“Art is a marriage of the conscious and the unconscious.” Jean Cocteau

How much of creative inspiration and problem solving is from our unconscious, and how can we get more in touch with our vast inner landscape?

This famous “Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I” is a 1907 painting by Gustav Klimt.

In his book “The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, from Vienna 1900 to the Present,” Nobel Prize winner psychiatrist Eric R. Kandel notes that Klimt historians Sophie Lillie and Georg Gaugusch commented about the painting that it “appears a compelling visual expression of Freud’s theory that emotions buried in the subconscious rise to the surface in disguised form.”

In another passage, Kandel writes, “Like other modern artists faced with the advent of photography, Klimt sought newer truths that could not be captured by the camera.

“He, and particularly his younger protégés Oskar Kokoschka and Egon Schiele, turned the artist’s view inward — away from the three-dimensional outside world and toward the multidimensional inner self and the unconscious mind.”

In her definition of visual spatial learners, Dr. Linda Silverman, who pioneered the concept, includes the quality of being a late bloomer, as well as “creatively, mechanically, emotionally, or technologically gifted.”

People who are ‘auditory-sequential’ learners are considered more academically talented and likely to be an early bloomer.

There are certainly many people who are creatively productive earlier in life, but painter Robert Genn notes there are a number of artists who are late bloomers.

In his article Early and late bloomers, he notes “Cezanne did not preconceive his work, but rather let the painting-in-progress tell him what it needed.

“He took a long time, was always dissatisfied, and bloomed late. He’s the third most illustrated French artist of the Twentieth Century. Of all his reproduced and celebrated images, only 2% are from his twenties.”

Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) created this painting “Road Before the Mountains, Sainte-Victoire” in his 60′s, between 1898–1902, according to the Wikipedia page.

In Part 1 of this post, I mentioned two articles that refer to multiple research studies; here are more excerpts from those articles, plus additional material.

In “The science of creativity,” Amy Novotney notes a study at Harvard Medical School in which creativity researchers suggest sleeping on a problem.

Psychologist Deirde Barrett, PhD “asked her students to imagine a problem they were trying to solve before going to sleep and found that they were able to come up with novel solutions in their dreams.

“In the study, published in Dreaming (Vol. 3, No. 2), half of the participants reported having dreams that addressed their chosen problems, and a quarter came up with solutions in their dreams.”

“We’re in a different biochemical state when we’re dreaming, and that’s why I think dreams can be so helpful anytime we’re stuck in our usual mode of thinking,” Barrett says.

There may not yet be a “unified field theory” in the science of creativity that definitively explains what it is and how the creative mind operates (see my previous post Do We Have a Science of Creativity?), but a number of research findings provide information in support of developing our creativity and innovation.

In her American Psychological Association article “The science of creativity,” Amy Novotney notes psychologist Robert Epstein, PhD. considers stress and time constraints as inhibitors of creativity.

“When you’re in graduate school, there are so many constraints on you. It’s detrimental to creative expression,” says Epstein, author of “The Big Book of Creativity Games.”

Novotney continues, “Yet it’s almost impossible to conquer any graduate school activity without at least some innovative thinking.

“Collaborating with other researchers, finding a subfield that excites you, maneuvering your way through an unexpected set of findings, and balancing the demands of your work and home life all require creative problem-solving.”

In a recent article on The Creativity Post site, Milena Z. Fisher gives some thoughtful and stimulating responses to the acclaimed Jonah Lehrer book “Imagine,” and comments about the state of creativity research.

[Fisher is a philosopher (Nietzsche scholar), entrepreneur, and co-founder of The Creativity Post.]

She notes there is no absolute definition, that nobody knows exactly what “creativity” really is, and that while Lehrer “elegantly and effortlessly skims through different aspects of creativity” and though his book is “charming and engaging,” it is also “disappointing that along with this beautiful literature some of his claims aren’t very well supported.

