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Chris Jones Explains Why Creativity Can’t Be Measured in “The Eye Test”
Data never tell the whole story, despite our dependence on numbers to explain everything from sports to weather / BY Chris Jones / February 2nd, 2022
While the rest of us were moaning about boredom during the pandemic, Canadian author Chris Jones wrote a book looking for hope, and optimism. The Eye Test: A Case for Human Creativity in an Age of Analytics is a spectacular leap from the numbness of numbers into the sparkling world of creativity. The Port Hope, Ont., resident, who writes about sports for CBC, begins with that famous foundational 2003 book by Michael Lewis, Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, which seemed to say: “Trust numbers. They can reveal something that your spidey senses may not.” Yet, as Jones points out, our increasing reliance on analytics has not always produced big payoffs. In chapters that discuss the use of data in everything from entertainment to weather to money and medicine, Jones references a fascinating array of talent who deploy a combination of instinct and creativity.
This sweet, exquisite excerpt from the chapter “Sports, Love and War,” about his autistic son Charley, will make you feel the heartbeat that animates Jones’ thesis. He appeals to us to embrace creativity and kindness – the human instincts – rather than the machine-driven, algorithmic ones. – Susan Grimbly
My older son, Charley, has autism. Today he’s fifteen years old. Raising him has been a beautiful gift and a maddening challenge. He views the world differently than I do. He views the world differently than most people, even most other people with autism. It’s hard for me to imagine that Charley might one day be independent, because he’s very hard to teach, particularly when it comes to the rules that govern polite society. Charley doesn’t respond to people or events typically. He doesn’t possess any body shame, for instance. Charley could be naked in front of the world, and it wouldn’t bother him in the slightest. He wouldn’t know why it should begin to bother him. By his reckoning, everybody’s body, more or less, is some version of the same. I admire that in a way, but I don’t expect Charley will receive admiration if he drops his pants on the school bus. He doesn’t know that it’s impolite to ask someone about their crooked front tooth or why they’re four feet tall. He doesn’t understand how money works, that twenty dollars is worth more than five dollars, because he doesn’t understand how numbers work. He can’t put historical events in a sequence. He will never understand that 1985 happened before 1994.
Charley also can’t spell, even though he has always loved to read. Everywhere Charley goes, he brings a giant bag of books with him, lest he run out of things to read, and so risk reaching the end of his known universe. Still, the spelling of even basic words defies him. When he was young, I couldn’t understand how a child who is such a voracious reader cannot spell. I couldn’t grasp how one didn’t relate to the other: Reading demands that you know how to spell.
After years of his counselling and therapy, we now know that’s not always the case. It’s not the case with Charley, because he doesn’t read in the usual way. He’s never sounded out a word; his eyes don’t forge the usual links in the linguistic chain. Instead, he’s asked “What word is that?” many, many thousands of times. And I’ll say, “poised” or “Atlantis” or “dragonfly,” and then Charley will return to his book and never again ask about that word. Charley, we’ve realized – or we think we realize, because it’s impossible to know for sure – has memorized the shapes of words. English to him is like Mandarin or hieroglyphics: Words aren’t assemblies of letters and syllables; they’re shapes with meanings. Each word is imprinted on his brain somehow, like any other memory, like a tattoo made of invisible ink. He can’t spell them the way you probably can’t draw a realistic portrait of someone whose face you know. For Charley, every word is like your memory of a face; every book is a collection of people he recognizes.
That same hard-to-describe skill – a specific kind of photographic memory, combined with off-the-charts pattern recognition – makes Charley incredibly good at some unusual tasks. One of Charley’s teachers once pointed at a field and asked him to find her a four-leaf clover. Within a few minutes, he had found five. Charley has repeated that trick on numerous occasions. For some reason, four-leaf clovers stand out to him the way the brightest star in the sky does to you or me. It’s as though they are lit up somehow, or call out to him. My younger son, Sam, is one of those kids who’s naturally good at most things. Life is easy for Sam, as hard as it sometimes can be for Charley. If we feel the need to balance the ledgers between our boys, we tell them to go outside and find as many four-leaf clovers as they can. Charley will come back with handfuls and Sam with none.
I don’t know why Charley can see four-leaf clovers so easily; I don’t really know how he sees anything. What I do know: Charley sees differently than I do. We can look together at the same object, the same person, the same moment in time, and even though we are father and son, we each see something totally different. Our separate ways of looking at the world reveal divergent truths. When we’re both looking at a busy street, the fact that Charley sees escape when I see danger fills me with terror. But when we look at the same green field, and Charley sees only the four-leaf clovers, it fills me with wonder.
Maybe there is something you can divine more clearly than anyone else – whether a movie is good, or whether a dish needs more or less salt, or whether a cancer is the killing sort. Isn’t it better, for you and for us, if you champion your differences in perspective, and seek opportunities where your gifts might be best applied, and try to use your methods more creatively? I’m not sure there’s one best way to do anything. Charley has shown me there isn’t even one best way to read.