Curiosity, Creativity, & Imagination
Written by Supakarn Nakavisut
Edited by Melanie Weiss
In the age of AI, where machines can already memorise faster, calculate better, and replicate tasks with terrifying precision, our role as teachers has to shift from information providers to curiosity nurturers. We are no longer preparing children to compete with computers, but rather to be more human than ever, to think critically, to imagine wildly, and to create meaningfully. If we fail to nurture these qualities in our students, we risk raising brilliant copy machines instead of original thinkers. Creativity isn’t a bonus skill anymore; it’s a survival trait. And it begins with us modelling what it means to wonder, to play, and to occasionally say,
“I don’t know, but let’s find out together.”
Where did this come from?
I originally wrote this piece in the months following the 2020 lockdown, while working at an early childhood centre. At the time, many parents were suddenly faced with the unexpected task of rearing their little ones at home — a responsibility they had thought would be shared with kindergarten. This writing was my way of reflecting on the work I’d been doing up until that point, clarifying the value I believed I was offering to the children, and offering something practical to help parents navigate home learning. Little did I know how deeply relevant it would become five years later with the rapid rise of AI and large language models. I’m incredibly grateful to the editor, my dear friend Mel, who took the time to absorb the content and shape it through her own lens and expertise — a process of human oversight that, within just a year, has all but vanished. I share this now to support teachers, caregivers, and parents as we collectively face the complex task of raising children in the age of AI, and to highlight the places where these technologies may, subtly or profoundly, be stunting natural child development. Though it was written half a decade ago, I believe its relevance has only grown.
This blog is about:
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What are curiosity, creativity and imagination?
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Why have they become one ofthe most essential skills in the 21st century?
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And how do we foster them in our children?
Using some personal stories, recent studies and testimonials, in 2020, as social distancing became everybody's reality, I attempted to answer these questions.
A Story from the Army
I will begin by sharing an anecdote from my time in the Royal Thai Army. In 2018, I volunteered to be in the Thai military. Now you might think “what does going to the military have anything to do with creativity?”, “If anything, it is the antithesis of creativity, with it’s rigid structures, totalitarian methods and emphasis on obedience, in other words, doing as you’re told”. Well, let me tell you that nothing about the military, itself made me feel more creative. Rather, it was what I was being refrained from doing.
The first three months was a brutal training period where we weren’t allowed any phones, internet or contact with the outside world. We were completely secluded. To prove how hidden we were, this all happened during that time where the young Thai soccer team got stuck in a cave. I did not hear about this story until months later upon leaving the barracks and realised that it had been international news. It appears that I had been stuck in a cave of my own.
As the comedian Ronny Chieng hilariously put it in his comedy special, “who knew that all of human knowledge could make people dumber?”, referring to the internet [Yuval Noah Harari has reiterated this sentiment in his new book NEXUS, saying "If we're so smart, why are we so stupid"]. This sentiment makes a lot of sense to me because I believe that during the training period, where I didn’t have a phone, I tapped into a function of my brain that had been inactive for a long time. The part that is responsible for my curiosity. Many times during this period, questions would pop into my head and instead of saying, let’s look it up, which wasn’t an option, my mind would instead say, let’s think about it. After the training period, I felt so much more creative. I wrote a 70-page business plan with just a pen and paper, I planned medium-scaled music events, and I thought more critically about things.
Now, I’m not suggesting for people to join the army or get rid of their phones. I am simply saying that this change happened because my lifestyle changed in a significant way. If we want to create a change, individually or collectively, we must try something that hasn’t been done before; and in most formal education institutions, producing creative children has been mostly unsuccessful.
As Albert Einstein put it,
“It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education”.
What Is Curiosity?
Personally, I describe curiosity as the mind’s hunger for more knowledge. The process that happens in the brain when we need more information to fill in a gap. When we hear a scream, our mind immediately asks, where did that come from? When we approach a corner, our mind asks, is there a car on the other side? In Myanmar, I’ve learned that the solution is to honk the horn. This is called perceptual curiosity, curiosity that triggered by your immediate senses, sight, smell, sound etc.
