I ran across some articles on educational gifts that might be of interest:

• Educational toys? Try DIY science experiments instead, USA Today article by Liz Szabo, 13 December 2011. Szabo gives some simple, inexpensive experiments you can do with your kids aged 3 to 10.
• Simple gifts of learning spark creativity, curiosity in kids, USA Today article by Liz Szabo, 13 December 2011. Szabo gives suggestions for some inexpensive gifts that will spark creativity and curiosity in young children.
• This Year, Give Them Brains, Scientific American article by Anna Kuchment, December 2011. Scientists’ and educators’ picks for fostering inquiry for younger and older kids.

Customer Collaboration, Part 1, discussed how a tee-shirt company, Threadless, collaborates with its customers. Part 2 continues this with how Volusion, an “all-in-one” e-commerce site, collaborates with its customers.

April Joyner in the Tapping Customers for Product Ideas article in the November 2010 issue of Inc Magazine describes how Volusion has set up a formal process of soliciting and vetting customer suggestions and the product development based on them. Volusion:

• Sends out a monthly survey to its customers which includes questions on customer loyalty and which improvements the customer would like to see.
• Built its own online forum that lets customers submit ideas and vote for the suggestions they like, modeled on Digg.
• A group of employees from different departments meets each week and evaluates the ideas.
• Once the group has approved of a new feature, sales and customer service employees follow up with those who made the suggestions and gather additional information for the software developers.
• Then the software developers start development.

If you’re looking to stimulate your brain and increase your mental faculties, read Ways to inflate Your IQ, from the Wall Street Journal November 29, 2011, issue, by Sue Shellenbarger. The things that stood out for me:

• People whose work involves complex relationships , setting up elaborate systems, or dealing with people or difficult problems tend to perform better on cognitive tests.
• New tasks stimulate the brain most.
• Training that involves switching mental tasks quickly aid in cognitive tests. I’m absolutely not a fan of multitasking, but I guess it does have some kind of benefit, at least to the individual, if not the tasks.
• Music lessons are linked to higher IQ throughout life.

In How To Study, one of the recommendations was “The night before the exam, review the toughest material right before going to bed.”

The December 3-4, 2011, Wall Street Journal article To Sleep, Perchance to Dream–But Why?, by Matt Ridley, answers why.

Ridley writes that recent research on dreams has shown that dreaming is a symptom that our brains are transforming new memories into more permanent memories, giving the memories mental context and extracting their meanings. He writes that people dream throughout sleep, not just in REM sleep, and that non-REM dreams are more literal than REM dreams.

The bottom line is that sleeping improves memory performance.

OK, the title is far more provocative than it needs to be–it’s the combination of two articles that recently caught my eye:

• Original Sinners from the Wall Street Journal’s December 3-4, 2011, edition
• Innovation’s Hard Part from Fortune Magazine’s December 6, 2010, issue

The Original Sinners article was about ethics, describing a study that ‘probed’ students’ creativity and intelligence, and then gave them a test in which cheating was an option. The study found that the high scorers on creativity were more likely to cheat than the lower scorers, whereas there was no link between general IQ and the likelihood of cheating.

Hmm…so what are we to think of this?? Are creative people really more prone to be ethically challenged? Are creative people more likely to be risk takers, and cheating a risk they are more likely to take if given the chance? Are creative people creative about their concept of ethics and more likely to bend their ethics under certain circumstances? Is the experiment described really even valid?

As I was pondering these questions, the Fortune Magazine article caught my attention. (I save magazines for a year and then re-read them before tossing them in to the recycling container.) Innovation’s Hard Part is a book review of The Other Side of Innovation by Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble. I’m sure they make more points in their book, but the very thin book review says the authors show that innovative ideas get more attention than they’re due, and the hard part is executing on them.

So that got me thinking that maybe the creative students considered cheating a short-cut to execution (the end result, in this case being filled-in bubbles on a question form). Or maybe creative people are more lazy than others and instead of expending the energy to master something and execute on something, when the end-result appears they’re more likely to take the short cut. I don’t know.

I do know, though, you have to be careful who you do business with. Diversification is fine, but it’s important to have the same values.

