“What would be truly surprising would be to find that sound could not suggest colour, that colours could not evoke the idea of a melody, and that sound and colour were unsuitable for the translation of ideas, seeing that things have always found their expression through a system of reciprocal analogy.” Charles Baudelaire

A simple definition of synesthesia is that it is a “crosstalking” or overlapping of sensory experiences that for most people remain separate.

Researchers find a higher proportion of creative people are synesthetes.

The image is from the book “The Hidden Sense: Synesthesia in Art and Science.”

The publisher explains that synesthesia occurs “when two or more senses cooperate in perception. Once dismissed as imagination or delusion, metaphor or drug-induced hallucination, the experience of synesthesia has now been documented by scans of synesthetes’ brains…”

The author “reports that some studies define synesthesia as a brain impairment, a short circuit between two different areas. But synesthetes cannot imagine perceiving in any other way; many claim that synesthesia helps them in daily life.”

From MIT Press page for the book “The Hidden Sense: Synesthesia in Art and Science” by Cretien van Campen.

The quote by French poet Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) comes from the article “Art and Synesthesia: in search of the synesthetic experience” by Dr. Hugo Heyrman, a lecture presented at the First International Conference on Art and Synesthesia in 2005, Universidad de Almería, Spain.

Dr. Heyrman writes, “My starting point is the hypothesis that ‘synesthesia-phenomena’ are at the roots of all artistic practice.”

He also quotes neuroscientist Dr. Vilayanur S. Ramachandran (from ‘Hearing Colors, Tasting Shapes’, Scientific American, May 2003): “Synesthesia is seven times more common among artists, novelists and poets, and creative people in general. Artists often have the ability to link unconnected domains, have the power of metaphor and the capability of blending realities.”

[Book by V.S. Ramachandran: "The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist's Quest for What Makes Us Human."]

A summary of the book “Wednesday Is Indigo Blue: Discovering the Brain of Synesthesia” by Richard E. Cytowic notes, “Synesthetes rarely talk about their peculiar sensory gift – believing either that everyone else senses the world exactly as they do, or that no one else does. Yet synesthesia occurs in one in twenty people, and is even more common among artists. One famous synesthete was novelist Vladimir Nabokov, who insisted as a toddler that the colors on his wooden alphabet blocks were ‘all wrong.’ His mother understood exactly what he meant because she, too, had synesthesia.”

Magenta Tuesdays

In her Psych Central article “3 Fascinating Facts About Our Brilliant Brains,” Margarita Tartakovsky, M.S. quotes neuroscientist David Eagleman from his book Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain: “For some people, there are magenta Tuesdays, tastes that have shapes and wavy green symphonies.”

Eagleman gives more examples in his book: “…the feel of sandpaper might evoke an F-sharp, the taste of chicken might be accompanied by a feeling of pinpoints on the fingertips, or a symphony might be experienced in blues and golds.”

People with “spatial sequence synesthesia” have locations for time and other numbers. For instance, “They can point to the spot where the number 32 is, where December floats or where the year 1966 lies.”

Video: “Synesthesia: A film by Jonathan Fowler” – “In this documentary, Dr. David Eagleman of Baylor College of Medicine explains this condition, and four synesthetes explain how they perceive the world.”

More common with artists

In her article “Are You a Synesthete?,” Darya L. Zabelina, M. S., says “Four percent of the population, when seeing number 5, also see color red. Or hear a C-sharp when seeing blue. Or even associate orange with Tuesdays. And among artists, the number goes to 20-25%!”

She explains, “The primary perspective of the cause of synesthesia is a mutation that causes defective pruning between areas of the brain that are ordinarily connected only sparsely. Therefore areas that are disconnected within a human brain retain certain connections in synesthetes, which causes unusual associations.”

More associations

In “First person: One singular sensation,” Lily Dayton (Special to the Los Angeles Times February 20, 2012) writes about her experience “when someone’s telling you a story and you get that amazing tingly feeling in your scalp, like their words are massaging your brain.”

She also writes about having a conversation with her father, who shares these kinds of experiences, about “the thrilling roar of the vacuum and the way the song ‘Ave Maria’ could feel like wing beats grazing our foreheads.”

In her longer article “The blended senses of synesthesia” she writes about even more connections: “If you ask Emma Anders about the number five, she’ll tell you that it’s red. She’ll also tell you that five is a mischievous, self-centered brat — like a kid throwing a temper tantrum at a party.

“Two is yellow, three is purple, four is an intense sky blue,” says the 21-year old student at UC San Diego. “An eight is very noble and kind of held together, almost like a parent figure to five. Nine is a brown-haired guy, and he’s pretty calm — but he’s really into seven.”

She says Anders also “ascribes colors to flavors and smells. (Vaseline, for instance, smells burgundy, and a green apple tastes yellowish-orange.)”

A cognitive advantage

Dayton notes that David Brang, a UC San Diego neuroscientist says “nature provides a strong hint that the brains of synesthetes may have some kind of cognitive advantage.

“The genes for synesthesia appear to be dominant, and family trees depict the trait marching through the bloodline. This high degree of heritability suggests the genetic mutation that causes synesthesia provides some significant evolutionary benefit.”

She adds, “Brang’s hypothesis is that the benefit is related to creativity, enhanced perception and overall smarts.

“So far, studies have found that so-called colored sequence synesthetes (who experience color when they see numbers or letters) have a heightened ability to discriminate between similar colors, while mirror-touch synesthetes (who experience touch sensations when watching another person touch themselves) are more sensitive to touch in general.”

What about you? Do you experience any kind of synesthesia?

~ ~

Writer Enoch Li says she never thought she had any creative talent, but in dealing with depression “rediscovered my creativity, which spurred my recovery.”

From post on my Depression and Creativity site: Depressed Creativity.

Many of us have found that creative expression can help deal with depressive feelings.

But a number of writers and psychologists are questioning the validity of the long history of associating depression with creativity.

In her post Depression, Creativity, and a New Pair of Shoes, Shelley H. Carson, Ph.D. writes, “After reading a newspaper article about some of the current research linking depressive disorders to creativity, an artist friend of mine commented, ‘Well, I guess now all I have to do is get depressed and my work will improve.’

