Before the language of expression, comes the inspiration of first thoughts. Before the dancer creates her first step, she imagines it in her mind. Surprisingly, she may not initially imagine it as bodily movement. Using the dancer-choreographer Martha Graham as an example, we can take a peek into human cognition. And what we find can give us a clue to what's going on in our own heads.

In case you were wondering, tinkering and thinkering are not just for scientists and engineers!

We've been arguing that "thinkering" is the way many creative people work. Thinkering, you may recall, is the conceptual thinking that goes along with tinkering - making things with your hands. That's what Einstein, Edison, Faraday and Maxwell did. Steven Chu understands this; Exxon-Mobil doesn't.

We argued in our previous blog that kinesthetic feelings and visual images precede symbolic expression of knowledge. Physicist Michael Faraday exemplifies this pattern perfectly and helps us to understand the results of Jeanne Bamberger's educational experiments in hands-on instruction with school children.

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In our last post we posed a primate puzzler. How did the chimpanzee in Wolfgang Köhler's experiment reach the banana hung from a hook in the ceiling? Here's what happened.

Linguists and philosophers argue that rational thought is impossible without words or symbolic forms of language. But one primate puzzler challenges us to consider forms of effective thinking that do not involve words or numbers.

Can animals be creative? What if you could demonstrate that an animal not only invented a new behavior, but that other animals copied it? And what if this behavior was then modified and transformed to solve yet another problem?

Who creates, and how? One never-to-be-forgotten experience of an elementary school classroom, story-telling time, and a diffident little boy suggests answers for people of all ages.

Consider this blog like a set of toy dolls or action figures. Or, better yet, a box of building blocks. In each post, we plan to explore in playful spirit the people, the places and the stories-in short, the who, what, where, when, why, and how-of creativity.