Thursday 25 September 2014

Creativity and Mind: Some Readings

Creativity has implications for people who study the human mind. I found three links from people and organizations who study mind-related sciences and creativity.

For photographer and psychologist Arthur Shimamura, creativity is understandable in terms of the formula I-SKE, which acknowledges the interrelationship between the artist's intention and the audience's sensation, knowledge and emotion.

Scott Barry Kaufman discusses research which suggests that creative people think in flat associations rather than hierarchical associations.

The American Psychological Association accepts artists and teachers of art as affiliate members of its division The Society for the Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts. As Erika Packard explains, "psychology has many applications in the arts--from music to visual and performing arts--as well as to the study of creativity."

An Internet image search on the words "creativity" and "mind" brings up all kinds of trippy images. [By Rp3082 (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons]

Wednesday 10 September 2014

Woolf Knew All About the Agony of Creativity

File:VirginiaWoolf.jpg
The Young Woolf (Wikimedia Commons)
Virginia Woolf was prolific not because she could sidestep the anguish of writing but because she did so much writing that she experienced it.

In her pseudobiography Orlando, Woolf describes what the title character inevitably experiences once he decides to be a writer:


Anyone moderately familiar with the rigours of composition will not need to be told the story in detail; how he wrote and it seemed good; read and it seemed vile; corrected and tore up; cut out; put in; was in ecstasy; in despair; had his good nights and bad mornings; snatched at ideas and lost them; saw his book plain before him and it vanished; acted his people's parts as he ate; mouthed them as he walked; now cried; now laughed; vacillated between this style and that; now preferred the heroic and the pompous; next the plain and simple; now the vales of Tempe; then the fields of Kent or Cornwall; and could not decide whether he was the divinest genius or the greatest fool in the world.