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Brainstorm: Harnessing the Power of Productive Obsessions, by Eric Maisel and Ann Maisel.
Eric Maisel is a psychotherapist and a well-known creativity coach, with many books to his credit. His co-author is his wife Ann, who is, according to the jacket blurb, busy researching the productive obsessions of others. They’ve produced a book of advice and [...]
I’ve been thinking a lot about creativity lately, in particular about how it works and what it feels like to create something. A couple of recent news articles, while not directly about creativity, do seem to shed some light.
This article from the Boston Globe discusses some of the capabilities of the infant mind and how [...]
The New York Times has a good article on frontotemporal dementia (FTD) and creativity. FTD is a rare disorder, or perhaps more accurately a cluster of related disorders, that affects the frontal and temporal lobes of the brain. As the frontal lobes begin to lose function, other areas of the brain, particularly those related to [...]
The Creative Brain: The Science of Genius, by Nancy Andreasen. Penguin, 2006.
Creativity is something of a mystery. Where do brilliant innovative ideas come from, and why? Nancy Andreasen’s book about creativity does a good job of nailing down some of the basic characteristics of creative people and the creative process, and making a first pass [...]
Happiness may spur creativity by widening the circle of attention, so that it’s easier to make connections between seemingly unrelated things. The down side of this broadened scope of awareness is that happy people have a harder time concentrating their attention on a single thing without being distracted. This news article from Scientific American [...]
Emotional ambivalence can be painful, or it can be beautiful in a bittersweet kind of way. Either way, it appears to be linked in some way to creativity. In a recent study at the University of Washington Business School, a researcher induced emotional states (positive, negative, neutral, or ambivalent) in volunteers and then measured their [...]
The mad artistic genius is something of a stereotype. Here’s a story about some recent research that looked into whether there was any difference in creative behavior between normal subjects, schizophrenic subjects, and people called schizotypes, who fall somewhere in between the schizophrenics and the normal subjects, leading normal lives but often eccentric in behavior [...]
There’s a stereotype that suggests that artists are often tormented souls, suffering emotionally for their art, and in fact the incidence of depression is considerably higher among writers and artists. A recent study suggests that maybe it’s not that creativity is linked directly with depression, but rather that both are common products of a different [...]
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