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Unread 07-28-2014, 06:21 AM
Janice D. Soderling's Avatar
Janice D. Soderling Janice D. Soderling is offline
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Default Secrets of the Creative Brain

I found this interesting. Possibly some others also will.

http://www.theatlantic.com/features/...-brain/372299/
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  #2  
Unread 07-28-2014, 07:48 AM
E. Shaun Russell E. Shaun Russell is offline
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Fascinating article, Janice. Thanks for that. I'm no genius, but most of this resonates with me regardless. I discovered about a year or so ago that if I was struggling to come up with a thesis, or needed to find "inspiration" for something, or even just needed to sort through stuff that was proving to be difficult, the best remedy was what I eventually dubbed as a "thinkrest." Just lying down with my eyes closed -- not with the intention of napping, but simply to let my mind wander -- usually prompted the creative surge I needed. The problem is always hanging on to that surge just long enough to put it to use.

I also find it interesting (though not wholly unsurprising) that many, if not most creative types have mental illness in their families. I'd be willing to bet that a lot of 'Spherians are in the same boat. As someone with close relatives who have (or had) clinical depression, agoraphobia, and paranoid schizophrenia, I certainly am...
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Unread 07-28-2014, 11:11 PM
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Norman Ball Norman Ball is offline
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Thanks for this Janice.

"I realized that I obviously couldn’t capture the entire creative process—instead, I could home in on the parts of the brain that make creativity possible."

That's a crucial and fair admission. We mustn't forget the mind and the complete mystery of consciousness which science still tends to regard (almost superstitiously) as originating in the brain. The heart plays a role in consciousness as do probably other organs of the body. Thus you have to think creativity is not the exclusive province of brain IQ and that consciousness plays some role in the creative process.

http://www.in5d.com/heart-has-brain-...ciousness.html

Last edited by Norman Ball; 07-29-2014 at 07:13 AM.
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Unread 07-29-2014, 04:36 AM
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Claudia Gary Claudia Gary is offline
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Default Autodidacts, polymaths...

Thank you for posting this, Janice.

Down toward the very end of the article are a few items that have nothing at all to do with mental illness, and I found those especially interesting.

One is persistence in the face of rejection.

Another has to do with being autodidactic, or at least having one's own style of learning.

And then there's this:

---
"Many creative people are polymaths, as historic geniuses including Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci were. George Lucas was awarded not only the National Medal of Arts in 2012 but also the National Medal of Technology in 2004. Lucas’s interests include anthropology, history, sociology, neuroscience, digital technology, architecture, and interior design....
"...The arts and the sciences are seen as separate tracks, and students are encouraged to specialize in one or the other. If we wish to nurture creative students, this may be a serious error."
---

I guess the mental illness angle is more likely to sell magazines or web ads! Perhaps the author was obliged to bury the above positive comments for that reason. But I think the items above are worthy of much more attention. Maybe they should be the real focus, in fact. After all, even if a creative individual were mentally ill, it would be that person's strengths -- such as resilience, persistence, independent thinking, and "polymath" qualities -- that would enable him or her to emerge into a creatively productive life, rather than merely an ill life.

Last edited by Claudia Gary; 07-29-2014 at 04:46 AM.
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Unread 07-29-2014, 08:22 AM
Matt Q Matt Q is offline
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Studies linking mental illness and creativity have often been criticised for being poorly designed, using criteria that are way too broad, or having too small a sample size. In respect of the last, this quote in particular stuck out for me in this article:

"Two of the 13 creative subjects in my current study have lost a parent to suicide—a rate many times that of the general U.S. population."

Firstly, suicide is not a form of mental illness; although some diagnoses of mental illness (e.g. Bipolar Disorder) clearly are associated with a significantly increased risk of suicide, many people with no mental health diagnosis kill themselves; suicide is typically a response to overwhelming mental pain, and anyone can experience that if life kicks them hard enough from enough directions.

Secondly, and more importantly, bear in mind that in any randomly selected group of thirteen people, the chances of them not have some property at a rate far higher (or far lower) than the national average is vanishingly small. From a statistic perspective, her figures are meaningless without a confidence interval (an estimate of the probability that the situation arose by chance). That group may also have a higher than the national average number of blue-eyed people. What, if anything, could we conclude from that? I thought this was really poor writing from a scientist. She presents as persuasive something that she must know may simply be attributable to chance. That's simply bad science.

