Dollies' Tea Party, 2011, cast glass, pit fired clay, 38 inches long by 24 inches wide by 11 inches high
Chair, Cast glass, pit fired clay, 18 inches high 2012
Antlers, 2011, cast glass, pit fired clay, oil paints, 14 inches high by 9 inches wide and 4 inches deep
'Angel', cast glass, oil paints, taxidermy, new born infant sized, 2012
"Growth is a spiral process, doubling back on itself, reassessing and regrouping."
Andy Kehoe
By Michael Michalko – psychologytoday.com
1. You are creative. The artist is not a special person, each one of us is a special kind of artist. Every one of us is born a creative, spontaneous thinker. The only difference between people who are creative and people who are not is a simple belief. Creative people believe they are creative. People who believe they are not creative, are not. Once you have a particular identity and set of beliefs about yourself, you become interested in seeking out the skills needed to express your identity and beliefs. This is why people who believe they are creative become creative. If you believe you are not creative, then there is no need to learn how to become creative and you don’t. The reality is that believing you are not creative excuses you from trying or attempting anything new. When someone tells you that they are not creative, you are talking to someone who has no interest and will make no effort to be a creative thinker.
2. Creative thinking is work. You must have passion and the determination to immerse yourself in the process of creating new and different ideas. Then you must have patience to persevere against all adversity. All creative geniuses work passionately hard and produce incredible numbers of ideas, most of which are bad. In fact, more bad poems were written by the major poets than by minor poets. Thomas Edison created 3000 different ideas for lighting systems before he evaluated them for practicality and profitability. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart produced more than six hundred pieces of music, including forty-one symphonies and some forty-odd operas and masses, during his short creative life. Rembrandt produced around 650 paintings and 2,000 drawings and Picasso executed more than 20,000 works. Shakespeare wrote 154 sonnets. Some were masterpieces, while others were no better than his contemporaries could have written, and some were simply bad.
3. You must go through the motions of being creative. When you are producing ideas, you are replenishing neurotransmitters linked to genes that are being turned on and off in response to what your brain is doing, which in turn is responding to challenges. When you go through the motions of trying to come up with new ideas, you are energizing your brain by increasing the number of contacts between neurons. The more times you try to get ideas, the more active your brain becomes and the more creative you become. If you want to become an artist and all you did was paint a picture every day, you will become an artist. You may not become another Vincent Van Gogh, but you will become more of an artist than someone who has never tried.
4. Your brain is not a computer. Your brain is a dynamic system that evolves its patterns of activity rather than computes them like a computer. It thrives on the creative energy of feedback from experiences real or fictional. You can synthesize experience; literally create it in your own imagination. The human brain cannot tell the difference between an “actual” experience and an experience imagined vividly and in detail. This discovery is what enabled Albert Einstein to create his thought experiments with imaginary scenarios that led to his revolutionary ideas about space and time. One day, for example, he imagined falling in love. Then he imagined meeting the woman he fell in love with two weeks after he fell in love. This led to his theory of acausality. The same process of synthesizing experience allowed Walt Disney to bring his fantasies to life.
5. There is no one right answer. Reality is ambiguous. Aristotle said it is either A or not-A. It cannot be both. The sky is either blue or not blue. This is black and white thinking as the sky is a billion different shades of blue. A beam of light is either a wave or not a wave (A or not-A). Physicists discovered that light can be either a wave or particle depending on the viewpoint of the observer. The only certainty in life is uncertainty. When trying to get ideas, do not censor or evaluate them as they occur. Nothing kills creativity faster than self-censorship of ideas while generating them. Think of all your ideas as possibilities and generate as many as you can before you decide which ones to select. The world is not black or white. It is grey.
6. Never stop with your first good idea. Always strive to find a better one and continue until you have one that is still better. In 1862, Phillip Reis demonstrated his invention which could transmit music over the wires. He was days away from improving it into a telephone that could transmit speech. Every communication expert in Germany dissuaded him from making improvements, as they said the telegraph is good enough. No one would buy or use a telephone. Ten years later, Alexander Graham Bell patented the telephone. Spencer Silver developed a new adhesive for 3M that stuck to objects but could easily be lifted off. It was first marketed as a bulletin board adhesive so the boards could be moved easily from place to place. There was no market for it. Silver didn’t discard it. One day Arthur Fry, another 3M employee, was singing in the church’s choir when his page marker fell out of his hymnal. Fry coated his page markers with Silver’s adhesive and discovered the markers stayed in place, yet lifted off without damaging the page. Hence the Post-it Notes were born. Thomas Edison was always trying to spring board from one idea to another in his work. He spring boarded his work from the telephone (sounds transmitted) to the phonograph (sounds recorded) and, finally, to motion pictures (images recorded).
