In the sixty years since then, if the studies are right, brainstorming has achieved nothing — or, at least, less than would have been achieved by six decades' worth of brainstormers working quietly on their own.
The brainstormers and the people given no guidelines produced an average of three additional ideas; the debaters produced seven.
It is crucial to how Cohen and Ross see themselves: equal parts barnstormers and brainstormers, creating and sustaining networks of networks.
It's kind of canny, causing an outcry the likes of which the brainstormers and blue-sky thinkers in the back rooms of the Tunnock empire would have almost certainly predicted.
A lack of theaters can hardly be blamed as the source of Off Broadway's undisputed woes, since there are, in fact, quite a few more commercial Off Broadway theaters than there were a decade ago, according to data compiled by the Off Broadway Brainstormers, an industry group formed last year.
The list of brainstormers reads like a who's who of the Clinton administration's economic elite -- Lawrence H. Summers, the current treasury secretary; Erskine B. Bowles, Mr. Clinton's former chief of staff; Laura D'Andrea Tyson, former chairwoman of Mr. Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers; and Gene Sperling, the president's top in-house economic adviser.
It is a testament to Yankee know-how that actual rocket scientists are seeking the input of "basement brainstormers" and "garage tinkerers" in the NASA-sponsored contests.
By day's end, brainstormers were proposing to mount transmitters everywhere from beneath helium balloons to atop the roofs of Moscow's hilltop state university.
Rubin Perez, 17, a senior at Cardinal Hayes High School, was one of the brainstormers.
Saturday, noon to 6 p.m., "A Day of Collaborative Performance," featuring the Brainstormers, the Guerrilla Girls Inc., the Spiderwoman Theater and other performance groups.
