Friday, June 5, 2009

Experiences are your creative equity

Is creativity anything more than taking a given and matching it with something unexpected? Watch this:



It's another example of a Z that can't easily be traced back to a known A. Of thinking that inspires joy, not just because of the content, but because of its unpredictability. I love it. And I was thinking about it when I read Noah Brier's comments on some interesting findings:

"What do artists, poets, and novelists have in common?" Ramachandran asked me. "The propensity to link seemingly unrelated things."


Michael Gruen writes this:

This is also not to say humans are incapable of complex thought, quantum leaps, or extraordinary thinking - I’m only suggesting that those leaps and complexities are based on systems that we know or that we happened upon: our imaginations are limited to our experiences and the patterns we innately understand on circumstance of being human.


Which means that creativity depends - almost to the exclusion of all else - on finding a lot of cool, random, beautiful stuff to put in your brain, so that when someone hands you a problem, you have a deep well to draw from. You take their A and add a Z that no one but you could've possibly seen coming.

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