Imagination, Creativity, Experience and Failure

On Imagination...

“Don’t trust a brilliant idea unless it survives the hangover.” ~ Jimmy Breslin

“Blessed are the curious, for they shall have adventures.” ~ L. Drachman

“Inspiration comes of working every day.” ~ Charles Baudelaire

“There are no rules here. We’re trying to accomplish something.” ~ Thomas Edison

“If I’m going to sing like someone else, then I don’t need to sing at all.” ~ Billie Holiday

“This world is but a canvas to our imagination.” ~ Thoreau

“Go to where the silence is and say something.” ~ Amy Goodman

“I love those who yearn for the impossible.” ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“There are always flowers for those who want to see them.” ~ Henri Matisse

“The artist is a receptacle for emotions that come from all over the place: from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider’s web. ” ~ Pablo Picasso

“Reality is whatever refuses to go away when I stop believing in it.” ~ Philip K. Dick

“I would challenge you to a battle of wits, but I see you are unarmed!” ~ William Shakespeare

“I shut my eyes in order to see.” ~ Paul Gauguin

“To imagine is everything, to know is nothing at all.” ~ Anatole France

“You need not leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. You need not even listen, simply wait, just learn to become quiet, and still, and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked. It has no choice; it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.” ~ Kafka

“Silence is the mother of truth” ~ Benjamin Disraeli

“It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.” ~ Thoreau

“No artist tolerates reality.” ~ Nietzsche

“Who looks outside, dreams… who looks inside, awakes.” ~ Carl Jung

“Think outside the box, collapse the box, and take a fucking sharp knife to it.” ~ Banksy

“Everyone has talent. What is rare is the courage to follow the talent to the dark place where it leads” ~ Erica Jong




On Creativity...





“Dance first, think later” ~ Samuel Beckett


“The thing about creativity is, people are going to laugh at it. Get over it.” ~ Twyla Tharp


“Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working.” ~ Pablo Picasso


“Don’t spend time beating on a wall, hoping to transform it into a door.” ~ Coco Chanel


“Don’t ask what the world needs, ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.” ~ Howard Thurman


“Inspiration comes and goes, creativity is the result of practice.” ~ Phil Cousineau


“Go where the silence is and say something.” ~ Amy Goodman


“Creativity is a type of learning process where teacher and pupil are located in the same individual.” ~ Arthur Koestler


“Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right or better.” ~ John Updike


“Sometimes you gotta create what you want to be part of.” ~ Geri Weitzman


“The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones.” ~ John Maynard Keynes


“Don’t think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It’s self-conscious, and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can’t try to do things. You simply must do things.” ~ Ray Bradbury


“To copy the truth can be a good thing, but to invent the truth is better, much better.” ~ Giuseppe Verdi


“Creativity is an act of defiance.” ~ Twyla Tharp


“Put your ear down close to your soul and listen hard.” ~ Anne Sexton


“It’s not where you take things from — it’s where you take them to.” ~ Jean-Luc Godard


“Creativity is the sudden cessation of stupidity.” ~ Edwin Land


“The ability to dream is all I have to give. That is my responsibility; that is my burden.” ~ Harlan Ellison


“Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen.” ~ Leonardo da Vinci


“The enemy of art is the absence of limitations.” ~ Orson Welles


“You don’t make art, you find it” ~ Pablo Picasso


“Creativity is essentially a lonely art. An even lonelier struggle. To some a blessing. To others a curse. It is in reality the ability to reach inside yourself and drag forth from your very soul an idea.” ~ Lou Dorfsman


“The chief enemy of creativity is good sense.” ~ Pablo Picasso


“Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.” ~ G.B. Shaw


“Everything’s already been said, but since nobody was listening, we have to start again.” ~ André Gide


“Creativity takes courage.” ~ Henri Matisse


“Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you’re there. It doesn’t matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that’s like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime.” ~ Ray Bradbury


“I’ll be more enthusiastic about encouraging thinking outside the box when there’s evidence of any thinking going on inside it.” ~ Terry Pratchett