Carson adds, “Since the time of Aristotle, creativity in the arts has been linked to melancholia…but depression itself doesn’t necessarily enhance creativity. Quite the opposite: most poets, artists, and composers have reported over the years that they are decidedly unable to work during episodes of severe depression. In fact, many have found their inability to create while depressed to be an impetus for ending it all.”

Carson is author of the book Your Creative Brain: Seven Steps to Maximize Imagination, Productivity, and Innovation in Your Life.

In her article Creativity, the Arts, and Madness, Maureen Neihart, Psy.D. gives a quote attributed to Aristotle: “No great genius was without a mixture of insanity.”

But is that really true?

Judith Schlesinger, PhD, author of the book The Insanity Hoax: Exposing the Myth of the Mad Genius, says “The fact is that, despite the efforts of numerous investigators and decades of confident pronouncements by a few, there’s still no concrete, empirical proof that highly creative people are any more likely to be mood-disordered than any other group.”

She thinks “A careful look at the so-called ‘landmark’ studies in the field — the work by psychiatrists Nancy Andreasen and Arnold Ludwig, and psychologist Kay Redfield Jamison — reveals gaping holes in their design, methodologies, and conclusions.”

From my post Madness and creativity: do we need to be crazy?

But studies continue to raise questions about potential links between mood and creativity.

For example, “The Dark Side of Creativity: Biological Vulnerability and Negative Emotions Lead to Greater Artistic Creativity” is a research study from Harvard University that “examined how vulnerability to experiencing negative affect, measured with biological products, and intense negative emotions influenced artistic creativity… Although some evidence suggests that positive mood can enhance creativity… many other studies have demonstrated that negative affect can have a facilitative effect on creativity.”

[Thanks to a member of a Facebook group: The Brain Cafe for pointing out this study. This group often reports on fascinating literature and research related to neuroscience, gifted adults and creativity.]

Rethinking Depression

Susan Jennifer Polese, a counselor in training, a personal coach and a freelance writer, notes in her article A Catalyst to Change – Rethinking Depression, “perhaps we can, for the moment, rethink depression much the way William Glasser, the founder of Reality Therapy does. Glasser maintains that we need to take responsibility for what we are and what we are experiencing. He states that being depressed, being anxious, even having a headache are expressions which avoid our responsibility in behaving in these ways.

“We choose to be depressed and hence, when depressed, we are depressing. We choose to have a headache, and hence, when we have a headache, we are headaching. He uses verbs to describe these conditions because we are choosing to experience this. This viewpoint does not support treatment with a medication.”

Polese continues, “Depression through the lens of Dr. Martin Seligman, the developer of positive psychology, changes the focus from what’s wrong to what’s strong. This ideology views the fight against depression as a journey through which the client accesses creativity and strength to endure and overcome deep unhappiness. Through these actions meaning can be found.”

She notes that creativity coach Eric Maisel, PhD has written a book ‘Rethinking Depression’ that explores this topic: “Like Glasser, Maisel takes a nonclinical look at depression and goes as far to declare that there really is no disorder of ‘depression’ and that unhappiness, chronic or otherwise, need not be looked at from a medical model of pathology.”

In his series of podcasts Overcoming Obstacles to Creating, Maisel has an episode titled “Minding Your Emotions” in which he says, “It is necessary that a creative person have and express her emotions, but that is a very different thing from being led around by the nose by her fear, anger, envy, or sadness. What can we do to break free of the grip of our emotions?”

Pathologizing everyday life

In a new post of his, Rethinking Depression, Dr. Maisel writes, “There is something profoundly wrong with the way that we currently name and treat certain human phenomena. When we call something a ‘mental disease’ or a ‘mental disorder’ we imply a great deal about its origins, its treatment, its intractability, and its locus of control.

“The mental health industry has its reasons for calling life’s challenges ‘disorders’ but we have few good reasons to collude with them.”

He thinks this sort of labeling can be very dangerous: “As soon as you employ the interesting linguistic tactic of calling every unwanted aspect of life abnormal, you are on the road to pathologizing everyday life. By making every unwanted experience a piece of pathology, it becomes possible to knit together disorders that have the look but not the reality of medical illness. This is what has happened in our ‘medicalize everything’ culture.”

Ed Harris as Jackson Pollock

Referring specifically to depression, he thinks the term “has virtually replaced unhappiness in our internal vocabularies.

“We feel sad but we call ourselves depressed. Having unconsciously made this linguistic switch, when we look for help we naturally turn to a ‘depression expert.’

“We look to a pill, a therapist, a social worker, or a pastoral counselor – even if we’re sad because we’re having trouble paying the bills, because our career is not taking off, or because our relationship is on the skids.

“That is, even if our sadness is rooted in our circumstances, social forces cause us to name that sadness ‘depression’ and to look for ‘help with our depression.’ People have been trained to call their sadness ‘depression’ by the many forces acting upon them, from the mental health industry to mass culture to advertising.

His new book is Rethinking Depression: How to Shed Mental Health Labels and Create Personal Meaning.

Psychotherapist and author Jed Diamond notes in his review: “I was fortunate to get an advance copy of Eric Maisel’s new book. I’ve been a psychotherapist for more than 40 years and treat depression every day. I’ve long come to see that our old way of looking at ‘mental illness’ is totally inadequate. We put more and more people on drugs while ignoring the underlying problems that feed our feelings of despair and hopelessness.”

Bipolar

In his Psych Central article At The Mercy Of Our Moods, Tom Wootton notes that “At the mercy of her moods” was “a very 19th century expression” but is still an undercurrent in both popular and professional attitudes about mental health.

He declares that based on his experience, “and that of many others…intensity has much less to do with it than understanding and training. When we seek understanding instead of just trying to make it go away, we find that we can separate the experience of physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual intensity from our reactions.”

From my Creative Mind post Creativity Higher with Bipolar?

Tom Wootton is author of the books:

The Depression Advantage

Bipolar In Order: Looking At Depression, Mania, Hallucination, and Delusion From The Other Side

Wootton is also President of Bipolar Advantage: Outcome-Based Education for Bipolar and Depression.

