Assessing and Cultivating The Synthesizing Mind: A Developmental Perspective

Ever since I began to analyze my own cognitive processes, I came to realize that I have—and have long had—a synthesizing mind. That is, I carry around lots of information of various sorts; I can access it quite readily, even at my advanced age;  I have engaged in various projects—what psychologist Howard Gruber dubbed “a network of enterprise;” and I draw on that disparate body of information (synthesizing various strands) to design, carry out, and complete my varying projects—writing a book, article, or blog, or designing a study. If I am planful and have the time, I run tentative syntheses past other informed persons and attend to their critiques; and if I am fortunate, the synthesis works reasonably well and proves useful to others.

Though there are certainly exceptions, by and large, synthesizing capacities are neither systematically trained nor regularly and reliably assessed. Either one does or does not have such an inclination; and if one is inclined to be a synthesizer, one is consigned (for the most part) to being an auto-didact.

This need not be the case. Particularly in the 21st century, when so much information is available at our fingertips (so to speak), it’s high time to direct our attention to the cultivation of the capacity to synthesize. Here I describe one promising approach.

My current endeavor was launched when I recalled a test of creativity devised over sixty years ago (link here). Dubbed “The Remote Associates Test” (RAT for short), this instrument purports to assess the capacity of children (and, in another version, of adults) to be creative.

The design is quite simple. The person is given three words and challenged to name a fourth word that unites the trio.

Here are two examples:

1. Item: Sleeping, Bean, Travel
   (Correct Answer: BAG)

2. Item: Dust, Cereal, Fish 

   (Correct Answer: BOWL)

Clearly, for most of us, locating the correct answer requires a search for words or phrases that can be linked to the three stimuli. What’s needed is a ‘stretch’, perhaps a breaking of ‘set’. But locating the correct answer does not require a deep understanding of the three words; instead, one has to search for an ‘associate’ that links the words. One could understand the three items well without knowing that there are sleeping bags or that there’s a place called the dust bowl; or one could come up with the correct answer (as any computer language program could do) just by examining words that typically co-occur with the three stimuli (see footnote 1).

Accordingly, the RAT does not satisfy my criteria for assessing synthesizing capacities. But I think that, suitably tweaked, the format of the RAT provides one promising way to assess and cultivate synthesizing capacities.

The solution is to move from ‘clang associates’ to ‘meaningful connecting concepts’. If the test requires individuals to provide a conceptual link among the three items, then it can serve as a rough-and-ready assessment of synthesizing capacity. The items can be ones with which children in a given society are assumed to be familiar, or items that they have learned about in school.

To wit:

1. Stimuli: Winter, Refrigerator, Face without Expression      

   (Correct Answer: Cold)

2. Stimuli: Tennis, Marriage, Noah’s Ark (or short poem/couplet)  

   (Correct Answer: Pair, Two items/Two of a kind) 

3. Stimuli: France in 1780, Russia in 1912, China in 1940, North America in 1760
   (Correct Answer: Nations on the eve of revolution)

4. Stimuli: Huckleberry Finn, Martin Luther King Jr., Japanese Internment in WWII  

   (Correct Answer: Tense relations between races/ethnic groups)

5. Stimuli: Pablo Picasso, Albert Einstein, Mahatma Gandhi 

   (Correct Answer: Breakthrough thinkers operating in different domains)

6. Stimuli: Monuments to soldiers killed in battle, Wedding rings, NFT (non-fungible tokens)

   (Correct Answer: Valued symbolic entities)

7. Stimuli: Blood/brain barrier, The Maginot Line (in WW II), Incest   

   (Correct Answer: Lines that should not be crossed)

Clearly, assuming one has been trained on a few sample items, a young person’s response to these items should denote a proclivity and/or a skill at synthesizing.

Tweaking this paradigm, one can also create variations. For example, one can ask subjects to solve the synthesis and add an item to it; or solve the synthesis and add an item that violates (or undermines) the synthesis.

Here are possible responses to the septet just introduced:

1. COLD

   Addition: A standoff between two powers (cold war)  

   Violation: Bonfire

2. PAIR
   Addition: Presidential debate in USA   

   Violation: Traffic signal (three lights)

3. EVE OF REVOLUTION
   Addition: Cuba in 1950   

   Violation: England in 1860

4. TENSION BETWEEN RACES

   Addition: Dalai Lama Tibet/China relations  

   Violation: Husbands/Wives

5. BREAKTHROUGH THINKERS

   Addition: Virginia Woolf    

   Violation: Stephen King, Grandma Moses

6.  VALUED SYMBOLIC ENTITIES

   Addition: Rosetta Stone 

   Violation: Yesterday’s news/newspaper

7. LINES THAT SHOULD NOT BE CROSSED

   Addition: Marriage between royalty and commoner   

   Violation: New York-New Jersey border

Needless to say, one can quarrel with these hypothetical responses. And in so doing, one engages the power and the limitations of a test for synthesis.

Of course, as a test that can be carried out and administered readily, this instrument is based on knowledge that is assumed to be present or accessible for all school children in a society.

Far more powerful and revealing would be assignments that draw on a young person’s particular interests. For example, when I was young, I was very interested in sports, politics, and television. In contrast, my daughter was very interested in drawing, ancient civilizations, and fashion. A custom-made assessment of synthesizing capacities would illuminate the strengths and the weaknesses of each of our knowledge bases as well as our capacities to bring elements together in a convincing configuration.

Somewhere in between would be assessments that draw on the knowledge of a particular community and/or the curriculum of a particular school. Of course, those students whose families remain in the same place and school district would be at a distinct advantage. 

It might also be possible to devise instruments that are particularly effective for those families that move around—military families, those in the diplomatic core, those who are in global businesses.

So much for the drawing board.

In closing, I want to pay tribute to Benjamin Bloom, the educational assessor. In his well-known Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, he listed synthesizing as the highest educational goal (see footnote 2.) Regrettably, he (or his successors) ultimately deleted synthesizing—it was considered too difficult to assess. I hope that this essay helps to address this lacuna and perhaps provides hints about how one might assess and cultivate synthesizing capacities in our time.

Footnotes

1. This is reminiscent of John Searle’s Chinese language computer translator, link to article here. It appears to ‘understand’ Chinese, but only ‘knows’ which responses are acceptable for each question or comment.

2. Link to my earlier blog post “Synthesis in Bloom” here.

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