“How we spend our days is how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour and with that one, is what we are doing.” ~ Annie Dillard


“Creativity is intelligence having fun.” ~ Albert Einstein


“I invent nothing, I rediscover.” ~ Auguste Rodin


“To draw, you must close your eyes and sing” ~ Pablo Picasso


“If I create from the heart, nearly everything works; if from the head, almost nothing.” ~ Marc Chagall


“Do not be satisfied with the stories that come before you. Unfold your own myth.” ~ Rumi


“Find something only you can say” ~ James Dickey


“Creativity is not the finding of a thing, but the making something out of it after it is found.” ~ James Russell Lowell


“Free your mind and your ass will follow” ~ George Clinton


“Art is not about thinking something up. It is the opposite–getting something down.” ~ Julia Cameron


“Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.” ~ Scott Adams



On Experience...




“To practice any art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow. So do it.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut


“The scariest moment is always just before you start.” ~ Stephen King


“The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.” ~ William Butler Yeats


“Learn from yesterday, live for today, look to tomorrow, rest this afternoon.” ~ Charles M. Schulz


“I can’t go back to yesterday because I was a different person then.” ~ Lewis Carroll


“Nothing is a waste of time if you use the experience wisely.” ~ Auguste Rodin


“You don’t have to say everything to say something.” ~ Beth Moore


“Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but it’s the only way you can do anything really good.” ~ William Faulkner


“The tragedy of life is not that it ends so soon, but that we wait so long to begin it.” ~ W. M. Lewis.


“Sometimes painful things can teach us lessons that we didn’t think we needed to know.” ~ Amy Poehler


“You cannot discover new oceans unless you have the courage to lose sight of the shore.” ~ André Gide


“I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become.” ~ Jung


“Some of us have great runways already built for us. If you have one, take off. But if you don’t have one, realize it is your responsibility to grab a shovel and build one for yourself and for those who will follow after you.” ~ Amelia Earhart


“Every moment and every event of every man’s life on earth plants something in his soul.” ~ Thomas Merton


“Don’t think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it’s good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art.” ~ Andy Warhol


“When you play, never mind who listens to you.” ~ Robert Schumann


“Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Being willing is not enough; we must do.” ~ Leonardo da Vinci


“Everything that we encounter leaves traces behind. Everything contributes imperceptibly to our education” ~ Goethe


“Go and make interesting mistakes, make amazing mistakes, make glorious and fantastic mistakes. Break rules. Leave the world more interesting for your being here. Make. Good. Art.” ~ Neil Gaiman


“To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest.” ~ Pema Chödrön


“Any idiot can face a crisis; it’s this day-to-day living that wears you out.” ~ Anton Chekhov


“The lessons you are meant to learn are in your work. To see them, you need only look at the work clearly — without judgment, without need or fear, without wishes or hopes. Without emotional expectations. Ask your work what it needs, not what you need. Then set aside your fears and listen, the way a good parent listens to a child” ~ David Bayles


“Everything in life comes to you as a teacher. Pay Attention. Learn Quickly.” ~ Cherokee saying


“Life is an opportunity, benefit from it.

Life is beauty, admire it.

Life is a dream, realize it.

Life is a challenge, meet it.

Life is a duty, complete it.

Life is a game, play it.

Life is a promise, fulfill it.

Life is sorrow, overcome it.

Life is a song, sing it.

Life is a struggle, accept it.

Life is a tragedy, confront it.

Life is an adventure, dare it.

Life is luck, make it.

Life is life, fight for it.”

