Many years ago I saw the movie by french film Director Truffaut “The wild Child” It is based in a true story and was about a boy that grew up in the wilderness and was nurtured by a wolf. He was spotted close to a town searching for food, and brought back to the civilized world under a teacher and psychologist who observed everyone of his moves and studied and recorded his innate learning capacities. The most intense moment of the film is when his Teacher wants to find out whether the sense of Justice is an culturally acquired trait in us, the result of our learning processes, or it is an innate trait, a genetic trait within our systems and minds.

What was used to teach him was a reward system for his learning progress ; he always gets a cup of milk when he has done well in his lessons, one day his trainer wants to find out about his sense of Justice and after he has done an exercise with very good results he is closed in a small closet without light, and the amazing result was that he rebelled fiercely to the injustice. The sense of Justice was then proved to be innate, inherent to the human beings and probably to other beings in Nature as we know it today.

Well when I went out of the movie theatre, out in the open air I was thrilled. And I remembered my primary school teacher Lobelia de Narváez back in Caracas,Venezuela, that taught me so many beautiful things that I still dearly cherish. One day she told us all, a 30+ girl’s class, something like this “ideas have no property, they are out there for you to grab, just discover them, use them, share them, do not worry if they are alike or even the same, this is what we call Parallel Creativity. Or can you imagine the wheel been invented in only one place, or the fire, how slow would civilization progress have been, if we have had to wait for many unique individuals to show us all their unique ideas?”

In a way she was a philosopher. A Plato reader maybe. Ideas exist outside us.

So there is Parallel Creativity and there are Parallel Minds. I have come across them recently and very vividly. While thinking of ideas to show in our ideas4all presentation and to post when the testing time would arrive, I have come up with some ideas, that after posted, I have found similar or equal ones. Last week I navigated further to see that some of the ones I have posted, have their parallel on the Internet. Some, I have edited and added what I have found. Examples are the art canned proposal for Coke that existed, Red bull beverage has a USA cannedart contest, I just hit my face with it in a poster in Chicago this fall, or the idea that a unique Malaria cross platform could be built, for which last week a similar initiative was launched called engagedmalaria.com, or the multichannel serenades/serenatas online business I was proposing, that exist locally in Colombia and Mexico, or my tall husband’s idea of having more than 2 classes in frequent flights airplanes to satisfy more customer needs and bring more business, like upgrading leg space or eating alternatives, well this month Spanair in Spain has done exactly the same with 4 classes. I could probably find many more, but I think the point is made. The spontaneous growth of ideas is a fact.

Now, there is also some cynicism around this Parallel creativity term. Joe Eszterhas, the famous Hollywood screenwriter, of such successful movies as Basic Instinct, Showgirls, and Flashdance, recently defined in his book “The devils guide to Hollywood” the term as “the phrase that will be used by someone that has plagiarized you”. Let aside this perspective, the History of Civilizations, the town Legends, the story of Religions are full of parallel creativity, they repeat themselves like clones, is this plagiarism, of course not it is the collective unconscious that impregnates our lives, dreams and wishes. The collective unconsciousness that grows spontaneously everywhere and at anytime.

We invite you to become an ideator, to find ideas, grab them write about them, with no complex, forget parallel creativity to unleash them. If it is already out there, if it has been published, or has been patented, if you have not copied it or plagiarized it, fine you are not the first one but certainly it is as yours in your mind and heart as theirs. The owner of ideas is the Universe and they are there for you to grab. Lets all construct and share them in ideas4all repository of ideas, lets all take care of them, lets construct the Global Brain. Use the innate creative force in all of us.

This entry was posted on Sunday, 4 de May de 2008 at 5:43 am and is filed under Challenges, Ideas, barcelona. You can track comments on this feed RSS 2.0. You can leave a comment or trackback from your own site.