How do we prime our brains to take the meandering mental paths necessary for creativity? New techniques of brain imaging, neuroscientist Rex Jung says, are helping us gain a whole new view on the differences between intelligence, creativity, and personality.
“With intelligence, there’s the analogy I’ve used is there’s this superhighway in the brain that allows you to get from point A to point B. With creativity, it’s a slower, more meandering process where you want to take the side roads and even the dirt roads to get there.”
One of our most popular interviews in which Dr. Jung unsettles some old assumptions — and suggests some new connections between creativity and family life, creativity and aging, and creativity and purpose.
“Water does not resist. Water flows. When you plunge your hand into it, all you feel is a caress. Water is not a solid wall, it will not stop you. But water always goes where it wants to go, and nothing in the end can stand against it. Water is patient. Dripping water wears away a stone.
Remember that, my child. Remember you are half water. If you can’t go through an obstacle, go around it. Water does.”
~Margaret Atwood, The Penelopiad: The Myth of Penelope and Odysseus
Photo by Courtney Carmody/Flickr, cc by 2.0
Doug Neill, a self-professed “sketchnoter” from Portland, Oregon, showed me a new way forward for visualizing our own work at On Being. While listening to our interview with Seth Godin, Doug did some real-time, visual note taking and created this sketchnote of the conversation. A most delightful and unexpected surprise.
“You have to show the Muse you’re serious.”
~Rosanne Cash, quoting Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art in her interview with Krista Tippett
Photo of Gabriel Royal playing cello in the New York subway by Dan Nguyen. (distributed with Instagram)