Another type of curiosity is the epistemic curiosity, the curiosity that wonders about intellectual concepts, facts and ideas such as:
“Where is the world’s longest wooden foot bridge?”
First you need to know what a bridge is. What is the purpose of it. Imagine being a child crossing a river for the first time and thinking “I’m not falling in? What? How is this possible?” I still feel the same with most technology these days. Then you need to know what wood is, how it feels, how things can be made from it. If a child knows these things, they can then say, “I wonder where I can find the longest one of those?”, as children usually do.
Children begin with an innate perceptual curiosity, trying to decipher their parents voice, making sense of what they are seeing and smelling. An epistemic curiosity emerges after the child has developed numerous sensory experiences. These experiences turn into memories, the memories turn into patterns; these patterns turn into concepts, concepts turn into ideas so on and so forth. To start having epistemic curiosity, a child must have a number of sensory experiences to conceptualise [I wrote this before I learned about Piaget's concrete operational stage, quite proud of myself].
What Is Imagination?
If I said “think about a tiger playing the piano”, most people would find it quite easy to conjure up an image in their mind, these mages most likely being diverse, some cartoon, some realistic, some 3-Dimensional, maybe even Tigger from Winnie the Pooh. However, most people would probably have never seen a tiger playing the piano in real life before. Everyone knows what a tiger looks like, everyone knows what playing the piano looks like, but to put them together, you need to use your imagination. It is the act of bringing things to mind that aren’t in your immediate senses. Einstein said that imagination was more important than knowledge. None of his theories of relativity would have been possible without the brilliant act of imagination. The act of bringing things to mind, not presently in your senses.
When Lao Tzu said:
“nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished”
, a masterful level of imagination is required, not only by Lao Tzu, but by the person trying to understand such a profound quote. Unlike other things in nature, human beings seem to be the only species that have the capacity for imagination. We can imagine things such as what kind of life we should live to make us fulfilled or how we would like to spend our years on this planet. We can also imagine the lives of our ancestors and the challenges that they faced. This act of imagining seems to be a uniquely human ability.
What Is Creativity?
The late educationalist, Sir Ken Robinson, described creativity as the act of taking your imagination to task. Bringing the ideas from your imagination to life. He goes on to describe it as having original ideas that have value. Edward De Bono, the leading thinker in creative thinking, said that being original for it’s own sake is not creative. The original idea must improve or build upon previous ideas and concepts. For example, to simply change the shape or colour of a golf club would not be creative unless it added to the experience of playing golf [after two years of studying a masters in music therapy, I disagree with this and think that if you change something to regulate your emotions or enhance your mood, it is creative as well]. We can see this with the earlier versions being made from wood and eventually turning into the metal golf clubs we see today. By changing the material and shape of the ball and club, the game can now be played using expanses of land, with more precision.
People often think creativity belongs exclusively in creative fields such as visual arts, drama and music , and though these fields can encourage creative thinking, it is not exclusively found in these fields, but rather is an essential in places we might lest expect it. Creativity is required for such fields as maths, science and engineering. De Bono said that creativity is an adjective not a noun, it is how well we do something, it is not a talent but a way of processing, a way of processing that is required to do most things in life well.
Why should we nurture curiosity, creativity and imagination in children?
Jack Ma, CEO of Alibaba has come out saying that our educational institutions are in need of a reform. He has seen, first hand, the trajectory of technological developments and knows that the economies of the future will no longer have a demand for employees who can only memorise and do as instructed. He said that machines are getting more advanced every day, we should not try to beat them. Instead, we should direct our efforts in education to create humans that excel in human qualities rather than making humans more like machines. We should reform our education systems to produce children that are ready for the workplace of tomorrow. Him and a number of CEO’s have said that they do not hire based on degrees. Jack Ma, Elon Musk [how things have changed], Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Google are just some of many tech giants who agreed that soft skills are much more critical. In 2010, IBM studied 1,500 CEO’s around the world and concluded that creativity is the number one leadership skill.