Onto the question of the link between mental illness and creativity. There do also seem to be many large studies that find no connection at all. And as I said above, the methodology of many that do find a connection are questionable. Here's an article arguing that there's no evidence for a connection between madness and creativity, citing large studies that have found nothing, and claiming flaws in a recent large scale Swedish study. It seems to me that the jury's still out on this one.

Matt

Last edited by Matt Q; 07-29-2014 at 08:37 AM. Reason: typo our->out
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Unread 07-29-2014, 09:45 AM
Mary McLean Mary McLean is offline
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I'd second Matt's criticisms and also add the question of how these 13 subjects were identified. Was the researcher really blind to the possibility of mental illness and suicide in the families of the people? It seems like that would be difficult to ensure with such a subjective method of selection.
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Unread 07-29-2014, 11:39 AM
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W.F. Lantry W.F. Lantry is offline
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I have very little sympathy for the 'madness and creativity' trope. In my experience, mentally ill people work in spite of, not because of, their illness... and actual, sustained productivity is extremely rare in such cases. Yes, we can all cite counterexamples, like Henry Darger or Augustin Lesage, but these are merely exceptions that test the rule.

We seem to have a tendency to romanticize mental illness in our culture, and some with relatively mild cases seem to latch onto art as a way to assert self-value and justification. But serious mental illness is nothing to romanticize, and we do ourselves and others harm by holding onto the myth.
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Unread 07-29-2014, 11:57 AM
dean peterson dean peterson is offline
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I tend to agree with Bill here, although there are always a few special folks -- you know -- who almost always make for a good argument otherwise.

So ... in a remarkably ambitious essay such as this, I was waiting for some slight something in the treatise I could latch on to from the skeptical side of me that might help me to be more of a believer in the author's premise, such as making some point about talent versus accomplishment, a heart beating with more than art & science, etc., etc.

Last edited by dean peterson; 07-29-2014 at 08:38 PM.
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Unread 07-29-2014, 12:14 PM
dean peterson dean peterson is offline
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ps., I'll just add quickly as I can (peanut gallery) that I've thought for years that 'creativity' is a really hard -- madness or not -- nut to crack.

Last edited by dean peterson; 07-29-2014 at 12:30 PM.
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  #10  
Unread 07-29-2014, 03:27 PM
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Rick Mullin Rick Mullin is online now
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I don't associate creativity, which defines us as human, with the brain. Other animals invent--they too have brains. But only homo sapiens creates (ie communicates a responds to experience in nature that is of no utility and don't even waste your time trying to figure it out). No one's brain is any more creative than anyone else's, because the brain has nothing to do with creativity other than the mechanics of moving body parts, etc. The brain comes in by getting in the way of creativity to varying degrees for different people. Selah. Now I will read this article as well as the one just like it in recent editions of The Scientist, the Wall Street Journal, and the catalog for the recent exhibit of Chaim Soutine's paintings in New York (this has diagrams of the brain!). Then I will review my notes on cognitive poetics (Cog-Po) from West Chester. And then I will read Powers of Two, a new book on how genius resides not in individuals but in two individuals, which must be true because Paul McCartney sucks without John Lennon.

Here's the thing. If science wants to tell us it has the only path to the truth and society wants to buy it, fine. Look where it's gotten us. Now, however, when it wants to come back and tell the revelators...us poets and painters, makers of all that groovy stuff and traffickers in the ineffable...how we work in terms of science, well, I'm not all that anxious to sit and listen. One thing I've learned as a journalist who covers science is that bad journalists and bad scientists (bad researchers) have one thing in common--they tend to find what they are looking for. And when they team up or, worse, compete, a fad is launched. Careers can be made and tenure secured--the articles tend to pile up. Even if all of this "your brain on art" is legit, ... who cares? Really... who cares what mechanism in my brain makes me look at a dead beef carcass and see something beautiful about which I want to write, paint, dance, act, or sing? Who cares why I look at an empty bottle and see God?

RM

Last edited by Rick Mullin; 07-29-2014 at 03:39 PM.
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