“Now, more than ever, human communities depend on a diversity of talents; not on a singular conception of ability.”

LIZ VARLOW IS A VIOLA PLAYER with the London Symphony Orchestra and winner of the prestigious Frink Award. She was born in Birmingham, England, and started playing the violin at the age of 8. She won two scholarships to the Royal College of Music, and went on to win numerous prizes. Fellow musicians describe her as a very fine musician who has developed her musical sensitivity to the highest levels. What sets her apart even further is that she is profoundly deaf. Her hearing began to deteriorate at the age of 16. By the time she was 19, she had become deaf for reasons that have never been established. Nonetheless she has maintained her capabilities as an outstanding professional musician. How does she perform without hearing?

“How does anyone play?” she says. “I know how to make sounds and also know how what I’m doing sounds. A ‘normal’ hearing player does this too. They make sounds and use hearing to check it. It’s too late afterwards if the note is out of tune. With the benefit of a fine aural memory, a solid technique and a good sense of humor I have been able to deal with all professional situations and found deafness to be little handicap.”

Dame Evelyn Glennie is one of the world’s most accomplished percussionists. She travels the world giving virtuoso concerts to huge acclaim. Her recordings have sold millions of copies and she has won a variety of awards from professional music organizations including Musician of the Year. She is in demand worldwide to lead master classes on musicianship. She too is deaf. She became profoundly deaf at the age of 12 just as she was beginning to develop her musical abilities. She persisted in developing these abilities despite the lack of the one sense that most people would consider critical to their fulfillment.

Such examples defy logic. How can someone who is deaf become an outstanding musician? The achievements of Liz Varlow and of Evelyn Glennie demonstrate the extraordinary flexibility and virtuosity of the human mind. It is these qualities that underpin the uniquely human capacities for creativity and innovation.

LIVING IN TWO WORLDS

One of the founding perceptions of modern philosophy is that we live in two distinct worlds. There is a world that exists whether or not you exist: the world of material objects, events and of other people. This world existed before you were born and it will continue to exist after you have gone. There is another world that exists only because you exist: the world of your own private consciousness, feelings and sensations. Your world is one in which, as the psychologist R.D. Laing put it, there is only one set of footprints.¹ Your world came into being when you were born and it will end when you do. We share the first world with other people; we share the second with no one. Recognizing the difference between your world and the world marks an important stage in the development of personal identity. How do we come to see the external world as we do? How do we know it is there and not just in our minds?

Some philosophers of the Enlightenment worried whether the outer world was there at all. One of the most celebrated was Bishop Berkeley (1685–1753). His theory of idealism proposed that the whole world might be no more than an elaborate idea in the mind of God. His theory was greeted with amusement by the celebrated wit, Dr Johnson (1709–84). One of the Bishop’s supporters attacked Dr Johnson’s flat rejection of idealism saying that Berkeley’s theory “could not be refuted.” Dr Johnson turned to a nearby boulder, kicked it with his foot and said, “I refute it thus.” To Dr Johnson and everyone else, even idealist philosophers seem to carry on living in the world and doing their shopping despite their uncertainty about its existence.

The outer world may be an illusion but for everyday purposes we assume it is not: we accept that the people and things we see about us are real and appear to us all in the same way. However tantalizing these problems may be for philosophers, they are only problems if we think about them as such. For most of the time, we live our lives in what has been called the natural attitude.² While some seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophers were questioning the existence of the material world, a new breed of scientists set about bringing it under our control. As Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) commented, the scientific outlook is not so much a rejection of philosophical doubts: it is more an illustration that, in daily life, we assume as certain many things that, on closer scrutiny, we find to be full of apparent contradictions. How do we bridge these two worlds?³

MAPPING THE MIND

In the Middle Ages it was believed that the mind consisted of different faculties, and that each of them was located in a different part of the brain. These faculties included memory, imagination and logical reasoning. This theory was used as a justification for the classical curriculum of the grammar schools. Memory, it was thought, was trained by learning Latin vocabulary; logical reasoning by geometry; and imagination by poetry and music.⁴

