Passion over Drudgery: The Interplay between Talent & Deliberate Practice in Expertise
A conversation with Kathyrn Friedlander on her book "The Psychology of Creative Performance and Expertise" (2024, Routledge).
Kathryn Friedlander is a Lecturer in Psychology at the University of Buckingham in the UK. Dr. Friedlander studied at Oxford for her BA and MA in Classics, followed by a DPhil in Roman Comedy. Following a wide-ranging career in the Civil Service, she became interested in the education of Gifted and Talented children. She went on to obtain a Postgraduate Diploma in the Psychology of Giftedness and Talent at the University of Worcester, UK. This was followed by an MSc in Psychology at Oxford Brookes University, UK. Dr. Friedlander has studied the psychology of expertise, creative performance, and puzzle-solving since 2007.
She sat down with Anna Abraham and Desiree Sharpe from the Torrance Center at UGA to discuss her latest book: The Psychology of Creative Performance and Expertise (find out more about the book at this link).
Below is link to the full audio interview. We recommend listening to the interview while reading through it. Video excerpts are embedded within the interview transcript if you prefer a briefer listen. Enjoy!
Anna Abraham
Thank you, Kathryn, for agreeing to do this. We’d first like to learn more about you. Could you tell us a little bit about yourself in terms of your professional trajectory, how you came to be working on the topic of performance and expertise?
Kathryn Friedlander
Yeah, I think one of the things that when I talk to people, it surprises them, is that I came to psychology actually quite late in my 40s. So my route was actually slightly unusual. I started off with the Humanities. I actually studied Classics, Latin and Greek at Oxford, my undergraduate degree. And then I stayed on to get my PhD in Roman comedy. So it’s quite a long way from what I do now in a way. So I studied one of the plays of Plautus in detail. Everything from the minutiae of the manuscript through to verbal humor and stagecraft as well as exploring the balance between the playwright’s reliance on earlier Greek comedy and where he was striking out and doing something in a new creative direction. So that was great and I loved my time at Oxford, and the work I did then. But then reality struck and I had to find a job. So, for a while I did the sensible thing and I got a job with the UK Civil Service in the UK Atomic Energy Authority, getting experience in a whole raft of business-related skills like finance and management, secretariat work, funding bids, and that kind of thing.
I guess it was after the birth of my daughter, I took a career break, and I realized that this work wasn’t really addressing a deep down need that I felt. I felt I needed to get back into studying in the field of the arts. That led me to move into Psychology via a long standing interest in how exceptional performance develops. So, that took me into studying areas of giftedness and talent, particularly music. I picked up my official psychology qualifications somewhere along the way of doing that.
One of my initial areas of interest of my own was in cryptic crossword solving, which I’m rather addicted to. This is a rather British centric form of puzzle, although it’s found around the world in quite a number of countries, especially those that play cricket. It’s a bit different from the straight definition crosswords that you get in the US. In cryptics, there’s this sort of, it’s code cracking. There’s a deliberate attempt to trick the solver while being very fair, but you use a sort of misleading surface reading of the clue.
I could give you an example, like a cryptic crossword clue such as, well, a clue such as, “grown up kid starts to gossip on aunt’s Twitter.” Okay, so you might be thinking like a hooded teenager and he’s got his aunt’s phone and things and that’s four letters. And the answer to that’s actually “goat.” Okay, so the definition of grown up kid gives you the answer, “goat” okay. And then the phrase starts to indicate the first letters of gossip on aunt’s Twitter.
Yeah, so in effect it’s kind of like algebra code cracking, a bit of sleight of hand, and a bit of misleading deception. And so it’s probably no surprise that they recruited people in the second World War to go do code cracking at Bletchley Park by asking them how fast they could solve the Times Crossword. Things like that.
Studying cryptics led me into the world of creativity by way of problem solving, by which I mean that in cryptics we’re setting up a puzzling or misleading challenge. And that leads to a bit of brainstorming and a bit of impasse where you get completely stuck in an incubation period, if you’re lucky.
It’s only when you reconceptualize the problem space and stop banging your head on the brick wall that we realize how the clue works. And we benefit from those sorts of “aha” moments. There’s quite a few that you can get with the cryptic crossword.
There were lots of fascinating rabbit holes to go down there and some of my initial work published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology back in 2016 and 2018 sort of focused on exploring this particular puzzle form and explaining how it operates as a form of insight puzzle.
