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 [...]

You Need a Manifesto

Stanford’s Design Institute fits its reason for existing, its manifesto, on an ordinary napkin. Could you? Think about your reason for existing. To Design Your Manifesto On a Napkin: Grab a stack of napkins. Find a Sharpie Marker. Ask the following questions: What keeps you awake at night and wakes you up in the morning? [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Idea-Sharing is Good

Highly creative people work alone to master a domain. But, not all the time.  Some of the time they hang-out with key people and in key communities. Creators don’t hoard ideas. They know ideas fertilize in the rich soil of human exchange. Less productive creative-types often fear throwing an idea out to the wind.  But, [...]

Creativity and Mental Illness

Is mental dysfunction, such as manic-depression or depression (formerly known as melancholy) common among highly Creative people?  It depends.  Writers, painters and sculptors are more likely to suffer from “diseases of the mind” than say, neuroscientists or architects, whom we assume, work for stable companies and receive regular paychecks. Lack of societal recognition may be [...]

Early Modern Ideals

In graduate school I embraced Early Modern European History as my hands down favorite area of study.  The clothes were fabulous. Think Veronica Franco, the Venetian poet and courtesan or Queen Elizabeth in her sumptuous get-ups. Food was plentiful and more varied than previous centuries. The printed word grew to disperse some of the most [...]