A new study investigates the phenomenology of both creativity and mental illness, focusing on their similarities and facilitating effects on each other.
Thank you so much for this article. I live between the creative and the rational world as a musician and an educator. I’ve always been aware of the way different elements of my character come into play, depending on where my focus is at the time. You have given me a framework for understanding the ambiguities.
Hi Scott, I gobble up every newsletter. Thank you. This one felt profound to me for more reasons than I can share in this post. But one in particular - my daughter, Emma, is battling mightily with an eating disorder. She has yet to see her many gifts. So I pray a lot and love her with all of my Mom might. I recently participated in your SAC for coaches. Love your boat, your message, your depth of thought and research, and your heart. Someday, I would like to talk live and to share a few things I've created outside of academia to help people be a little more patient, kind, and humble and a little less of the opposite. Right now Im sharing the framework with a bunch of HS XC athletes. You betcha that Im going to weave your beautiful boat in with all of my favorite constructs. It helps to be living in a nautical place:) Thank you for helping me fall back in love with Maslow and humansim. I believe in the goodness of people. See it every day, even when (and maybe especially when) good intentions and impact don't align.
Although I feel as if Im being a bit of an "Evesdropper" listening-in, lol, I was struck in a positive way by your intention to "speak" live to others using what you've learned in hopes of inspiring them to display increased patience, kindness, humility, (7 perhaps along with more tolerance for others' diversities in a variety of capacities?).
I just think it's so exciting and wonderful you are already beginning to share the framework youve created witht he athletes & it appears your desire is to continue to expand upon your influence within the world in this manner. So, Great for you! And I hope you and I want to strongly encourage you to do so since it's positive efforts like yours that can definitely make a Huge difference in our world where its much needed, especially at a time such as this.
I'll have to check out the boat ananlogy as you've greatly peaked my interest as it just may be an anology I'd always like to seize the use of in future discussions with others whom, in my role as a counselor or otherwise, I'd to hope to inspire hope and support in their pursuit of personal growth &/or further healing. Take good care and wishing you all the best in your positive pursuits!! Carol
Thank you, Carol! Choose Growth (Scott and Jordan's latest book) is great for the sailboat and a ton of delicious research. And your work as a licensed counselor who cares deeply about connection and equity is invaluable. A dear friend and exceptional clinician was asking a very important question nearly 20 years ago - How do we get better results for people? Together with some other wonderful colleagues, we dove into the amazing, emerging science of the brain and began developing, testing, and refining a visual, translational framework that would be simple and memorable (and playful:) so it could be helpful to counselors, teachers, coaches, parents ... and taught to teens and young adults. For the HS XC athletes, we introduce the top-level tools and concepts in 5-minute lessons before practice and focus on what matters to them (how they can feel less anxious and perform better). With repetition, they are starting to share how they are creatively applying them at home and socially to relate with more love and less reactivity not only to others, but to themselves/ their inner world. It's mind-blowingly wonderful and they are my teachers.
"Creative Genius" often arises from an instability of cognitive coherence (caused by trauma, genes, ...). So she/he is forced into a process of ongoing coherence-making & meaning mapping. Mental Clarity & Coherence gives peace, it calms our subconscious because we tell our intuition that there is nothing further to process. In contrast, when there is the tension of coherence seeking, our subconscious is open & active in pattern recognition. Driven by an inherent tendency towards incoherence and balanced by high openness & intelligence (to stay grounded) as you wrote in another article :)
Both backstage and onstage, dancing, feeling the active delight, interacting lively with all the others dancing, portraying, sensing, laughing, nested in community, while even more ecstatically leaping or spinning as the musicians swell in predictable - because rehearsed - but vividly NEW moment, never before experienced.
It is identical, yet vastly different than demonstrating to kids, so that they will find themselves lifted in that similiar, but unique way, as they learn?
Once, transporting two young schizophrenics, one, a paranoid, described how he was feeling while huddling in the passenger footrest area, telling me how the lights, people, motion threw him into confusion, and he could feel.himself being transported into his imagination, a world of meanings that he at the moment still knew was not the coherent, plotting world he was imagining.
The other, in the back seat with the curious Wolf ( born captive, but having repeatedly escaped to me because i ALWAYS played as well as changed my life to share freedom not allowed by humans to domestics), ruminated on the events, watching as curiously as the inquisitive wolf.
They had clung together, the two young schizophrenics, completely trusting one another, making a whole, confident dyadic individual, able tl accept the big Wolf and me, speaking more intimately than any supposedly healthy girl or adult ever had or does.
What do i make of this? Some communal sense of pleasure encompassed us, and the journey reached the farmhouse shelter where one lived, and he exited in the warm night, surely fed, reinforced. A few miles, and the reservation where the other sheltered, was also imbued with home.
The Wolf and i traveled on, back to where we had met them. We walked for a while in the night, then lept in each other's sight.
