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I am sure that in Russia there are also night clubs where the thrill is on the sensory input,
the bit of the music, brightness of the light, the sound of the music, not the words or the
meaning of the words, not the past or the future. As we say in English ‘Let oneself
go’. We are having ‘a sensational time’. You do not say ‘Let us go out and have a
cognitive time’. One could say that this is a raw feeling. I do not think that people
in clubs do much thinking.
One could think of the two different modes that we put ourselves in. You could call it
‘mindless’ and ‘meaningful’. On the one hand – strong feelings. On the other
– thinking dominating. On one side – strongly sensory. On another – cognitive. Mindless
– you are in the ‘here and now, yak and wow’, you are living for the moment. Meaningful
– you have a past and a present, a future or a fantasy. In the mindless state you are
having distractions form the outside world, in the meaningful state you are interacting
with the world, you evaluate it in terms of what happened in the past and what will happen
in the future. In the mindless state there is a reduced sense of self, you have let yourself
go, you have blown your mind. Whereas in the meaningful state there is a very strong feeling
of self, you are acting in your life story. In the mindless state there is no space or
time, you are just in the moment. In the meaningful world there are strong space and time references.
The first state is more dopamine, the second is less dopamine.
What we can do as adults is putting ourselves in environment of ‘wine, women, and song’
or ‘drugs, and sex, and rock-and-roll’ which disables the connections between brain
cells and blows our mind temporarily. And my concern is that although we have done this
since we have evolved as a species, and we have had this balance between letting ourselves
go and creating an identity, that now what we are doing with computer games is developing
an environment that shifts us asymmetrically to stay in this mindless state which would
match up with under-functional prefrontal cortex.
That scenario, some people could claim, is surely related to creativity. And this is
an interesting thought. Kind of people that might paint pictures are creative. Or the
children. And we know that their connections are still growing. Schizophrenics are renowned
for writing poetry or painting pictures. And they have dysfunctional connections due to
the dopamine level. We know that drugs impair connections and still people on drugs are
often highly creative. But these conditions do not guarantee creativity. I am sure that
one can know of children, or schizophrenics, or people who have taken drugs, who are not
creative at all. And I am sure that you have known of creative people who are not children,
not schizophrenics, and have not taken drugs.
I think it shows us a possible link, but one that may be necessary without being sufficient
and can be reached in different ways where one is challenging dogma, deconstructing the
world, not seeing automatic associations between one thing and something else.
What are the conditions of creativity? The first one is premium on de-constructing to
abstract sensations. To see the world not as a bottle of water, not as a glass, but
as a series of textures and light that you can de-construct and try to reproduce. We
also know that you have to have an unusual association. Schizophrenics would have what
is called ‘word salads’, unusual words that come together. Artists will pain the
things that are unusual, that you are not used to seeing.
Here is the painting of a sheep made by a girl and let us think why it is not a work
of art. She has painted an unusual sheep, with an unusually colored red body, and still
it is not hanging in any art gallery in the world. Here is another sheep by Damien Hirst.
It is in formaldehyde and hailed as work of art by some. What is the difference between
these two sheep? In both cases the authors have challenged dogma and they had unusual
associations. The difference is that Hirst’s sheep has shown that these new associations
can activate more extensive associations so that they have meaning in self and the others.
And what that means is that suddenly you see the world in a new way. Suddenly you can see
a person, or a sheep even, in a way that you never saw that sheep before. In the case of
science or in literature you can have an idea about life that you never had before. But
it is not enough that it is something new or unusual. It has to tap in to a meaning.
And by doing that it has to recruit new associations between your brain cells.
We said at the beginning that neuronal connections give connections an even deeper meaning as
with the candle. How does that help to understand the world around us? There are connections
in space where one can see one thing in terms of something else. But for me thinking involves
connections over time. As I said earlier, thinking is movement confined to the brain.
Perhaps this could be the essence of thinking. Thinking always has a time sequence, like
a rational argument, showing that two equals one, or a business plan which shows how one
thing leads to another, or a little story with the beginning and the end. Whatever happens,
you always go ‘beginning-middle-end’. It is always sequence of steps. You can not
access it in random. Like a sentence is a sequence. Like
you life is. It goes from your childhood, to your work, to eventually your retirement:
all that is making you the unique person that you are. You cannot reverse things; you cannot
muddle up the order of those things. This is in a way what we call‘cognition’. That
is what ‘thinking’ is following a particular sequence, telling you a story, and that story
gives you your identity.
Stories are essential for creative insight, because this needs meaning and spatial sequence,
so that it would have significance. It enables thinking because you have to have a temporal
sequence. It gives you an identity that is a meaning over time. That is why the print
and broadcast media are also essential because I thing that what you are in the business
of doing ultimately, whether it is a fact or fiction, is you are in the business of
telling stories.