Just as most human brains are similar in appearance, most skulls are the same general shape. On closer inspection they vary in size and have distinctive bumps and hollows across the surface. In the eighteenth century, the Austrian scientist Franz Gall studied the brains of hundreds of dead people and tried to match their shapes with the personalities of their former owners. From these he developed a detailed theory of personality, brain shape and the patterns of bumps on the skull, a theory known as phrenology; literally the “study of the mind.” Gall identified 32 personality traits associated with different patterns of bumps on the skull. Phrenologists believed there was a direct link between specific functions, such as speech, and different regions of the brain. Gall’s phrenological speculations were later discounted by more considered studies of the brain. Studies of people with brain damage in the nineteenth century showed that the idea of exclusive locations for particular brain functions was misleading.

The capacities of the brain are more complex and dynamic than initial theories suggested. For generations, scientists developed their understanding of the brain by dissecting dead brains on laboratory tables, a method with some obvious limitations. Over the last 30 years the technologies of brain scanning have made it possible to study living brains by tracking patterns of electrical activity and blood flow during different activities. Scientists now understand much more about the gross functions of the brain: which parts are used in different activities and in which combinations; in speech, for example, in recognizing faces, listening to music or doing mathematics. Neuroscience is using nanotechnology to explore brain activity at the molecular level including the transfer of electrical charges at the neural synapses. These studies are generating new approaches in psychology, in the design of drugs and in the treatment of pain. They also suggest three crucial themes for understanding creativity. Intelligence is highly diverse, dynamic and distinct.

DIVERSITY

The view of the Enlightenment philosophers was that knowledge of the world could only be derived from systematic logic and the empirical evidence of the senses. This approach has a powerful appeal to common sense. In practice, there are other factors to take into account.

There is more to the world than meets the eye, or any of our senses. We do not see the world as it is but as our particular senses present it to us. The nature of our senses determines our field of perception: what we are able to perceive and how. We live in a rich sensory environment but can perceive only some of it because our senses are limited. We experience the world as we do partly because of the way we are built. As human beings we are typically between five and six feet tall, we stand upright and our bodies are broadly symmetrical. Unprotected, our bodies can endure only small variations in heat. Although it is commonly taken for granted that we have five senses – sight, taste, touch, hearing, smell – we have at least four more: balance, orientation, pain and temperature. Our eyes are at the front of our heads and we have binocular vision. We can see light that has a wavelength from about 400 nanometers (extreme violet) to about 770 nanometers (extreme red). Our ears can normally hear sounds in the range 20–15,000 Hz. Our senses are the channels through which information flows between the outside world and our own consciousness. If those channels were different, other sorts of information would flow through them and our view of the outside world could well be transformed.

Other animals have different and often more specialized senses and inhabit different sensory worlds. Some mammals, such as bats, can detect ultrasonic frequencies well above 15,000 Hz. Some animals and birds can detect infrasound or low-frequency sound. Pigeons can detect sounds as low as 0.1 Hz. Elephants communicate using sounds as low as 1 Hz. Two animals living in exactly the same physical environment may have entirely different views of what’s going on. A seahorse and a killer whale, living in the same stretch of ocean, inhabit the same environment but live in different worlds. One factor is their relative size and strength. They are also equipped with entirely different sensory capacities. Your view of the world would be different too if you could hear the sounds that bats hear, or see the world as cats do, or had the smell receptors of a dog; if you could see sounds, or breathe underwater or fly.

Our physical configuration determines what we can perceive of the world; there are other factors that affect what we do perceive. Human intelligence is not just a process of perception but of selection. Otherwise there would be too much information coming in, like a radio tuned to an open frequency. When you look at a room, a landscape, the street, you don’t pay equal attention to everything in your field of perception. You notice some things, not others. Two people standing in the same street may perceive it in completely different ways. A traffic warden may see a landscape of offenders; a window cleaner a land of opportunity. A bird fancier wandering through a wood will see it differently from a botanist interested in rare plants. If you drive a yellow car, you are likely to see yellow cars everywhere. What we do perceive is affected by a range of factors, many of which are cultural. We’ll come back to them in Chapter 8.

