Can 'Eureka' be learned?

Was just reading a Science book review entitled 'Facilitating "A-ha!" moments'. The book is about how to expand creativity, apparently loaded with anecdotes and 'tricks' to facilitate it. Interesting example includes the fact that building planners locate bathrooms in places that force people that are not used to meet to come together to the same place. Apparently, this has been shown to increase a company's creativity. I have been told that this kind of planning to force people to meet is increasingly taken into account into scientific buildings eg at the Janelia Farm campus, VA. More importantly, there is apparently a call to change our education system in order to promote creativity in children. The book is apparently great fun. It is still not clear if reading it would improve your creativity, but it can certainly not hurt. I was not convince if I should buy it or not, but the call to change education to promote creativity got me. I will buy it and tell you more about it soon.


Got it, very nice book. Had trouble to put it down. Lots of interesting stuff, some you know, some you guessed and some you never thought about. By example there is an important distinction between insights and sustained focused attention during long period of intensive work. Coffee and other drugs might help with the later, but not with the former.

Topics sections in PLoS Computational Biology

New topic sections has appeared in PLoS Comp. Bio., 8(3): e1002446 in an attempt to promote contribution and recognition of it in Wikipedia. There is no way to deny the ever increasing role of Wikipedia in basic research. This is an attempt to induce biologist (computational ones) to contribute to it. I am even more excited because the first highlighted example, on circular permutations in proteins is by a friend of mine. Excellent article.
Interesting initiative, let see how it develops and may be contribute. As the paper suggests in ending:

Who knows what you might be contributing to?

Time for a new genetics curriculum

Biology is changing fast. In an excellent article in Plos Biology, 10(7): e1001356, Redfield RJ, consider that the way we use to teach genetics is updated and propose alternative to teach useful and interesting material. Although we might not agree on everything she propose, it is to be admitted that the historical perspective in genetic teaching is outdated and in need of a shaking.

However, I personally believe that the historical aspect is part of the beauty and attraction of biology. I remember very well that learning about the elegance and beauty of the classical experiments by eg Jacob and Monod, amongst many others was part of the fascination to become a biologist. By example, I recently very much enjoyed an historical perspective on the first tree of life by Woese written by Pace et al., PNAS 2012. I believe that the combination of historical context and realization of the implications that it had and still has, is fascinating.

It is true that with the pace of change in current biology, it should probably be forming a separate less central aspect of a modern curriculum. I would however favor to keep the historical perspective because of the intrinsic beauty of the experiments and the lessons it teaches about scientific thinking.

The before last sentence is highly stimulating:

As long as we remain comfortable with teaching largely irrelevant material, we don't have to worry about changing it.

It has now to be seen how this develop in a new course and how this modifies the potential interest of the student.

Creative Science Thinking Education

Excellent article about Teaching creative science thinking in Science. This article is not only about how to prepare the next generation of scientists, but also about ourselves and how to improve our creative thinking in our daily scientific job.

Mixed education

All of us involved in teaching know that a mix of research and education is a difficult balance to find. In addition, undergraduate education can be improved by a higher level of student participation in authentic research. Kloser et al., (2011) PLoS Biology describe possible way to do just so. More than the article in itself, there is lots of references therein. Integrating Teaching and Research in Undergraduate Biology Laboratory Education is an interesting concept that deserve more attention.