall Van Alstyne have been studying information worker productivity for a number of years. (See, for example, “What Makes Information Workers Productive,” a 2008 MIT Sloan Management Review article about some of their work.)
In a new working paper, the three researchers highlight selected findings from their own work and that of others in order to offer practical tips to help information workers — and top managers — improve their own productivity and that of their organizations.
Here’s a quick summary of Aral, Brynolfsson and Van Alstyne’s four recommendations for improving individual productivity in information work:
1. Be an “information hub” in your network and maintain a diverse network of contacts.
Getting or sending a lot of e-mail is not, by itself, the best predictor of high productivity. But workers who are more central to information networks – who are well-connected and broker information between others – tend to be more productive, the researchers report.
2. Keep your e-mail messages brief and focused.
Research, the three authors observe, suggests that people who send short e-mails are likely to get responses more quickly than those who send longer, less focused ones. And getting faster responses to e-mail questions translates into better productivity.
3. Use technology such as e-mail to multitask more — within reason.
In one of their studies, Aral, Brynolfsson and Van Alstyne found that more productive employees used technology to enable them to multitask more and complete more projects. But that tip comes with an important caveat: The researchers also found that, if taken to extremes, excessive multiasking can actually decrease productivity.
4. Delegate routine information work to subordinates and use information-support systems.
The scholars found that the most productive information workers were more likely to allow lower-value information work to be handled by subordinates or IT-based tools. Those high-productivity information workers also were most likely to have knowledge of specialized information sources that gave them an advantage.

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>BOOST O2 >> A Million Brains are better than One

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Collaborative Consumption: Drivers, Systems, Implications

Are you familiar yet with Rachel Botsman and her book What’s Mine Is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption (HarperBusiness, September 2010)?

Her talk at TEDxSydney last May is featured at the TED website on the subpage about “The Rise of Collaboration” (the 15-minute presentation and a transcript are both online here). Time magazine in the Dec 9 issue named her ideas about collaborative consumption and technology-enabled sharing of goods and services one of the top trends of 2010. A piece in the October issue of Harvard Business Review by Botsman and her co-author Roo Rogers set out their thesis in 349 words.
Here’s the idea: there is, as Botsman says in the TED talk, “a powerful cultural and economic force reinventing not just what we consume, but how we consume.” The website Swaptree is a perfect example. Botsman had a set of DVDs from the TV show “24.” She wanted a copy of the movie “Sex and the City.” And right on Swaptree she was able to find someone who wanted that exact swap, solving what economists call “the coincidence of wants” in about one minute.
As Botsman puts it: “An extremely powerful dynamic that has huge commercial and cultural implications is at play. Namely, that technology is enabling trust between strangers. We now live in a global village where we can mimic the ties that used to happen face-to-face, but on a scale and in ways that have never been possible before.”

Her ideas about this concept of “collaborative consumption” started, she says, from noticing “how ridiculously easy it is to form groups for a purpose” with the Internet removing the middleman, and how much conversation there was around “the wisdom of crowds” (see MIT SMR’s interview with MIT Sloan’s Thomas Malone, “A Billion Brains Are Better Than One,” and the story “The Collective Intelligence Genome”).
She and Rodgers started collecting examples. They identified four drivers: a renewed belief in the importance of community. A “torrent of peer-to-peer social networks and real-time technologies.” A wave of unresolved environmental concerns. And a global recession that has “fundamentally shocked consumer behaviors.”
Three kinds of systems have resulted, she says: Redistribution markets, like Swaptree. Collaborative lifestyles, like Landshare, a UK program that matches people with space in their yard with people who want to build a garden there, and Couchsurfing.org, which Botsman says averaged more than 35 million daily page views in Nov 2009. And product service systems, like peer-to-peer car rental, where you make money renting your car to your neighbor.
Botsman isn’t big on IDing what makes these systems work behind the scenes — she says in the TED talk that “there are layers of technical wonder behind sites such as Swaptree, but that’s not my interest” — but there certainly are management implications of her research.
You can find them in the last part of the book. After laying out the context (chapter 3: “From Generation Me to Generation We”) and the groundswell (chapter 4: “The Rise of Collaborative Consumption”), the book concludes with a section on implications (chapter 9: “Community Is the Brand”). Here’s a section on NikePlus, from chapter 9:

Even mega consumer brands such as Nike are shifting their brand focus and advertising away from products and toward building collaborative communities. Nike is spending 55 per cent less on traditional advertising and impressive celebrity endorsements than it was ten years ago. Instead, Nike is investing in nonmedia social hubs such as NikePlus, cocreated with Apple, where runners around the world post running routes, map their runs, offer advice and encouragement to one another, track their progress toward goals, load running songs, and arrange to meet up with other runners in the real world.
. . . What is critical for the growth of Collaborative Consumption is that we are moving beyond an era of defining ourselves just by the swoosh on our T-shirts or sneakers. Now we express who we are by what we join, in this instance the world’s largest running club. Brands are realizing that they need to offer experiences, not just products.

Want more ideas to mull over? Check out the examples page at the website collaborativeconsumption.com.

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>BOOST O2 >> Boost your Brain’s Creativity

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How to Make Your Brain More Creative

Can you make yourself more creative? According to Shelley Carson, author of the new book Your Creative Brain: Seven Steps to Maximize Imagination, Productivity, and Innovation in Your Life, you can.
In a recent conversation with the Boston Globe, Carson, who has a PhD in psychology from Harvard University and teaches at Harvard Extension School, noted these three things: “In the business world, creativity is now the number-one quality that head hunters are looking for in top-level chief executives. Most of the elite business schools in the country now have courses on creativity, and many Fortune 500 companies have hired creativity consultants.”
It’s possible, she says, for creativity-challenged people to use “biofeedback programs and other types of cognitive behavioral research” to change brain activation patterns to “mimic the brain activation of highly creative people.”
“What we have found in recent years in the neuroscience of creativity is that highly creative people tend to activate certain neural patterns in their brain when they are solving a creative problem or doing creative work,” she told the Globe.
Creativity and control are closely linked, she says. “I subscribe to the cognitive disinhibition theory of creativity,” Carson said. “A lot of people are really afraid to turn down the volume on the executive function part of their brain. They want control over their cognitive awareness and their mental workspace. It’s very difficult for them to relinquish that control and say to the guys back there in research and development, throw at me what you’ve got.”
An interview with Carson posted at her website gives a little more detail about this idea that you can make your brain more open to new material:

What do you think are the greatest challenges for people who want to get more creative?
Everyone has a built-in censoring system in their brains that filters thoughts, images, and memories, and stimuli from the outside world before they reach conscious awareness. Our censoring system keeps us focused on our current goals and on information that prior learning has taught us is “appropriate.” Learning to loosen up this mental filtering system to allow more novel ideas and stimuli into conscious awareness is one of the biggest challenges for people who don’t think of themselves as creative. In Your Creative Brain, I provide a lot of information on how to loosen the censoring system so that ideas can flow more fluently.
Does every brain really have the potential to be creative?
Yes! While it’s true that some brains are naturally more inclined toward creative ideation than others, all brains have a marvelous ability to continually change and develop. Research has shown that people who are naturally highly creative can switch between various brain activation patterns more easily than those who are less naturally creative. However, this is a skill that can be practiced and learned. Although it may not make an Einstein out of everyone, practice and exercise can definitely make any brain more creative.

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