The constitution of our senses, our bodies and of our brains deeply affects what we think about. It also affects how we think. The rationalist view of knowledge is focused on the logico-deductive powers of mind. While this may seem reasonable in itself, there is more to consciousness than these particular powers. The brain is an organic entity that interacts with all the physical states and processes of our bodies. Our health, physical condition and appetites can deeply affect our states of mind.

The academic life tends to deny the rest of the body. In many schools, students are educated from the waist up and attention eventually comes to focus on their heads, and particularly the left side. Many academics live in their heads, and slightly to one side. They are disembodied in a certain way. They tend to look upon their bodies as a form of transport for their heads: it’s a way of getting their heads to meetings. If you want real evidence of out-of-body experiences, sign up for a residential conference for senior academics and go along to the dance on the final night. There you will see it. Grown men and women, writhing uncontrollably, off the beat, waiting for it to end so that they can go home and write a paper about it.

In contrast, dancers exult in their bodies and in the forms of understanding that can only be manifested through movement. I used to be on the board of the Birmingham Royal Ballet in England and had the privilege of watching professional dancers at work. The rigor, precision and sensibility of their work are breathtaking. I mentioned earlier that dance does not have the same status in schools as “academic” subjects, but dance gives form to ideas and feelings that cannot be expressed in any other way. As Martha Graham once said, dance is the hidden language of the soul.

There may be no agreed definition of intelligence, but we might agree here that intelligence includes the ability to formulate and express our thoughts in coherent ways. We can do this using words and numbers. We can also think visually, in sound, in movement and in all the many ways in which these different modes interact. Musicians are not trying to express in sound ideas that would be better put into words. They are having musical ideas: ideas for which there may be no words. Visual artists think visually and have visual ideas.

Intelligence includes the ability to engage effectively with the practical challenges of living in the world. Developmental psychologist Howard Gardner, best known for his theory of multiple intelligences, defines intelligence as the ability to solve problems in a given context. Consider a 12-year-old Puluwat in the Caroline Islands, he says, who has been selected by his elders to learn how to become a master sailor: “under the tutelage of master navigators he will learn to combine knowledge of sailing stars and geography so as to find his way around hundreds of islands. Or consider the 14-year-old adolescent in Paris who has learnt how to program a computer and is beginning to compose works of music with the aid of a synthesizer.” A moment’s reflection, says Gardner, reveals that each of these individuals “is demonstrating a high level of competence in a challenging field and should by any reasonable definition of the term be viewed as exhibiting intelligent behaviour.”⁵ Gardner argues that there are least seven different types of intelligence. In later work he accepts that there are others too.

I mentioned my reservations about Mensa, the organization for people with high IQs. I am not against an organization for people who enjoy IQ tests. I am all for clubs and societies. It is good that people with common interests should get together and benefit from each other’s passions. There are clubs for everything: cooking, chess, athletics, politics, philately, dog breeding, astronomy, you name it. Certainly there should be an IQ club. My problem is with the branding of Mensa. It is promoted as the club for the most intelligent people on earth. Really? If there were such a club, no doubt we would all like to be considered for membership. But shouldn’t there be some other questions on the application forms? For example, can you compose a symphony? Could you play in an orchestra? Could you start and run a successful business? Could you write poetry that will move people to tears? Could you choreograph or perform in a dance that speaks to our inner humanity? All of these are examples of the manifest diversity of human intelligence and of the many ways in which we engage with each other and with the world around us. Shouldn’t they count too in any comprehensive conception of intelligence? And shouldn’t people who are exceptionally good at any of these things be welcomed in the club that aims to celebrate the highest levels of intelligence?

The point is that intelligence is multifaceted, rich, complex and highly diverse. It includes and goes well beyond conventional conceptions of academic ability and IQ, which is why the world is full of music, technology, art, dance, architecture, business, practical science, feelings, relationships and inventions that actually work.