Maureen Duffy Ph.D., Professor and Chairperson, The Counseling Program, Barry University says, “Tom is doing something no one else is really doing. He is turning a serious mental illness on its head and suggesting that by accepting rather than fighting the disorder, people with bipolar can identify and access their strengths and lead lives that are not only satisfying but productive beyond their wildest imaginings.”

John D. Gartner, PhD (author of The Hypomanic Edge) says, “Bipolar Advantage offers a comprehensive program for bipolars to find their own type of balance — to be themselves and in control at the same time.”

Follow the link to Bipolar Advantage to get started with the program for free.

See a video presentation by Wootton in my slightly longer version of this post: Rethinking Creativity and Depression.

At the top of this post, I referred to my “depressive feelings” – for many years of my life, I struggled with depression and dysthymia, and have experienced benefit from psychotherapy and the use of antidepressants (years ago). I still use the herbal supplement St. John’s Wort daily for mood control. (A good source of information and of research-grade tablets is HBC Protocols.)

Considering how many artists (such as Jackson Pollock, played in a movie by Ed Harris – photo) have reportedly suffered from depression and anxiety, and thinking about the kinds of perspectives mentioned in this post, it seems to me that it is vital to deal with our emotional and mental health challenges, to better access our creativity. But it is also vital to consider how we label and respond to those challenges.

~ ~

As reported in a news release, a Michigan State University study concluded that “both boys and girls who play video games tend to be more creative, regardless of whether the games are violent or nonviolent.”

“A study of nearly 500 12-year-olds found that the more kids played video games, the more creative they were in tasks such as drawing pictures and writing stories. In contrast, use of cell phones, the Internet and computers (other than for video games) was unrelated to creativity.”

Professor of psychology Linda Jackson, the lead researcher, said the study “may be the first evidence-based demonstration of a relationship between technology use and creativity.”

Creativity was evaluated using The Torrance Test, which “included tasks such as drawing an ‘interesting and exciting’ picture from a curved shape, giving the picture a title and then writing a story about it.”

The study found that “boys played video games more than girls, and that boys favored games of violence and sports while girls favored games involving interaction with others (human or nonhuman). Yet, regardless of gender, race or type of game played, greater video game playing was the only technology to be associated with greater creativity.”

The press release also notes, “About 72 percent of U.S. households play video or computer games, according to the Entertainment Software Association. The MSU findings should motivate game designers to identify the aspects of video game activity that are responsible for the creative effects, Jackson said.”

“Once they do that, video games can be designed to optimize the development of creativity while retaining their entertainment values such that a new generation of video games will blur the distinction between education and entertainment,” Jackson said.

From Video game playing tied to creativity.

The photo at top is from another post on this research: Study Links Creativity to Playing Video Games.

Hilda Huang on gaming and playing Bach

Hilda Huang started playing the piano at the age of three, and won the International Bach Competition in March, 2010, becoming the youngest person to win.

This is from a Big Think Interview With Hilda Huang in 2010, when she was 14. See video below

Question: You once said that playing Bach is like playing Nintendo. How so?

Hilda Huang: “When I was really young, I loved playing video games and I kind of noticed that when you play video games, you have to be really, really focused.

“So if you’re playing maybe ‘Mario Kart’ on the Nintendo 64, so you’re driving along and of course there’s a koopa waiting to hit you. But if you blink or you say, ‘Oh I need to get something to eat or I need some chips,’ so you put your controller down, and, wham, the koopa smashes in to you, so you die and lose a life.

“And of course, in video games, you have plenty of lives, so it’s okay. But in Bach, when you’re performing, you don’t have that kind of a privilege. So you have to stay really focused through the whole thing and you can’t stop.”

Read more quotes of hers on how playing Bach is different from other composers, and a video of her performing, in my post Hilda Huang on Bach and video games; Gina Trapani on multitasking.

British playwright Lucy Prebble, author of the plays The Sugar Syndrome and Enron, among other works, “attacked the popular stereotype of teenage gamers as ‘chubby automatons’ who spend their days shooting virtual enemies and eating [snacks],” according to a newspaper article.

“The award-winning writer said playing video games requires more involvement and creative input than reading a book or watching a film – and also offers more opportunities to be active and sociable.

“Rather than being vilified, video games should be recognised as an art form appreciated for the way they tugged at our emotions and stimulated creativity, Prebble said.”

She also commented that gaming “was similar to writing, in that both are private, creative activities very different to watching films or reading books, which involve less input.”

From Video games ‘more creative than reading’ by Nick Collins, The Telegraph, 12 Feb 2012.

Actor, writer, producer Felicia Day created her web series “The Guild” [dvd] based on her passion for gaming.

From my post Felicia Day on Being Creatively Bored and Developing Her Own Project.

The book Video Games and Learning: Teaching and Participatory Culture in the Digital Age, by Kurt Squire, declares “Good games inspire interest, creativity, and social interaction.”

My earlier post Designing Video Games for Mental Health mentions some of the emotional and cognitive aspects of games.

Are you a game player? If so, what is your take on this topic of gaming and developing creativity?

~~

“Great acting comes from a well-developed imagination.”
Acting teacher Jason Bennett

Imagination is central to creative expression.

Psychologist Carl Jung talked about using imagination as a means to access our unconscious, one of the main sources of creative ideas and energies.

He developed the concept of Active Imagination as a “meditation technique wherein the contents of one’s unconscious are translated into images, narrative or personified as separate entities.

“It can serve as a bridge between the conscious ‘ego’ and the unconscious and includes working with dreams and the creative self via imagination or fantasy.”  [Wikipedia]

[Books by C. G. Jung: Jung on Active Imagination ; The Red Book.]

Jungian analyst Dr. Monika Wikman refers to the idea as “activated imagination field” and says “it’s informing everything all the time. And all creative process is deeply informed by the activated imaginal field. Think of Shakespeare and all these characters that get birth. He gives them a life…”

From Shrink Rap Radio # 286, Understanding Jungian Active Imagination, David Van Nuys, Ph.D., aka “Dr. Dave” interviews Dr. Monika Wikman, PhD.

Wikman is author of The Pregnant Darkness: Alchemy and the Rebirth of Consciousness.

Michelle Williams devoted some ten months to researching Marilyn Monroe for her acclaimed performance in “My Week With Marilyn.”