“Lehrer worked in a neuroscience lab, so he should know better that we are far, far away from the real ‘science of creativity’ and even more importantly we are probably not on the right track yet.”

Darold Treffert, M.D., one of the foremost experts on savantism, cites examples of “acquired savants” – defined as “previously non-disabled persons who after some injury or disease begin to demonstrate some, until then, dormant savant characteristics and capacities.”

A new Atlantic magazine article gives examples such as British photographer Eadweard Muybridge who created images like this one, “The Human Figure in Motion.”

A famous 1880s series of his photographs of a horse in midstride proved there was a point when all four feet were off the ground.

Definitions of the word “improvise” include “to compose, play, recite, or sing on the spur of the moment, without previous preparation” and “to make, provide, or arrange from whatever materials are readily available.”

One of the elements of creativity tests such as the widely used Torrance Test of Creative Thinking is questions about “unusual uses” – such as, “How many uses can you think of for a tin can?”

That sounds like a cognitive sort of improvisation.

You can see drawings by children and adults who took the Torrance Test, plus evaluations by creativity scholars James C. Kaufman and Kyung Hee Kim, in the post How Creative Are You?

The photo is Keith Jarrett. His Amazon.com page lists his albums and notes he “has come to be recognized as one of the most creative musicians of our times – universally acclaimed as an improviser of unsurpassed genius.”

“To assume, then, that such diseases usually promote artistic talent wrongly reinforces simplistic notions of the ‘mad genius.’” Kay Redfield Jamison

In an interview for the NPR radio program Fresh Air with Terry Gross, science writer Jonah Lehrer commented, “One of the surprising things that’s emerged from the study of moods…is that putting [people] in a bad mood — making them a little bit sad or melancholy — comes with some cognitive benefits.

“So sadness, although it is not fun and is not pleasant, it does sharpen the mind a little bit.

“And one of the long-standing mysteries in the field of creativity is this correlation — and this was first identified by Kay Redfield Jamison and others — is people suffering from various kinds of depression and creative output.”

He continued, “People who are successful creators — especially writers — are anywhere between 8 and 40 times more likely to suffer from bipolar depression than the general public. And no one’s known what to make of this.”

Exploring the intricate “landscapes” of neuroanatomy has inspired a number of scientists to create visual art.

Heather Bimonte-Nelson, head of the Memory and Aging Laboratory at Arizona State University, creates paintings that add a new dimension to her research.

She notes, “Science is really about convincing people that your hypothesis or theory could be the truth in nature.

“And if you’re not a good storyteller, people will never believe it. You could have the best theory ever, but if you can’t communicate it effectively so others understand it, it doesn’t count.”

As described in an article about her work, this painting of hers, titled “GABA,” functions as “a portrait of her daughters’ seizures, and the quest to control them.

“Even tones of light green and cerulean blue streak down the canvas, but are disrupted on one side in a dramatic blood-red band.

“The colors represent neurotransmitters in the brain. The blues and greens are the inhibitory gamma-aminobutyric acid, or GABA, and the red is glutamate, an excitatory neurotransmitter.”

“When I don’t build in cushions of time between activities for reflection and creative synthesis, my writing suffers, my mood suffers, everything suffers.”

Those are comments by writer Lisa Rivero, who continues, “Without this imaginative life, we might still be productive, but at what cost?

“I know that when I give in to the temptation to pack every spare hour or moment with tasks…I may still write as much, just not as well.”

From my post Developing Creativity by Staring Out the Window – quoting from her post If you don’t value your imaginative life, no one else will.

[One of her books: "A Parent's Guide to Gifted Teens: Living with Intense and Creative Adolescents."]

Packing “every spare hour or moment with tasks” as Rivero puts it, is something I more or less constantly feel pressured to do. But, as she points out, at what cost? Stress and overwork and other challenges are among the consequences for me, and probably many writers.

What is the potential value of not always doing?

A new post by Scott Barry Kaufman, Ph.D. describes research indicating that creative people tend to daydream more, even while concentrating on tasks.