We kind of romanticize creativity as inventing ideas out of thin air. When you actually deconstruct even the most radical new ideas, they’re often just a new connection between old ideas. They’re transplanting a solution from one problem space to another. So whether it’s the Gutenberg printing press, which is really just wine-press technology applied to letters and words, or even the Google Search algorithm – the basic logic of that algorithm was the logic that academics had been using for decades to rank their peer-reviewed articles, so more citations meant a bigger influence, meant a higher rank. That’s the logic of Google Page Rank.

You see this again and again. Whether you call it stealing or recombination – that’s just the polite word – the basic premise is the same, which is that the human mind is a connection machine. We are always making connections between old ideas. That’s why you see the most creative people are the ones who seem to have the most ideas in their head, the ones who bump into a wider spectrum of ideas.

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Does education as it is in the US today do an effective enough job at exploiting our latent creativity?

No, education’s great at killing creativity. Every kid is born an artist, as Picasso said. The problems begin when we grow up. Right now, K – 12 education is doing a really effective job at killing that out of kids.

Partly it’s just the start of brain development. Educators refer to the fourth-grade slump, which is when a lot of kids lose interest in writing and drawing and painting, and it’s not a coincidence that this is also the time of life when the frontal lobes come online and kids can for the first time delay gratification, they can control their impulses, and inhibit their first answer.

That’s good for all sorts of reasons – it allows us to exert self-control and work with our hands and stuff, but it does get in the way of creativity. For the first time they’ve got a voice in their head telling them what not to do, telling them to not make that mark there, reminding them that their drawings don’t live up to their expectations.

So the first thing we have to do, the low-hanging fruit here, is to focus on this window of third, fourth, fifth grade, really focus there and try to find ways to make sure kids know that, “Yeah, your drawing may not look great now. But if you invest in your talent, if you keep on practicing, it will get better.”