The Truth About Creativity: Jonah Lehrer talks about why brainstorming doesn't work and why artists need to cultivate grit
Jonah Lehrer: There are all sorts of romantic misconceptions about creativity. We’ve long believed, for instance, that the imagination is hindered by constraints and constructive criticism. But the scientific evidence clearly suggests that the opposite is true. We think of creativity as being an innate trait — you either have it or you don’t — when studies have consistently shown that even seemingly minor factors, such as the color of paint on the wall, can dramatically increase creative output. And then there’s the myth of effort. Because creativity has long been associated with the muses, we’ve assumed that creativity should feel easy and effortless, that if we’re truly inventive then the gods will take care of us. But nothing could be further from the truth. Instead, creativity is like any other human talent – it takes an enormous amount of effort to develop. And then, even after we’ve learned to effectively wield the imagination, we still have to invest the time and energy needed to fine-tune our creations. If it feels easy, then you’re doing it wrong.
“It’s the human friction that makes the sparks.”
“… I am participating in the creation of yet another culture, a new story to explain the world and our participation in it, a new value system with images and symbols that connect us to each other and to the planet. Soy un amasamiento, I am an act of kneading, of uniting and joining that not only has produced both a creature of darkness and a creature of light, but also a create that questions the definitions of light and dark and gives them new meanings.
“We are the people who leap in the dark, we are the people on the knees of the gods. In our very flesh, (r)evolution works out the clash of cultures. It makes us crazy constantly, but if the center holds, we’ve made some kind of evolutionary step forward. Nuestra alma trabajo, the opus, the great alchemical work; a spiritual mestizaje, a ‘morphogenesis,’an inevitable unfolding. We have become the quickening serpent movement.”
Gloria Anzaldua in Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987)
The secret of change is to focus all of your energy, not on fighting the old, but on building the new.
Source: psychotherapy
“True, the desire to read is an insatiable desire and you must read. Nevertheless, you must also think. Intellectual isolation loses value in an existence of books. I think I sent you some time ago a quotation from Henry James about living in a world of creation. A world of creation is one of the areas, and only one, of the world of thought and there is no passion like the passion of thinking which grows stronger as one grows older, even though one never thinks anything of anything particular interest to anyone else. Spend an hour or two a day even if in the beginning you are staggered by the confusion and the aimlessness of your thoughts.”
From Letters of Wallace Stevens, ed. Holly Stevens. New York: Knopf, 1966; rpt. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. p 513
Out of these nothings
—All beginnings come.
From Theodore Roethke’s “North American Sequence: The Longing” (1964)
Modern reality is a reality of decreation.
Her eyes, unmake an instant of the world…
“Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.”
D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (1923)
We have to create. It is the only thing louder than destruction.
(via the-rx)
Source: freyjageist
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
— Buckminster Fuller, an American engineer, systems theorist, author, designer, inventor, and futurist. Fuller published more than 30 books, inventing and popularizing terms such as “Spaceship Earth”, ephemeralization, and synergetics. He also developed numerous inventions, mainly architectural designs, the best known of which is the geodesic dome. Carbon molecules known as fullerenes were later named by scientists for their resemblance to geodesic spheres.
(via the-rx)
Source: quotevadis
