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Category: Creativity

Do we possess a transpersonal imagination?

Do we possess a transpersonal imagination?

John Horgan writes: I’m still mulling over a meeting I attended last month at Esalen, the spiritual retreat center, on “exceptional experiences” that challenge conventional science. More specifically, I’m mulling over imagination. What generates it, and what are its limits, if any? Is it sometimes more akin to revelation than invention? Imagination is arguably the quintessential human trait. Our capacity to imagine the consequences of our choices gives us free will. Lacking imagination, we’d lack art, science, mathematics, technology and…

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The accidental book review that made Jack Kerouac famous

The accidental book review that made Jack Kerouac famous

Ronald K.L. Collins writes: In early September 1957, Jack Kerouac achieved the dream of every writer. Around midnight he and his girlfriend, Joyce Glassman, left her brownstone apartment in New York City for a nearby newsstand at Broadway and 66th Street. They waited while the nightman cut the twine around the morning edition of the New York Times. Rifling through the paper, they found on Page 27 an expected review of Kerouac’s new book, “On the Road.” Glassman recalled that…

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What makes a polymath?

What makes a polymath?

David Robson writes: If it weren’t for an actress and a pianist, GPS and WiFi might not exist. In the late 1930s and early 40s, Hedy Lamarr was already the toast of Hollywood, famed for her portrayals of femme fatales. Few of her contemporaries knew that her other great passion was inventing. (She had previously designed more streamlined aeroplanes for a lover, the aviation tycoon Howard Hughes.) Lamarr met a kindred spirit in George Antheil, however – an avant-garde pianist,…

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Our imagination has access to the pre-linguistic, ancestral mind

Our imagination has access to the pre-linguistic, ancestral mind

Stephen T Asma writes: Imagination is intrinsic to our inner lives. You could even say that it makes up a ‘second universe’ inside our heads. We invent animals and events that don’t exist, we rerun history with alternative outcomes, we envision social and moral utopias, we revel in fantasy art, and we meditate both on what we could have been and on what we might become. Animators such as Hayao Miyazaki, Walt Disney and the people at Pixar Studios are…

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A mathematician on how to get a stuck mind moving

A mathematician on how to get a stuck mind moving

Dan Rockmore writes: My job is to come up with ideas. Sometimes we mathematicians call the things we think about and work with “objects,” which doesn’t mean triangles, spheres, or other shapes. Mathematical objects are big ideas about algebra, geometry, and logic, about the properties and definitions of numbers. It’s not at all obvious how to go about thinking up some new twist on these things—the transformation from test-taker to theorem poser and then theorem prover is difficult to articulate….

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We live in a one track world but anyone can become a polymath

We live in a one track world but anyone can become a polymath

Robert Twigger writes: I travelled with Bedouin in the Western Desert of Egypt. When we got a puncture, they used tape and an old inner tube to suck air from three tyres to inflate a fourth. It was the cook who suggested the idea; maybe he was used to making food designed for a few go further. Far from expressing shame at having no pump, they told me that carrying too many tools is the sign of a weak man;…

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Science is deeply imaginative. Why is this treated as a secret?

Science is deeply imaginative. Why is this treated as a secret?

By Tom McLeish My latest book, The Poetry and Music of Science (2019), starts with my experiences of visiting schools and working with sixth-form pupils in general-studies classes. These students, aged 17-18, would tell me that they just didn’t see in science any room for their own imagination or creativity. Not just on one occasion but repeatedly I heard this from young people bright enough to have succeeded at any subject to which they set their minds.  Yet it doesn’t…

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First major center for psychedelic research opening in the U.S.

First major center for psychedelic research opening in the U.S.

Discover magazine reports: The launch of a new privately-funded research center dedicated to investigating the therapeutic benefits of psychedelic drugs was announced today at Johns Hopkins University. The Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research will be dedicated to understanding how psychedelics alter consciousness, behavior and brain function. The bulk of the research will focus on psilocybin, the active ingredient in “magic” mushrooms, which has been demonstrated as a powerful tool to treat mental health afflictions. The launch comes thanks to…

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Gregory Bateson changed the way we think about changing ourselves

Gregory Bateson changed the way we think about changing ourselves

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Tim Parks writes: [F]or Bateson the only worthy object of study appeared to be human behaviour, the kind of complex circumstances – the war, British academia, his family background – that had created the drama he was living through. What he would eventually do was to use the tools of observation and analysis that his father taught him, the zoologist’s attention to patterning and morphology, to bring a fresh approach to the study of behaviour in groups, and above all…

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The power of seeing what is not there

The power of seeing what is not there

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In a review of Felipe Fernández-Armesto’s, Out of Our Minds: A History of What We Think and How We Think, Philip Marsden writes: Wallace Stevens called it ‘the necessary angel’. Ted Hughes thought it ‘the most essential bit of machinery we have if we are going to live the lives of human beings’. Coleridge described its role a little more vigorously: ‘The living Power and prime Agent of all human perception… a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal…

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Isaac Asimov on creativity

Isaac Asimov on creativity

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In 1959, Isaac Asimov wrote: The history of human thought would make it seem that there is difficulty in thinking of an idea even when all the facts are on the table. Making the cross-connection requires a certain daring. It must, for any cross-connection that does not require daring is performed at once by many and develops not as a “new idea,” but as a mere “corollary of an old idea.” It is only afterward that a new idea seems…

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Open to the unexpected: Why jazz musicians are more creative than classical musicians

Open to the unexpected: Why jazz musicians are more creative than classical musicians

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PsyPost reports: Scientists at Wesleyan University have used electroencephalography to uncover differences in how the brains of Classical and Jazz musicians react to an unexpected chord progression. Their new study, published in the journal Brain and Cognition, sheds new light on the nature of the creative process. “I have been a classical musician for many years, and have always been inspired by the great jazz masters who can improvise beautiful performances on the spot,” explained study author Psyche Loui. “Whenever…

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A philosopher argues that an AI can’t be creative

A philosopher argues that an AI can’t be creative

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Sean Dorrance Kelly writes: Advances in artificial intelligence have led many to speculate that human beings will soon be replaced by machines in every domain, including that of creativity. Ray Kurzweil, a futurist, predicts that by 2029 we will have produced an AI that can pass for an average educated human being. Nick Bostrom, an Oxford philosopher, is more circumspect. He does not give a date but suggests that philosophers and mathematicians defer work on fundamental questions to “superintelligent” successors,…

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The ancient hunt in which the tracker’s skill united reason and imagination

The ancient hunt in which the tracker’s skill united reason and imagination

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“The San people of the Kalahari desert are the last tribe on Earth to use what some believe to be the most ancient hunting technique of all: the persistence hunt; they run down their prey,” says David Attenborough:   “The hunter pays tribute to his quarry’s courage and strength. With ceremonial gestures that ensure that its spirit returns to the desert sands from which it came. While it was alive, he lived and breathed with it and felt its every…

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