How Art Makes Us Feel Like We're in Love
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/05/18/falling-in-love-with-art-_n_861812.html
ArtLab |
of Tayloe White |
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/05/18/falling-in-love-with-art-_n_861812.html
Dana Foundation offers a wealth of info on the latest developments in neuroscience and especially the intersection of art and neuroscience. They produce lots of free publications like the one above. Enjoy!
He is small for his age.
And also very old. I think he's been around the block a few times.
Goodnight to red birds,
Goodnight to red birds on strings,
Goodnight, empty slippers,
Goodnight, Professor the cat.
Goodnight, you.
Goodnight, me.
Day 2 & 3 Review- Truth Telling & Noise Reduction
Day 4 & 5 Review- No Sugar. No Talking.
Day 6 & 7 Review-- No Talking About Abstractions (whatever.) & No Buying Anything.
Creative Vacuuming- The practice of voluntarily abstaining from a particular behavior in order to: 1) create a vacuum in one's schedule which might be filled with novel experiences, self-observation, and reflection 2) cause mild cognitive turbulence that diverts routine thought pathways in order to increase potential for creative thought.My adventurous friend Carol* agreed to participate in a week long experiment in which we are giving up one routine behavior each day of the coming week. Using the ARC technique, I input the following possible behaviors into a randomizer (youspin app for iphones):
email, use of our car, use of iphone, talking, listening to radio/music, using AC/heat, using the computer, watching TV, reading, movement (that's right-staying in bed all day except to void and eat), eating meat, buying anything, looking in the mirror, caffeine, sugar, exercise, complaining, bathing/brushing teeth, lying (e.g. no false compliments), talking in abstraction, texting. Watch us discover the constraints for the week:Will Carol be a silent ski bunny on Friday? Will Tayloe abstain from gratuitously complimenting people on Tuesday? Stay tuned for more as we blog about our experiences.
We'd love for you to join in on the experiment this smelly Monday and let us know how it goes for you.
I have been very resistant to blogging of late- which means that among other things- my house is exceptionally clean. My friend Judi suggested I follow my own damn advice and use ARC for my writing. I did and it helped tremendously. But now I am transposing the results of the writing experiment (below) and I'm finding this editing process very challenging.
|
Ambient Noise |
Medium |
Time |
|
Music |
Writing with pencil on paper |
23 min |
|
Humming |
Writing with pen on paper |
12 min. |
|
Silence |
Dictation transcribed to digital file Keyboard |
39 min. 19 min. |
"To engage in activity for enjoyment rather than for a practical purpose." Sounds like the definition of slacker to me. Alas, the word defined here is play.
Playing is what my child does with Legos and other small plastic things Made in China, right? Additional evidence of play can be found on the kitchen counter in the form of secret notes to make-believe spies. It has been suggested that play is dress rehearsal for being grown up because one day those plastic building blocks might be the designs for a new art museum. Those secret spy notes on scratch paper may be the seeds of a novel (and not a career in espionage, I hope.)
(Jiffy feet=further evidence of play)
Even as I write this though, I'm noticing that my 7 year-old self takes issue with the play-as-dress-rehearsal theory. If we could peer back into the summer of 1982, we’d see that 7- year-old hovering over an ant mound and we might wonder why she is clutching a glass jar of her mother’s spices in each hand. What she is doing-she'd tell you- is testing the affect of various amounts of basil and ginger on several backyard mounds of fire ants. The other thing she'd tell you is that the results of these experiments are entirely irrelevant. Even before the ants record their protests with bites to her feet, she'd like you to know that it is the itch of curiosity itself that she must scratch.
As best I can remember, scratching the itch of curiosity is the deepest and most satisfying kind of play. Without cultivation, curiosity’s impulse is dulled by familiarity with the world and its invitation to wonder is silenced by a tyranny of schedules. There was a time when we all experienced play as an engaging curiosity about the nature of the world. When did play wither from this rich engagement of the world to a plea for moments of reprieve from it? For me, I think play packed up and moved away about the same time Reagan set up shop in the Oval Office. A quick inventory of my leisure activities reveals less of a pursuit of enjoyment and more of a pursuit of something to reduce anxiety.
I write. (My self-imposed deadline for this blog was Wednesday. It’s Saturday!)
I make art. (And it had better sell because we have some mouths to feed here, people.)
I dance. (At the gym. So I won’t get fat or die too young.)
I don’t know what your week was like, but for me it was filled to the brim with Grown Up Responsibilities: meetings with the principal, a flurry of emails regarding disability insurance, voice mails left and listened to by which schedules were negotiated, and blah blah blah. Ironically, it’s during weeks like this that playing feels so risky. If you could peer through to this side of the computer screen, you’d find my Protestant Work Ethic (PWE) busily preparing a lecture on the pitfalls of play. Here are its main bullet points.
Nothing reeks more of frivolity than play.
Sigh.
Just for kicks and giggles I looked up the word frivolous in a thesaurus (Note to Self: looking up words in a thesaurus for kicks = not a good sign). The listing reads like a nightmare review from the boss: skittish, flighty, foolish, superficial, shallow, irresponsible, thoughtless, featherbrained, empty-headed, peabrained, vacuous, dizzy, dippy, ditzy, flaky.
Please forgive me if I don't rush to sign up for frivolity.