When I got into studying this back in 2007 with my colleague Philip Fine it also meant that we started studying expertise, we’ve decided to consider the area of expertise because within the cryptic crossword world there are various layers of difficulty in the puzzles that are set. It depends on the newspaper, some of them are easier than others; the Times of London is generally thought to be pretty tricky. So, there are everyday grids with fewer clues and sort of blacked out areas between the intersecting words.
But then there are advanced cryptics, which have barred grids and more obscure vocabulary and obscure coding devices. Many of these also have a lateral thinking puzzle at the end, which requires a solver to make remote connections after the grid’s complete to solve a thematic challenge or to reconstruct or transform the grid in some sort of way. So these were really challenging. And one of the most difficult crosswords, The Listener Crossword, which comes out weekly, only has a handful of solvers who manage to solve all 52 puzzles a year. And so that got us thinking, what makes some people able to do that and willing to do that and interested in dedicating as much time as that to solving a puzzle of that difficulty?
And of course, at that point, everybody has to address the findings of Anders Eriksson, who’s a colossus in the field of expertise. His theory that it’s deliberate practice of about 10,000 hours - that’s all you really need to succeed in any expertise area. Now with what we knew about crossword solving both personally, and in collecting data from our participants, this didn’t sit right with us because we knew they weren’t doing any deliberate practice and so we began to explore whether this viewpoint could and should be challenged.
So that was where I came from and why I was interested in both the areas of creativity and in puzzle solving and expertise, and also more broadly in the field of performing arts and the theatre in particular. All those interests really fused when I came to the University of Buckingham and devised a course called Creative Performance and Expertise.
Desiree Sharpe
Your book reveals an immense amount of work gone in. I mean, it’s so impressive, the effort, time, and intention involved in that. So, as you’re exploring expertise, and as you were developing and collecting information for the book, what was the motivation to get you to put this all together and publish it, and what has the response been?
Kathryn Friedlander
It was published in August 2024. The motivation was very simple really. I’ve been teaching this sort of innovative model since 2014. I put it together. Really, I was just lucky. I was asked - “well, given your interest, do you want to design a brand new module? One that is really quite different, and that might be quite attractive to students.” So I devised it. One always look for a textbook, but I just couldn’t find anything. There genuinely wasn’t a single accessible text that integrated creativity and expertise across a widespread domain. There are lots of Handbooks, such as the Cambridge Handbook of Expertise, but they were all written for scholars. They weren’t written for students and they weren’t written in a way that could explain the issues in a very even-handed way in one volume. They also didn’t explore widespread domains.
I wanted to push expertise scholarship beyond the usual anchor domains that are normally explored (which are things like chess, sport, and music) and push students and researchers into other areas as well, like dance and theatre, creative writing, art, and STEM.
In my experience these were the areas that, when I was teaching students, they were firing the imagination more. I mean obviously we do cut the more canonical areas like music and mind games, but students were into the creative writing they wanted to understand about humor, and they wanted to understand about dance and theatre.
So, that was the motivation - it was to try to merge the two. When I came to study in this area, I could never understand why nobody was talking about expertise and creativity in the same breath. They seemed to be very, very distinct traditions. And as someone from the humanities, I just thought, well, we’ll study expertise in all these creative fields and see what’s out there. But there just isn’t anything out there. There’s work by people studying theatre, but there isn’t anything that unites creativity, expertise, and theatre in our particular area. So that was the motivation.
Anna Abraham
Speaking of expertise, there are ways of thinking about it that maybe most people aren’t really familiar with. When we talk about levels of expertise and how they apply to different domains of human enterprise, You named a few: some artistic fields, some scientific fields, and so on. And I’m sure this must have been one of the many things that you encountered. When it comes to how we think about expertise, it might differ from area to area.
So can you tell us a little bit about levels of expertise and how you know you’ve reached a level? I know it might be a tricky question, but often when we think of such things or people, we have these sort of dichotomous ways of thinking of experts and non-experts, for instance. One of the many things interesting about your book is that you really talk about levels of expertise. And so, I was wondering if you could speak to that a little bit.
Kathryn Friedlander
Yes, I think it was out of frustration in some ways because so many studies would just say “expert/novice”. And really, if you’re really comparing experts with novices, then you’re almost certainly going to find that it’s just practice that distinguishes them. If you’re really talking about a true novice, who is doing something for the first time compared to an expert who’s playing at the proms or something similar, well, this is a silly comparison. And actually what the studies were doing was they really weren’t looking to merely compare experts and novices. They were looking at something more fine-grained than that.
