# Fire in the Crucible ## Metadata * Author: [John Briggs](https://www.amazon.com/John-Briggs/e/B000APLTZA/ref=dp_byline_cont_ebooks_1) * ASIN: B007EF7V8I * ISBN: 0874775477 * Reference: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B007EF7V8I * [Kindle link](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I) ## Highlights Creators create in order to find some truth about life and we value them precisely because we see that they have found it and have bequeathed to us their mind-altering vision. — location: [212](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=212) ^ref-2910 --- the lives of great creators are importantly motivated or guided by some quest for truth, some vision, some inner spirit, like the voice of Socrates’ daemon, which he consulted when he was worried about going off in the wrong direction. — location: [219](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=219) ^ref-35425 --- Part 1 asks, What is creative vision and where does it come from? Part 2 discusses the standard equipment of genius such as talent, the ability to think profitably by means of contradictions, comparisons or images, and the necessity of the creator to interact with the forces of history. This part ends with a chapter considering whether a touch of madness is also a necessary part of the creative equipment. Part 3 traces some of the key movements involved in the lifelong process to create a particular work that shows genius, a magnum opus. — location: [259](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=259) ^ref-64652 --- The geniuses discussed in this book are, for the most part, women and men who have altered in some significant way our perception of a major field of human endeavor. — location: [265](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=265) ^ref-29244 --- A major objective of this book is to show how the combination of these ingredients—including such elements as vision, talent, absorption, courage, even history—together form a whole, integral process, — location: [280](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=280) ^ref-19181 --- The book also aims to review the fascinating new research being done into creativity, and to expose a number of myths about creative genius, — location: [282](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=282) ^ref-49092 --- The ability of someone to choose and arrange the details of their creative field guided by a vision is a major hallmark of a genius. — location: [318](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=318) ^ref-14310 --- Vision guides a great scientist fatefully toward those problems whose solution will eventually shatter the conventional wisdom of the day. — location: [320](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=320) ^ref-64480 --- Vision seems to make it possible for the creator to see things freshly and more deeply, not just by some clever permutation of the previous way of looking, but by coming up with a new way of looking. — location: [321](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=321) ^ref-5633 --- Probably from time to time nearly everyone has felt the rise of their unique vision into awareness—as nuances, as uncanny moments, as a fleetingly strong sense that a mix of different contours and feelings one has about the world must somehow go together. — location: [332](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=332) ^ref-8327 --- Holton has discerned that the work of scientific creativity is shaped by clusters of presuppositions and “gut” assumptions which each scientist has about the universe. He calls these gut assumptions “themata”: themes. — location: [443](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=443) ^ref-43382 --- most scientists doing what Thomas Kuhn has called “normal” science share basically the same set of underlying assumptions. Scientists who end up revolutionizing their fields appear to have a collection of themata at variance in some significant ways with the theme clusters held by most of their colleagues. — location: [450](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=450) ^ref-61041 --- The themata are central to scientific process because they are imposed “on your observations and they often tell you which kinds of experiments to try or not to try.” — location: [454](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=454) ^ref-57149 Similar to the concept of mental models. --- Man seeks for himself, in whatever manner is suitable for him, a simplified and lucid image of the world, and so to overcome the world of experience by striving to replace it to some extent by this image. — location: [481](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=481) ^ref-64790 --- Holton's point is that the scientists who were trying to master the rules of the cosmic puzzle were passionately committed to different sets of themata, so they had different visions that shaped their orientation. — location: [526](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=526) ^ref-51728 --- Holton calls these obstinately held constituents of the scientist's vision themata because they recur through history and the total number which have thus far appeared in science is really quite small—around one hundred, he believes. — location: [536](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=536) ^ref-28714 --- Great creators are different in the sense that they feel compelled to show the world that their themata in fact point to a hidden reality that people pursuing the consensual themata of the moment have failed to notice. — location: [547](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=547) ^ref-31139 --- from the outset truth is of vital importance to the creator. A creator doesn't want to deceive him- or herself, or anybody else. To avoid self-deception you need self-criticism. — location: [575](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=575) ^ref-60840 --- A screen memory is a recollection of an event that may not even have actually occurred. It's an image that has become a personal myth representing some significant early period in one's life and concealing unconscious drives and motivations. — location: [610](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=610) ^ref-30262 --- the half-awake, half-asleep moment remembered in the St. Ives nursery evidently contained an ambience, a nuance or subtle reality which was an endless source of inspiration for this genius of the English novel. She could return to it again and again from different angles and never exhaust it. — location: [638](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=638) ^ref-36776 --- Manuel believes that the emotional meaning of attraction for Newton accounted for the physicist's interest in magnetism and in the alchemic notion of sympathetic attraction, and that it gave him “his ardent religious longing for God the Father.” — location: [702](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=702) ^ref-55971 --- But Manuel's interpretation suggests that it was essentially the complex coloring, the powerful personal perfume enveloping these themata that drove Newton on. — location: [711](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=711) ^ref-51376 What if these themata or emotional themata are also what drive people to believe in less logical things orr tto myatycism by making them believe the confirmation off their themata as truth, has meaning. Or they see the themata everywhhere as a result "to the man with a hammer everything looks like a nail." --- Thoughts containing a similar nuance of feeling are filed together, even if they aren't logically or chronologically connected. — location: [790](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=790) ^ref-11895 --- “Thoughts are sort of like cartoons of reality,” LaViolette says. “Once formed they shape the way we perceive the world. When we look at a tree, we're filtering the stream of sense data through a stereotyped thought pattern, the pattern we're accustomed to. As a result, there's a lot of data there that never comes to our consciousness.” — location: [806](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=806) ^ref-28169 --- As these waveforms circulate through the Papez circuit and pass through the