I happened to stumble onto this brilliant presentation by John Cleese about creativity.
If you are a PhD supervisor or a PhD student I strongly suggest you to watch this video. It is about 36 minutes long, but really worth the time. Besides, you will get a good laugh!

Research and Creativity has many things in common, and Cleese shows how you easily can promote creativity among co-workers and for yourself, but also how easy it is to make sure creativity cannot thrive, by promoting effectivity. Research is, just like creativity, about childishly testing impossible ideas. Taking time to ponder over these ideas, and not being disturbed, while doing it. He also emphasises the importance of doing these things together with others. He doesn’t use the word ‘brainstorming’, but essentially this is what he suggests. Not surprisingly he shows the importance of ‘humour’ and the devastating effects of being ‘solemn’. Boring ‘effective’ people, will never be creative, but will find the easiest way out of a problem, or the “obvious solution”. Research, just as creativity, is to find the “hidden gems”, just waiting to be discovered, or invented!

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Published by Anders

Anders Hast received a PhD in Computerised Image processing at Uppsala university in 2004. In 2011 he spent one year at IIT, CNR, Pisa in Italy as an ERCIM fellow and after that he received a full time position as associate professor and in 2019 he became professor in image processing, both at Uppsala University. He has been affiliated with UPPMAX super computer centre where he worked as an application expert in Scientific Visualisation and later in the field of digital humanities together with the Centre for digital humanities in Uppsala. His recent research has focused on image processing and computer vision, for applications in microscopy, aerial photography, object recognition and especially hand written text recognition and face recognition.

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