When we started to explore cryptic crossword solving, we realized that there were these different layers of competence. And at the time, because we hadn’t actually stumbled across the work of Robert Hoffman, we used labels like “super expert” for instance, who is somebody like Mark Goodliffe, who’s won the Time speed championship a record number of times. So he’s just sort of head and shoulders above the rest of the competitors. So he’s a super expert.
Then there are “experts” - people who put in a really good performance. And then we thought of “ordinary solvers” too, who would perhaps take an hour to solve the Times crossword, but would enjoy it. But it’s not a spectacular performance. I think the world record for solving the Times crossword is just over three minutes, which is hardly enough time to write the answers in, never mind solving it. So you see we have these different layers.
Our research started to explore real world differences between these groups to see if it actually made a difference. For example, in 2022 in the Journal of Expertise, we were exploring levels of fluid intelligence, comparing ordinary solvers with super experts. Although we found all of them were working at quite an elevated level of fluid intelligence, the super experts were noticeably higher. In fact, they are higher than any of the norms in the test manual we were using. So, they were very, very, very good.
Of course if we’d done our homework and we found the Hoffman levels early we would most certainly have aligned ourselves with that and we would have used the terms “journeyman”, “expert” and “master”, which are the official Hoffman terms.
I now use Hoffman’s staged model as a vocabulary across domains because it’s beautifully nuanced. It starts with the novice and then as you’re getting a little bit more initiated then you’re an apprentice who can do certain things unsupervised. And then next levels that follow are journeyman, expert, and master.
So, it helps with the benchmarking of expertise. It also forces us to be explicit about what the person can do, and relative to whom, when we’re doing our expertise studies.
In my teaching and in the book, one practical point I keep returning to is that you can’t study experts unless you’ve been careful about what level you mean. It’s frustrating that in some papers a university level music student could be deemed an expert in one paper and non-expert in another paper. It means that we keep introducing a sort of unnecessary imprecision into the study of expertise, which we probably need to tackle.
You were asking about different domains and it’s messy. I think one of the reasons why chess is so popular as an expertise area of study is that they’ve got the ELO ratings. So, you actually do know the level of expertise from the number, and of course you can use it in statistics as well. It’s a continuous measure, so it’s very handy.
But in other domains, you really haven’t got that kind of measure. You can use tournament metrics for some areas, but realistically for many creative fields like ballet, for example, you’ve got to use reputational or achievement or peer judgment or some other metric to establish what level of expertise you’re talking about. But I do think it’s worth doing. I started every chapter in my book, across all the domains, I try to give suggestions to the type of benchmarking criteria that could be explored. The only caveat really is one of the traps that we do fall into and we must be wary of is the assumption that we could use the high forms of artistic performance as representative of the whole field. And again, that’s a trap that we keep falling into in the expertise domains.
For example, ballet and classical music have very clearly demarcated progression through things like certification, conservatoire achievement, then troupe or orchestra, a sort of membership. But that simply isn’t the case even for all areas of music and dance, for example hip-hop or other forms of street dance or blues or country music, we don’t have such levels, but we do have experts. So, there’s a pressing need to examine the relevant criteria in each area and to calibrate this with Hoffman’s scheme. But as you probably guessed from this I’m going to fudge and say it all depends on the domain and it’s quite tricky and quite fudgy really.
In chapter 2, I set out all the various ways that we could benchmark and there’s quite a few ideas for tossing in the mix. I think Hoffman himself says it really ought to be triangulating from a number of different sources if you can; to try to make sure you’ve taken some certification combined with actual performance metrics.
I think one of the interesting things is that using Hoffman’s framework, why I like it is it actually very closely mirrors the Four Cs framework of Kaufman and Beghetto as well. So, when you’re trying to merge the expertise with the creativity areas, this is actually quite handy because common to both schemes is this concept of a developmental trajectory through layers of expertise acquisition.
Kaufmann and Beghetto starts with mini-C which is you know a very sort of personal skills acquisition; it’s very comparable to Hoffman’s apprenticeship or initiate stages. When you move through to the little c, we’ve got journeyman. Maybe for pro-c, we’re looking a bit more like expert. And if we go up to the Big C levels of Kaufman and Beghetto we’re looking at master on the Hoffman side and there are some very strong parallels between the two ways of mapping this developmental trajectory.
