Creativity and Resilience
“No great thing is created suddenly, any more than a bunch of grapes or a fig. If you tell me that you desire a fig, I answer you that there must be time. Let it first blossom, then bear fruit, then ripen.”
–Epictetus (Phrygian-born Greek Stoic Philosopher, c.A.D.55- c.A.D.135)
I have written several articles about resilience, and I have begun to talk about some of the methods for developing psychological resilience and also some of the potential consequences of not developing this essential psychological strength.
I’d also like to share with you another aspect of resilience: it is essential ingredient of creativity and of innovation.
I’ve had a longstanding fascination with the creative process, and one of the most robust findings in the research on extraordinary creative achievement is that even the greatest performers in their fields seem to produce the same ratio of undistinguished works to notable ones through their careers. The great chess player wins more often than the average one, but only sometimes produces a truly great creation. Even the best engineers and scientists conduct many unsuccessful experiments. The stories are legion of artists who produce many paintings and works of music that never win recognition and may not even be much good. Many great actors, directors, cricketers and companies have a great many failures behind – and sometimes in front – of them.
Amongst the many attributes of the high achiever in each of these fields is a remarkable ability to bounce back, to detach from the apparent failure, to see it as an education, and to understand the importance of persistence and perseverance. To take a risk, to take a step back and to learn and adapt if at first it doesn’t succeed. This never means repeating the same strategies over and over again, it means being smart and not being fazed by failure
“Unless you are willing to try, fail miserable, and try again, success won’t happen.”
–Phillip Adams (Australian Broadcaster, Filmmaker, Archaeologist and Satirist, 1939-)
I was once working with a company that had just tried to launch a promising new medicine. The initial effort had been a flop and at the time that I became involved, the company had just fired the entire marketing team. Neither the company nor the recently departed team had had the chance to find out what had gone wrong and how to build something new and different. The new team had to start from scratch and, living in constant fear, was burning out at an astonishing rate. The real problem was the inflexibility of the company that was stifling creative solutions to problems. Once that was fixed, things began to improve very quickly.
If anyone ever says that they and the company never accepts failure, it is laudable but impractical.
It’s different if an enterprise fails because people are not pulling their weight; or failing to meet deadlines; or being overly rigid in interpreting rules or just goofing off. But if everyone is trying to help, learning, and being dynamic and flexible, then it’s best not to send them on their way, but instead to see how we can learn from a failure.
And the key for you personally and the key for your company is to learn to develop personal and corporate resilience. Then creative answers have the chance to start flowing.
“Results! Why, man, I have gotten a lot of results. I know several thousand things that won’t work.”
–Thomas Alva Edison (American Inventor, 1847-1931)
“No one succeeds without effort…. Those who succeed owe their success to their perseverance.”
–Ramana Maharshi (Indian Hindu Mystic and Spiritual Teacher, 1879-1950)
Critics and Creativity
“Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.”
–Albert Einstein (German-born American Physicist and, in 1921, Winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics, 1879-1955)
I have had the incredible privilege of knowing, working with, and sometimes sitting at the feet of more than one hundred of the greatest and most influential thinkers, scientists and spiritual leaders of the last fifty years. I have never been interested in listing them: many wish to retain their privacy, and it is much more important for you to get the message, rather than its origin.
It’s great if a Nobel Laureate or a fourteenth generation teacher transmits his or her insights and wisdom. Yet it remains our responsibility to use all our powers – emotional, intellectual and intuitive – to decide what is right for us. I have seen a T’ai Chi Ch’uan master forget the “form,” a “guru” who neglected the most fundamental part of his own teachings, and a Nobel Laureate misquote a study in which I was involved. Such things happen; it just means that we have to bring our own gifts to bear when we decide how to proceed. Some spiritual teachers deliberately throw in some misinformation to see if we are actually working with their material, and not just sitting passively and soaking it up like a sponge.
