HUMAN MADE--So why is it that a website devoted to the history of Information Technology and its great pioneers accords so much space —or space at all, for that matter—to creativity and the technical mind? Simply put, it’s the glue that binds everything else together.

We believe, and history seems to have abundant-ly confirmed it, that creativity is the single most transformative force in the evolution of techn-ology, yet the one most often overlooked or underappreciated in the innovation process and in the technical literature that records it.

The stories of pioneering innovation, the resulting inventions, and the minds who wrought them are not isolated exhibits in a museum, encountered one after another in passing like so many descriptions in a gallery catalog.

Technical creativity is the living thread that binds all together; it is integral and not incidental to the process of discovery. There’s a vital continuum at play here, and as such, we feel it very important to illuminate creativity as it manifests itself in the workings of the technical mind.

Since Alan Turing's breakthrough paper "On Computable Numbers..." in 1936, and Claude Shannon's information theory of 1948, the evolution of Information Technology has been much like a great, ongoing convergence--part by part, decade by decade--into a single, vast and interconnected machine.

Be it smartphone, desktop, laptop, auto dashboard, or the kitchen refrigerator, it's all coming together. Human made but with ever more machine intervention as the IT evolution continues inexorably forward. To know how creativity has historically involved itself in that process is vital to understanding the convergence and its future direction.

The hippocampi of London taxi drivers offer up amazing insights into how our creative processes lay down maps of new worlds within us.

 


 

 

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Note to Teachers & Educators:

To accomodate the many requests for print copies of "Bright Boys" study guides and aids, we have chosen to embed both high school and college-level study guides--in HTML-- directly into the pages at brightboys.org.

Doing so gives brightboys.org the ability to update the pages more easily, to ensure greater interactivity and also offers the site the capability for worldwide outreach in as many as 32 different languages. The website can be easily translated using the Bing translation engine: BING. To that end, we have tried to compose as much of the content as possible in HTML. We feel that this approach will make for a more rewarding overall student experience.

Study material begins at the navigation tab: BRIGHT BOYS

For updates, History of Information Technology newsletters, and other ongoing content for students, please keep in touch by pinging us here: tjg@brightboys.org

Thanks,
Tom Green

 

  

The Hippocampus

Major player in our creativity?

Recent research shows that "When humans explore an unfamiliar environment, ensembles of ‘place’ cells in the hippocampus fire individually, recording specific locations in a cognitive map that aid future spatial navigation of the area.

Once the relationship between place cell activity andlocation has been established, the activity of the cells can be used to predict a person's location within its environ-ment. Activity patterns in the ensembles are later ‘replayed’ during rest and sleep, and neuroscientists believe this is important for consolidating the spatial memories of the new environment."

OK, now think, unfamiliar creative environment--and the gradual dawning of place within that new environ-ment.

"This suggests that the activity patterns represent ‘preplay’ of the unexplored locations rather than replay of the familiar part of the environment.

Thus, the activity of hippocampal place cells appears not only to consolidate spatial memories of newly experienced environments, but also to predict how novel, unexplored environments can be encoded when they are navigated in the future.

"The researchers also suggest that hippocampal preplay may accelerate spatial memory formation once the novel environment is eventually explored."

The researchers studied the hippocampus of London taxi drivers because they were interested to see if the hippocampus would change because of the taxi drivers’ high dependence on navigational skills.

 

 

 

 

 

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