hippocampus, they evoke long-term memories having waveforms with similar nuance characteristics. — location: [858](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=858) ^ref-61580 --- LaViolette says, “It is good to tune into feelings before they get abstracted into a thought. People who can do this are able to directly tune into data of far greater complexity. Such sensitivity fosters creativity and the ability to see things in new ways.” — location: [910](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=910) ^ref-25583 --- In a similar way, LaViolette is saying, attention to nuance would power up the brain's loops that attend to nuance. — location: [963](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=963) ^ref-7228 --- Bergström's more than thirty years of primary research on brains and neuroanatomy have led him to believe that creativity lives at a threshold between neuroelectrical order and chaos. — location: [976](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=976) ^ref-41666 --- Bergström thinks that an illustration of this is the effect of alcohol on the brain. Alcohol depresses the information-generating capacity of the cortex. The random-generating capacity is therefore relatively higher. At low levels of alcohol intake people feel looser and more alive, wittier, more in touch with others, more open. — location: [1004](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=1004) ^ref-16255 --- Faraday, who made several major chemical and electrical discoveries, called the two sides of his creative mental activity “imagination” and “judgment.” One biographer reports that, in essays, “Faraday described imagination as akin to idle wool-gathering yielding pleasure but little else. Judgment, on the other hand, was what forced the mind to attend to its business and unravel twisted skeins of events — location: [1012](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=1012) ^ref-13615 --- The desire to achieve wholeness (or, to put it more precisely, the desire to reach the meeting place between the nuances of personal themata and universal laws) is synonymous, in the creator's mind, with a journey across the terrain of truth. — location: [1086](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=1086) ^ref-1451 --- From the eighteenth century through the twentieth century intellectual history records a growing uneasiness over absolute truths. — location: [1099](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=1099) ^ref-53015 --- Indeed, the drive to share the truth that (s)he sees is the heart's blood of every creator's vision. Why else would creators engage in the lifelong, often arduous struggle to mold a language for expressing creative insights that others can understand? — location: [1151](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=1151) ^ref-19803 --- Artists try to capture the truth of personally detected nuance by creating a context (a painting, poem, symphony) in which someone else may experience the truth, “see” it as Conrad says. — location: [1181](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=1181) ^ref-45999 --- Kuhn concluded, there are long periods when a certain way of looking at nature is explored. Then a revolution comes (science historians dispute Kuhn's contention of how quickly these revolutions happen) and a new way of looking at nature is explored. Kuhn calls these revolutions “paradigm shifts.” — location: [1189](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=1189) ^ref-51215 --- Philosopher Max Black has said worldview shifts occur when one metaphor or scientific model becomes exhausted. — location: [1193](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=1193) ^ref-54436 --- In the long run, scientific truths may prove no more absolute than the human truths discovered by Homer in The Iliad. — location: [1205](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=1205) ^ref-63031 --- Darwin wrote: “From earliest childhood on I have had the strongest desire to understand and to comprehend whatever I observed.” — location: [1217](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=1217) ^ref-5284 --- Holton speculates that an important aspect of a creator's psychology is a sense that (s)he is “chosen,” a special person assigned the task of unifying and revealing. — location: [1226](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=1226) ^ref-22740 --- A sense of chosenness goes hand in hand with a certain ambition, creative ambition it might be called because it focuses not so much on the attainment of money or fame as on achieving the “cosmical” task. — location: [1231](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=1231) ^ref-21119 --- All this suggests humility and conceit are in circular paradox. — location: [1255](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=1255) ^ref-5547 --- Darwin's struggle on the cross of the humility-conceit paradox indicates its connection to creators’ perfectionism and their desire for “more” (discussed in chapter 6 — location: [1262](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=1262) ^ref-53269 --- Holton agrees that for high-level creators, doing their work is at least figuratively “a matter of life and death.” Put another way, creators feel that they are not alive unless they can find their way into the cosmic center. — location: [1285](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=1285) ^ref-49071 --- René Descartes saw his work in the fields of geometry, optics, anatomy, theology, developing a universal language and perfecting the scientific method as a single creative endeavor. “He became less desirous of solving a particular problem than of finding the universal principle which lay behind all such problems,” says one Descartes scholar. — location: [1304](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=1304) ^ref-12434 --- Howard Gruber has shown that a common feature of the highly creative life is the development of what he calls a “network of enterprises,” projects and lines of thought that to the outsider might seem unrelated. However, in most cases these disparate projects appear to be aspects of an underlying unity, the prima materia the creator is trying to distill. — location: [1307](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=1307) ^ref-56479 --- “It has to do with the interests of the person. If you're interested in what is the nature of reality in the universe, these thoughts will be circulating more than in someone else's mind who's just concerned with lunch.” — location: [1317](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=1317) ^ref-42704 --- From all of this it is evident that the creator's task is very large. It is nothing less than the re-creation of the universe or, more precisely, finding or constructing a whole, integrated microcosm in order to reflect the whole macrocosm. — location: [1322](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=1322) ^ref-43778 --- The impression created by a great work of art is a little like the impact of peering through a microscope into a drop of pond water teaming with a life and structure that seems in a startling and thoroughly alien way to mirror the life and structure that we ourselves are immersed in at the other end of the eyepiece. — location: [1368](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=1368) ^ref-49472 --- A typical class of polarity stressed by biographers seems related to the creator's circular paradox of humility and conceit. — location: [1407](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=1407) ^ref-29058 --- Einstein was the “apostle of rationality,” yet insisted that to do serious work it was necessary to make unlogical (intuitive) leaps from experience to theory. He was simultaneously agnostic and deeply religious. — location: [1430](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=1430) ^ref-31972 --- “There's a high level of ambivalence in the personalities of creative people which fuels the creative process.” — location: [1462](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=1462) ^ref-35450 --- The life of Leonardo da Vinci, for example, was shot through with ambivalence. According to de Vinci's biographer, Antonina Vallentin, the great Renaissance artist-scientist had an “ambition to leave a lasting memory of his activities on earth,” which lived “side by side with his keen interest in research for its own sake. — location: [1465](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=1465) ^ref-22443 --- Vallentin explains that da Vinci's desire for perfection continually ran counter to his desire to immediately carry out a task; his ability to become totally absorbed in a project continually ran counter to his tendency to become deflected into other trains of thought by some detail. — location: [1473](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=1473) ^ref-64507 --- It's fair to say Beethoven's works are in important ways musical representations of the torrents of ambivalence he experienced. — location: [1529](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=1529) ^ref-51639 --- Getting him to make a decision to go anywhere was next to impossible. In the context of such extraordinary ambivalence surrounding even the most ordinary activities, it is interesting to hear Picasso describe his working process—an echo of da Vinci: — location: [1544](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=1544) ^ref-41631 --- A few years ago scientists found that when they presented people with conflicting or incongruous information, dyssynchronous brain waves, indicating alertness, appeared. The investigators concluded that conflict can be a source of drive which causes increased learning and attention. — location: [1620](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=1620) ^ref-51681 --- Ambivalence is derived from conflict and it arouses the brain. If the ambivalence in some area or context is not denied, suppressed or resolved but instead is “tolerated” it leads individuals to experience a state which Desy Safán-Gerard, a UCLA psychologist who is also a painter, described as “an enrichment in our appreciation of reality and ourselves.” — location: [1622](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=1622) ^ref-37879 --- Famed physiologist Claude Bernard said doubt is crucial because “those who have an excessive faith in their ideas are not well fitted to make discoveries.” — location: [1628](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=1628) ^ref-4810 --- He postulates that staying with that ambivalent movement (exercising negative capability) gives a creator access to great energy and insight into nuances usually obscured by our polarized patterns of thought. — location: [1658](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=1658) ^ref-10426 --- Contradictory feelings are experienced not as mere conflict or ambivalence, but as possibilities, potentials, mystery, openness. Omnivalence might be a better term. — location: [1707](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=1707) ^ref-32116 --- For irony, metaphor, humor—all undercut our fixed meanings, suddenly springing upon us the revelation that things which we have categorized emotionally as contraries and contrasts (grandes dames and slung food) are not so contrasting and contrary after all. — location: [1774](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=1774) ^ref-38367 --- “If you hold these opposites together, then you suspend thought and your mind must move to a new level. The suspension of thought allows an intelligence beyond thought to act. Then you can create a new form.” — location: [1782](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=1782) ^ref-23052 --- Ambivalence about life, sexuality, authority, money or anything else can undermine or cripple (as it usually does) or it can link to a wider questioning, sensitivity and exploration at the boundaries of the contraries that schematize our existence. — location: [1795](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=1795) ^ref-35946 --- It appears Darwin is near the core of what compels him to do his creative work. His emotional state and his cognitive quest for a simple explanation to nature's wildness have merged. — location: [1804](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=1804) ^ref-12547 --- His state is almost ambivalence about this chaos, but it is much more than that because it includes mystery and wonder—and negative capability. This capability is evident in his willingness to let the swarming wildness and his desire for simplicity remain suspended together until the “future.” — location: [1806](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=1806) ^ref-36324 Are people generally afraid of the chaos and uncertainty? Does this push them to force a simplistic model of reality onto the world, even if its not true, in order to feel safety or certainty? --- Shainberg thinks the dynamic contraries and the space between of omnivalence help the creator see the truth without judging or excusing it. — location: [1823](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=1823) ^ref-57637 --- For other creators, mystical beliefs or interests seem largely a spillover from the omnivalence in creative activity rather than a primary preoccupation informing the activity. — location: [1882](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=1882) ^ref-58091 --- Two of the fathers of quantum theory became fascinated by oriental mystical thought. Erwin Schrödinger believed our scientific view needed to be “amended, perhaps by a bit of blood transfusion from Eastern thought.” — location: [1886](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=1886) ^ref-912 --- The creator attempts to find for him- or herself and for others with whom (s)he shares the creation, the center of existence—however the creator defines that center, whether religiously, mystically, skeptically, scientifically, artistically, ritualistically. Whatever strikes us as “new” or “original” (even in a piece of conforming ritual art) is an inevitable by-product of this motivation. — location: [1953](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=1953) ^ref-52678 --- Doing easily what others find difficult is talent; doing what is impossible for talent is genius. —HENRI-FRÉDÉRIC AMIEL — location: [2027](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=2027) ^ref-8185 --- The scale in the next few chapters will be the special capacities of mind and motivation that are possessed by creative genius. — location: [2050](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=2050) ^ref-41700 --- In chapters 7 and 8 we will try to discern the psychology and biology of talent by looking at science's attempts to measure it and at the scientific studies being made of the extraordinary talent of prodigies. We'll also speculate about how talent is “mapped” in the brain. Chapter 9 will examine evidence for some unusual talents or turns of mind that geniuses seem to favor. Chapter 10 investigates a piece of the creative engine called the powers of concentration or absorption—a hallmark of genius. Chapter 11 suggests that the collision of a creator's talents and a vision with the forces of history may also be a faculty of genius. Finally, in chapter 12 we'll find out if the old cliché is true, that there is madness in genius. — location: [2064](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=2064) ^ref-14601 --- A more effective critique of IQ (at least among some educators and psychologists) has been its inability to predict very much about how well people do with their brains when they go out into the world and actually use them. — location: [2108](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=2108) ^ref-1561 Is this true? Very interesting if so. Apparently poincare scored very poorly --- Marian Diamond, a neuroanatomist at the University of California at Berkeley examined the embalmed remains of some of Einstein's frontal cortex and the inferior parietal regions, which she obtained thirty years after Einstein's death. Diamond compared these regions with tissue taken from eleven men who had died between the ages of forty-nine and eighty and were known to have had no brain damage. She learned that the seventy-six-year-old physicist who said he had no brain muscles did have statistically more glial cells in his parietal lobe. — location: [2137](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=2137) ^ref-63510 What are glial cells? how can we encourage