Bouncing Across Disciplines

 
From a post titled Switch! - Cross-Disciplinary Learning over at Eide Neurolearning Blog, a suggestion that long-term productivity for innovators has much to do with a person's ability and inclination to switch fields every so often and to therefore learn new things. Hmm, could generalism be the Holy Grail for creative longevity?

In Root-Berstein's study of innovators, he found "In every case that I have been able to examine, researchers who continued to be productive past middle age changed fields regularly. In effect they periodically returned to the state of a novice by taking up a new subject. They broke out of the patterns of work and thought to which they had become accustomed."

Maybe it's as Nobel Prize winner Peter Debye said, "...ask for people who have enough brain power that they at least have a feeling of how to handle a new problem. The specific nature of the problem is not important."

The interesting story of Louis Pasteur is raised as an example of a scientist trained in one area (crystallography) but who made breakthroughs in other somewhat unrelated fields (microbiology and immunology). The post also offers several links that expand on interdisciplinary / cross-disciplinary / trans-disciplinary involvement, particularly as it relates to teaching.