Thank you so much for this article. I live between the creative and the rational world as a musician and an educator. I’ve always been aware of the way different elements of my character come into play, depending on where my focus is at the time. You have given me a framework for understanding the ambiguities.
Hi Scott, I gobble up every newsletter. Thank you. This one felt profound to me for more reasons than I can share in this post. But one in particular - my daughter, Emma, is battling mightily with an eating disorder. She has yet to see her many gifts. So I pray a lot and love her with all of my Mom might. I recently participated in your SAC for coaches. Love your boat, your message, your depth of thought and research, and your heart. Someday, I would like to talk live and to share a few things I've created outside of academia to help people be a little more patient, kind, and humble and a little less of the opposite. Right now Im sharing the framework with a bunch of HS XC athletes. You betcha that Im going to weave your beautiful boat in with all of my favorite constructs. It helps to be living in a nautical place:) Thank you for helping me fall back in love with Maslow and humansim. I believe in the goodness of people. See it every day, even when (and maybe especially when) good intentions and impact don't align.
Melissa,
Although I feel as if Im being a bit of an "Evesdropper" listening-in, lol, I was struck in a positive way by your intention to "speak" live to others using what you've learned in hopes of inspiring them to display increased patience, kindness, humility, (7 perhaps along with more tolerance for others' diversities in a variety of capacities?).
I just think it's so exciting and wonderful you are already beginning to share the framework youve created witht he athletes & it appears your desire is to continue to expand upon your influence within the world in this manner. So, Great for you! And I hope you and I want to strongly encourage you to do so since it's positive efforts like yours that can definitely make a Huge difference in our world where its much needed, especially at a time such as this.
I'll have to check out the boat ananlogy as you've greatly peaked my interest as it just may be an anology I'd always like to seize the use of in future discussions with others whom, in my role as a counselor or otherwise, I'd to hope to inspire hope and support in their pursuit of personal growth &/or further healing. Take good care and wishing you all the best in your positive pursuits!! Carol
Thank you, Carol! Choose Growth (Scott and Jordan's latest book) is great for the sailboat and a ton of delicious research. And your work as a licensed counselor who cares deeply about connection and equity is invaluable. A dear friend and exceptional clinician was asking a very important question nearly 20 years ago - How do we get better results for people? Together with some other wonderful colleagues, we dove into the amazing, emerging science of the brain and began developing, testing, and refining a visual, translational framework that would be simple and memorable (and playful:) so it could be helpful to counselors, teachers, coaches, parents ... and taught to teens and young adults. For the HS XC athletes, we introduce the top-level tools and concepts in 5-minute lessons before practice and focus on what matters to them (how they can feel less anxious and perform better). With repetition, they are starting to share how they are creatively applying them at home and socially to relate with more love and less reactivity not only to others, but to themselves/ their inner world. It's mind-blowingly wonderful and they are my teachers.
Keep making this world a better place, Melissa
Thank you!
"Creative Genius" often arises from an instability of cognitive coherence (caused by trauma, genes, ...). So she/he is forced into a process of ongoing coherence-making & meaning mapping. Mental Clarity & Coherence gives peace, it calms our subconscious because we tell our intuition that there is nothing further to process. In contrast, when there is the tension of coherence seeking, our subconscious is open & active in pattern recognition. Driven by an inherent tendency towards incoherence and balanced by high openness & intelligence (to stay grounded) as you wrote in another article :)
❤️
Please will you share the full details of this research. What was the research question and the methodology?
Is obsession, when shared, health?
Both backstage and onstage, dancing, feeling the active delight, interacting lively with all the others dancing, portraying, sensing, laughing, nested in community, while even more ecstatically leaping or spinning as the musicians swell in predictable - because rehearsed - but vividly NEW moment, never before experienced.
It is identical, yet vastly different than demonstrating to kids, so that they will find themselves lifted in that similiar, but unique way, as they learn?
Once, transporting two young schizophrenics, one, a paranoid, described how he was feeling while huddling in the passenger footrest area, telling me how the lights, people, motion threw him into confusion, and he could feel.himself being transported into his imagination, a world of meanings that he at the moment still knew was not the coherent, plotting world he was imagining.
The other, in the back seat with the curious Wolf ( born captive, but having repeatedly escaped to me because i ALWAYS played as well as changed my life to share freedom not allowed by humans to domestics), ruminated on the events, watching as curiously as the inquisitive wolf.
They had clung together, the two young schizophrenics, completely trusting one another, making a whole, confident dyadic individual, able tl accept the big Wolf and me, speaking more intimately than any supposedly healthy girl or adult ever had or does.
What do i make of this? Some communal sense of pleasure encompassed us, and the journey reached the farmhouse shelter where one lived, and he exited in the warm night, surely fed, reinforced. A few miles, and the reservation where the other sheltered, was also imbued with home.
The Wolf and i traveled on, back to where we had met them. We walked for a while in the night, then lept in each other's sight.
Siblings of those with autism but not children of those with autism???