The Secrets of a Creative Brain

The Atlantic looks deep.

9 Geniuses Who Were Coffee Addicts

The list, care of Huffington Post.

29 Ways to Stay Creative

29 WAYS TO STAY CREATIVE from TO-FU on Vimeo.

The Creative Process Visualized

"Process" from hellopluto on Vimeo.

The Creative Pace of Famous Authors.

Visualized.

50 Paintings to Inspire Artists Of All Kinds

The list, care of Flavorwire.

How to Be Creative

Want to Be More Creative? Turn Down The Lights

Darkness promotes creativity, according to a new study.

From a piece in Salon...

Don’t have a dimmer switch at your desk? No worries. Other experiments found that merely priming the idea of darkness—such as by taking five minutes to describe an experience of literally being in the dark, and recalling how it felt—was sufficient to boost creativity. Participants who did just that drew more innovative portraits of space aliens than their counterparts who had described being in bright light.

However, the darkness-spurs-innovation equation did not always hold true. In another experiment, the researchers found “the darkness-related increase in creativity disappeared when using a more informal, indirect light instead of direct light.”

Is Drinking Coffee Good for Creativity? Or Bad?

It's complicated.

From a piece in the New Yorker...

When we drink a caffeinated beverage, the caffeine quickly crosses the blood-brain barrier—an interface of sorts between the brain and the body’s circulatory system, designed to protect the central nervous system from chemicals in the blood that might harm it—and proceeds to block the activity of a substance called adenosine. Normally, a central function of adenosine is to inhibit the release of various chemicals into the brain, lowering energy levels and promoting sleep, among other regulatory bodily functions. When it’s blocked, we’re less likely to fall asleep on our desks or feel our focus drifting. According to a recent review of some hundred studies, caffeine has a number of distinct benefits. Chief among them are that it boosts energy and decreases fatigue; enhances physical, cognitive, and motor performance; and aids short-term memory, problem solving, decision making, and concentration. 

But all of that comes at a cost. Science is only beginning to unravel the full complexity behind different forms of creative accomplishment.

The Scientific Power of Thought

How Woody Allen Works

How a Boy Became an Artist

Off Book - The Art of Creative Coding

How Nature Affects Our Imagination

The Huffington Post discusses it, here.

From the piece...



We have been aware for a long time that landscape, the natural world, deeply affects many individual writers and artists. Very often it is the landscape of childhood that imprints itself indelibly on the creative imagination, although there are exceptions.

A newer question though is whether landscape shapes, or more modestly perhaps becomes one of the things that shapes, whole cultures, their languages, their religion and their mythology; and of course therefore their responses to their artists and artistic forms. Is it by chance that the great monotheisms emerged from the desert? That perhaps the most pessimistic theology I know of, that of the Norse gods, developed in the place of the longest darkest winters? That, in the wildly diverse broken landscapes of the Mediterranean islands, Greek mythology has characters constantly metamorphosing into something else -- animals, stars or Gods? Or that, in Northern European fairy stories (like the Grimm Brothers' collections), forests are the place of both peril and triumph over adversity?

Can Creative Writing Be Taught?

Is Creative Writing Inherited?

Yes.

From a piece in the Telegraph...

The study analysed the creative writing of 511 children aged eight to 17 and 489 of their mothers and 326 fathers. All the participants wrote stories on particular themes. For children, the subjects were "were I an elephant" and "were I invisible"; for adolescents "a time machine for an hour" and "visiting a witch"; and for adults "the world from an insect's point of view" and "imagine who lives and what happens on a planet called Priumliava".

The stories were then scored and rated for originality and novelty, plot development and quality, and sophistication and creative use of prior knowledge. The researchers also carried out detailed intelligence tests and analysed how families functioned in the Russian households.

Taking into account intelligence and family background, the researchers then calculated the inherited and the environmental elements of creative writing. They found what they describe as a modest but statistically significant familiality and heritability element to creative writing.

"This work is unique in its objective to investigate the familiality and heritability of the trait of creative writing," the researchers write, "while controlling for general cognitive ability and for the general level of family functioning. Despite the lack of systematic research on the aetiology of writing in general and creative writing in particular, it is rather difficult not to acknowledge the familiality of creativity in writing, given the families of writers who have entertained and educated us over the years. These findings constitute the tip of an interesting iceberg, indicating that there may be some components of creative writing that are familial and heritable.

Why I Hate the Myth of the Suffering Artist

It is absurd and insulting to assume artists are assisted by despair or hunger in a way that, say, plumbers are not.

From a piece in the Guardian...

I have been trying to write for at least a quarter of a century, and I can say very firmly that in my experience, suffering is largely of no bloody use to anyone, and definitely not a prerequisite for creation. If an artist has managed to take something appalling and make it into art, that's because the artist is an artist, not because something appalling is naturally art.

Just try kicking your bare foot really hard against the nearest wall. In your own time – I can wait … And now tell me how creative you feel. Just bloody sore and mind-fillingly distracting, isn't it?

Why Brainstorming Doesn't Matter

Jonah Lehrer talks about why brainstorming doesn't work and why artists need to cultivate grit on Slate.

From the post...

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.

Elizabeth Gilbert on Her Creative Process

Creative Writing Can Be Taught

Creative writing professors, on the Huffington Post, answer questions about, well, creative writing.

From the piece...

Is there a crisis in literature?

TIM MAYERS: Those of us with even a cursory knowledge of literary criticism know that literature as a concept, as a canon, or as a term has been contested throughout its existence. To assert that a stable notion of literature has persisted throughout the history of writing is a spectacularly ignorant claim. Alexander Pope, for example, penned broadsides against the so-called hacks populating Grub Street. Not only does literature change in meaning over time, but it also is--and has been--the subject of deep disagreement among contemporaries. Yes, of course, literature is in crisis. That's its very nature. And that has little to do with the rise of creative writing in the academy.

ANNA LEAHY: Literature suggests a host of assumptions, including genius, isolation, and inspiration that only partially capture the writing life--then or now. Charles Darwin claimed that his idea of natural selection came to him in a flash, but Steven Johnson points out that Darwin's notebooks indicate he'd worked it out over almost three decades.

In a New Yorker article a few years ago, Malcolm Gladwell highlighted that the experimental innovator is at least as important as the precocious genius when we look at artistic talent and production. Creative writing is about doing the work of writing, and the experimental innovator benefits from time, support, and guidance. That's what creative writing classes and programs provide. That's what novelist John Irving said to John Stewart on The Daily Show, namely that a creative writing program and his mentor Kurt Vonnegut showed him, "You do these things better than those things. Why don't you do more of these things and fewer of those?" Irving remains grateful for the time this saved him in his development as a novelist.

STEPHANIE VANDERSLICE: Conflating creative writing and literature doesn't serve a useful purpose, especially if the main issue is teaching. Thousands of creative writers--some publishing during their time, some not (Emily Dickinson)--aspire to write work of literary merit that will transcend their own era, or perhaps they merely aspire to a writing life because they are compelled to do so, just as a painter is compelled to paint. Most of these artists have evolved past the desire to simply express themselves. In fact, as studies like Greg Light's "How Students Understand and Learn Creative Writing in Higher Education" in Writing in Education show, realizing that making literary art transcends self-expression is the first step in the writer's development. Like most artists, they struggle to define their own aesthetic and to find their place within any number of literary traditions.