Producer Harvey Weinstein said he was impressed at the level of Williams’ preparation, how she could quote passages from Maurice Zolotow’s biography on Monroe.

“Michelle researches a role like no one I’ve ever encountered,” Weinstein wrote in an email. “She watched and studied the movies and photos; she read every book, every biography.… She could describe how Marilyn wiggled and winked while quoting some of her best lines, [like] when she teased that she was nude by saying, ‘I have nothing on but the radio.’” …

Williams probably also read: My Story, the autobiography by Marilyn Monroe.

She commented in an interview, “So I lived with her, and I never stopped trying to find more information. Even on set, on the 10-minute breaks, I would be back poring through photos or with my earphones in watching a movie. I was obsessed. I was on the trail of something. There were clues, and I had to solve a mystery.”

From my Inner Actor post Michelle Williams on Interpreting Marilyn Monroe.

An interest in research and reading early in life

Like a number of talented actors, Williams has a high ability intellect: she was in an Advanced Placement program in high school, and graduated early (at age 15). She also did independent study: “It was great, because I could work at my own pace, and it was completely uninterrupted, and I finished three years in eight months or something.”

Part of her interest in acting is from a love of literature, Williams notes: “For as long as I can remember, my father read voraciously to me when I was a kid. I grew up with William Faulkner and all these great, fabulous books, and I always wanted to be in those worlds.

“And daily, growing up, I lived in these fantasies of whatever it was, “Anna Karenina” or you name it, and I wanted to be there. So it was sort of a natural progression to want to become an actress, to live that out.”

Asked if she still finds time to read, she says “Oh yes. Whether it means I don’t get any sleep, it’s a huge part of my life. I think it’s really balancing. It’s been the most enlightening thing, and being read to as a child is the best thing that could happen to me.”

From our interview about her acting in “Halloween: H20″ with Jamie Lee Curtis (1998).

That love of reading and research probably helps fuel her dynamic performances.

Responding to the creative challenges of the work

An interview article noted that some of her careful “research and rehearsal either went out the window or had to be hastily enriched while shooting three of the film’s key scenes. ‘Sometimes you have to fight the circumstances or re-create them in your head,’ [Williams] says. ‘Which is OK. Using your imagination is always a fine thing for an actor to do.’”

(Michelle Williams talks about her year with Marilyn, By Glenn Whipp, Los Angeles Times)

To imagine is to create

In his article (on the site of his Actors Workshop) – “The Curious Imagination” – Jason Bennett says, “Great acting comes from a well-developed imagination. But many aspiring actors’ imaginations are undeveloped or blocked… Your imagination is the source of your creativity… Imagining is ‘the act or power of forming a mental image of something not present to the [external] senses or never before wholly perceived in [external] reality.’ To imagine is to create.”

~ ~

“Maybe my calling is to feel deeply some aspects of human pain and grief.”

Writing the script for one of her insightful and powerful movies – Blue Car (2002) – was a “wrenching, emotional experience” for writer and director Karen Moncrieff, according to a Writers Guild magazine article.

She wrote it, she said, as “a reaction to films I had seen, like Stealing Beauty, a very idealized view of a girl’s coming of age. I wanted to get inside the woman’s experience and tell the story from her own perspective.”

From my Inner Writer post Writing Honestly: Writing and Fear.

Film reviewer Roger Ebert noted the story is about “a vulnerable teenage girl [Agnes Bruckner] who falls into the emotional trap set by her high school English teacher [David Strathairn]. The teacher watches with horror, too: He knows what he is doing [sexual abuse] is wrong, but he is weak, and pities himself more than the sad girl he is exploiting.”

One of the reasons for the impact of her creative writing is that her characters have such emotional nuance and authenticity.

Her more recent movie is The Dead Girl (2006) – about a number of characters whose lives intersect, catalyzed by the murder of a drug-addicted prostitute (played by the late Brittany Murphy). Other talented actors in the cast include Toni Collette, Piper Laurie, Giovanni Ribisi, Rose Byrne, Mary Beth Hurt, James Franco, Marcia Gay Harden, Kerry Washington and others.

Like other artists who address dark aspects of humanity, Moncrieff chooses these kinds of themes consciously, to illuminate pains and conditions that many people face.

“I feel like I’m making films for people who are like me, who like to go to movies and be shaken up, literally taken by the throat and shaken up for an hour and a half. And moved and forced to look at things that are ugly, forced to contemplate the darkest moments any of us can imagine.”

[From 'Dead Girl' filmmaker's calling is to break hearts, by Mark Olsen, Los Angeles Times.]

In the same article, she comments, “Somebody asked me if it would be better if the movie was uplifting,” Moncrieff recalled. “And I said, ‘Well, to me this is uplifting.’ To me what’s depressing is to see lies on-screen, to see lives sugar-coated, a fake version of life as I know it or I feel it. Anything less than that and I’d feel like I hadn’t done my job.

“There are other people who are much better at shining a light on what’s funny or what’s sweet. Maybe my calling is to feel deeply some aspects of human pain and grief. Maybe I’m working something out in my work, but it’s what I’m attracted to. People making choices, struggling to do better and change, to me is uplifting.”

In another interview, she talked about the inspiration for her script – the sort of experience that creative novelists and screenwriters can use for evocative and meaningful stories.

“I was a juror on a murder trial a few years ago,” Moncrieff said. “On the first day, it was revealed that the victim was a prostitute. I realized that I had certain preconceptions about her that were not positive. At the same time, I recognized my tendency to feel that — as the victim of a crime — she must be some kind of innocent.”

She adds, “She was a series of contradictions: a passionate mother of her young daughters, and also an unmedicated bipolar, a drug addict, and a liar. She was neither sinner, nor saint. She was a troubled human being who didn’t deserve to die. After the month long trial, I found the tremendous waste of her life stayed with me.”

Like other writers (both male and female), Moncrieff says she has “struggled for a long time to make sense of the constant violence against women and girls in our society, and its far-reaching and life-altering consequences.

“I usually feel powerless to do anything, except to try not thinking about it—which is awful in its own way. So I wanted to make a film that dealt, in part, with the consequences of violence. There have occasionally been comments made about the darkness in my films. But the reality of the lives of victims of violent crimes make my movies look downright sunny.”

