Your Elusive Creative Genius

"Eat, Pray, Love" author Elizabeth Gilbert muses on the impossible things we expect from artists and geniuses -- and shares the radical idea that, instead of the rare person "being" a genius, all of us "have" a genius. It's a funny, personal and surprisingly moving talk.

Gilbert explores the difficult to grasp thought of where ideas come from. Good ideas often seem like little fragments, transients ideas that come from somewhere outside of us, and that in the right state of mind we can capture an idea as it passes on it's journey. We just happen to be in the way and, sometimes, in the right state of mind to receive.

Of course that's not how it happens, there is no genie to let out of the bottle. 

I don't, and nor does Gilbert, agree that ideas come from outside us, but we seem need a "second" voice, that seems to be outside us, so, as in all good storytelling, we make it up. We find a way to visualise a process we don't fully understand.

The reality is you just have to show up for the job. As Gilbert says, be stubborn, keep at it. you can't wait for inspiration to come to you, you have to get yourself into the right mindset and do the work. In some ways it's a numbers game. The more you turn up, the more chance you have of getting the result you want.

But just turning up isn't enough, you need to get into the right mind state too. This is what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi  calls "flow". That playful state of mind where relaxation and concentration meet, where time passes unnoticed. A bit like a trance. Perhaps that's why we allocate this feeling to something outside us, like God. It's easier to think of creativity as coming from outside of you, and perhaps visualising it this way helps to get into the right mindset. It's difficult to believe that creativity comes from you, it's easier to think it comes from a force outside. Whatever helps to make it happen is worthwhile.

But Gilbert's advice is right "Do your job...show up. be stubborn".

The Divided Brain

The Divided Brain, from Iain McGilchrist

The Divisions of the brain has a rocky history, particularly in our understanding of how we think creativity works in the brain. McGilchrist thinks this needs to be re-addressed, particularly from its simplistic explanation. The common split, suggesting that the brain is equally divided on the left by rational and the right for emotion and creativity is now thought to be wholly wrong. Both side have important roles to play in every mode of thinking.

There is something very important to understand, particularly in humans, about this division, particularly in relation to the function of the corpus callosum, whose role it turns out is to "inhibit" the function of one hemisphere from the other. 

The brain's asymmetry is there for a reason, mostly to do with the types of focus we have to have. the left is for narrow focus, the right is for a broader outlook. This is borne out by people who have damaged one or other of their hemispheres.

When we know something is important and we wish to be precise about it, we use our left hemisphere. When we need a more general awareness we use our right.

Our ability to empathise with others is what allows us to read other people's minds and intentions, and this is what allows us to make bonds with other people.

Our minds use a simplified version of reality and we use mental maps to know where things are and what is important to us. The right hemisphere is used to understand things in context and to understand their implicit meaning. It deals with the embodied world.

For imagination you need both hemispheres, for reason you need both hemispheres.

There is an interesting metaphor used by McGilchrist of understanding the world in the left hemisphere as essentially lifeless and deals with things that are static and essentially lifeless. The right hemisphere as understanding the world as embodied, individual and living.

This offers us two versions of the world, which has favoured the left "rational" side which is not right and has led to many deficiencies in our current view of our place in society.

We have developed something that looks distinctly like the left hemisphere view of the world. Control lead to paranoia. The left hemisphere view seems to be more consistent, largely because it has made it so. A self-fulfilling prophesy.

We must return to what the right hemisphere knows.

As Einstein said, "the intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant...we have created a society that honours the servant and has forgotten the gift".

C.L. 27 Aug 2017

The Era of Open Innovation

The Era of Open Innovation.

This talk is deceptively simple but addresses the problem of whether patents promote innovation or protect the larger organisations. Larger organisations are understandably risk-averse, their credo is often to reduce the exposure and risk in order to produce predictably and, of course, profit. Real innovation is, by its nature, risky. The greater the leap, the greater the risk. What Leadbeater looks at, with a beautifully clear train of thought, is whether open source is the real future of innovation.

This is well worth listening to. 

Charles Leon. 7th August 2017

The Passion to Create

The passion to create drives the human species, making us different from all other living things.

Creativity is a fundamental part of human existence. The creative impulse is instinctive to everyone, but it remains a misunderstood and elusive phenomenon often shrouded in the mystery and misunderstanding. Creativity is a state of mind that can motivate and generate change. Innovation and creativity are at the heart of what it means to be alive and to experience.

In this blog I'd like to explore and discuss the idea that creativity and innovation are fundamental human qualities and are applicable to everyone. 

There are 3 important abilities:

1. The synthetic ability to see problems in new ways and to escape the bounds of conventional thinking.
2. The analytic ability to recognise which of one's ideas are worth pursuing and which are not
3. The practical-contextual ability to know how to persuade others of - to sell other people - the value of ones ideas. 

References

Robert J Sternberg & Todd I. Lubart - The concept of creativity: Prospects and Paradigms
Charles J. Lumsden - Evolving Creative Minds: Stories and Mechanisms
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi - Creativity, The pshychology of Discovery and Invention.
David Bohm - On Creativity