The Mind's Best Work

by David N. Perkins

Over the years, tales about the creative process have flourished-tales of sudden insight and superior intelligence and personal eccentricity. Coleridge claimed that he wrote "Kubla Khan" in one sitting after an opium-induced dream. Poe declared that his "Raven" was worked out "with the precision and rigid consequence of a mathematical problem."

D. N. Perkins discusses the creative episodes of Beethoven, Mozart, Picasso, and others in this exploration of the creative process in the arts, sciences, and everyday life.

324 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1981

About the author

David Perkins is a founding member of Harvard Project Zero, a basic research project at the Harvard Graduate School of Education investigating human symbolic capacities and their development. For many years, he served as co-director, and is now senior co-director and a member of the steering committee. Perkins conducts research on creativity in the arts and sciences, informal reasoning, problem solving, understanding, individual and organizational learning, and the teaching of thinking skills. He has participated in curriculum projects addressing thinking, understanding, and learning in Colombia, Israel, Venezuela, South Africa, Sweden, Holland, Australia, and the United States. He is actively involved in school change. Perkins was one of the principal developers of WIDE World, a distance learning model practitioners now embedded in programs at HGSE. He is the author of numerous publications, including fourteen authored or co-authored books. His books include; The Eureka Effect, about creativity; King Arthurs Round Table, about organizational intelligence and learning; Making Learning Whole, a general framework for deepening education at all levels; and Future Wise, about what's worth teaching for the contemporary era.

Reviews

[Daphne]

Lots of good ideas here, though I didn't quite like the "proposition" and "revised proposition" format. Certainly thought-provoking.

[Don · Rating 4 out of 5]

Is creativity magic? Do really creative people simply invent, write, paint, prove and compose in bursts of intuition that is special in some way? According to Perkins, this is a myth and every human mind is capable not only of creativity but also fostering it. We've been taught that the Darwins, Poes, Curies, Poincares, etc. made their great leaps in some form of creative inspired moment that just came out of nowhere. But, this really isn't true - including naive stories of those walking along and suddenly 'seeing' the answer. Perkins sets out to prove that there is a model of thinking in these great creative giants and that leaps of insight are part of a structured effort over time.

Perkins digs deep into the psychology of the mind, sociological research on creativity and cognitive function to reveal his own theory of how creativity work. Key to any creative output is time spent on a problem (poem, painting, mathematical proof, theory, composition) with a set of cognitive constraints - noticing opportunities, noticing flaws, directed remembering, reasons in judgment, looking harder, setting work aside, model for the work, and climbing the hill (perfecting). But, it is more than that - it isn't unconscious - it is a directed behavior. I think he places it well in his analogy that we don't question an athlete's ability because we know we can exercise, practice, get stronger if we work at it and maybe be more athletic - yet, most of us don't believe we're creative and it is some form of magical ability. Believe me, Perkins dispels this well!

I purchased this book about 20 years ago and for some reason never got around to reading it. After discovering it again on a basement shelf I decided to dig in and was pleasantly surprised. Perkins wrote this book over 30 years ago so I wonder where his research has led him over the decades. Nevertheless, if you want to discover how to be creative this is the book to read.

[Theresa · Rating 3 out of 5]

The previous owner of this book took margin notes and had a little index card outlining some of the main ideas, like it might have been used for a college course.

Anyway, without those notes I don't think I would have understood a good chunk of what the author was saying or why he was saying it.

This is a 'skill issue' on my end more than a complaint about the writing.

[Karen · Rating 2 out of 5]

The concepts about creativity in this book are interesting, but it reads too much like a research paper. Got 1/2 way through before I gave up. It's not holding my interest.

[Maurizio Codogno · Rating 4 out of 5]

Come funziona la mente? Cos'è la creatività? Sono domande che ci si fa ca sempre, e ancora oggi non si ha in effetti una risposta chiara, univoca e definitiva. Ecco perché questo libro, pur avendo più di trent'anni di vita, ha ancora un suo senso. L'approccio di Perkins è peculiare: inizia con l'affermare un concetto (Proposition), che poi viene rapidamente demolito per arrivare quando va bene a un concetto rivisto, mantenendo il buono della parte iniziale ma specificandolo; e quando va male a un'affermazione che è l'opposta di quella iniziale. Dal mio punto di vista, in cui come ho detto la creatività è ancora un mistero, questo metodo non è malvagio: almeno ti costringe a pensare un po', proprio come gli esercizi sparsi per il testo sono degli ottimi modi per accorgersi di persona che le nostre idee ingenue sono spesso fallaci. Altro punto interessante è la spiegazione di come il brainstorming non è che funzioni sempre così bene, e soprattutto che il suo risultato dipende molto dalle persone coinvolte: la maggior parte della gente si ferma quando trova un'idea decente e mette per così dire i remi in barca. In definitiva, un testo interessante.

[Darius · Rating 5 out of 5]

Perkins begin by contrasting the creation of two long poems: Coleridge's "Kubla Khan", and Poe's "The Raven". While Coleridge claimed that the entire poem came to him in a drug-induced dream, Poe speaks of a rigorous, logical, deductive process while writing "The Raven".

Are there two different process at work in creativity? Is one of those poets misrepresenting some aspect of creation? Are people simply different in their creative processes? These are the questions Perkins seeks to answer in this book, primarily by walking the reader through numerous examples of research.