DYNAMISM

Roger Sperry (1913–94) was awarded the Nobel Prize for his groundbreaking research into the structure and functions of the brain. In the 1950s, he conducted a series of experiments that involved people whose brain hemispheres had been separated by cutting the corpus callosum. I assume they had had their hemispheres separated before they agreed to help Sperry and not as a result. If not they were far more committed to these issues than I am. Sperry found that the “split-brain” subjects could perform two unrelated tasks simultaneously; for example, drawing a picture with one hand while writing with another. He concluded that the two hemispheres of the brain fulfilled different but complementary functions. The left side of the brain was largely involved in logical procedures including language and mathematics; the right-hand side of the brain was more concerned with holistic operations such as the recognition of faces and orientation in physical space.

This research provoked massive interest, not least in education. It suggested a physical correspondence in the brain to the two great traditions in Western European culture. The left hemisphere seemed to relate to the logico-deductive analysis of the Enlightenment and the scientific method; the right hemisphere to the Romantic impulses of beauty, intuition and spirituality. Educational reformers were quick to argue that the academic education system was almost wholly left-brained. James Hemming drew a striking conclusion. Educating people entirely through the left-brain activities of the academic curriculum was, he said, like training somebody for a race by exercising only one leg while leaving the muscles of the other leg to atrophy. Others went too far. I remember reading an article by someone who had half-digested the implications of this research. She said she had written the piece in blank verse because she had only used the right-hand side of her brain; a remark that suggested she hadn’t used either side. The point is not that the two halves should work separately but together.

Carl Sagan captured this exactly. There is no way to tell, he said, “whether the patterns extracted by the right hemisphere are real or imagined without subjecting them to left hemisphere scrutiny.” On the other hand, “mere critical thinking without creative and intuitive insights, without the search for new patterns is sterile and doomed. To solve complex problems in changing circumstances requires the activity of both cerebral hemispheres. The pattern to the future lies through the corpus callosum.”⁶

Brain-scanning techniques show that the brain lights up in different configurations according to the activity in hand and that even simple actions draw simultaneously on different regions of the brain. Different areas of the brain are associated with particular mental functions but they participate in other processes too. The interdependence of functions is obvious in the effects of damage to the brain. The right frontal lobe is focally responsible for music; if it is damaged, musical abilities are impaired. If you were to remove this section of the brain and hold it in your hand it would not hum a tune. It relies on its connections with the rest of the brain and body to function at all. Speech is an example of how patterns of brain activity vary. When someone is speaking in their native tongue, their brain configures in one way; it configures differently when they speak a second language learned after infancy.

We experience these dynamics of intelligence constantly. Speech is usually accompanied by a symphony of physical movements, facial expressions and gestures. Dance seems to be quintessentially kinesthetic but choreographers design dances with a passionate attention to visual design and to the qualities of the music, often with mathematical precision. For the audience, dance is also a visual art. Mathematics may seem to be quintessentially abstract, but many mathematicians depend on keen visual imaginations.

I remember watching a teacher in Hong Kong taking a Saturday morning class in mathematics. The children, aged between 8 and 12, each sat with an abacus on their desks. The teacher called out calculations for them to do: 1,289 multiplied by 15,822; 22,348 divided by 4,019. As soon as he finished calling the numbers, a forest of arms shot into the air. Every child had the correct answer. The children used only the abacus for their calculations, flicking the beads across the bars at lightning speed. Another boy was asked to use an electronic calculator for comparison. He was slower every time. The teacher asked the children to put the abacus away. The answers came just as quickly and always faster than the boy with the calculator. The children had internalized the operation, visualizing the abacus in their minds’ eyes and “seeing” the answers.

In learning to speak, the relationships between speech, song and music are very strong. Brain imaging shows that the areas of the brain that are primarily concerned with music and language overlap considerably. Diana Deutsch is Professor of Psychology at the University of California. She says, “A person’s native tongue influences the way he or she perceives music. The same succession of notes may sound different depending on the language the listener learned growing up.”⁷ Speakers of tonal languages including Mandarin are more likely than Westerners to have perfect pitch. In one study, 92% of Mandarin speakers who began music lessons at or before the age of 5 had perfect pitch, compared to 8% of English speakers with comparable music training.