growth of them? --- Variations in the hormone level in boys, Geschwind hypothesized, would result in a less developed left hemisphere and such brain activities as speech and handedness—normally located in the left side of the brain—would be sited in the right side of the brain. This would lead to left-handedness. It has been found that left-handed people have a much higher incidence of dyslexia, migraines, allergies, autoimmune disorders like arthritis—and talent in math. Lefthanders have also been discovered to have a larger corpus callosum, the area that joins the two halves of the brain. — location: [2153](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=2153) ^ref-5446 --- These examples illustrate many points, but one should be noted immediately. While prodigies are amazing, they are not creative geniuses, though occasionally a prodigy, like Mozart, may grow into one. — location: [2193](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=2193) ^ref-59119 --- “There has never been a child genius in the sense that there has never been a child who has fundamentally reorganized a highly demanding domain of knowledge and skill. Nor by any means have individuals who have produced works of genius all been prodigies.” Not genius itself, David Feldman believes, prodigy is an instance of pure and specialized talent; — location: [2197](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=2197) ^ref-40498 Talent is the ability to climb the mountain quickly, quicker than almost anyone else. Genius is realising there is an elevator that takes you there quicker. Talent is often content taking the same route because itts efficient. Genius finds a different way. Is this fair? not realy, since geniuses are also really talented. --- Feldman observes that prodigies seem only to occur in fields where there are well-defined steps for achieving mastery. — location: [2270](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=2270) ^ref-27182 --- Perhaps what is really the most extraordinary thing about prodigies is their ability to concentrate. Feldman says, “They all seem to have tremendous energy that they can focus on the task at hand. — location: [2278](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=2278) ^ref-55375 --- Csikszentmihalyi discovered that people enter an almost addicting state when they can “concentrate their attention on a limited stimulus field, forget personal problems, lose their sense of time and of themselves, feel competent and in control and have a sense of harmony and union with their surroundings.” — location: [2285](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=2285) ^ref-33591 --- “Flow is the best of life and that's part of it. But prodigies also keep going when things aren't working well, when it isn't flowing. And for them what they're doing is not just the best of life, it's all of life.” — location: [2295](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=2295) ^ref-3430 --- Bamberger speculates that musical prodigies often suffer a “mid-life” crisis when the developmental processes that occur during adolescence force them to analyze and conceptualize musical structure. Apparently many are unable to make this transition without a fatal loss of the sensory, perceptual, emotional contact with their instrument and the music. — location: [2343](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=2343) ^ref-23962 --- In the literature on prodigies, there is little indication that themata, nuance-laden ‘themes’, truth, omnivalence or the individual-universal equation are key elements in a prodigy's experience. — location: [2368](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=2368) ^ref-8953 --- Hollander's memory of becoming the notes of the music he was playing and Sartre's memory of discovering that in “writing I was existing,” might be an early step in that evolution. Both these prodigies went on to mature creative work. Most prodigies don't. We might put the difference this way: Prodigies commit themselves intensely to their talent; geniuses commit their talents intensely to their vision. — location: [2370](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=2370) ^ref-1734 --- with the prodigy “the early fit between talent and field is too good. For prodigies everything goes too well, in a way. For creativity things can't go that well. If this goes too well, then the person's going to be satisfied with things the way they are.” — location: [2373](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=2373) ^ref-33690 --- The site that represented the monkey's hand, for instance, was not in exactly the same place (though it was in the same general area) as that hand's site in another monkey. — location: [2447](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=2447) ^ref-30928 --- However, a statistical examination of the important contributions made by some four hundred mathematicians does not entirely validate this wisdom. There are numerous instances of creators who didn't make a significant contribution till they were past seventy. — location: [2521](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=2521) ^ref-30481 --- Great creators on the whole are “very conscious of the special skills they have and their special way of looking at things,” Gardner says. “But if they lack something they need, they will study to get it or look for somebody to collaborate with. They will look for artful dodges, for ways to solve the problem or fashion the product where they don't have to use that particular talent they don't have.” — location: [2633](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=2633) ^ref-62166 --- The mercurial distilling agent of genius also takes many forms. One is talent. Others might be called the creator’s “insight strategies.” Though researchers believe creators use these strategies extensively in their work, it is still not certain whether such capacities are inborn, inclinations of mind learned early, later mental distillations, the dynamical effects of talent or even talents themselves. — location: [2705](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=2705) ^ref-52613 --- It is “the creator’s ability to actively conceive of multiple opposites or antitheses simultaneously.” He calls this ability “janusian thinking” after the Roman god Janus who could look in many directions at the same time. — location: [2717](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=2717) ^ref-2396 This is a brilliant section. An ability to hold opposing thoughts, and not get married to one idea. --- The experimental results showed that the students who did creative things tended more often than the other students to respond to the words on the list with opposite words. — location: [2724](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=2724) ^ref-14552 --- Selective encoding might be described as a selective alertness related to the person’s whole creative enterprise. — location: [2830](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=2830) ^ref-62289 --- “Mathematicians,” Sternberg says, “tend to be selective combiners.” — location: [2835](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=2835) ^ref-65198 --- Arthur Koestler believed that the central act of creation is the mind bringing together two “habitually incompatible frames of reference.” — location: [2843](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=2843) ^ref-54583 --- Gruber, for one, takes strenuous issue with the creative flash approach and instead views creativity as a long pull punctuated by small insights that result in (and form) a constant shifting of frames of reference. Gruber thinks this gradual movement of thought can sometimes lead to an intense moment when weeks or years of work culminate suddenly. — location: [2854](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=2854) ^ref-45233 --- Images of wide scope are an important discovery in the study of creativity. They seem often to mark the first surfacing into a concrete form of the inchoate, emotional and sensory qualities of a creator’s vision; — location: [2933](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=2933) ^ref-4417 --- Gruber believes that the total number of images of wide scope developed by any individual creator is very