“I go to the movies to be moved and touched. And pushed off my center in a way, so that I leave the theater thinking about what I’ve just experienced. Most of us walk around from day to day with some sense of numbness and isolation.

“Especially when we read in the paper about people relegated to descriptions like ‘the dead girl’ or ‘the wife of a serial killer’ or ‘the sister of the missing girl.’ If someone leaves the theater after seeing The Dead Girl with a heightened awareness of what the lives of those people might be like, or they’ve had an emotional experience that fosters a greater sense of connection, then I’ll be satisfied.”

[From The Dead Girl Interview with Karen Moncrieff, CelebrityWonder.]

Both inner and outer dark emotions when creating

As a “coach for writers, entrepreneurs and other creative types,” Cynthia Morris, CPCC says, “It would be nice to believe that the life of a creative person is one long, happy adventure. But despite the freedom and satisfaction that can come from working as a creative professional, it’s not all fun.

‘It’s not always sunny, and frankly, it can get pretty dark in there. But I do find that acknowledging the darker emotions inherent to the creative process helps my clients cope with them.”

From her article Develop your creativity by dealing with ‘negative’ realities.

Psychologist Stephen Diamond, PhD also notes that creativity may be a powerful and often dark endeavor: “The more conflict, the more rage, the more anxiety there is, the more the inner necessity to create. We must also bear in mind that gifted individuals, those with a genius (incidentally, genius was the Latin word for daimon, the basis of the daimonic concept) for certain things, feel this inner necessity even more intensely, and in some respects experience and give voice not only to their own demons but the collective daimonic as well.”

[From my interview with him: The Psychology of Creativity.]

~ ~

“I started out as a painter, and then painting led to cinema… Then cinema led to so many different areas…” David Lynch

In her book, Mary-Elaine Jacobsen quotes some insightful comments by Annemarie Roeper (founder of the Roeper School and The Roeper Review, a professional journal on the gifted) about the intense inner pressure to create as a characteristic of high ability people:

“Gifted adults may be overwhelmed by the pressure of their own creativity. The gifted derive enormous satisfaction from the creative process.

“Much has been written about this process: how it works, the pressure of the inner agenda, the different phases it involves, the excitement and anxiety that comes with it, and the role played by the unconscious.”

She adds, “I believe the whole process is accompanied by a feeling of aliveness, of power, of capability, of enormous relief and of transcendence of the limits of our own body and soul. The ‘unique self’ flows into the world outside. It is like giving birth.

“Creative expression derives directly from the unique Self of the creator, and its activation brings inherent feelings of happiness and aliveness, even though they may be accompanied by less positive emotions, such as sadness, fear, and pain…

“Just as the creative process creates a feeling of happiness, the greatest unhappiness can occur if it is interfered with or not allowed to happen. In that case the inner pressure cannot be released.”

Jacobsen notes, “Beyond producing objects of value, the gifted create for the sole purpose of creative expression. They need to create and are rejuvenated by it. They often do so whether someone asks them to or not, regardless of payment or recognition, chiefly because they enjoy solving their own puzzles independent of external influence.”

From The Gifted Adult: A Revolutionary Guide for Liberating Everyday Genius, by Mary-Elaine Jacobsen, PsyD.

David Lynch is one well-known example of a multitalented creator, and has commented about being a creative polymath: “I started out as a painter, and then painting led to cinema… Then cinema led to so many different areas—it led to still photography, music . . . Furniture is also a big love of mine. I started building these kind of sculptural lamps. Then I got into lithography… And I’ve always been painting along the way, as well as doing drawings and watercolors . . . There are just so many things out there for us to do.”

[From Interview magazine - quoted on my Facebook/TalentDevelop page.]

Creative passion and intensity can be part of a complex blend of emotions for many creative people, with strong impacts on emotional and spiritual balance, vulnerability to anxiety and depression, disruptions in relationships and more.

The photo is Charlton Heston as Michelangelo in The Agony and the Ecstasy (1965) – from my post Agitation or Not – Eric Maisel on Calm and Creativity.

Of course many creative people do not have the level of fame of a David Lynch or Michelangelo or Madonna – but can still experience the kinds of intensities and pressures that often accompany being gifted.

And creators are often solo entrepreneurs developing creative projects in small home offices, like the image at top from a Right-Brain Business Plan page of Artizen Coaching, founded by Jennifer Lee.

Learn more about her free Right-Brainers in Business Video Summit, with multiple presentations on being a creative entrepreneur and “connected to your creative gifts but struggling with the nuts and bolts of business.”

~~

“I love breaking the myth of the starving artist. That is such a lie that people tell artists from the day they are born, and it’s so sad that so many artists psych themselves out with this myth.”

Musician Magdalen Hsu-Li continues, “There is always a way to make a great living from music or any art form if you are willing to use your creativity to the business aspect.

“People think that creativity should only be in art and the business should be in business. But the most successful business people use their intuition and creativity to problem solve and figure out how to make things work.”

[From MusicDish interview by Steven Digman.]

She founded her own company ChickPop Records. The photo is from her album Fire.

This notion of the starving artist can affect us in many ways, even providing a “reason” why someone will not invest any time of energy into pursuing a creative interest because “only big stars make money” or another self-limiting belief like that.

In his post in his post Twelve Things You Were Not Taught in School About Creative Thinking, Michael Michalko writes about a number of attitudes and viewpoints that can affect how we engage in creative thinking and creative expression.

One of his comments: “The artist is not a special person… Every one of us is born a creative, spontaneous thinker. The only difference between people who are creative and people who are not is a simple belief. Creative people believe they are creative. People who believe they are not creative, are not. Once you have a particular identity and set of beliefs about yourself, you become interested in seeking out the skills needed to express your identity and beliefs. This is why people who believe they are creative become creative. If you believe you are not creative, then there is no need to learn how to become creative and you don’t.”

Michael Michalko is the author of a number of books including Creative Thinkering: Putting your Imagination to Work.

But it goes beyond just believing you are creative – or not.