When they are born, babies are already familiar with the melody of the mother’s speech. Audio recordings from inside the womb at the beginning of labor reveal that the sounds produced by the mother can be heard loudly: “The phrases reaching the baby have been filtered through the mother’s tissues, so that the crisp, high frequencies which carry much of the information important for identifying the meanings of words, are muted, whereas the musical characteristics of speech – its pitch contours, loudness variations, tempo and rhythmic patterning – are well preserved.” In addition to forging a nascent connection between mother and child, early exposure to musical speech sounds may begin the process of learning to speak. According to Deutsch, after birth the melodies of speech are vital to communication between mother and child. When parents speak to their babies, they use exaggerated speech patterns known as “motherese,” and these differ considerably between languages.

Perhaps the most compelling evidence of the holistic functioning of the brain comes from those with sensory impairments. Evelyn Glennie experiences the music with her whole being. Playing in bare feet she absorbs the musical vibrations and rhythms through her body in ways that transcend ordinary concepts of sensory perception. In a way, intelligence itself is like an orchestra. The whole is more than the sum of the parts. It is composed of many specialized elements but only functions as it should when they work together in concert.

The brain is not a mechanical object: it is an organic entity. The mind is not a calculator: it is a dynamic process of consciousness. Creativity is not a single ability that lives in one or other region of the body. It thrives on the dynamism between different ways of thinking and being. Intelligence is not only diverse and dynamic, it is unique and distinct in each of us as individuals.

DISTINCTIVENESS

Martha Graham said, “There is a vitality, a life-force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and be lost.”

I have had the honor and pleasure of working at times with Robert Cohan, the gifted partner of Martha Graham and founding principal of the London School of Contemporary Dance. I asked him how he came to be involved in contemporary dance. In the early 1950s, he left the US army and was living in New York. He had always enjoyed dancing and had a conventional training. A friend told him of a woman who was running dance classes downtown and suggested he might enjoy them. He went, and his life was changed. After the first three-hour session in Martha Graham’s studio, his body was shaking almost uncontrollably with excitement. He discovered in her methods and forms of dance a capacity in himself that he had never suspected. Through meeting Martha Graham he found himself and spent his artistic life in the world he helped her to create. He went on to become her principal partner in dance and to promote her methods in Europe in the 1970s and 1980s as principal of the London School of Contemporary Dance.

“There is a vitality, a life-force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and be lost.”

– Martha Graham

Cohan’s exhilaration in dance illustrates a more general point. Each of us is a unique moment in history: a distinctive blend of our genetic inheritance, of our experiences and of the thoughts and feelings that have woven through them and constitute our unique consciousness. We each have great natural capacities, but we all have them in different forms. Does this mean that no one can be thought of as more intelligent than anyone else? Of course not. Some people have strong abilities in many areas, music, mathematics, verbal reasoning, visual thinking and so on. High ability in one area does not entail it in others nor does it exclude it. A good mathematician may or may not be a good painter or poet; a gifted poet may have no feel for dance or be a virtuoso in salsa. We should not stereotype people for having or lacking academic ability, or label someone with high academic abilities as more intelligent than someone with high abilities in music or dance. People are so much more than either academic or non-academic. I am not arguing against developing academic abilities; I am arguing for an expanded conception of intelligence that includes but goes beyond them.

Children with strong academic abilities may fail to discover their other abilities; those with less academic ability may have equally powerful capacities that lie dormant. They can all pass through the whole of their education never knowing what these are. They can become disaffected, resentful of their “failure” and conclude that they are simply not very bright. Some of these educational failures go on to have great success in adult life. How many do not? They may never know what they are capable of and who or what they might become.

Many people are diverted from their natural paths in life by the preoccupation in education with academic intelligence and the hierarchy of disciplines. It shows itself especially in the distinction between academic and vocational programs and the idea that doing practical work or studying for a trade is lower grade than taking an academic degree. And yet, the ability to construct buildings, to wire a house, to install plumbing systems, to make things grow, to make things that work, to provide practical services, is exactly what resonates with very many people and all these skills are fundamental to the vitality and sustainability of human life. Sometimes this is literally true.