After all these years spent with these fine people and scores of complementary practitioners, athletes, musicians, opera singers and ballet dancers, all have told me the same thing: the more creative you are, the more you give the world, the stronger the negative reaction. It almost seems to be a law of nature, to stop anyone form rising too high.
Debate is great! Willful destruction never is. Gently pointing out errors or inconsistencies is one of the marvelous strengths of the Internet. Smashing things and people for fun seems singularly pointless! Think about all the people in the public eye, actors and performers, who have been built up only to be thrown down again.
I’ve always been a gossip magnet: it’s just one of those things that I’ve come to expect! Yet we recently had something totally bizarre: we received a number of odd messages from people with strange pseudonyms. One made the bizarre claim that I was going to die. Well, I guess that’s a safe prediction for anyone! But with thanks to this modern Cassandra I am not, in fact, even close! I practice what I preach. Experts who have looked at my biophysical and "energetic" profiles think that I’m going to be around for another fifty to seventy years. And I plan to use those years to do what I can for others: helping, guiding, teaching, encouraging and supporting. And as long as people find them helpful, I’m going to keep the blogs, articles, books and CDs coming!
As Mark Twain said:
“The report of my death was an exaggeration.”
And another wise person had this to say:
“Pay no attention to critics. No one ever erected a statue to a critic.”
Odd comments like those recently sent to me are a terrific gift: they help us to see how far we’ve come with one of the three great pillars of self-realization: detachment. The other two pillars are "Honesty of mind" and "Sincerity of spirit."
You must decide how far along you and I are with those!
Technorati tags: Creativity Criticism Detachment Cassandra
The Passing of the Crazy Diamond
You may have heard of the passing of Syd Barrett, one of the founding members and creative drivers of Pink Floyd. He was only 60 years old.
His extraordinary creativity is well known: his fingerprints were all over the early performances and albums, and he was a muse to a generation of performers. I remember everyone’s consternation as his behavior became progressively more erratic between 1967 and 1968. I was very young then, but we all loved the music.
Some blamed his psychological meltdown on his consumption of prodigious amounts of LSD and all manner of other trendy chemical amusement aids. But in hindsight, he was probably suffering from a psychotic illness, and he was either self-medicating, or the drugs pushed him over the edge. Without doing a full evaluation, I could not say for sure. Although it’s now a moot point, several things make me think that he had a psychotic illness:
1. His startling type of creativity before and in the early stages of his illness.
2. There are clues suggesting that he already had problems before become obviously unwell.
3. The chronicity of his problems are not at all like drug-induced psychosis. I saw a man in Australia who told me that all his years of psychosis were the result of a single “bad trip” in the 1960s. Unlikely.
4. He suffered for years from diabetes mellitus. Diabetes may be as much as twice as common in people suffering from schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, and also in their first-degree relatives. (England’s first chess grandmaster, Tony Miles, who sadly had a psychotic episode in the late 1980s, also struggled with diabetes for many years, and died at the age of only 46.)
Why does any of this matter now?
If you ever see a young person abusing drugs, be aware that it is not necessarily that he or she is being impulsive or has just fallen in with a bad crowd. It may be that they are self-medicating.
People with major mental illnesses are at increased risk of many other physical illnesses, not all of which are a result of poor lifestyle choices. If you in contact with someone struggling with mental illness, anything that you can do to help them look after their physical health is all to the good.
And finally, a favorite song of mine that was written about Syd. According to legend, by a strange coincidence he arrived at the Abbey Road studio un-announced, at very time that the song was being recorded. It was nice that he was well enough to come and listen.
Remember when you were young, you shone like the sun.
Shine on you crazy diamond.
Now there’s a look in your eyes, like black holes in the sky.
Shine on you crazy diamond.
You were caught on the cross fire of childhood and stardom,
blown on the steel breeze.
Come on you target for faraway laughter, come on you stranger,
you legend, you martyr, and shine!