For example, how much do you compare your creative ambitions to the renowned accomplishments of name brand artists? If you like composing, do you disparage your level and quality of music writing if it isn’t at the level of a Mozart or a Leonard Cohen? Do you categorize yourself or other creative people in an either-or way: either wildly successful, or unsuccessful?

In her post “Starving Artist, Meet Web 2.0,” Emilie Wapnick writes about a “very talented guitarist” who was feeling very discouraged about his hunt for a job: “At this point, I’m willing to take any job that I don’t completely hate and I’ll just play music on the side.”

Wapnick comments: “All you want is to make art, and instead here you are running around, trying to get the corporate world’s attention, tweaking résumés, shouting ‘pick me! pick me!’ to faceless corporations who see you as nothing more than an interchangeable cog in the machine. That sense of powerlessness is enough to make anyone feel bitter and worthless. And has the life of an artist not always been marked by the romantic notion of struggle, famine, and hardship?”

But, she continues, “Okay look, I don’t mean to be harsh, but Starving Artist, would you please get with the times?! You may have had to ‘sell out or starve’ in the past, but a lot has changed in recent years. For example:

“No more are the days when you must carry around slides of your paintings from gallery to gallery in order to get a public viewing.

“No more must you send your manuscript from publisher to publisher in order to get your novel into the hands of the public.

“No more do record labels decide which music gets heard and which doesn’t.

“The gatekeepers have toppled over, and guess what? You no longer need anyone’s permission to ‘make it.’

“Thanks to widespread access to the internet and new, affordable technology, the power that these exclusive gatekeepers once had – that is, the power of distribution – is now yours.”

Emilie Wapnick is author of the program Renaissance Business – make your multipotentiality your day job.

Of course, being an artist entrepreneur requires changes in attitudes, and adding or refining work priorities and activities.

If you create a painting, you may not be in the position of having a gallery waiting to buy it and market it for you.

You may need to be creative about other ways to market your work, and even develop other products to express your creative ideas and knowledge.

In her article “Combine multiple talents to become a successful artist,” Andrea Kay addresses possible attitudes about being creative.

“So you want to make music, act, produce films, design fashion, dance or write movies?,” she writes.

“No sweat. That is, if you tweak your thinking a bit. That includes eliminating the term ‘starving artist’ from your vocabulary.

“For one thing, if you think that’s what you’re getting into when you pursue a creative career, well, that’s what you’ll get. Just as predictable is the possibility for success if you can envision a wider path…”

From my post Marketing Yourself And Your Creative Work: Don’t They Deserve a Wider Audience? – which has references to more articles and programs about being an entrepreneur and making money from your creative work.

Also see a related post: Creativity and Commerce.

Pumpkin carver photo from article Want to Work for Yourself? Those Dream Jobs Don’t Just Happen, They’re Created, by Valerie Young.

Multiple Forms of Expression

One example of a creative polymath or “multipotentialite” (Emilie Wapnick’s term) is Viggo Mortensen – an actor, writer, musician, poet, photographer and painter.

He has commented, “Photography, painting or poetry – those are just extensions of me, how I perceive things, they are my way of communicating.”

From my post Viggo Mortensen: “Why just one thing?”

That is also a quote I used in my book Developing Multiple Talents – The personal side of creative expression.
[Website]     [Facebook]

[Photo: Street Painter, by pedrosimoes7 - from my post Artists are Crazy; Mothers Can't Be Artists, and Other Myths.]

A final quote:

“But starvation, unfortunately, didn’t improve art. It only hindered it. A man’s soul was rooted in his stomach. A man could write much better after eating a porterhouse steak and drinking a pint of whiskey than he could ever write after eating a nickel candy bar. The myth of the starving artist was a hoax.”
- Charles Bukowski, Factotum (1975)

So Yong Kim

In an interview, she talks about a number of aspects of developing her script and shooting the film – aspects of creative expression that impact other artists as well.

Like many creative and talented people, she purposely seeks challenge and difficulty:

“I think it’s surprising for people because I did two Korean language films, and suddenly I’m doing this film with actors and cast that are white and named. But the decision was because I felt, I can do a film in Korean, I want to do a film in English.

“I speak English, why not? And it’s so much fun and freeing somehow. As an independent filmmaker, I think if I made another Korean language film it’s like ‘yeah, of course she can do that.’ It’s like challenging for me to use different colors in the pallet.”

In a previous post – Developing Creativity in Solitude – I addressed creating alone versus in collaboration. Directing a movie, of course, is a very collaborative endeavor, but Kim says writing the script was solitary.

“I never send my script or writing to anybody until it’s completely ready. I don’t talk about it with my husband either really. I keep a tight lid as to what I’m doing…I think he was really surprised. But no, for me it’s very internal. I want to, you know, protect the baby. Protect the film as long as I can.”

Her husband is filmmaker Bradley Rust Gray, and she also does not give him input on his scripts, at least “not until he’s ready. Not until he’s done. And likewise. I think that’s because we feel that you know when you’re writing, these characters are so fragile. Like any slight comment could affect the characters so much.

“So we really try not to attack the idea, or the concept, or the development of the character. And I feel that more so than Brad I think, although he really doesn’t want me to know anything about his script until the first reading. So I don’t know, we do that to have some boundaries. Otherwise we wouldn’t be able to be married, have kids, work together and have a good friendship going.”

The movie is about a struggling musician (Paul Dano) who is fighting his estranged wife (Jena Malone) for custody of their young daughter.

Kim says one of her challenges in writing Dano’s character was that it was so personal.

“I think the scariest part about the writing of the character was not the fact that he was male but it was more that the most terrifying thing about this character is that he has so many traits of myself. That’s the most embarrassing thing I’ve seen on screen.”

She said the film was challenging because she “really had to go into these parts of myself that are really unlikeable. That’s difficult for me to face.”

She also praises actor Dano for his input while making the movie.

“Everything seemed very organic once Paul came on board, everything kind of fit into place. I’m really grateful for that collaboration, because Paul is a great cinephile, and he’s seen so many films, and he has a great language of cinema, so it was for me a great learning experience because I also learned from the way he worked.”

Quotes from article: So Yong Kim Discusses Her Collaboration With Paul Dano & Battling The Freezing Winter In ‘For Ellen’ by Cory Everett, Indiewire January 25, 2012.