~ Mother Teresa


“You may not be a Picasso or Mozart but you don’t have to be. Just create to create. Create to remind yourself you’re still alive. Make stuff to inspire others to make something too. Create to learn a bit more about yourself.” ~ Frederick Terral


“We are not on this earth to accumulate victories, things, and experiences, but to be whittled and sandpapered until what’s left is who we truly are.” ~ Arianna Huffington


“Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities have crept in – forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day. You shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.” ~ Emerson


“There is nothing like looking, if you want to find something. You certainly usually find something, if you look, but it is not always quite the something you were after.” ~ J.R.R. Tolkien


“The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication.” ~ Cyril Connolly


“Life moves on, whether we act as cowards or heroes. Everything we shut our eyes to, everything we run away from, everything we deny, denigrate, or despise, serves to defeat us in the end. What seems nasty, painful, or evil, can become a source of beauty, joy and strength, if faced with an open mind. Every moment is a golden one for him who has the vision to recognize it as such.” ~ Henry Miller


”The seed of your next artwork lies embedded in the imperfections of your current piece.” ~ David Bayles


“Knowledge speaks, but wisdom listens.” ~ Jimi Hendrix


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On Failure...


“An artist cannot fail; it is a success to be one.” ~ Charles Horton Cooley


“You have to know how to accept rejection and reject acceptance.” ~ Ray Bradbury


“Mistakes are the portals of discovery” ~ James Joyce


“Work like hell! I had 122 rejection slips before I sold a story.” ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald


“Failure is a bruise, not a tattoo.” ~ Jon Sinclair


“To try and fail is at least to learn. To fail to try is to suffer the loss of what might have been.” ~ Benjamin Franklin


“A man can fail many times, but he isn’t a failure until he begins to blame somebody else.” ~ John Burroughs


“Failure is unimportant. It takes courage to make a fool of yourself.” ~ Charlie Chaplin


“I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I’m awake, you know?” ~ Ernest Hemingway


Life’s like a movie, write your own ending. Keep believing, keep pretending.” ~ Jim Henson


”It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work, and then we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey.” ~ Wendell Berry


“It’s better to fail in originality, than succeed in imitation.” ~ Herman Melville


“I myself am made entirely of flaws, stitched together with good intentions.” ~ Augusten Burroughs


“Some succeed because they are destined. Some succeed because they are determined.” ~ Unknown


“Life isn’t fair, it’s just fairer than death, that’s all.” ~ William Goldman


“Life is pretty simple: You do some stuff. Most fails. Some works. You do more of what works. If it works big, others quickly copy it. Then you do something else. The trick is the doing something else.” ~ Leonardo da Vinci


“When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be.” ~ Lao Tzu


“I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.” ~ Douglas Adams


“Empty pockets never held anyone back. Only empty heads and empty hearts can do that.” ~ Norman Vincent Peale


“I would rather die of passion than of boredom.” ~ Vincent van Gogh


“Whether you succeed or not is irrelevant, there is no such thing. Making your unknown known is the important thing.” ~ Georgia O’Keeffe


“Do not fear mistakes—there are none.” ~ Miles Davis


“Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars.” ~ Khalil Gibran


“You should keep on painting no matter how difficult it is, because this is all part of experience, and the more experience you have, the better it is…unless it kills you, and then you know you have gone too far.” ~ Alice Neel


“Fail, fail again, fail better” ~ Samuel Beckett

Low Latent Inhibition + High IQ = Creative Genius

Jordan Peterson of the University of Toronto and colleagues at Harvard University have found that decreased latent inhibition of environmental stimuli appears to correlate with greater creativity among people with high IQ. (same press release available here and here)

The study in the September issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology says the brains of creative people appear to be more open to incoming stimuli from the surrounding environment. Other people's brains might shut out this same information through a process called "latent inhibition" - defined as an animal's unconscious capacity to ignore stimuli that experience has shown are irrelevant to its needs. Through psychological testing, the researchers showed that creative individuals are much more likely to have low levels of latent inhibition.
"This means that creative individuals remain in contact with the extra information constantly streaming in from the environment," says co-author and U of T psychology professor Jordan Peterson. "The normal person classifies an object, and then forgets about it, even though that object is much more complex and interesting than he or she thinks. The creative person, by contrast, is always open to new possibilities."
Previously, scientists have associated failure to screen out stimuli with psychosis. However, Peterson and his co-researchers - lead author and psychology lecturer Shelley Carson of Harvard University's Faculty of Arts and Sciences and Harvard PhD candidate Daniel Higgins - hypothesized that it might also contribute to original thinking, especially when combined with high IQ. They administered tests of latent inhibition to Harvard undergraduates. Those classified as eminent creative achievers - participants under age 21 who reported unusually high scores in a single area of creative achievement - were seven times more likely to have low latent inhibition scores.