small, perhaps four or five over a lifetime. In addition there may be between fifty and a hundred subsidiary images “that are used in the elaboration of these thematic organizers.” — location: [2940](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=2940) ^ref-56009 --- Bohm confides that all his life he felt he has been “following that image” of the electrons as like both the individual and society. — location: [2965](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=2965) ^ref-41285 --- Psychiatrist Rollo May claims that “absorption, being caught up in, wholly involved” in a work is the hallmark of the artist. Of the scientist, too. While Edison was working on inventing the phonograph, a blizzard swept across the east but the inventor spent days in his laboratory and didn't even know it was snowing until his wife sent a sleigh for him. William Hogarth, like Edison, insisted that “genius is nothing but labour and diligence.” Even the miraculous Bach said, “ceaseless work…analysis, reflection, writing much, endless self-correction, that is my secret.” Newton believed the successful solution to a problem lay in “thinking on it continually.” — location: [3016](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=3016) ^ref-56732 --- Conrad imposed crisis deadlines on his writing, a tactic that was clearly his way of enforcing an absorption in the work and wrenching himself from what he felt was his congenital “indolence.” — location: [3047](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=3047) ^ref-25657 --- Conrad was like many creators who complain of their own laziness, which they paradoxically associate with their absorption. In a moment of pique over the poor reception of his novels by the public, Faulkner wrote to his publisher, “I think now that I'll sell my typewriter and go to work—though God knows, it's a sacrilege to waste that talent for idleness which I possess.” — location: [3052](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=3052) ^ref-60894 --- Could it be that a creator experiences idleness or indolence so keenly because the creative state of mind seems indolent compared to the aggressive concentration of purposeful thought? — location: [3058](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=3058) ^ref-7510 --- By imagining themselves as basically lazy creators could also be spurring themselves to creative absorption. Feeling a constant need to jar themselves from their sulphuric laziness could be a way of forcing themselves to return again and again and again to the creative enterprise they are working on, keeping it always before them. — location: [3062](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=3062) ^ref-56035 --- If the creator isn't from circumstances that will carry him through during the long years it generally takes for the evolution of vision and its public acceptance and financial rewards (if they ever come), he must be prepared to live in poverty. — location: [3077](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=3077) ^ref-60438 --- A second apparent paradox of absorption has been pinpointed by Nobel prize biochemist Arthur Kornberg. A creator, Kornberg said, “needs intense motivation or focus, but he also needs a certain restlessness. That may sound like a contradiction.” — location: [3101](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=3101) ^ref-29664 --- Gruber calls the creator's wide interests his “network of enterprises” and thinks the network is an important indicator of creative absorption. A network of projects allows creative individuals to explore their visions from a number of different angles. Shifting back and forth among projects, they can pry loose insights that might have been otherwise impossible to obtain. The differing projects which are nonetheless intuitively united, help the creator move elements of data and insight around to create a new context of relationships, leading eventually to the expression of the creative vision. — location: [3108](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=3108) ^ref-41308 --- There is an inherent pretentiousness and overreaching in starting up all these enterprises. Thus da Vinci discovered to his despair in his last days, that a human lifetime wasn't long enough to bring all the projects of his network together into a coherent creative legacy. — location: [3117](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=3117) ^ref-12892 --- Creative restlessness goes quite well with the intense focus of absorption. Both are part of the willingness to put one's entire life at the service of the creative activity. — location: [3124](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=3124) ^ref-25805 --- Csikszentmihalyi's research on activities that produce an addictive sense of “flow” indicates that intense absorption has a fascinating quality: It is intrinsically rewarding. That is, activities that stimulate an absorption are carried on for their own sake, for the continued varied arousal they produce, rather than for the sake of some extrinsic pleasurable reward. — location: [3162](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=3162) ^ref-44676 --- The creative rating of those exposed to the extrinsic questionnaire dropped significantly, according to the judgment of twelve independent poets who read the poems. Amabile concludes, “The more complex the activity, the more it's hurt by extrinsic reward.” — location: [3175](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=3175) ^ref-52730 --- Various studies, including Gabon's, have suggested that first-born children—especially first-born sons—are more likely to become geniuses than their siblings. — location: [3187](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=3187) ^ref-57348 --- Other research points to a correlation between the early loss of a parent and genius. Among the geniuses we've followed here, Conrad, Newton, Beethoven and Woolf lost parents early in life. One study found that fully one-third of geniuses lost one parent by age ten, a much higher percentage than normal. Orphanhood may immerse the future genius in an intense uncertainty, which creative absorption could both compensate for and express. — location: [3191](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=3191) ^ref-35469 --- It involves looking at everything one wants to describe long enough, and attentively enough, to find in it some aspect that no one has yet seen or expressed. Everything contains some element of the unexplored because we are accustomed to use our eyes only with the memory of what other people before us have thought about the object we are looking at. — location: [3226](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=3226) ^ref-30656 --- The true creative courage may be in the daily, yearly living with that peculiar “dis-ease” and the demands it makes: among them, to keep the mind open, to let go of the known and follow the subtle shadows of nuance and omnivalence (vision), and to continue to do this despite the distracting seductions and disappointments of success, flattery, aspersion and neglect. — location: [3254](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=3254) ^ref-44398 --- “In creative people there are important disjunctions between the creative person and the domain. If things are too far apart, it can’t work, but the right kind of tension will push somebody into having a new understanding.” — location: [3358](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=3358) ^ref-43090 --- The themes of discreteness and continuum had become polarized within the historical context, creating a “paradigm crisis” that caught most scientists in the middle, choosing one side of those oppositions or the other. — location: [3370](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=3370) ^ref-55685 --- Simultaneous discoveries in science seem to indicate that the fires of the individual vision are considerably less important to the discovery process than the fires of the Zeitgeist. In this view, says University of California psychologist Dean Keith Simonton, “Individual creators must be little more than interchangeable agents.” Simonton examined this possibility using what are called “historiometric” methods and rejects it on several