How to Escape a Lion: Why Children are More Creative than Adults

Land took the same test he used at NASA to select the most innovative researchers and scientists. He administered it to a group of five year old children. Because Land and his team wanted to learn more about nature vs nurture as it applied to creative thinking.

It turns out that 98% of these five year olds scored as creative geniuses.

Land went back five years later to test the same children at the age of ten. Their scores went down. Very down. At age ten, only 30% of the SAME CHILDREN were still creative geniuses.

Five years later, Land returned again. At age fifteen, the same youth had now dropped to only 12% scoring at that high level!

As Land reveals in his TED Talk on this story, the educators administering the test got so depressed that they didn’t want to carry on further.

Instead, Land compiled results from tests of 280,000 adults aged 25 and over. Yet the result of this effort was even more depressing: only 2% of grown-ups scored as creative geniuses.

The historian Oswald Spengler estimated that only about 1 in 50 people were the ones who came up with the new ideas in society. The rest of people just implement them. “Turns out his estimate was just about right,” Land said.

What Land’s Research into the Creativity of Children Means

So nearly all of us are born creative, and we lose it as we get older.

We lose it very fast, in fact.

Indeed, educator Ken Robinson argued in his own 2006 TED Talk that today’s education practices, designed in the (First) Industrial Revolution, crush students’ innate creative talents. This presentation of Robinson’s has become the most popular TED Talk of all time.

Yet I don’t think that so much of the blame for this creative “dumbing down” should be put on traditional schooling. To me it seems that the tendency to “think in boxes” by adults is not an externally imposed mechanism of control. It is a perfectly natural feature of humans.

Adults in traditional societies need the ability to make quick decisions more than they need creativity. External threats and opportunities come fast and furiously. This means using experience, not imagination, to select appropriate actions.

Only a very few people in a traditional society need creativity. The inventors, the strategists, and the shamans. And they receive training and lifestyle guidance to maintain their creative minds.

Creativity loses hands down to traditional wisdom in a crisis. If you run into a lion, there is a right way to respond: do not run!

Instead, stop, look at the lion, and slowly back away, while waving your arms around and talking to it. This gives you the best chance for survival.

A modern equivalent is a drunk driver speeding toward you in the middle of the road. In that case, you don’t need to ponder a variety of alternatives. You just need to get out of the way as fast as you can.

At age five, we don’t worry about survival and protection. We can play and experiment and take risks. In fact, we are designed to. The point of our mind at five years old is to try out new things, learn, and design our mental boxscape. So yes, school is part of the process of our creativity being reduced. But it’s also an appropriate tool designed to help us become effective grown-ups.

It’s only recently that creativity has become useful for all adults. Today, our systems need to catch up. It’s likely that human creativity scores will now begin to increase as we age, rather than plummet. This is no solace to those of us caught between generations. But the good news is our creativity is just hiding. It’s not lost.

It’s easy to get it back.

One simple hack is to slow down and chill out.

This will help you realize that giving up multi-tasking is one great recipe for creative success.

Take the first basic step of separating divergent and convergent thinking. Aka ideation and critical thought. These are two radically different types of thought. Yet we tend to rush them together, assessing our ideas as soon as they come out.

This is one reason why creativity does not work as well in crisis. There’s no time to let new ideas bubble up, and incubate them.

Because it seems like most adults spend their lives in a form of extended crisis. We worry about everything that’s happening as if it’s a matter of life and death. Like facing off against a wild lion.

There is one more hack – how to deal with a lion.

It’s not the kindest method, but it works.

Consider it a metaphor.

Bring friends who are slower than you in your walk through the bush.

Then when you see a lion, run like hell.

See, you don’t have to outrun the lion.

You just have to outrun everyone else.

Michael Lee