Previous forms of formal education have been very good at telling us what to think but not how to think. De Bono says that our systems of educations are not very good at teaching people how to create value, and creating value is exactly what most companies are looking for when hiring. Not every profession demands creativity in it’s application, eg factory worker, waitress, accounting, plumbing. Imagine a creative plumber, “we’ll be turning your toilet into a fountain today” (though it wouldn’t be far off from the invention of the Japanese bidet). Creativity can still be applied in the marketing of the business. How to attract clients so that every time they need a service, they think of you instead of another company. Not only this, you can also use your creativity to make your working process in any job more efficient.
“Creativity may be the last unfair advantage you can legally have over your competitors” - Bill Bernbach
Another aspect of creativity, as opposed to the economic and commercial benefits, are the therapeutic and spiritual aspects of it. Creative arts therapy is now being used to treat people of many different disorders. Music therapy, art therapy, play therapy when practised, show significant improvements in the quality of a person’s day to day life. We feel this when we paint a picture, write/read a book, listen or play music, sing, dance, read poetry. It may not get us any richer financially but enriches the deepest parts of our existence [I wrote this 2 years before even considering studying music therapy. Now I reread this with a masters degree in music therapy, fancy that].
How can I foster more curiosity, imagination and creativity?
If you asked me how creative I think I am as a teacher, I could only say that I’m more creative then before but nowhere near as creative as I’m going to be. There are still many areas to explore in teaching. However, I will share with you how I intend to nurture curiosity, imagination and creativity in the young children, using some latest research on the subject.
Guide and support instead of lead and instruct.
All children are born naturally curious. It is not the teachers job to “teach” how to be curious but to nurture their inherent curiosity. In 1992, scientists from NASA, developed a test that examined someone’s capacity for divergent thinking (a fundamental skill required for creativity). They tested 1,600 children from ages 4-5 and found that children at this age scored average of 98% on the test, constituting them to be creative geniuses. They measured the test throughout their life and found that as they grew up through the systems of education, their score dropped significantly. This shows that there is something systematically wrong with the current methods of education. If the goal of the future is to create people with the most valued and demanded skills in this century, such as creativity, we are not on the right path towards it. Something needs to be fundamentally changed. The fact that most of us reach our creative peak at the age of 4-5 is a significant problem if we are to have innovators in the country, creating new-age solutions to new-age problems.
“The creative adult is the child who survived.” - Ursula Leguin
Engage with the child's personal interests and give time and space to explore concepts.
A study researching the neurological activity of curiosity in the brain was undertaken by Gruber, Gelman, & Ranganath (2014). In the study, a group of people were asked different questions in an fMRI scanner. The questions were ranked by varying degrees of curiosity from low-curiosity (questions that did not spark the interest of the test subject) and high-curiosity (questions that highly sparked the interest of the test subject). The results showed a correlation between high mid-brain activity (the part of the brain responsible for wakefulness, sleep and arousal) and high-curiosity questions.
Another parameter was set using the length of time it took for the answer to be revealed to the subjects. It turns out that the longer it took for the in the high- curiosity answer to be revealed, the better the subjects could remember the answer. The fMRI showed that, when the answer to the high-curiosity question was revealed, there was an activation in the hippocampus region, an area responsible for creating long term memories. The longer a subject could wonder about the high-curiosity question, the more activity in the mid-brain, and the more activity in the mid-brain means a stronger connection made to the hippocampus when the answer is revealed, creating a robust long term memory retention. What the study showed is that, not only is curiosity good for your own creativity but can be used to create more powerful memories in the process. Allowing time for the child to play with an idea is crucial.
“If you want creative workers, give them enough time to play.” – John Cleese
Gruber, M. J., Gelman, B. D., & Ranganath, C. (2014). States of curiosity modulate hippocampus-dependent learning via the dopaminergic circuit. Neuron, 84(2), 486–496. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2014.08.060
Allow for organic responses.
