Sir Ken Robinson: The Most Extraordinary Thing

Transcript:
People often ask what is it essentially makes us human beings, essentially, if you just say, we’re sitting here and not far from the natural history museum, you know, what’s the difference between us and all the other species? And you know, it’s a question that’s interested philosophers since the dawn of time. I have my own view of this, I don’t want to say I have the answer to this question… this question which has plagued people since the dawn of time, here is the answer to it, but my point of entry to this is there is this faculty or a capacity that human beings have that other animals, other species certainly don’t have to the same extent, at all. So you might want to part this question and say what is that. If you were to write on a piece of paper what’s the thing that makes you human, what makes you different from your dog, or your goldfish or the plants that surround you or any of the breathing being what’s that? My answer to that is imagination. Now imagination is one of the things that we take for granted, people go well, duh, you think well hang on. Imagination is the most extraordinary thing, it’s the ability to bring to mind things that aren’t present to our senses, however many senses it turns out we’ve got. 9 I believe, but if I were to say to you, or to anybody, think of your bedroom or your favorite person, or your favorite place you can do that, you can bring it mind or think about your tenth birthday, you can remember that, if you had one. You don’t have to take us there. You can bring it to mind. Now that act of bringing things into conscious that aren’t here to me is the fundamental act of human consciousness. Because with it, your not only have a past, you’re not locked in to this present sensory moment. You have a past, you also have an infinite number of possible futures, because as soon as you can bring to mind things that you have experienced you can do something remarkable, you can bring to mind things that you have never experienced. In other words you can hypothesize. You can be imaginative, you can speculate. And it’s that capacity that’s taken us from caves to cities, from bone clubs to golf clubs, from eating carrion to eating cuisine, because that capacity to be imaginative leads to the most remarkable power which is the capacity of being creative. Now creativity is a bit different from imagination, because to be creative you have to do something. It’s a very practical process, but the reason that we’re sitting outside the natural history museum and we’re not exhibits in it, surrounded by other animals who created that thing, is because we have the power of imagination, and they don’t, not to the same degree. I was looking at some amazing images from the Hubble telescope recently, you know, you can show this pictures to your dog, and the dog will just stare at you and wonder what the problem is, show it to a 5 year old kid and they’ll go, oh my, because we have this extraordinary capacity to project, to make meanings from things. So I see the impulse to create as a fundamental human drive. It’s the source of our spiritual restlessness, it’s the source of our innovative capacity in science and art and music and social systems and I say there is attention because part of us wants things to be stable you know, there’s a kind if conformist tendency to, like enough innovation already, and some things you think, we’ll I’m not going to think about that anymore, I work, I have to put my socks on in the morning, I don’t need to revisit that one. I’ve checked that box. So there comes a point where there’s balance between conformity and innovation and creativity starts to shift but the thing that will take us into the future is to keep alive collectively the sense of imagination and creativity. Because the future isn’t foregone, it’s not yet, happened. Somebody once said that, a guy from Motorola, there are no facts about the future, there are only speculations, there are trends and we’d be wise to pay attention to them. There are some things which are desperately urgent and threatening. But the great hope for the future is we have this extraordinary capacity to imagine alternatives and then to act upon them, and the future will depend on the degree to which we exercise and apply our imaginations. It’s the one thing that’s taken us this far, it’s only thing that will take us any further.