A couple of years ago, I was in San Francisco for a book signing. One of the people in line was a man in his mid-30s and I asked him what he did for a living. He said he was a fireman. I asked him when he had decided to be a fireman and he said he had always wanted to be a fireman. “Actually,” he said, “in elementary school it was a problem because at that age everyone wanted to be a fireman. But I really did want to be a fireman and as I grew up I couldn’t wait to leave school to join the fire service.” He said that when he was in his senior year of high school, one of the teachers asked his class what they were all planning to do when they left. Almost everyone talked about going to college; he said he was applying to join the fire service. The teacher said that he was making a big mistake; that he was academically smart, had a bright future and would be wasting it if he joined the fire service. The fireman said it was an embarrassing moment and he felt humiliated in front of his friends, but he went ahead with his plans and has been in the fire service and loving it ever since. “But I was thinking about that teacher when you were talking just now,” he said. “Because six months ago, I saved his life. He was in a car wreck and my unit was called out. I pulled him from the car, gave him CPR and saved him. I saved his wife’s life too.” He said, “I think he thinks better of me now.”

PLASTICITY AND POTENTIAL

Jeff Lichtman is Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology at Harvard University. He directs a wide-ranging program of research to create a detailed map of the circuitry of the human brain. The research is part of a new field called “connectomics.” A piece of technology called the Automatic Tape Collecting Lathe Ultra Microtome (ATLUM) cuts samples of brain tissue into very thin slices which are then placed under a scanning electron microscope to create images of individual cells and all their connections to other cells. Professor Lichtman says that this technology “gives us an opportunity to witness this vast complicated universe that has been largely inaccessible until now.”

“As children grow, their brains are customized around the uses they make or do not make of them.”

One of the aims of the study is to understand the processes of neural growth and pruning. At birth the human brain consists of about 100 billion brain cells. During infancy the child’s brain is tremendously plastic. To begin with, each neuron has dozens of connections, but these connections pare down to just a few strong ones as the brain develops and according to how it is used. According to Lichtman, each baby nerve cell connects to 20 times the number of nerve cells that it will have as an adult: “We try to understand what the rules of pruning are. If the nerve cell has a hundred connections and needs to prune that down to five, the question is, which five?” The neurons fight to stay connected and each competition affects the outcome for the rest of the cells. “So to understand the competition’s impact on one cell, you have to understand all the competitions.” The net effect of all that new neural “hand-to-hand combat” is what we call brain development and it’s what transforms a baby who can’t walk or talk into a modern adult human being. It’s this process that provides us with the flexibility that Lichtman calls “the magic of being human.” When a dragonfly is born, he says, it has to know how to catch a mosquito. “But for us, none of this is built-in. Our brains have to go through this profound education that lasts until our second decade. What is changing in our brains?”¹²

The plasticity of the brain is evident in our use of language. If children are born into multilingual households, they learn all the languages they are regularly exposed to. Parents don’t teach children to speak in the way they are taught languages in school. Mothers do not teach their babies the principles of grammar and have them practice lists of vocabulary. They prompt and guide and teach particular words. Learning a language is so complex that teaching it formally to an infant would be impossible. Teaching them three or four languages would be unthinkable. Yet infants do learn three or four languages and more if necessary. They don’t reach a point of saturation or ask for their grandmothers to be kept out of the room because they can’t handle another dialect. They absorb them all. This is because they have a language instinct. It is not that multilingual households produce linguistically gifted children by some random process of good luck. All “normal” children have the capacity to learn not only one but many languages. If a child is born into a home where only one language is spoken, that is the language they learn. Learning a second language in adolescence is much more difficult.¹³

As children grow, their brains are customized around the uses they make or do not make of them. If the language capacity is not used, it may fade as the brain’s neural capacities are turned to other uses. The same can be true of music or mathematics or any other capacity. Susan Greenfield gives a startling example of the plasticity of the brain.¹⁴ She tells of a 6-year-old Italian boy who was blind in one eye. The cause of his blindness was that at a crucial period in his infancy his eye was covered with a patch. The neural networks, which facilitate sight from that eye, became redeployed, causing permanent blindness.