Kim has the advantage in this movie and a couple of others of being both screenwriter and director. Many screenwriters have to labor a long time on story ideas that may be very personal for them, with little or no assurance their work will ever be made into a movie.

Dennis Palumbo, MFT, is a former screenwriter, now licensed psychotherapist specializing in creative issues.

He says, “You’re very powerless as a screenwriter. And what happens – and it’s a subtle change, but I think it’s the one that most mature writers go through – is the gratification becomes personal… the process of writing becomes its own reward… you tell the story the way you want to tell the story, and then hope for the best.”

From my Inner Writer post Therapist Dennis Palumbo on the Writer’s Inner Life.

His book: Writing from the Inside Out: Transforming Your Psychological Blocks to Release the Writer Within.

Many writers and other artists realize how valuable it can be to explore and make use of depth psychology concepts such as archetypes and the shadow self, both for creating characters and for exploring themselves as people and artists.

Psychologist Carl Jung developed ideas about exploring and using our personal shadow – “the negative side of the personality, the sum of all those unpleasant qualities we like to hide, together with the insufficiently developed functions and the contents of the personal unconscious.”

He said the shadow “also displays a number of good qualities such as normal instincts, appropriate reactions, realistic insights, creative impulses, etc.”

Director and screenwriter Wes Craven said that during the years while writing his movie “A Nightmare on Elm Street” (1984 – the photo is from a scene), he was reading “a lot of Eastern sort of esoteric knowledge. There’s a Russian philosopher who wrote about levels of consciousness and equated consciousness with being awake.”

Craven adds that the hero – an archetypal figure – is “the person that remains conscious, remains awake, up to the point where it’s so painful you want to kill yourself. Most people, if they get near that level, turn around and go the other way; some people actually kill themselves, and some people break through to a sort of clarity where they’re truly conscious. That became the framework for the film.”

From my post: Archetypes for Writers: Developing Complex Characters.

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Do you think of creative expression as something more “spiritual” or “pure” than sales or business?

The photo – “Artist at work” by Balaji Dutt – reflects how many creative people typically work: engrossed, and happily solitary.

We may see and read about many examples of successful – even extravagantly successful – artists, but they are usually celebrities, and mostly not solitary creative workers.

There is not much media attention on the millions of creative people with careers in film production, book cover illustration, fashion design, video game creation and so many other creative occupations – many of them often working as entrepreneurs, responsible for their own achievement and success.

Many creators probably don’t think much about the value of marketing to get their ideas and creations out to a wider audience, to have more impact and success.

It’s something I’m thinking about more, with a new year commencing, and a continuing need to create income – especially as I don’t get paid directly for any of the research and writing of my blog posts here and on other sites.

Combine multiple talents

In her article Combine multiple talents to become a successful artist, Andrea Kay addresses possible attitudes about being creative.

“So you want to make music, act, produce films, design fashion, dance or write movies?,” she writes. “No sweat. That is, if you tweak your thinking a bit.

“That includes eliminating the term ‘starving artist’ from your vocabulary. For one thing, if you think that’s what you’re getting into when you pursue a creative career, well, that’s what you’ll get. Just as predictable is the possibility for success if you can envision a wider path – not limiting yourself to a particular title and, you’ve got them, combining multiple talents.”

She cites the example of Nick Radina, who “plays guitar, cuatro and percussion and is also a singer, composer, band leader, sound engineer and public-relations master. He wears all these hats to be a successful musician.”

“It’s not just how well you play your instrument, it’s about treating your career like a business,” he says.

Kay comments, “Musicians in particular understand the advantage of combining multiple talents. A professional musician might be a composer, performer, teacher and an arranger, says Elaina Loveland in her book Creative Careers: Paths for Aspiring Actors, Artists, Dancers, Musicians and Writers.”

Andrea Kay is author of Life’s a Bitch and Then You Change Careers: 9 Steps to Get You Out of Your Funk & on to Your Future.

Taking charge

Especially in the current economy, you may need to be more proactive about promoting your creative work – and yourself.

There are many ways to realize an income from your creative interests.

Valerie Young points to a number of ideas on her site Changing Course, and in her articles such as Want to Work for Yourself? Those Dream Jobs Don’t Just Happen, They’re Created, in which she mentions a speaker at a Rotary Club meeting who “had to cut his presentation short because he was being flown down to Disneyland to carve elaborate Halloween pumpkins for the park festivities.” The various Disney Company entities hire many thousands of creative people.

Art careers consultant and author Alyson Stanfield writes in a recent post (“You Are in Charge”) on her site ArtBizCoach about how important attitudes are for successful artists.

“There are six principles of no-excuse art marketing that guide my teaching and my book. The first principle, I believe, is the most important. It states:

“You are in charge of your career. You have control over words, prices, artwork, and your image. People will take as much from you as you give them, so guard this power to remain in charge of your destiny. Accept 100% responsibility for your actions and make no excuses.

“It might seem as though your power is in the hands of galleries, curators, granting agencies, collectors . . . anyone but you! But all of these people have only as much power over you as you give them.”

She quotes from the book The Success Principles, by Jack Canfield:

“You only have control over three things in your life – the thoughts you think, the images you visualize, and the actions you take (your behavior). How you use these three things determines everything you experience. If you don’t like what you are producing and experiencing, you have to change your responses. Change your negative thoughts to positive ones. Change what you daydream about. Change your habits. Change what you read. Change your friends. Change how you talk.”

Better business skills for more success

Elia Woods, an Oklahoma City artist, has worked with Alyson Stanfield, consulting by phone and e-mail on how to develop her business plan and market her fiber art and glass earrings.

“As an artist, my weak areas were marketing and the business aspect of selling my artwork,” Woods said. “I have put a lot of energy into learning my artistic skills but not a lot into the business side.”

Woods said working with Stanfield was hard because it made a lot of work for her and took time away from creating art.

The effort was worth it, however, because it has helped her get her work into local and national exhibits and her jewelry is now selling at stores in the state and nationwide. Stanfield also helped her design a brochure that landed her a teaching spot at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art.

“Marketing to me was terrifying,” Woods said, “But Alyson was very positive and very enjoyable to work with.”

