On a recent morning, the students in the TEAL Room of 17 Hillhouse, outfitted with virtual reality headsets, swiped and pointed in the air. They were creating personal memory palaces - a way to enhance memories and think differently by mentally placing certain objects or ideas in different rooms of an imaginary structure. It’s a millennia-old concept given a modern twist with Apple Vision Pro headsets, provided by Apple specifically for the course, Finding Yourself in the Future of Creativity.
“The course was designed to be relevant at a personal but also at an intellectual level,” said John Kao, who created the course, which debuted this year. “It's not just a course about brainstorming and creative tricks, because there is a lot going on around new approaches to cognitive intelligence - new concepts of how human and machine intelligence interact, new concepts in the biology of the brain - but also how peak wellness affects your ability to foster creative intelligence. The course was deliberately designed as a balance of conceptual material and experience to give the students a toolbox that they could use after the course and hopefully benefit from indefinitely.”
Kao describes it as a course for aspiring entrepreneurs, future leaders, and innovators who want to understand and amplify their creative potential to make a meaningful impact. As part of their work, students consider the ethical challenges of navigating creativity’s growing role in solving complex societal problems. It emphasizes what Kao calls the “internalities” - the human and cognitive dimensions that drive creative outcomes. Kao said he specifically chose students – from first-years to graduate students - so that the class would have a diverse array of majors and experience.
Luis Halvorssen ’25, a cognitive science major, decided to take the course after sitting through a guest lecture by Kao in another class.
“I used to think creativity was something limited to artists, musicians, and other ‘creative types,’ but this class changed this thinking,” he said. “I now see creativity as a muscle to build that can be activated in countless domains to come up with novel and adequate solutions for whatever problems we face.”
Kao, whose career has taken a nonlinear path that includes producing films, teaching entrepreneurship at Harvard Business School, and writing books, said he designed the course to teach the sort of things that usually require life experience.
“I can be as academic as the next person, but my goal is not to impart knowledge that they could read out of a book,” he said. “It's really to give them experiences that sticks to their bones that they can use later.”