In the South Pacific, many young children are accomplished underwater divers. They develop the ability to swim underwater for long periods so that they can gather pearls. In New York, most children do not have this ability. There are very few skilled pearl divers in the Bronx. There is no demand. It’s reasonable to assume that the average New Yorker translated at an early enough age to the South Pacific would learn the necessary skills. Living in the Bronx they may have the capacity but not the need and, as a result, not the ability.

“Now, more than ever, human communities depend on a diversity of talents not on a singular conception of ability.”

DARRYL’S DANCE

Statistically, there is a higher than normal chance that those who pull out or fall out of education may move in to the criminal justice system. The conventional strategy is to incarcerate offenders, even though it incurs immense social and economic costs and recidivism rates are high. There are more creative approaches to the problem, which are based on an understanding that ability is diverse, dynamic and distinct and that strategies for dealing with disaffection and alienation should be equally sophisticated. One that I admire particularly expresses a special irony. It brings together young offenders – who have often been failed by education – and dance, the discipline that lies at the lowest point in the hierarchy of educational priorities. The results illustrate how often the offenders and the discipline are under-estimated in education.

Dance United is a professional contemporary dance company based in Bradford in the United Kingdom. The company provides a dance-based education program, called The Academy, as an option for young offenders within the local criminal justice system. The Academy was designed for young people who have failed in conventional educational settings and who may be offenders or at serious risk of offending. The participants have included young people convicted of robbery, drug offences, burglary and assault. The Academy team is made up of professional dance artists and teachers working alongside support workers from the Bradford Youth Offending Team (YOT) and other agencies.

The aim of The Academy is not simply to help young people to avoid re-offending, but to help them to discover their innate capacity to succeed. The Academy aims for profound changes in the participants by raising their beliefs in what they are capable of achieving. The young people on the program are treated not as offenders in remediation but as professional dancers in training.¹⁵ The program is based on methods that are used to educate and train professional contemporary dance artists and is highly disciplined and rigorous. For example, the ground rules include the requirement to dance in bare feet. Wearing jewelry, hats or other personal artifacts is not allowed. The physical and creative demands of dance itself are at the core of the program, which aims to promote work of a high artistic standard. The program helps them to learn to trust and support others too.

The Academy works with up to 15 young people at any one time on a program that takes 25 hours each week, for a period of 12 weeks. Each cycle begins with an intensive, three-week performance project, at the end of which the production is presented in professionally staged performances, either in The Academy studio theater, or at a local or regional theater venue. From the fourth week, the program expands into a broader dance and educational curriculum including jazz, African dance, capoeira, circus skills, choreography and more. The program includes input from visiting artists, including photographers, film makers and musicians.

Many people greeted the idea of The Academy program with flat skepticism. How could dance possibly have any effect on people who had shown no regard for other people or property? Wasn’t this just groundless romantic nonsense that pandered to the offenders? Surely the obvious answer was prison. For Jim Brady, a professional member of the Bradford Youth Offending Team, who knows something about these issues, the obvious answer was wrong. “If prison worked,” he says, “that would be the solution to youth crime. Unfortunately all the evidence suggests that prison doesn’t work.”¹⁶ To begin with, his colleague, Dave Pope, was also skeptical about the power of dance. He says now that he has seen many other strategies for dealing with young offenders, but none that are as powerful or as effective: “I’ve seen offenders working on building sites, offenders joining in team sports, offenders doing offender behavior courses and I’ve seen offenders doing anger management courses. Contemporary dance, much to my surprise, has turned out to be the one thing where I’ve seen people make the most progress over the shortest period of time.”

Why should this program make such a difference where others have not? Tara Jane Herbert, the artistic director of Dance United, is clear about what the program really does. Although the participants are treated as professional dancers and put through a comparable regimen, The Academy is not about turning all of them into performers: “It’s about giving those young people the opportunity to do something practical and the skills to be able to choose. Most of the young people that we work with don’t make clear choices. They react. Dance training gives them the opportunity to actually think and then make an action. You have to be able to sit still before you make a choice, before you make an action.” She says that typically the young people on the program do not know how to focus their physical energy. “They’re very fidgety, or very floppy. They’re not grounded. There’s not a strength and a stillness behind them and that’s what focus is about. It’s about actually stopping before you begin something. It’s like an orchestra. It’s the silence before you begin playing and it’s exactly the same in dance and in life.”

