If you would like to challenge your cognitive inhibitory systems regarding the human brain and creativity, you might want to take a look at Shelley Carson’s challenging book Your Creative Brain: Seven Steps to Maximize Imagination, Productivity, and Innovation in Your Life (Jossey-Bass/Wiley, 2010).
I learned the expression “cognitive inhibitory systems” from her book (see page 82). I have to wonder if Dr. Carson tells her students in her popular undergraduate course on creativity at Harvard that when they are having difficulty learning something in college, their cognitive inhibitory systems are inhibiting their learning.
Dr. Carson holds a Ph.D. in psychology from Harvard University. You can access her website at http://ShelleyCarson.com. Her book is a publication of Harvard Health Publications, Harvard Medical School.
As the subtitle of her book intimates, she discusses seven aspects of the human brain, which she styles brainsets, and supplies a number of exercises designed to help one access and activate each brainset. She allows that these seven brainsets are not entirely discrete states. The following are the seven brainsets:
(1) the absorb brainset (pages 73-101)
(2) the envision brainset (pages 103-122)
(3) the connect brainset (pages 123-152)
(4) the reason brainset (pages 155-179)
(5) the evaluate brainset (pages 181-205)
(6) the transform brainset (pages 207-232)
(7) the stream brainset (pages 233-255).
As she notes on page 15, the names of these seven brainsets can be re-arranged so that the initial letters in each name form the acronym CREATES:
Connect
Reason
Envision
Absorb
Transform
Evaluate
Stream
I would like to share with you a few thoughts that have occurred to me regarding her book.
(1) Because Dr. Carson has included exercises in her book, I have to wonder if she has seen the short book titled the Spiritual Exercises that St. Ignatius Loyola compiled. (He is also famous as the founder of the Jesuit order in the Roman Catholic Church.)
As the title Spiritual Exercises aptly indicates, the book is a compilation of spiritual exercises. But what exactly are spiritual exercises anyway? The exercises are spiritual in the sense that they focus on one aspect or another of the Christian tradition of thought. But the exercises are intended to be exercises – that is, the exercises consist of instructions for undertaking forms of meditation and contemplation that involve the use of imagery and one’s imagination. You can read the instructions in a comparatively short amount of time. But to follow the instructions and thereby do the exercises would take a certain amount of time and effort and concentration.
Because doing the exercises involves the use of imagery and one’s imagination, I would say that these forms of meditation and contemplation involve what Dr. Carson refers to as the envision brainset. However, time and again, Ignatius Loyola in his instructions calls for one to use the technique called the application of the senses. That is, after one has used one’s imagination to compose the scene, one is supposed to move through each of the five senses in turn to take in the scene in multiple sensory ways, if possible.
In her exercise on page 116, Dr. Carson refers to using one’s eyes repeatedly, and once she refers to odor. But what about sounds? And what about touch? And could taste be worked in somehow?
(2) Dr. Carson identifies the absorb brainset as the brainset involved in the experience of insight. The Canadian Jesuit philosopher and theologian Bernard Lonergan (1904-1984) has undertaken a thorough examination of insight in his magisterial book Insight: A Study of Understanding (orig. 1957), which has been reprinted with a helpful editorial apparatus as volume 3 of the Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan (University of Toronto Press, 1992).
Robert M. Doran has supplied a succinct introductory overview of Lonergan’s thought titled “Foreword: Common Ground,” which is the foreword of the anthology Communication and Lonergan: Common Ground for Forging the New Age, edited by me and Paul A. Soukup (1993).
I am sorry that Dr. Carson does not point out that much of formal education is devoted to having students learn insights others have had in the past – in effect, such learning involves recapitulating the insights of others and making their insights one’s own.
(3) On page 58, Dr. Carson says that she is discussing the kind of creativity that came into vogue “beginning in the Romantic period of the arts and continuing to today.” Good point. The American Jesuit cultural historian and theorist Walter J. Ong (1912-2003) emphasizes this point in his essays collected together in his book Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology: Studies in the Interaction of Expression and Culture (Cornell University Press, 1971). (The term “Romance” in the title refers to the Romantic Movement in the arts.)
In Western culture, the art of rhetoric and the art of memory that Ong discusses involve what Dr. Carson refers to as the envision brainset. To be sure, the Romantic Movement did not involve abandoning the envision brainset, but restructuring the envision brainset from the way it had been structured and used over the centuries in which the art of rhetoric and the art of memory were such strong cultural forces in Western culture.
(4) The kind of imagistic thinking that the classicist Eric A. Havelock in Preface to Plato (Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 1963) identifies with orality involves what you refer to as the envision brainset of imagery and imagination. By contrast, the distinctively literate way of thinking that Havelock and Ong and others identify as emerging historically in ancient Greek philosophic thought in Plato and Aristotle involves what Dr. Carson refers to as the transform brainset.
(5) I liked Dr. Carson’s emphasis on the so-called 10-year rule in connection with the stream brainset. That’s an important point to emphasize.
(6) But what about contesting behavior and the spirit of competitiveness involved in the spirit of creativity? In Plato’s Republic and the Phaedrus, the interlocutors discuss three parts of the human psyche: (1) the rational part, (2) the desiring part, and (3) the spirited part (Greek, “thumos” or “thymos”). What Plato and Aristotle refer to as thumos is the psychodynamism of contesting behavior and competitiveness. Does Dr. Carson’s way of thinking about creativity exclude the psychodynamism of contesting behavior and competitiveness that Harold Bloom discusses? Or is it the case that the parts of the human brain that are activated by contesting behavior and competitiveness have not yet been adequately identified, and therefore a brainset cannot yet be named for contesting behavior and competitiveness?
In conclusion, Dr. Carson’s book about the brain and creativity provides a lot of food for thought.
–Tom
Thomas J. Farrell
Professor Emeritus
Department of Writing Studies
University of Minnesota Duluth
Homepage: www.d.umn.edu/~tfarrell
Email: tfarrell@d.umn.edu
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