Failure’s relationship to creativity has been discussed in this blog several times before — expecting, tolerating, embracing, and learning from failure. The October 29, 2011, Wall Street Journal article, The Art Of Failing Successfully, by Jonah Lehrer, provides a more scientific look at learning from failure.

Lehrer writes that people experience two distinct reactions to failure. The first one is a mostly involuntary reaction, called Error-Related Negativity, that appears about 50 milliseconds after the failure. The second one is called Error Positivity, and happens when we dwell upon the disappointing result.

We learn most from failure when our Negativity response is large, meaning the reaction to the failure was strong, and when our Positivity response is consistent, meaning we focus on the failure and are trying to learn from it.

Our Negativity response may be more automated, but how we think of things greatly controls our Positivity response. If our mindset is one in which we think we can learn from failure (a growth mindset), obviously that helps us in this type of situation. If our mindset is one in which we think mistakes happen as a result of stupidity and nothing can be done about them (a fixed mindset), that does not help us learn from failure.

Lehrer writes about an interesting experiment that showed that if people were praised for being smart, they tended towards a fixed mindset, and if they were praised for their effort they tended towards a growth mindset. That reminded me of a company I worked at years ago where a senior manager told everyone at the company that the company would not reward people for their efforts, only for their results. That company no longer exists today.

Daydreaming and mining your dreams for ideas have been discussed in this blog before, but an October 27, 2011, Wall Street Journal article, The Music of His Dreams, really blew my mind. Larry Blumenfeld writes that pianist Fred Hersch awoke from a two-month coma in 2008 and remembered eight specific dreams. Hersch was compelled by them and in 2009 wrote a 90 minute theater piece blending Hersch’s music with interpretations of his dreams and experiences. I just found that amazing.

As I’ve mentioned in an early podcast episode, you will be more creative in the things that you have spent a fair amount of time studying, and so the October 26, 2011, Wall Street Journal article, Toughest Exam Question: What is the Best Way to Study?, by Sue Shellenbarger, caught my eye.

The information in this article is geared towards someone taking an exam, like in high school or college, and it’s easy to see how this information can apply to someone going on a job interview. A good deal of this information also applies to our creative endeavors, and will be familiar with those familiar with this blog.

Shellenbarger writes that a growing body of research on study techniques shows that to do optimally on a test, you should:

• Repeatedly test yourself before the exam, like with practice tests, to teach the brain to retrieve and apply knowledge from memory and to help with test-taking skills. I used this technique years ago, first when studying for the GED to graduate high school a year early, then for the SAT, then for the EIT and PE exams. Back in the day, I just went to a general bookstore or technical bookstore and picked up a book on practice exams. Now, I would assume these can all be found on-line.
• Get enough sleep
• The night before the exam, review the toughest material right before going to bed. Presumably this helps in recalling the information the next day. I bet it also gives you a restless sleep.
• Don’t wake up earlier than usual the day of the exam in order to study, as that could interfere with REM sleep that aids in memory retention.
•  Don’t do the “all-nighter.” This practice is linked to lower grades and impairs reasoning and memory for as long as four days. I’ve never done an all-nighter…never had the stamina, actually, and just on the face of it it always seemed like a bad idea. People will do this for work, too, working long hours, but I always wonder if they wind up creating more problems than they solve.
• Sleeping and napping and have been discussed in this blog elsewhere. Search for it.
• Eat right
• High-carb, high fiber, slow-digesting foods are best
• Eat breakfast the morning of an exam. Oatmeal is good. I like mixing it up with crushed wallnuts, wheat germ, a cut-up apple or banana, and if it’s unflavored oatmeal a dollop of maple syrup.
• What you eat a week in advance of the exam matters, too. Eat a balanced diet with fruits and vegetables.
• Avoid distractions, like music, text messages, TV, and email.
• Reduce anxiety on the day of the exam as that can impair performance
• If taking the exam in an unfamiliar place, visit the room or location in advance, if possible.
• Set aside 10 minutes before the exam to write down your fears and anxieties.
• Before the test, envision yourself answering questions calmly and with confidence.