You reached for the secret too soon, you cried for the moon.
Shine on you crazy diamond.
Threatened by shadows at night, and exposed in the light.
Shine on you crazy diamond.
Well you wore out your welcome with random precision,
rode on the steel breeze.
Come on you raver, you seer of visions, come on you painter,
you piper, you prisoner, and shine!
Technorati tags: Syd Barrett Pink Floyd Psychotic illness Diabetes mellitus Substance abuseSelf-medication
Neurogenesis 101
The great Spanish histologist and Nobel Prize winner in Physiology or Medicine, Santiago Ramón y Cajal, was probably the first modern scientist to say that neurons in the adult brain did not divide. In other words, humans are born with a finite number of brain cells and an individual cannot develop/grow/replicate new cells over the course of their adult lives. This is an axiom that underlies some parts of the stem-cell debate.
There is emerging research that seems to refute this notion. I have written a long article for my friends over at Psychiatric Resource Forum discussing the research indicating that humans may have the ability to produce new neurons in key regions of the brain throughout life, a process called neurogenesis. I also discuss what this means for field of psychiatry.
The concept of neurogenesis also engenders hope for the fields of personal and spiritual development. I will discuss these at a later date. I just wanted to link to this article because it provides (along with the links) a good primer on neurogenesis that will be helpful as I write new posts.
Technorati tags: neurogenesis, personal growth, Self Improvement
Unconscious Processing and Intuition
There is a very interesting paper in this week’s Journal Science. It is from a group working at the University of Amsterdam, and their findings are likely to turn one branch of psychology upside down. Let me explain the importance of this work, and how you can start to apply it in your own life.
What the researchers did was to divide their subjects into two groups. In the first experiment the subjects had to decide on a favorite car. One group used a conscious, intellectual reasoning approach and the other group was distracted with puzzles to keep their conscious minds busy before making the decision. When there were only four things to factor into the choice, the intellectuals did better. But when they had to choose on the basis of 12 factors the people using conscious decision-making did much worse than the people who had to make an immediate decision based on unconscious thought processes. In the second experiment shoppers were asked about their satisfaction with items that they had bought. People who bought on the basis of conscious deliberation were much happier with their choices of simple items, while the “unconscious” shoppers preferred their choices of more complex items.
Why is this so important? Since the Enlightenment, science has emphasized the benefits of conscious deliberation in decision-making, and has tended to look down on the whole notion of unconscious thought. Yet this study adds to the growing body of evidence that not only can people think unconsciously, but that for complex decisions, unconscious thought is actually superior. Conscious thought is like a bright torchlight that can only illuminate a few things at a time, and that can lead to some aspects of a problem being given undue attention.
This report supports something that many of us have been teaching for some time. Too much conscious deliberation can actually be counter-productive. Effective thinking needs us to get all the information necessary to make a decision. Then, if we are dealing with a simple decision use conscious thought. But if the decision is complex, it is best left to unconscious thought; in effect to sleep upon it. The answer then tends to appear very suddenly.
There is a secret about the way in which a great deal of progress is made: Most of the major advances in physics have come not from logical progression, but from mystical revelation: Albert Einstein and the theory of relativity, Max Planck and quantum theory, Erwin Schrödinger and wave mechanics, the list is a long one. The great Welsh mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell once said of Einstein, that the problem in understanding him was not a difficulty with his logic, but with Einstein’s imagination. He was able to let his mind go to places that others could not, and it came back with answers that nobody else could have conceived of. There is evidence that while most chess players spend virtually all of their time trying to calculate, strong players rely on unconscious processes for most of the game, and only calculate for short periods when their unconscious mind tells them too. There is even evidence from brain imaging studies that average players activate all the cognitive areas of the frontal lobes while playing, with some temporal lobe activity as they try to remember their lessons. By contrast, a chess master uses many regions of his brain at once, and only occasionally activates parts of his frontal lobes when calculation is required.
