Yann Daout

After teaching a few classes on creativity, I’ve come across a few more ideas, so take this as a short addendum to my creativity articles. I might update it from time to time. This will be more focused on parkour, but the ideas might apply to other sports. How can we make creativity less abstract ?...

In the first part, I suggested that in the context of motor learning, it would be profitable to move aways from thinking of creativity as ideation, i.e. thinking new ideas that can then be put into actions. Rather, these are fruitful ways of thinking about creativity: It can be defined as...

We tend to think of creativity as the generation or apparition of new ideas, which can then be put into action. I call this “ideation”. This view of creativity is probably so strong because we take our paradigmatic examples of creativity in specific domains like scientific or technological...

When I throw a stick, my dog starts moving before the stick even leaves my hand. How is that possible ? Does my dog know the future ? Of course, beyond the joke and the clickbaity title, this should not seem like magic. We usually admit that animals can anticipate by predicting the future, at least...

When it comes to producing skillful sport performance, we tend to think that we need to achieve a very consistent way of moving. In that perspective, less movement variability means better performance. This comes from a common assumption that consistent performance is an essential element of skill....

In this article, we will be focusing on two key concepts of ecological-dynamics: self-organisation, and the attractor landscape. As we have shown previously, ecological-dynamics understands our bodies as complex systems with numerous interacting parts (or degrees of freedom). Self-organisation means...

Dynamical systems theory is a branch of mathematics used to describe complex dynamical systems. These are systems with multiple parts that interact with each other and change over time. Examples can range from living things like a colony of ants to inorganic systems like Earth’s climate....

You probably know the game called “the floor is lava”, where players must traverse space without touching the ground. Although it is a kids’ game, it is also popular among parkour practitioners, who use different obstacles, ledges, walls or rails to avoid touching the “lava”. Here, I will argue that...