It’s not to say that everybody reaches every stage, of course, but that we make our way through to the level that we finally achieve through these stages of skill acquisition. So, for that reason in my book I’ve actually explicitly aligned those two models and said you know we need to take these side-by-side. I think the argument is really the some of the later stages of pro-C and Big C levels of creativity really can’t exist without a detailed experience in the field. And conversely, it is difficult to see on the expertise side how someone could deliver a master level contribution to the field if they’re simply regurgitating what came before. So, it seems to make seems to make sense and I was really pleased in this Special Issue on my book posted by the Journal of Expertise. I was really extremely pleased that James Kaufman himself was sort of supportive of this explicit linking of the two frameworks in the book. So I think that’s something we can start to explore now.
Desiree Sharpe
Through your clear immersion in the literature and, at this point, being a seasoned scholar in this field, has there been anything that has surprised you about what you’ve uncovered?
Kathryn Friedlander
Not so much surprise. I think probably, if I’m honest, the book is borne out of a little bit of frustration that we got ourselves so very bogged down in two ways. Firstly, I think that most scholars feel now that the nature-nurture debate really went on rather too unproductively for too long in the expertise field. And thankfully, from about the mid-2012 onwards, we started to emerge from that rather sterile debate.
The expertise field has now embraced much broader understanding of “expertise development” using multifactorial models and that places us very much more on the same footing as the creativity areas, as for example, the broad multifactorial models of creativity of Robert Sternberg.
This means that we can now give attention not merely to attitudes and to practice, but to other broader aspects such as intra-personal qualities; personality, of course, but also gender, ethnicity, and even season of birth. These can affect outcomes through the constraining of opportunity, and this means that factors like gatekeeping and evaluative culture matter too as they subtly affect our access to resources, luck, and opportunity.
I think one of the things that I was most perhaps surprised about was that I wanted to include gender in every chapter as perhaps a nod. The more I got into it, the more I found that this was in fact seriously affecting access to opportunity. So much so that in chapter 14, I dedicate a particular section to such obstacles which drew together from across each of the chapters. And this would be the case I’m sure for a number of the other personal attributes.
I suppose the other frustration I had was that we’ve been slow to explore these areas outside a few fields. I think the frustration with even the studies of the creative fields in expertise, such as music, a lot of the studies are doing things like studying musical expertise by getting people into a lab and getting them to sight read or play a piece, give them 20 minutes and then play it again and see how reliably they play it. To me, this doesn’t compute. So I think I was quite keen to sort of address this. It had always struck me from my background that this, this really is not what expertise in performance areas like music was really all about, not at the very top echelons of performance.
Anna Abraham
That leads me to my next question as well, because sometimes when one focuses on the lab-based work, one loses the ecological validity as a sort of anchor. In the expertise debate, how much focus is there on how to cultivate it, depending on which field you’re in, and particularly in childhood. Is this studied well at all? From what we know so far, is there anything that can be said about how best to cultivate expertise? Even if it’s not across all domains, but only a few domains, what do we know about that so far?
Kathryn Friedlander
From my background I originally came into this field through studying giftedness and talent, and there’s a lot out there. I was trying to draw some of the knowledge that we have from the gifted and talented literature into the book as well. And it’s difficult, isn’t it? I mean because all the research is sort of suggesting that age of starting is really important, particularly in fields which peak early and in fields where we revere prodigious performance. Like the youngest young musician of the year or youngest chess grandmaster. So, there’s this kind of this drive for precocity and a spiraling demand for ever earlier starting ages.
Typically speaking, no very young child at the age of three or four decides - “I really want to have violin lessons.” I know Jacqueline Dupre was actually a counter-example of that. Apparently she hear the cello playing on the radio and so she wanted to play that. But typically speaking, it’s the parents who decide on violin lessons or piano lessons or whatever. So, parental support is obviously critical in terms of the payment for the lessons, and the ferrying to the training sessions, and the purchase of instruments, and whatnot. So it is seen as quite crucial and I do cover that extensively by drawing very heavily on gifted and talented literature literature in chapter 13.