From my Inner Entrepreneur post Business Success for Artists – ArtBizCoach Programs.

Learn more about Stanfield’s programs for artists – including her book “I’d Rather Be in the Studio!” – at her site ArtBizCoach.

Not even thinking about an audience

In one of her posts [The Eternal Battle between Art and Marketing (and Why the two Needn’t be at War)] on her site, Emilie Wapnick reports part of a conversation she had with Scott, a photographer, who admitted he has “trouble marketing my stuff. I like creating art for me. I don’t want to even think about appealing to an audience.”

Wapnick replied that she understood, and said, “But creativity and marketing don’t need to be two separate things. The key is finding a motivation or theme behind your work– something that is both personal for you, and resonates with other people. Then you express that theme and allow your work to stand as an example of it.”

She wanted to post about this conversation because she thinks “it represents a really commonly held belief held by artists: that art and marketing need to be separate and distinct, and that art is this creative and beautiful activity, while marketing is about selling or changing your vision to be more commercially appealing.

“This idea may have been true in the past, but the face of marketing has changed radically in the last five years.”

She adds, “It’s important not to see marketing as an altering or dumbing down your vision. Instead, see it as an opportunity to better communicate the meaning of your work and touch more people.”

She notes that she goes into these ideas “in depth and provides a number of exercises to help you find your overarching theme” in her book Renaissance Business.

Another site with programs and products for creative entrepreneurs is Artizen Coaching by Jennifer Lee. One of her courses is The Right-Brain Business Plan. Visit the site and click “About” for her free newsletter.

Also see the site for the 6th Annual smARTist Telesummit 2012
- “The Professional Development and Career Conference for Visual Artists” – January 26 thru Feb 3.

See many more ideas in the list of Articles for entrepreneurs and on my site The Inner Entrepreneur.

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Do we get more creative with more intelligence? How do intelligence and creative ability interact?

Dean Keith Simonton, PhD thinks “Intelligence is purely a cognitive construct. Creativity on the other hand, I see as being much more complex.”

Like other writers on creativity, he makes a distinction between “little c creativity” and “big C creativity.”

He says creativity in everyday life, solving everyday problems, or “little c creativity,” “is very closely related to intelligence because intelligence includes, as part of it, problem-solving abilities.

But, he adds, “when you are talking about ‘big C creativity,’ you’re talking about being able to generate new ideas, generate some kind of product that’s going to have some kind of impression on other people…a poem, a patent, a short story, a journal article or whatever.

“But it’s something that is a concrete, discrete product that is original and serves some kind of adaptive function.

“And that kind of creativity, that big c creativity, involves a whole bunch of other characteristics besides intelligence.”

From his article On creativity and intelligence.

Dean Keith Simonton, PhD is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Psychology, University of California, Davis. His expertise includes genius, creativity, leadership, and aesthetics – the cognitive, personal, developmental, social, and cultural factors behind eminence, giftedness, and talent in science, philosophy, literature, music, art, cinema, and politics.

One of his books: Origins of Genius: Darwinian Perspectives on Creativity.

Smart yet naive

In his article The Creative Personality: Ten paradoxical traits of the creative personality, 

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi writes that “Creative people combine playfulness and discipline, or responsibility and irresponsibility” and also that “Creative people tend to be smart yet naive at the same time.”

He says that “a core of general intelligence is high among people who make important creative contributions,” but according to the studies of Lewis Terman, “after a certain point IQ does not seem to be correlated with superior performance in real life” – including level of creativity.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, PhD,  (pronounced me-high chick-sent-me-high) is author of a number of books including Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention.

Evolutionary psychologist Nigel Barber notes “some of the most creative people in the world are not all that bright in terms of being capable of scoring high on IQ tests. High Iq may be necessary for creativity but it is not sufficient.”

One example he gives is Mozart, who “had a lifelong fondness for garish costumes and the grossest of bathroom humor. In the movie Amadeus, he was depicted as giddy and immature. His defenders refuse to admit that the one of the most accomplished composers who ever lived could have had a trivial intellect.

“But people with Williams syndrome may have incredible musical facility and still be intellectually incapable of tying their shoes.”

Another famous creator Vincent Van Gogh “was considered dumb as a post by those who knew him. His neighbors even took to calling him The Caveman.”

From article Giftedness Doesn’t Guarantee Creative Achievement, by Nigel Barber, PhD.

More overlap

Professor Jonathan Wai, Professor, a psychologist, and research scientist at the Duke University Talent Identification Program, writes, “We know that intelligence is likely important for any field of creativity that requires a cognitive component or problem solving, but is it also important for areas in the arts?”

He notes that author Howard Gardner “once noted that he thought the individuals profiled in his excellent book Creating Minds (which included people from the arts) likely all had to have an IQ of at least 120 which indicates they were at least in the top 10% of ability.”

From article Steve Jobs Leveraged His Intelligence to More Effectively Create, by Jonathan Wai.

Book: Creating Minds: An Anatomy of Creativity as Seen Through the Lives of Freud, Einstein, Picasso, Stravinsky, Eliot, Graham, and Gandhi, By Howard E. Gardner.

In another article, Wai refers to research by Emily Nusbaum and Paul Silvia at the University of North Carolina Greensboro, which asks the question, “Are intelligence and creativity really so different?”

Wai says, “The authors point out that all of the major creativity textbooks contend that intelligence and creativity are essentially unrelated abilities.  However, Nusbaum and Silvia conclude based on their studies that ‘fluid and executive cognition is in fact central to creative thought.’

“Certainly there are facets of creativity that are different from intelligence and I am not saying creativity and intelligence are synonymous.

“Yet I think what these studies suggest is that there is probably more overlap between intelligence and creativity than we realize.”

He gives an example of a highly intelligent creator: Stefani Germanotta was identified as gifted in adolescence. We know her now as Lady Gaga.

From his article If You Are Creative, Are You Also Intelligent?

Photos from my articles:

Lady Gaga on identity and creative expression

Steve Jobs: Intensities and Overexcitabilities.

Related Creative Mind article: Boosted Cognition and Enhanced Creativity

See more material on my High Ability site, and in my articles database, under the category: High Ability – gifted/talented

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