A group of people were asked to look at a bunch of Chinese ideograms (people who could not read Chinese). The group was then split into two. After a week the first group were shown another set of Chinese ideograms, which included some from the week before, and were asked which characters were the same as the previous week. Their results didn't look very good. The second group were asked to come back and were also given a different set of ideograms to look at, but instead of being asked to recall the ones from the previous week, they were asked which ideograms they liked. The results showed that this group had performed significantly better in selecting the ideograms from the week before. Many of the ones that they liked were the ones they saw from the previous week. The information was there in the brain; you just couldn’t access it in a straightforward manner.
I believe highlights a significant problem with the system of memorisation in our education structures; exams that consider a child’s ability to memorise as a pivotal judgement of intelligence. As the research shows, just because someone cannot regurgitate information, doesn’t mean it is not there in their head. It shows that if someone has the need to use a piece of information in a manner, they find useful, they will. Current states of standardised testing are being seen less and less of a desired way for someone to express their knowledge.
Creativity doesn’t wait for that perfect moment. It fashions its own perfect moments out of ordinary ones.” – Bruce Garrabrandt
Use humour and a sense of fun in lessons, but create clear deadlines for work.
A research once looked into the behaviours of creative and less creative architects (without saying that’s what they’re doing). The study wanted to investigate what the innovative architects were doing differently. Thousands of architects were monitored over a specific course of time. The research showed was that there were two critical behavioural differences in the creative architects. The first one is that they knew how to play. They became easily immersed in an idea or concept for that sake of it. The idea of play, to the creative, is an essential part of bringing an idea to fruition. The second difference was that they prolonged finishing their work for as long as possible. As counter-intuitive as this sounds, it allows time for new ideas/information to arrive or for improvement of old ideas. The non-creative will finish their work as soon as they can because they can’t stand the anxiety of having not completed it. Creative people can handle more of this anxiety and delay its completion, knowing that extra time could potentially improve the work. Incorporating more guided play learning in the classroom can help a child tap into this creative spirit with ease but lay down a certain timeframe.
“Creativity is intelligence having fun.” -- Albert Einstein
Conclusion
Founding member of Monty Python, John Cleese, once gave a hilarious talk on creativity. He said, and I paraphrase, “I cannot tell you how to be creative, I can only say how not to be creative. From what I know from working with many creative minds, is that creativity cannot exist in a closed mind. A mind that is closed to new information, a mind that is already certain on all the facts and doesn’t need to update. Creativity can only exist in an open state of mind, a mind that is open and ready for new information to flow in and out. This isn’t to say that a closed mind is good for nothing. After you’ve come up with your brilliantly original idea in the open mind, you need to go into your close state of mind in order to execute the idea. This means you must think about logistics, be realistic about putting it together, create a schedule and make quick and sharp decisions. The closed mind is very good at doing these things. Most people have the ability to go into both states of minds, but creative people are people who can open and close their minds fluently. Not so creative people tend to become comfortable in the closed state of mind because it is familiar and less risky.”
Since most of society operates in a closed state of mind, young children will naturally become more and more closed as they grow up. This is why it is an absolute imperative that modern education systems “teach” children how to travel back and forth from these two states of minds. If they can still operate between them by the time they go into the workplace, they will be unstoppable.
Even though it would take more than a few pages to delve into these topics and do them justice, hopefully, this paper was able to bring some ideas to light to whoever is reading it. By nurturing a child’s inherent curiosity, both perceptual and epistemic, and showing them how to use their imagination constructively, every child can creatively flourish and meet the demands of the 21st-century workplace.
Morevoer, these ideas and strategies are not only applicable to children. As I evoked in the beginning of this speech, during my time in the Thai military, I was able to expand my creative capcities. Everyone, no matter how old, can take steps to become more creative, and use more creativity in their daily lives. Although I can’t lay out an exact plan for you to improve your creativity as an individual, I can tell you that it very often begins with doing something you’ve never done before. You need to be fearless like a tiger playing the piano and trust that Lao Tzu’s river of new possibilities will patiently flow from the minds of future generations in Myanmar, a country where you can find the world’s longest wooden bridge.
