If you watch one video today, you should watch the heartwarming video embedded above–a Los Angeles filmmaker visited a cardboard box arcade built by a 9-year-old kid.
The video should remind us all about why we should think like a little kid when we write. Wired contributing editor and author Jonah Lehrer described why children can be “effortlessly creative” in his new book, Imagine: How Creativity Works:
Picasso once summarized the paradox this way: “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.” From the perspective of the brain, Picasso is exactly right, as the DLPFC is the last brain area to fully develop. This helps explain why young children are so effortlessly creative: their censors don’t yet exist. But then the brain matures and we become too self-conscious to improvise, too worried about saying the wrong thing, or playing the wrong note, or falling off the surfboard.