The program helps to build their sense of self-worth by facilitating creative achievement. As one member of the team explains, “They’ve often been told they’re worthless and can’t really achieve anything. They learn here that they can. By getting up in the morning they’ve achieved structure, discipline, being able to take orders, the confidence to go out and approach difficult situations. It’s not easy for some of them because they’ve never danced before.”

Dance is highly collaborative. As Helen Linsell, one of the dance artists, explains, “There are different people they have to get on with: people who are older, younger, and different members of staff that they might not connect with.” Rhiana Laws, another of the dancers, emphasizes that “There is no room for them to hang out or lean against the wall or sit down because they’re tired, or giggle in the middle of an exercise because they did it wrong. We’re absolutely rigid and that is what I experienced when I was training professionally.”

Tara Jane Herbert says that the public performance at the end of the first three weeks is a massive step. “We invite friends, family; and for most of them it’s the first time that they’ll be seen in a positive light. It’s vital that the quality, the standard of work is excellent, so that they can shine. At the end of the performance their confidence has grown enormously and they suddenly understand why we’ve pushed for focus, why we’ve demanded cooperation and all the things that we’ve been pushing at them suddenly become clear.”

One of the participants on the program was a young man named Darryl. When Jim Brady first met Darryl and his mother to consider his options as a young offender, it was hard to know what Darryl might have been thinking. “He didn’t engage. He virtually didn’t speak,” says Brady. “Mom did all the talking. In among the menu of choices I said would be available, was dance.” His mother said immediately that Darryl would not dance. Darryl said nothing. In the event, he went to The Academy. And Darryl danced. The results were remarkable, says Brady. “He’s physically transformed by it. He’s now concerned about nutrition and diet and general health. He’s articulate and he’s speaking. He carries himself very differently. He’s confident and that all happened in the space of three weeks. That’s quite a transformation.”

Darryl himself is in no doubt. “You do one good session here,” he says, “and you ache. But it’s a good ache because you know you’ve done something good. After a few weeks you start to notice your body getting healthier, muscles are coming up and you can feel them growing. It makes you think that there is something you can do and enjoy and it passes time away.” The physical and artistic rigors of dance have changed Darryl’s view of himself. They’ve also changed his view of other people; “I’ve probably learned to consider what other people think,” he says, “and look at things from the other person’s point of view.”

Darryl’s father has noticed the difference too. “We really had a lot of friction with Darryl. Now we all have a really good relationship and we’re just looking forward to the little spell at college and hoping he motivates himself that little bit more to try just that little bit harder.” The parents of one of the other young men on the program saw a change in him too. After the performance, they were a little overwhelmed. “He was just full of life,” said his father. “He said it was brilliant and that he’d go back and do it again.” His mother agreed. “He’s a changed lad. I can’t believe it’s my son. I feel like that cloned him and made him good.”

For the Chairman of the Youth Justice Board, Professor Robert Morgan, the moral of The Academy is clear: “We need to treat these young offenders as people with potential. Anyone who has observed the sort of work that is being done here realizes the huge untapped resources that we need to develop.” After a young lifetime of failure and conflict, Darryl sees the potential in very personal terms. “You can make a difference,” he says. “Depending on how you look at it. If you want to keep an open mind and leave everything behind you, it’d be like a new world.”

REALIZING WHO WE ARE

We all have profound natural capacities, but we all have them differently. If we fail to promote a full sense of people’s abilities through education and training, some, perhaps most, will never discover what their real capacities are. To that extent they do not really know who they are or what they might become. Now, more than ever, human communities depend on a diversity of talents not on a singular conception of ability. When we talk of realizing our potential, we should aim to do so in both senses of the word. We need to understand its range and variety. We also need to turn it into reality. This is why creativity should be center stage in school, work and life.

I said in Chapter 1 that there are many misconceptions about creativity. So what is creativity? How does it relate to intelligence and how does it work in practice? Let’s begin with Las Vegas.