Wendy Ross
StoryTANK, the European Think Tank dedicated to storytelling for film professionals and screenwriters throughout Europe, carries its exploratory approach into this new season, delving deeper into Le Groupe Ouest and lim’s methodology, designed to accelerate creativity and developed hand in hand with the applied research team of LA FABRIQUE DES MONDES (France 2030).
We interviewed 5 international researchers from complementary fields — cognitive neuroscience, cognitive ergonomics, the psychology of serendipity, social sciences, and anthropology — inviting their expertise to shed light on what they observed unfolding within this methodology, and on what is really at stake in its experimental setups.
Wendy is a researcher at London Metropolitan University, main topic: Serendipity in higher cognitive processes. Wendy is a cognitive psychologist with an interest in how external events and accidents spark ideas. She believes that thinking is not just something that happens in our heads but something that we do in interaction with the people and things around us. She has worked on projects as varied as online experiments to ethnographic projects. The thread that runs through all her work is a fascination with the non-linear process of idea generation and making and how she, as a researcher, can understand that.
BEYOND THE OBVIOUS
“The more creative you are, the easier you find it to jump between very remote associations.”
The more creative you are, the easier you find it to jump between very remote associations. What I’ve thought about the greenhouse and what really attracted me was here’s something that’s happening not with words, but with images. The relations between things will appear in front of you without you necessarily having the control over them.
BEYOND SURPRISE
“It’s not just being surprised that’s going to be interesting, it’s the sense making process.”
We can’t make people more creative by just surprising them. It’s not just being surprised that’s going to be interesting, it’s the sense making process. It’s the how are we going to update everything that we knew in order to understand how that surprise worked?
MAKING SENSE TOGETHER
“And that sense-making, I think, is really powerful.”
With the AI generated pictures, there definitely was the sense that this came out and it wasn’t what you were expecting. So then you explained what it actually was and adopted it and did that as a group. So the group started to make sense of what was happening. And that sense-making, I think, is really powerful. I think the sense making is probably the heart of our engagement with the outside world.
THE AHA MOMENT
“That moment of understanding or that moment of comprehension.”
There’s some evidence that laughing and the feeling of insight have overlapping mechanisms in the brain, if you like. Because often to laugh or to get a joke, you have to get that: “Oh I understand!” That moment of understanding or that moment of comprehension.
OPENING UP POSSIBILITIES
“You are more open to opportunities or possibilities after you’ve had the feeling.”
When you have this feeling of insight, you are more open to opportunities or possibilities after you’ve had the feeling. There’s something maybe about the way that humour is used, which allows us as well to open up that feeling. It brings in that feeling that we’re more open to what’s happening in the world around us. We’re more likely to believe people and to trust people because we’ve had laughter.
LEAVING THE EXPECTED PATH
“Real true serendipity takes you off on a completely different path.”
Real true serendipity takes you off on a completely different path, one you weren’t expecting. And that is an emotional rather than a rational reaction. Always. Because there’s no rational reason to go off one path down the other. There never can be because there’s so much risk involved in a path you don’t know, the path you haven’t expected.
FOLLOWING WHAT FEELS RIGHT
“It feels right. And then you go down that way.”
I think you can only do that with emotions. So either the emotions are excitement or surprise or interest. It feels right. And then you go down that way.
BEYOND IMAGINATION
“The imagination is a solo thing. It starts with I.”
What we need to do is almost — it sounds silly to say break free from imagination — but actually the imagination is a solo thing. It starts with I. It’s I. You’re imagining it based on your own experiences. What I think the Groupe Ouest is trying to do is take the magic from imagination and bring the magic from outside.
FOCUS, THEN SPRINGBOARD
“It really rooted people back down in the sense of the material that they had in front of them.”
By focusing on the objects in that way, it really rooted people back down in the sense of the material that they had in front of them. And you felt that kind of shrinking, that real intensive focus, which then meant you could springboard off to the other things.
