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POPSLeft-Brain Creativitiy Tactics Ever had to face a room full of left-brained types? Married to an engineer? Trying to get your artsy-fartsy ideas across to logical, analytical people? Take it from me...it can be frightening. Try these 10 ways to help left-brainers tap into the best of their creativity. Tell me how it goes...tweet us at http://www.twitter.com/thirstyfishinfo
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POPSThe Quiet Mind and Innovation Article on 'Blogging Innovation' by Mathew May well worth a read in this busy lifestyle we live. As an artist, I have known for years that the times when it looks like I am doing nothing are the times when the most important work takes place.... but it has been really difficult to convince anyone else! Now there seems to be evidence to back that up.
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POPSWhat Does It Take to Become a Good Musician?
Written from the perspective of a guitarist but applicable to all. I know that half of what musicians become, is because of the time they spend with a guitar in their hands, in their mind. It is almost the same as really practicing, imagining the guitar in your hands, playing this and that. The older I become, the more I realize it. I have been playing long enough that there is very little difference between practicing and visualizing and I have come to the conclusion, that this time visualizing, is a major part of the equation. That is why love is the key. If you didn't love the guitar, how could you think about it all the time? In the book, "This is your Brain on Music," Daniel J. Levitin comes to the conclusion that to be good it takes about ten-thousand hours on your instrument (that equals about 3 hours a day for 10 years). But I will add that a lot of these hours can and have to be knocked off in your head. I'm not that sure that your brain knows the difference.
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POPSGetting The "Short End"? The obscenity of exchanging the most precious commodity on earth--your time--for little slips of green paper and thinking you've been justly compensated for the loss.
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POPSA Changing Worldview This adequate epistemology will be, above all else, humble. It will recognize that science deals with models and metaphors representing certain aspects of experienced reality, and that any model or metaphor may be permissible if it is useful in helping to order knowledge, even though it may seem to conflict with another model which is also useful. (The classic example is the history of wave and particle models in physics.) This includes, specifically, the metaphor of consciousness. The ontological stance of the universe as holarchy appears to have great promise as the basis for an extended science in which consciousness-related phenomena are no longer anomalies, but keys to a deeper understanding; a science that transcends and includes the science we have. The implications of research on consciousness go even further. They suggest interconnection at a level that has yet to be fully recognized by Western science.
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POPSWaht is Mind Mapping? bear with me: once you break the ingrained habit of linear note taking, you won’t look back. Benefits and Uses I think I already gave away the benefits of mind mapping and why mind maps work. Basically, mind mapping avoids dull, linear thinking, jogging your creativity and making note taking fun again. But what can we use mind maps for? * Note taking * Brainstorming (individually or in groups) * Problem solving * Studying and memorization * Planning * Researching and consolidating information from multiple sources * Presenting information * Gaining insight on complex subjects * Jogging your creativity It is hard to make justice to the number of uses mind maps can have – the truth is that they can help clarify your thinking in pretty much anything, in many different contexts: personal, family, educational or business. Planning you day or planning your life, summarizing a book, launching a project, planning and creating presentatio
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POPSAre Smart Drugs the Answer to Bad Moods—and a Bad Economy? "Artists and lawyers, musicians and businesspeople mingle, talk, and imbibe that eternally popular feel-good drug, alcohol. The slightly pungent scent of marijuana drifts in from a room off the kitchen, where joints are passed among a dozen people, some of them old enough to have been smoking marijuana as a recreational drug since the 1960s. Despite the fears of their worried parents in the hippie heyday, most of these folks have ended up successful; they say that they are using pot to unwind, de-stress, and be more sociable".
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POPSThe myth of the Concentration Oasis "The ability to focus on a single task, relatively uninterrupted, is the strange anomaly in the history of our psychological development. (...) New technology has not created some sort of unnatural cyber-world (...) and when we compare the level of stress and distraction it causes in comparison to the life of the average low-tech family, it's nothing. (...) The past, and for most people on the planet, the present, have never been an oasis of mental calm and creativity. And anyone who thinks they have it hard because people keep emailing them should trying bringing up a room of kids with nothing but two pairs of hands and a cooking pot."
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POPSThe Serious Need for Play “Play has to be reframed and seen not as an opposite to work but rather as a complement,” Curiosity, imagination and creativity are like muscles: if you don’t use them, you lose them.”
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POPSBrains of low-income kids function differently This UC Berkeley study found detectable differences in the function of the prefrontal cortex (critical for problem solving and creativity) between low-income and higher-income kids. Low frontal lobe response is more likely in kids from low-income families. The authors conclude that environmental factors are tremendously important - simple factors like talking and reading together. The conclusion is simple: Parents matter a lot. The nurture they provide significantly impacts the brain development of their children - and by consequence their later educational and social opportunities.
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POPSSharism: A Mind Revolution However, daily decisions for most adults are quite low in creative productivity, if only because they've switched off their sharing paths. People generally like to share what they create, but in a culture that tells them to be protective of their ideas, people start to believe in the danger of sharing. Then Sharism will be degraded in their mind and not encouraged in their society. But if we can encourage someone to share, her sharing paths will stay open. Sharism will be kept in her mind as a memory and an instinct. If in the future she faces a creative choice, her choice will be, "Share."
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POPSNeuroscience Sheds New Light on Creativity That's why there is a striking lack of imagination in most people's visualization of a beach sunset. It's an iconic image, so your brain simply takes the path of least resistance and reactivates neurons that have been optimized to process this sort of scene. If you imagine something that you have never actually seen, like a Pluto sunset, the possibilities for creative thinking become much greater because the brain can no longer rely on connections shaped by past experience. In order to think creatively, you must develop new neural pathways and break out of the cycle of experience-dependent categorization. As Mark Twain said, "Education consists mainly in what we have unlearned." For most people, this does not come naturally. Often, the harder you try to think differently, the more rigid the categories become. Interesting read
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