There’s a danger though, isn’t there, because this type of parenting characterizes (in UK terms) a type of middle-class preoccupation with concerted cultivation where we’re going to tick all the right things off on our culture, which is aimed at rigorously shaping your child’s leisure activities and childhood to acquire a cultural checklist of achievements. And, of course, the areas targeted are often those that are earning prestige and potentially high monetary rewards for those at the top. Those are the fields where we’ve got most pressure to succeed and achieve.
I don’t think there are many parents sitting there saying you’ve got to finish your cryptic crossword this evening; 20 minutes practice on your screen. Or even other areas like, I don’t know, fishing or whatever. It’s always the high profile and high cultural achievement areas.
So, there is this risk of aspiring domains setting children off earlier and earlier, regardless of perhaps what we might recognize as “aptitude” and that can have consequences for the mental and physical health of the children. It can risk burnout, something I cover in chapter 14.
I think possibly one of the detrimental legacies of the Ericsson idea - it only takes 10,000 hours - is that if you sell that dream, then if you don’t get there after 10,000 hours, then either you didn’t try hard enough or your teachers weren’t good enough or whatever. I think we obviously do have to allow a role for natural ability in this. That is certainly the line that Zach Hambrick would take.
Zach Hambrick has argued that natural ability where your real attributes lie has to be considered as a key to success. Deliberate practice in a field where it doesn’t play to your strengths may lead to success, but - as Dean Keith Simonton has said - it is through drudgery, rather than a passion.
So, while it can result in proficiency, the aspirations of many parents is for their child to progress beyond the level of journeyman, let’s say. But progress beyond that level is unlikely without a really helpful constellation of abilities and passion and support and all the rest of it.
Hambrick concludes that one of the benefits of recognizing that aptitudes are genuinely part of the picture is that it encourages individuals to niche-pick; actually marry your strengths with a suitable domain where you will flourish given the hard work and the opportunity and so on.
So, I think yeah it’s a delicate balance, it’s tricky. I don’t think there’s one recipe for anybody, it very much depends on again on individual. But it gets tricky where talent is spotted and people get very excited about their child’s potential to succeed and I think Ellen Winner has done quite a lot of work in that area, warning us of the dangers of converting a child’s intrinsic motivation for their pursuit, their raged mastery if you like, into an extrinsic desire for rewards like winning the competition and complying with expectations of parents and that way can easily lead to burnout and dropping out altogether, which is sad. So, I think parenting and coaching styles are therefore quite critical in determining how effectively the child’s well-being is protected during these potentially high pressure times.
Desiree Sharpe
You’re speaking to something that I had thought about while going through your book, which is that there is no formula. Could you speak to the idea that emergent properties might surface through a constellation of factors that come into place, and provide your perspective on what’s happening synergistically beyond that?
Kathryn Friedlander
I think this is where the multifactorial models come in. Parental influence and family is very important. We have all sorts of outcry about things like “nepo babies” and there’s obviously great advantages in belonging to a family with connections. But there are other ways as well, such as where just simply being in a particular family means that you are going to have important experiences. Perhaps being in a musical house means that you absorb the general musicality of music by it just being present all the time. Or maybe your abilities themselves might be fostered by a family that is in that field and would like to try that out for you too. So you would then be provided with opportunities to see how that swings.
But there might also be children whose families are not particularly musical but then suddenly show this talent. Families get very very excited and I think the stimulation from this environment at home can go in multiple ways. There’s clearly in many cases a genetically helpful component going on there, but the way that one is exposed, the influences that one has, the connections that one has, the music or cultural influences that one’s exposed to when one’s growing up, these are all very, very important. It all factors into this multi-factor of the opportunities, the luck, the simple hearing a cello on the radio and saying, hey, I want to play that thing. These things all feed in.
Interestingly, in the special issue of the Journal of Expertise, one of the commentators there reminded me of the simple thing like the season of year in which you’re born awfully influential. It certainly affects academics if you’re one of the youngest in the class, you’re much less likely to go to university; you’re much less likely to be selected for that elite football team. There’s been a recent study that even saw this coming through for selection for conservatoires, for musical students. Being younger actually really does matter. So, there’s quite a lot to throw into the melting pot.
Anna Abraham
Your book came out at a really interesting time. It came out in 2024, but you would have submitted it about a year or more before that, right? Since then, we have had this explosion of generative AI and how that is affecting practice. It adds onto the question of the influence of technological advancements like social media, smartphones, and so on. I’m wondering how much discussion there is in the expertise community about cultivating creative expertise or cultivating proficiency in any particular skill in the current day and age that we’re in. Because I imagine there seems to be just a bit more of an uphill battle now. If the only music you’re hearing is music you make yourself or you perhaps own very few records and you’re much more interested in it in a sort of intrinsic way, you might be more motivated to make new music. But now though, you may not be as motivated because you have endless amounts and variates of music on your phone that you can access.
