What is Creativity Anyway?

I started Creating Brains.com because I needed to read it.  I have always thought of myself as creative but through years of having little children underfoot and family-size to-do lists my creative energy shrunk.  Still I read widely and went to graduate school. Then one sunny afternoon in May my oldest daughter died suddenly and cosmic entropy [...]

Death and Mindset

Sometime after the birth of my first child I read The Good Life: Scott and Ellen Nearing’s Sixty Years of Self-Sufficient Living. Self-sufficient living is a backward idea overall, but one powerful image of the Nearings’ story has stuck with me.   Scott Nearing died by choice.  He lived to 100 years of age and [...]

Creativity as a Hierarchy of Processes

Although the word Creativity actually appeared in the English dictionary only in the early twentieth century, by the 1950′s it became a popular catch-all and often overused word. Sixty years later, creativity is still ill-defined.  Today, a whimsical cook is creative, as is a finger painting toddler. Earlier this year, Fast Company Magazine published its [...]

Defining Creativity, Part 7: Creativity as Experimentation in the Enlightenment

Every day, for a week,  I’m writing about the definitions of Creativity thinkers have offered throughout history and why each one cannot be the final definition. Yesterday I wrote about Cultural Suppression of Creativity. Sitting under an apple tree, Isaac Newton discovered gravity. A falling apple answered for him all questions regarding the mechanics of [...]

Defining Creativity, Part 2: Semitic Slaves and the Brain-Altering Invention

Every day, for a week,  I’m writing about the definitions of Creativity thinkers have offered throughout history and why each one cannot be the final definition. Yesterday I wrote about Ancient Greek Artists Following the Rules. The first pure alphabet, created by Semitic slaves to track the work of underlings, stirred little sand and much [...]

Creativity, is Not Yet Defined

Creativity is the ability to illustrate what is outside the box from within it.  –The Ride Today I’m spending time looking out windows. Creativity is still a fuzzy idea.  If you are looking, you know it when you see it. But, a clear-cut definition is still at large, still outside the box of science.  A [...]