What this means for us is that we must not be afraid to turn complex problems over to our unconscious minds. I have also spent a great deal of time training people to get used to using their intuition, for this is really one aspect of what we are talking about here. In my book Healing, Meaning and Purpose, I have several sections on developing your intuition.
When you start learning to turn problems over to your unconscious mind, one of the most difficult things is to know when to trust it. So here are some tips:
1. Once you have an answer, now is the time to use your conscious mind to see if the answer that you’ve come up with makes sense.
2. Learn to trust yourself. That may take a little time, but if you have a problem with trusting yourself, you have something tangible to work on.
3. Always be certain that you are prepared to hear whatever answers you receive.
4. Use your intuition to evaluate your intuitions: does the answer “feel” right?
5. Don’t force the process: conscious deliberation follows a linear time scale, unconscious thinking does not; so let insights come in their own time.
6. Always promise yourself that you will take action on any decisions that you make. Your brain and mind will not likely be very cooperative if you ignore the fruits of your unconscious thinking!
“There is no such thing as a logical method of having new ideas…. Every great discovery contains an irrational element of creative intuition.” –Sir Karl Popper (Austrian-born British Philosopher, 1902-1994)
Creativity and Promiscuity
What do Lord Byron, Dylan Thomas and Pablo Picasso have in common? Not only were they all creative, they also had lively and probably exhausting sex lives. British researchers have recently found evidence that this connection may be no coincidence.
Daniel Nettle from the University of Newcastle upon Tyne and Helen Clegg of the Open University have spent some years examining the puzzle of schizophrenia. This is without doubt one of the most savage and distressing illness to afflict humanity. There is a heritable component, yet sufferers themselves often find it very hard to maintain relationships, have many physical illnesses and tend to have fewer children themselves. Yet the illness persists, and indeed appears to have become far more common in the middle of the 18th century, roughly coinciding with the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. The question then is whether some mild forms of the illness may have survival advantage. Theses investigators have been looking at some of the personality traits that may be predictive of schizophrenia. They found high rates of what is known as “Schizotypy” amongst the artists and poets.
The typical features of schizotypal personality disorder are:
1. Unusual experiences, including odd perceptions, magical thinking and sometimes hallucinations
2. Cognitive disorganization
3. Impulsivity
4. Non-conformity with regard to rules and social conventions
5. Often introverted, though some become overly sociable
People with schizotypal personality may develop schizophrenia symptoms if stressed, and they are found more commonly in the families of people with full-blown schizophrenia.
Psychologists have previously found that the creativity of professional artists and poets acts almost like a sexual magnetic, and it has long been thought that creative people are more likely to engage in increased sexual activity, but this research is the first to prove it. The average number of sexual partners for artists and poets was between four and ten, compared with three for non-creative types. Statistics also showed that the average number of sexual partners for both men and women rose in line with an increase in the amount of creative activity.
Links have been made before between bipolar disorder and creativity and also between creativity and schizotypy. An essential feature of creativity is the ability to put together unusual associations and ideas. In the schizotypal person who is creative, this is kept in balance, but in schizophrenia these association can become bizarre. Schizotypy tends to be associated with cognitive activation and sometimes greater sociability.
Apart from art and poetry, it is an open secret in the psychiatric community that several Nobel Prize-winning scientists have schizotypy, at least two have been diagnosed with schizophrenia, including John Nash of Beautiful Mind fame, and several famous Nobel Laureates have first-degree relatives with schizophrenia. The numbers are much higher than in the general population.
Some commentators have suggested that if you want to be lucky in love, perhaps you need to be more creative. We cannot all be a Byron or a Picasso, but I would suggest that injecting a little more creativity into your current relationships and if you are looking for new ones, being more open and creative about how and whom you meet, will likely make encounters more congenial for both of you.
Technorati tags: creativity, schizotypy, Picasso,