One of our previous speakers talked about how social media and current media exposure allows us to “scratch the aesthetic itch”. I know it’s still early days, but how is the expertise community talking about the influence of technologies, especially on young people. What are the positives and what are the negatives? Is there a conversation or is that still not happening?
Kathryn Friedlander
I haven’t seen a very strong conversation. I’ve seen stronger conversations in the creativity field, because of the obvious worries of AI in creative fields. I think, for example, in the special issue in the general expertise, one of the contributors there was rightly drawing to our attention the opportunities there are now for using virtual reality for supporting expertise development. They work in the field of music and to be able to simulate a concert hall to play in with the acoustics. And perhaps in the area of stage fright, to become accustomed to audience noise, or whatever. These techniques are really useful.
Virtual reality has been around helping us to train the military and for doing laparoscopic surgery or whatever for some decades now. So yes, it can help you train expertise in areas where to do something very risky, such as a surgery or a military raid. Flying a military aircraft for real is a risky situation. You wouldn’t want to be doing that as a novice. But you can train on simulators, and I think that’s thought of as quite useful.
I haven’t seen any debate really about the amount of time that young people would now dedicate to deliberate practice, and I think that’s one of the interesting questions. There’s so many other shiny, attractive things that could grab your attention now, aren’t there? The TikTok flicking or, the constant stream of music. There are influences, of course, on what you might be doing, such as to be able to instantly play music and engage with music.
But, for expertise development, actually picking up that instrument yourself and going through the very hard work (and it is hard work, even if you have a rage to master) is necessary. Nobody’s denying the 10,000 hours of deliberate practice needs to happen. It’s just it’s not the sole determinant. You have to be prepared to sacrifice the here and now for the future goal, the remote future goal of actually being able to achieve that expert performance.
I think perhaps what is destabilizing at the moment is the thought that well, are those roles even going to exist? You put in your hours to practice this musical instrument or to train as an actor, but if AI is going to do all the voiceovers or the acting, even if it is just for adverts, to have AI to take away the end goal, then why would one sacrifice the here and now. So I’m really concerned about that. I know there’s a lot of moral panic about attention spans as well of young people and I don’t know the rights or wrongs of that, but there are an awful lot of competing attractions, whether that’s gaming or TikToking or social media, that erode the time that children and young people in particular are willing to invest in acquiring levels of high expertise.
Desiree Sharpe
I think that also speaks to something that we address in creativity, which is incubation periods or taking a step away from the problem, right? This idea that sometimes you need to actually shift attention or focus, or stop that deliberate practice. I’m wondering from the expertise angle, if you can speak to what’s been done about taking breaks or just the impact of rest on how performance levels increase over time?
Kathryn Friedlander
Yeah, that’s an interesting one. I mean, certainly I know a lot from the mind games and puzzle area as well, it’s quite well established. So, for things like cryptic crosswords, often people put down their crossword and they step away. When they come back, the answer may be staring you in the face. I think that one of the most valuable things in terms of creative performance is the ability to step back and use the mind, so it’s more of the kind of daydreaming of taking a break from something, but then allowing the mind to roam around the landscape.
Perhaps of the part that you’re an actor, the part that you’re trying to play certainly with the method school of acting you’re wanting to get into that character. And yes, you can you can sit there and you can study the script and you can take part in the performances, but I think a lot of the work actually happens when you take that step away and reimagine the role in your own mind and think of how the character is feeling and actually run the script mentally.
There’s quite a lot of literature in the expertise field of the use of mental imagery for mental rehearsal in expertise fields.
Take music, for example. You might lie there at night thinking, yeah, it’s not really that bit I’m playing there and you can imagine your fingers and you can imagine maybe if I put a rubato here, maybe if I stress that note here … and so on. I believe the same thing happens with dancers and actors as well, where they are really imagining the role, performing it again and maybe tweaking aspects in the mind. So it’s more the kind of, not exactly daydreaming, it’s allowing oneself the space to explore mentally the part, as opposed to being physically practicing your ballet steps or whatever. It’s still a part of practice, but in the mind instead.