grounds. — location: [3454](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=3454) ^ref-32769 --- Bohm has proposed that subtle differences in the creative vision of scientists should be explored rather than ignored or homogenized by the scientific establishment. “We might find all sorts of interesting new things by going into these subtleties,” Bohm says. “The differences in views could be brought together creatively and this would lead to new insights.” — location: [3477](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=3477) ^ref-18829 --- Yearly, scientific evidence and press reports appear to add weight to the notion that in high-level talent, absorption and vision are a volatile combination which probably derives from a basic unsoundness in the genius mind. In one study of famous poets, 15 percent were deemed psychotic and said to exhibit some pathological symptoms. — location: [3570](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=3570) ^ref-64285 --- Between you and me, I suspect the belief in the connection of creativity and madness is riddled with confused assumptions. At bottom, these assumptions may be rooted in an uneasiness, even an aversion, in the human psyche. Conrad described it as an aversion to anything that seems truly different: — location: [3588](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=3588) ^ref-16281 --- Of course, the stereotype is that creative thinking and crazy thinking are akin because disturbed people and creative people both sometimes make bizarre associations. — location: [3614](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=3614) ^ref-13456 --- The psychotic denies the data. Creators because of their vision, suspend the data; they put it on hold. — location: [3654](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=3654) ^ref-17031 --- The psychotic is trying to make all the uncertainty into certainty. The creator integrates certainty and uncertainty. Creative work makes us aware of mysteries beyond mysteries, what you term omnivalence. Creativity is to desire to live and act from the omnivalent state. — location: [3657](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=3657) ^ref-40643 --- “First there’s the fact that in our society creative people are thought of as somewhat crazy, and we often don’t give them the recognition and decent livelihood we give people in other professions. This is particularly true for artists. That has an effect on the creator’s mental health. — location: [3673](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=3673) ^ref-11204 --- Could it be that by supporting the myth of the mad creator we have found a way to absolve ourselves of the uncertainty and omnivalence creators face? Asserting our desire to remain sane, we justify our timidity to engage in the long, arduous, and unusual process which creativity involves and from which genius sometimes springs. — location: [3712](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=3712) ^ref-50534 --- For the individual who will eventually be dubbed a genius, making the magnum opus requires assiduously applying the distilling agents—the mercury and sulphur of talent and absorption, insight and history—to the raw material of vision. — location: [3733](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=3733) ^ref-23677 --- “A powerful reinforcing process develops for the highly creative person: as he becomes more internally aligned, the results he creates in his life become more consistent with his personal purpose; this leads to deeper understanding of that purpose, clearer vision, and more commitment to his vision; and in turn, deeper alignment and creative capacity.” — location: [3740](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=3740) ^ref-20654 --- Germs are nexus points of vision and talent. We'll find out how creators harness the power of these germs, and we'll see how by unfolding and nourishing a germ the creator liberates and gives a concrete form to nuance. — location: [3748](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=3748) ^ref-51609 --- Whatever the crystallizing inspiration is, it reveals to creators that there is a direction to go in which they can express their deep sense of truth about life, a direction that feels more like them than anything they have previously done. — location: [3803](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=3803) ^ref-784 --- It's not unusual for the refining crystallizations to have a long incubation. Rene Descartes had rejected most of what he learned in school as a confused mass of knowledge that contained no method for organizing or making sense of it. At age twenty, he set himself the task of finding a true method of knowledge. After two years in seclusion thinking about the problem, he returned to society uncertain that his thoughts were in the right direction. Then one night while serving on military duty, he had a series of dreams. The dreams crystallized for him that he was indeed on the right track and revealed to him that it would be his destiny to unify the sciences, reform knowledge and search for truth. — location: [3826](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=3826) ^ref-19971 --- Stone encouraged Faulkner's poetry writing and introduced him to the French symbolists, Verlaine, Valery and Baudelaire. The works of these poets are characterized by intense longing and a perception that the physical world is symbolic of something more than itself. The symbolists also preached that everything in that world is intimately connected to everything else. — location: [3855](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=3855) ^ref-22399 Look into the work of these poets. --- Faulkner's story also shows that despite the occasional dramatic crystallization, a creator's development occurs in thousands of small acts, adjustments, insights and shiftings of perspective. It is like a pearl which may be started by something trivial, but accretes over time into a treasure. Gruber calls this pearl-making “constructing a point of view.” He says elegantly, that it's “the slow process by which the thinker constructs the mental circumstances of his own insights.” In his book Darwin on Man, Gruber depicts a several-year evolution of Darwin's point of view which was quite different from the evolution just described for Faulkner. That difference is precisely Gruber's message. Each creator's development, he believes, is unique and unpredictable. — location: [3887](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=3887) ^ref-50224 --- “We don't think in order to solve problems,” Gruber says, “we solve problems in order to help us construct the point of view we're moving toward.” There's also the complement of this: “The person evolves a special point of view within which to look at a problem.” — location: [3900](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=3900) ^ref-60633 --- Building a point of view means creating a context that unites the creator's amorphous inner vision with the outward requirements of the creative field and its audience. — location: [3906](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=3906) ^ref-31191 --- Generally a long time is required before the creator's context shifts enough for the magnum opus to emerge. Gruber estimates that a hardworking genius can expect at best one or two insights per day, maybe five hundred per year. To achieve this the creator must expend an apprenticeship in constant motion, developing insight strategies and learning to separate insight from opinion; finding and developing talents, turning deficits into talents; appropriating pathology to the creative task; making maps of maps in the brain to enrich synesthesia; composing and decomposing to learn the schema of the creative field (for example, young Richard Feynman decomposing radios to find out how circuits work); learning from mentors and models; getting a handle on personal creative working routines; developing the capacity for absorption; evolving images of wide scope and networks of enterprise. Cultivating the ability to think oppositionally would allow the creator to transform contexts quickly, breaking the currently operating mindset repeatedly to plumb the material from new angles, keeping open a negative