So it is of great curiosity to me (that word again) that the latest neuroscience research suggests that novel experiences, including those labeled frivolous, might be the very thing our brains needs to stay healthy. Novel experiences that are fresh, imaginative, and innovative keep us interested and engaged in life. If we want to create a veritable nursery of new neurons in our curious craniums, what we need are 1) novel experiences and …2) I’m sorry to take another turn on the broken record…exercise.
So since my commitment to exercise and to play is feeble at best, I’ve devised a couple of ways to trick my PWE into giving me a break by combining novelty and exercise in a most efficient and responsible manner while also reaching unprecedented levels of adult play.
The key to maintaining a sustainable exercise regime is first of all to never call it an exercise regime. Kiss of death. Instead you need to call your exercise something that will actually inspire you. Take for example, hip-hop diva, Fergie from the Black Eyed Peas. She’s not “working out”. Hell no. That woman is “up in the gym workin’ on my fitness” while she puts those “boys on rock rock.” Who wouldn’t want to put those boys on rock rock? I don’t even know what that means but I just put my cross trainers on so I could find out.
Recently I spent time on the shores of the Crooked River at the fish camp my great grandparents built there 85 years ago. While walking on the dock under a nearly moonless night, my friend and I noticed something unusual in the water below. Minnows seemed to leave contrails of light in their wakes as they flitted about. I had heard of the river sometimes lighting up with phosphorescence but I couldn’t remember what caused it. We immediately headed down to the floating dock to investigate more closely. Was this glow in the water a living thing and more importantly would it sting us?
I imagined myself as an explorer on some alien planet as I tentatively lowered a single hand into the brackish black river. Immediately the edges of my palms glowed and I flung my hand out of the water in surprise. Noticing I wasn’t in pain I wondered what would happen if I moved my entire hand under water. Trails of sparkling light danced from my fingertips as I flickered them under water. Magic!
Naturally I did what one is compelled to do when presented such opportunities. I got in. I moved my arms and legs like a child making snow angels. With water as my canvas and luminescence my medium; I became the painter, the paintbrush, and the painting all at once. I noticed that what I was doing was something I hadn’t done for a very long time.
I was playing.
For a couple of hours I played with the abandon of an eight-year-old. Finally, elated and exhausted, I tried to hold the glowing water in my cupped hands as if I might carry it back to the cabin to enjoy later, but of course the luminescence slipped down the folds of my fingers back into the water. It was a light that was slippery, edgeless, and impossible to grip.
So it is with the definition of creativity. Most scientists studying creativity define it as bringing into existence that which is novel and useful/meaningful. Will someone please give me a scientific definition of meaningful? Why are scientists even bothering to understand this concept that is so difficult to define and to quantify? As it turns out, the nature of creativity may teach us quite a bit about the nature of the brain itself.
Was my experience on the river creative? Certainly my dip with the dinoflagellates was meaningful, but was it novel? Useful? Are the words you’re reading useful to you? The evidence remains to be seen, but back in the summer of 1974 two students studying electrophysiology in San Diego turned their similar encounter with a phosphorescing jellyfish into something that truly has revolutionized our understanding of the brain.
The reason we can see this snappy image of astrocytes is thanks in part to those adventurous student scientists who discovered that by injecting the protein from the bioluminescence of the jellyfish into nerve cells they could watch in real time the tracks of phosphorescence left behind when a current of calcium flowed through the cell.In 1994 a pioneering neuroscientist named Douglas Fields built on this discovery when he applied the technique to the very mysterious brain cells called glial. Glial cells don’t fire electrical impulses as nerve cells do and so their activity and purpose was largely unknown and assumed to be that of a sort of neuronal glue around the brain.
Turns out, those jellyfish had a thing or two to teach us about our brains.
I don’t know about you, but I think of the brain as made up mostly of squiggly gray matter packed with neurons. I’ve recently learned that most of the brain is made up not of gray matter (which is actually pinkish tan) but of the stuff below, between, and around the gray matter. Namely, glial cells: astrocytes, oligodendrites, and microglia.
In the population of cells in your brain, glial cells outnumber neurons 6 to 1 and are especially concentrated in your white matter (pinkish white), the area below the gray squiggly surface of the cortex. There, tucked inside the core of your brain, these cells outnumber neurons by about 100 to 1. White matter is where all the cool neuroscientist are hanging out these days.
All of those glial cells in the white matter play an important role in connecting the two hemispheres of the brain. Guess what researchers find in brains of the highly creative? High interhemispheric connectivity. Einstein’s brain for example, was found to contain typical amounts of neurons but proportionally more astrocytes and oligodendrites than the average person. I bet Einstein’s brain could have lit up the night with all its phosphorescence.
The idea that the brain can rewire itself (neuroplasticity) and can grow new neurons (neurogenesis) is a relatively new discovery. Just 15 years ago the idea that a fully mature brain could dramatically rewire itself was unheard of. This discovery offers tremendous hope to those recovering from brain trauma and to those of us who want to experience life more richly. Research has shown that a novel and enriched environment enhances both neuroplasticity and neurogenesis. Personally, I have seen my neuropsychological scores for visuospatial skills increase by nearly 2000% over the course of my career as a visual artist. I am convinced that creativity can help heal the brain.
So how does one go about imparting creativity? What is the neuroscience of wonder? Of curiosity? Of exploration? Can creativity be taught?
Let me ask you this. What isn’t creative? Every moment is new. Every experience is ripe for meaningfulness if we are paying attention. My evening on the river convinced me that creativity doesn’t need to be taught, it only needs to be remembered.
Executive Director, Art With a Heart in Healthcare
www.artwithaheart.info