This one area I’m particularly interested in is exploring the role of mental imagery in creative performance fields and creative writing as well. The imagination is so very important to some of these creative performance fields, and we really haven’t studied it.
In a paper I wrote a while back about visual imagery, following Anna’s line, we were looking at things like the use of imagery for what I call “storyboarding”. So, as in films where you have the storyboards laid out to show what the scene might feel like or what the costumes might look like or you could be telling the story as if there’s a camera in your head. You’re projecting how that chapter of your book’s going to play out or what your characters might sound like or what costume they might be or what the setting would look like. So, there’s actually a role there for again taking a step back but playing things through your mind as well as other even fancier rules for creativity like conceptual expansion where we’re actually just chucking out the rules and breaking through the boundaries of what we know already exists. But we’re just breaking through that and coming up with a completely new conceptual idea or approach. So, I think that’s probably what I would say - not exactly incubation, but time to think, time to explore in one’s mind.
Anna Abraham
That’s wonderful. I like that very much. Since your book came out a little over a year ago, are there other publications that have come out or are there interesting new developments that you’ve been surprised to see or happy to see that have would have made an added component to your chapters? Or is that not the case? In the field, what has changed, have things changed, have things developed at all, since the book?
Kathryn Friedlander
Yeah, I don’t know, whether I’ll ever get to a second edition. But I have another copy of my Scrivener file which says second edition. It’s just so frustrating because the minute the book comes out, there’s a whole raft of so many papers that also come out. So, I’m going through and kind of pasting the references in by the side in the notes field, which means it will be sort of ready for the next edition, if it ever comes.
I mean, of course, research moves on and there’s always so many wonderful, wonderful things. I think one of the exciting angles for me was actually - I keep referring to the special edition in the Journal of Expertise because we got people in from all sorts of fields to weigh in, and there were some really interesting angles that came out of that for where we might take the conversation further.
James Kaufman, for example, in that issue, proposed the existence of “accidental creative expertise”, which I was really quite intrigued by. This is a new concept to me. What he was talking about was actually a trajectory in which individuals may develop really quite high levels of creative skill simply through long-term engagement in enjoyable self-directed activities. They may not even frame them as a kind of practice or trying to achieve a creative career or anything. But they’re developing skills. Like during the COVID lockdown, we saw a lot of people who suddenly rediscovered things like home sewing or knitting or baking or gardening or woodworking. And some people have gone on to maintain these hobbies. Certainly in the UK we’ve had programs that have been spinning out of that interest, such as “The Great British Bake-Off” and “The Great British Sewing Bee.” It’s a kind of competition format where we take ordinary people who have developed a skill in home sewing for making clothes or home baking, and suddenly they’re on the television and they are experts. They clearly have done that and this is quite interesting to me. We typically study high stakes or high wire activities, like playing the violin at the proms, that reflect high cultural, high financial reward, high professional status, and so on. But in fact if you expand to looking at little-c but verging on pro-c creativity, there are many other everyday activities that people do. They merit exploring and we do have experts as well, which makes it quite an interesting view to have a look at, I thought. So I was interested, I was quite excited by that idea.
There is also room to re-explore some of the more canonical fields. Even a field like chess, for example, bringing in the angle of creativity to try to broaden out what we’re thinking about. The recent work of Alisa Scherbakova and colleagues demonstrated that chess tournaments actually give prizes for brilliancy, which is a mix of originality, elegance, and aesthetic beauty of chess moves. So why aren’t we studying that? Because that’s a really interesting angle. In fact, prominent players frequently describe that creative expression is central to engagement with chess. So, we can see that even in a really paradigmatically cognitive domain that we’ve been studying in terms of expertise, template acquisition, and knowing all the moves. Even there we’ve got the opportunity to study expressive and aesthetic qualities that we just haven’t looked at before. So, I think that would be that would be really quite interesting.
Anna Abraham
Kathryn, thank you so much. The focus on process is something we care about greatly. You mentioned Alisa Scherbakova, who was at UGA, got her PhD here, and actually worked with the Torrance Center. So we are absolutely delighted that you brought up her work. That’s just brilliant. Thank you so much, Kathryn. This has been a wonderful conversation for us, and thank you for taking the time.
Desiree Sharpe
Thank you so much, Kathryn.
Kathryn Friedlander
Thank you very much. It’s a pleasure.
For more information about Kathyrn Friedlander, please visit her webpage.
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