capability. During the apprenticeship period, the different nuance themes (themata) link up and creators recognize the nuances of other works in the creative field as having both relevance and irrelevance to the personal creative purpose. Most importantly, throughout apprenticeship, creators develop what Einstein called the capacity for “self-criticism.” — location: [3927](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=3927) ^ref-37063 Description of the creative process and improving the ability to think creatively. --- Thomas Kuhn believes that in science an “essential tension” always exists between the traditional forms, dogmas and paradigms embodied in the great works of the past and the new view being proposed by a creator. That tension also exists in the creator. After all, it is the great works and forms of tradition which attracted the creator to the field in the first place. These exemplars instill in the creator a conservatism which monitors the wild flights of the grand attempt to re-create reality. Niels Bohr once expressed the essential tension by explaining that he regularly spent three days a week trying to imagine all the wild theories he could and another three days trying to disprove them. — location: [3937](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=3937) ^ref-23738 --- This essential tension involves playfulness; but it also involves pain. LaViolette says. “When you get an idea there's often this thrill of satisfaction and you tend to charge that very highly. It's easy to get trapped into thinking that that's the way things are. You have to be able to criticize your idea. That involves pain.” — location: [3942](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=3942) ^ref-4647 --- Of course, that other, deeper factor also contributes to the capacity for self-criticism—the desire for truth which is a primary ingredient in any great creator's vision. As painter Robert Motherwell says, creators are always struggling against self-deception. “It's not that the creative act and the critical act are simultaneous. It's more like you blurt something out and then analyze it. After each brush stroke, you're analyzing it. Is this stroke an authentic expression or not?” Here “authentic” means consistent with vision. If vision is to be expressed, the expression will have to be the truth, though it's going to be a different truth from the one traditionally accepted. — location: [3945](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=3945) ^ref-5231 --- Altogether the creator's constant motion to build a new point of view, to construct a new context, amounts to the formation of what Conrad called the “inward voice that decides.” The whole movement to evolve that inward voice entails linking feedback loops which join talent and vision, with the problem or material the creator is focusing on, with insight strategies, and with the tradition of the creative field. These interlocking loops, at a certain point (indicated in some creators by a “crystallizing” moment) interact to form what systems theorists call a “self-organizing structure.” — location: [3950](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=3950) ^ref-6261 The new world view forms as part of a self organizing structure which is the result of interactions and feedback loops between talent, insight strategies and traditions in the creative field. --- The alchemist could never tell what had caused the transmutation because all that he had done had caused it. Everything was part of the distillation, including those times when nothing seemed to change. — location: [3991](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=3991) ^ref-15514 --- Clustering related images and ideas is another tactic. A frequent approach among creators is to overload the brain with information about the problem until confusion sets in, then step away to a fresh environment. That's what Henri Poincare did when he was working on the problem of Fuchsian functions. His brain confounded, Poincare went on an excursion and forgot his mathematical work. Then as he was stepping onto an omnibus, the answer came. Poincare employed this “principle of forgetting” frequently when working on problems. It was a good tactic for him, but might not be for everybody. — location: [4029](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=4029) ^ref-65218 --- Creators are perhaps more aware of the subtle mechanisms of their own thought processes than most people are because it's only by taking maximum advantage of those subtleties that they can do their highly subtle, nuance-filled jobs. — location: [4045](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=4045) ^ref-56652 --- Van Gogh's sensitivity to his own creative process suggests we should put under the heading of idiosyncratic mental tactics the keen awareness individual creators have about how a piece generally unfolds for them. — location: [4052](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=4052) ^ref-15384 --- The ongoing absorption in the creative process also includes mechanisms creators develop and use regularly to organize different lines of creative inquiry, to provide a flow of germ material for creative rumination, and to keep themselves continually in the game of creating options and insights. — location: [4093](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=4093) ^ref-60739 --- Other creators accomplish a similar freestyle absorption with their work through such devices as writing letters (as Conrad did) or regularly meeting and discussing their creative activity with colleagues. — location: [4109](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=4109) ^ref-53679 --- In his well-known book Chase, Chance and Creativity, medical researcher James Austin proposes that there are four kinds of chance that figure into creative activity: 1) blind luck that doesn't depend on any personal characteristics by the recipient; 2) the good luck that comes from “persistence, willingness to experiment and explore”; 3) chance that occurs as a faint clue overlooked by everyone except the creator who, because of his training and experience, is prepared to notice it and grasp its significance (Fleming was the recipient of this brand of chance); and 4) chance that comes to people like Darwin reading Malthus or Archimedes discovering the principle of displacement. This type of chance occurs in the context of the creator's unique approach to life. — location: [4139](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=4139) ^ref-38384 --- When a mistake shows up, most people despair, give up or back down the rutty path again. But the creator seizes the mistake as a way to break out. A mistake may suddenly create a space between thoughts sunken into each other because the creator got mired in the details of some perception. Seizing upon the mistake, the mind suddenly bursts into the open and takes a new route toward vision. This approach to mistakes is very different from the one taken by our educational system which punishes mistakes, marks them wrong. This may well be one reason why creators as a group don't do well in school. — location: [4160](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=4160) ^ref-30405 --- But whether it involves adding, changing, or editing down to the seedlike material, the unfolding process is generally painstaking. Valery pointed out that a work may take months or years, only to pass through a reader's mind as a momentary shock. He said, “One may (very roughly, of course) compare this effect to the fall, in a few seconds, of a mass which has been carried up, piece by piece, to the top of a tower without regard to the time or the number of trips.” — location: [4269](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=4269) ^ref-35630 --- Stravinsky went on to say that the germs or foretastes occurred mostly by accident, “and the true creator may be recognized by his ability always to find about him, in the commonest and humblest thing, items worthy of note.” — location: [4473](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=4473) ^ref-50947 --- Van Gogh, according to Brower, moved from germ to completed expression by the following stages. He “painted a work in one session, perhaps in two or three hours. He didn't work from sketches. He most often had a conceptualization for a work [germ] and he would evolve a series of paintings for a particular subject, trying to get closer and closer” to approximate his germ. — location: [4475](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=4475) ^ref-61627 --- The painter, he said, must become hypnoatized “as though he were in a trance. He must stay as close as possible to his own inner world.