The authors hypothesize that latent inhibition may be positive when combined with high intelligence and good working memory - the capacity to think about many things at once - but negative otherwise.  

Peterson states: "If you are open to new information, new ideas, you better be able to intelligently and carefully edit and choose. If you have 50 ideas, only two or three are likely to be good. You have to be able to discriminate or you'll get swamped."
"Scientists have wondered for a long time why madness and creativity seem linked," says Carson. "It appears likely that low levels of latent inhibition and exceptional flexibility in thought might predispose to mental illness under some conditions and to creative accomplishment under others."

A less able mind has a greater need to be able to filter out and ignore stimuli. A less intelligent person with a low level of latent inhibition for filtering out familiar stimuli may well sink into mental illness as a result. But a smarter mind can handle the effects of taking note of a larger number of stimuli and even find interesting and useful patterns by continually processing a larger quantity of familiar information.

You can find the original paper here: Decreased Latent Inhibition Is Associated With Increased Creative Achievement in High-Functioning Individuals

The central idea underlying our research program is therefore that individuals characterized by increased plasticity (extroversion and openness)retain higher post-exposure access to the range of complex possibilities laying dormant in so-called ‘‘familiar ’’environments.This heightened access is the subjective concomitant of decreased latent inhibition,which allows the plastic person increased incentive-reward-tagged appreciation for hidden or latent information (Peterson,1999). Such decreases in LI may have pathological consequences,as in the case of schizophrenia or its associated conditions (perhaps in individuals whose higher-order cognitive processes are also impaired,and who thus become involuntarily ‘‘?ooded ’’by an excess of effectively tagged information),or may constitute a precondition for creative thinking (in individuals who have the cognitive resources to ‘‘edit ’’or otherwise constrain (Stokes,2001)their broader range of meaningful experience).

Note from the text of the full paper that stress causes the release of the hormone corticosterone which lowers latent inhibition. In a nutshell, when an organism runs into problems that cause stress the resulting release of stress hormones causes the mind to shift into a state where it will examine factors in the environment that it normally ignores. This allows the organism to look for solutions to the stress-causing problem that would be ignored in normal and less stressed circumstances.

So perhaps we could hypothesize something like this:under stressful conditions,or in personality congurations characterized by increased novelty-sensitivity,approach behavior,and DA activity, decreased LI is associated with increased permeability and flexibility of functional cognitive and perceptual category [see Barsalou (1983)for a discussion of such categories ].Imagine a situation where current plans are not producing desired outcomes —a situation where current categories of perception and cognition are in error, from the pragmatic perspective. Something anomalous or novel emerges as a consequence (Peterson,1999), and drives exploratory behavior. Stress or trait-dependent decreased LI, under such circumstances, could produce increased signal (as well as noise), with regards to the erroneous pattern of behavior and the anomaly that it produced. This might o?er the organism, currently enmeshed in the consequences of mistaken presuppositions, the possibility of gathering new information, where nothing but categorical certainty once existed. Decreased LI might therefore be regarded as advantageous, in that it allows for the perception of more unlikely, radical and numerous options for reconsideration, but disadvantageous in that the stressed or approach-oriented person risks ‘‘drowning in possibility,’’ to use Kierkegaard ’s phrase.

One can easily see how this response could have been selected for evolutionarily. At the same time, one can also see how chronic stress could lead a person to fall into a state of confusion as a sustained large flood of stimuli could overwhelm the brain by giving it too much to think about and make a person unable to clearly see solutions that will relieve the feeling of stress.