It’s been a day of feeling tired. My own fault for not turning an audible story off, and then fall into silence and sleep. I have done research today, about the processes of the brain. It appears we know just so much of how it works, and people seem to be able to come up with a limited explanation about how it works. There are clues. So I am gathering clues that will help me frame “How the mind works during the creative process.” It is so like me to ask tough questions that I feel a need to find answers for!
The book? Super Summary. Study Guide: How The Mind Works by Steven Pinker. The title suggests I will find what I want, or at least a way to put it in words. What can I deduce so far? It won’t be easy he says. And if I am to back up my theory, I must read this. it is about behaviors we do and their complexities. What we do comes from an organized mind. “Understanding these behaviors involves having the mind consider itself.” I know what that feels like. I feel it is like stacking up pros and cons in a way. But only partly. I know that we experience life, and file away the results of what we experience to be used later. And I know the mind predicts what it calls up to be used. Pinker is adding to or affirming ideas. It is the affirming ideas I am after as well as adding to my information.
The mind simply works as it does, and it’s an amazing “thing” It tells the rest of our bodies what is needed and how to react in such complex ways. For example the act of seeing, Pinker writes “vision involves brightness of individual patterns in our field of vision, identifying boundaries between objects, somehow creating their three-dimensional impressions then identifying those objects to make sense of the world.” Well said! This and the fact it’s light that determines the color we see uniquely from our own eyes. Not everyone sees the same color. This interests me. I have a friend who sees colors differently out of each eye. Interesting.
The thing is the brain has to have a lot in its filing cabinet before we can use what’s in there! When we have no reference to something, we don’t make a connection. We live in a world that is full of data, and opportunities to fill that filing cabinet to brimming. It works, even if we don’t know just how.
Daniel Dennett is mentioned and he argues that humans live by a set of core rules and that we use them to “quietly reason the world about us.”
If all of these thoughts are true then and then since they are a part of who we are___we bring these things into our creative process in some form or way. My gut tells me so!
Unless we slow our minds down to think about the processes we use____then they are simply in the subconscious? Working in the background? And therefore we rely on them as instinctual parts of us. The braid predicts we make choices, and there we are? Freewill/choice?
Then are we caught up in the act of being led by our minds towards things by trusting in the self to do art or write? Create?
Anisette Studios & Shibui Fine Arts 