…” — location: [4499](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=4499) ^ref-40289 --- Picasso's work on La Femme Fleur demonstrates that for him germ finding and germ unfolding were a circular paradox, for they were the same thing. — location: [4513](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=4513) ^ref-61242 --- In a famous letter, Mozart said that his musical germs came to him most often when he was alone, in a good mood, traveling in a carriage, walking, after dinner or late at night. Apparently, in these loose moments various bits of musical notions floated through his mind and some he recognized as having a germlike resonance, an omnivalence or nuance. Those, he said, “I retain in memory, and am accustomed to hum them to myself.” As he hummed, the “peculiarities of the various instruments,” “the rules of counterpoint” and other elements began to accumulate around the germ fragment and “provided I am not disturbed, my subject enlarges itself, becomes methodized and defined.” These early stages which ripened the germ and started it unfolding apparently took some time. During that time Mozart would work sporadically on several different germs he kept in his mind. When the germ reached a critical mass and he had gotten major elements of the composition to resonate together with the germ and form a context, he wrote the piece down. — location: [4560](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=4560) ^ref-10775 --- The current musical schemas, the variation schemas he had developed in his own previous compositions, and his musical images of wide scope such as his “law of growing animation”—all would have been so familiar to Mozart he would not have needed to agonize over them very much. Since in most cases a new piece was unlikely to stray very far from previous schemas, he had only to determine how far and in what way in order to have at his command most of the information he needed to “see” how the piece would develop. Significantly, whenever Mozart attempted a new musical genre, or when later in his career he attempted more complex transformations of the inner parts of his works, the master's creative method shows signs of struggle. There is evidence of laborious sketches, erasures and corrections—enough to make poor Salieri's plodding heart warm. — location: [4590](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=4590) ^ref-24189 --- The Sketchbooks show that Beethoven developed his musical seeds by crisscross routes, shifting and juggling context. Like Mozart, he was usually working on several pieces or parts of a piece simultaneously, or alternately. But unlike Mozart, he left a record of his mental process. Sometimes the pages of the Sketchbook which he left free for one composition or movement would get used up and the different composition or movement became intermingled (a converging network of enterprise), contributing to what one critic calls “the unity of his works, whether considered singly or in groups.” Even when he reached the scoring stage, the revision continued and he would score many times, crossing out and rejecting passages in a messy hand. But through all this activity, the germ remained central. — location: [4610](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=4610) ^ref-47070 --- The usual form of domestic collaboration is less dramatically symbiotic. Jesse Conrad's management of a household conducive to her husband's difficult temperament is typical. The domestic partner collaborates with the creator to create the conditions and foster the habits that make absorption and negative capability possible. — location: [4692](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=4692) ^ref-21752 --- Gruber says, “Creative people must use their skills to devise environments that foster their work. They invent new peer groups appropriate to their projects. Being creative means striking out in new directions and not accepting ready-made relationships.…” Each creator therefore invents new forms of collaboration. — location: [4767](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=4767) ^ref-40312 --- Gruber says that when he began the experiments he thought the collaboration would take place “like two astronomers taking a fix on the heavens from different positions, and they see the world in slightly different ways. They don't fight it out and they don't yield to each other. They take respectful advantage of the fact that one sees it from here and the other from there, and they put together a richer, more soundly based idea of what is really out there than either one could reach alone.” — location: [4781](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=4781) ^ref-25923 --- “The way that people retain their individuality while combining their efforts and talents in something that transcends them both—understanding that is vital to the survival of humanity.” — location: [4791](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=4791) ^ref-44433 --- Wolken believes technique is only useful when you need to solve a particular problem, get a particular effect; then you learn or invent the technique you need. I suspect a good many creators would agree with him. — location: [4883](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=4883) ^ref-17723 --- Creators ultimately don't care about genres or techniques or discipline except as these things can be used as instruments of vision. — location: [4909](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=4909) ^ref-28795 --- Perhaps this man wasn't as driven by the need to discover and express the truth of a hidden reality as he was driven by his image of becoming a literary genius. He spent six years—which is a long time—but he didn't spend his whole life. Later, he concluded he must have lacked the right genes, a special talent for language, the right personality type, or some other essential ingredient of creativity. But I believe he had all the ingredients for creativity. He just didn't distill them. — location: [4950](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=4950) ^ref-9597 No one should have the goal of becoming a creative agenius. It's out of your control. Have a goal to create a new perspective on reality and to convey it to others. Be a truth seeker, and if you discover something big enough you might be a creative genius in the eyes of others. --- But I think now we can see that as common as creativity is, the total commitment of a life to the expression of creative truth is extremely rare. This is because high-level creativity and genius is not a particular trait or flash here and there but a sustained way of life, a self-organizing structure. Though I'm convinced that everybody possesses what creative genius is based on, a unique perspective and moments of omnivalence, great creators are rare because most of us don't allow a creative self-organizing structure to form. Instead, we permit our omnivalence to fade and our unique perspective to become homogenized into the general cultural perspective. Our ideas, opinions, beliefs, ambitions become important to us. They become more important than our fleeting perceptions of something “more,” our unique but unformed vision which may at first seem only a subtle difference, a nuance, but can be a door into an immense, ultimately sharable, even universal way of seeing. Perhaps the secret of genius is simple. — location: [4956](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B007EF7V8I&location=4956) ^ref-61774 What if everyone can become a genius but few people allow themselves to focus on nuance and a unique perspective. It takes courage to be different and to have different opinions & beliefs than those around you. Maybe we should encourage that and be tolerant af differences. This would encourage anew worldview to creatively emerge. ---