7. Expect the experts to be negative. The more expert and specialized a person becomes, the more their mindset becomes narrowed and the more fixated they become on confirming what they believe to be absolute. Consequently, when confronted with new and different ideas, their focus will be on conformity. Does it conform with what I know is right? If not, experts will spend all their time showing and explaining why it can’t be done and why it can’t work. They will not look for ways to make it work or get it done because this might demonstrate that what they regarded as absolute is not absolute at all. This is why when Fred Smith created Federal Express, every delivery expert in the U.S. predicted its certain doom. After all, they said, if this delivery concept was doable, the Post Office or UPS would have done it long ago.
8. Trust your instincts. Don’t allow yourself to get discouraged. Albert Einstein was expelled from school because his attitude had a negative effect on serious students; he failed his university entrance exam and had to attend a trade school for one year before finally being admitted; and was the only one in his graduating class who did not get a teaching position because no professor would recommend him. One professor said Einstein was “the laziest dog” the university ever had. Beethoven’s parents were told he was too stupid to be a music composer. Charles Darwin’s colleagues called him a fool and what he was doing “fool’s experiments” when he worked on his theory of biological evolution. Walt Disney was fired from his first job on a newspaper because “he lacked imagination.” Thomas Edison had only two years of formal schooling, was totally deaf in one ear and was hard of hearing in the other, was fired from his first job as a newsboy and later fired from his job as a telegrapher; and still he became the most famous inventor in the history of the U.S.
9. There is no such thing as failure. Whenever you try to do something and do not succeed, you do not fail. You have learned something that does not work. Always ask “What have I learned about what doesn’t work?”, “Can this explain something that I didn’t set out to explain?”, and “What have I discovered that I didn’t set out to discover?” Whenever someone tells you that they have never made a mistake, you are talking to someone who has never tried anything new.
10. You do not see things as they are; you see them as you are. Interpret your own experiences. All experiences are neutral. They have no meaning. You give them meaning by the way you choose to interpret them. If you are a priest, you see evidence of God everywhere. If you are an atheist, you see the absence of God everywhere. IBM observed that no one in the world had a personal computer. IBM interpreted this to mean there was no market. College dropouts, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, looked at the same absence of personal computers and saw a massive opportunity. Once Thomas Edison was approached by an assistant while working on the filament for the light bulb. The assistant asked Edison why he didn’t give up. “After all,” he said, “you have failed 5000 times.” Edison looked at him and told him that he didn’t understand what the assistant meant by failure, because, Edison said, “I have discovered 5000 things that don’t work.” You construct your own reality by how you choose to interpret your experiences.
11. Always approach a problem on its own terms. Do not trust your first perspective of a problem as it will be too biased toward your usual way of thinking. Always look at your problem from multiple perspectives. Always remember that genius is finding a perspective no one else has taken. Look for different ways to look at the problem. Write the problem statement several times using different words. Take another role, for example, how would someone else see it, how would Jay Leno, Pablo Picasso, George Patton see it? Draw a picture of the problem, make a model, or mold a sculpture. Take a walk and look for things that metaphorically represent the problem and force connections between those things and the problem (How is a broken store window like my communications problem with my students?) Ask your friends and strangers how they see the problem. Ask a child. How would a ten year old solve it? Ask a grandparent. Imagine you are the problem. When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.
12. Learn to think unconventionally. Creative geniuses do not think analytically and logically. Conventional, logical, analytical thinkers are exclusive thinkers which means they exclude all information that is not related to the problem. They look for ways to eliminate possibilities. Creative geniuses are inclusive thinkers which mean they look for ways to include everything, including things that are dissimilar and totally unrelated. Generating associations and connections between unrelated or dissimilar subjects is how they provoke different thinking patterns in their brain. These new patterns lead to new connections which give them a different way to focus on the information and different ways to interpret what they are focusing on. This is how original and truly novel ideas are created. Albert Einstein once famously remarked “Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.”
And, finally, Creativity is paradoxical. To create, a person must have knowledge but forget the knowledge, must see unexpected connections in things but not have a mental disorder, must work hard but spend time doing nothing as information incubates, must create many ideas yet most of them are useless, must look at the same thing as everyone else, yet see something different, must desire success but embrace failure, must be persistent but not stubborn, and must listen to experts but know how to disregard them.
About the Author
Michael Michalko is the author of the highly acclaimed Thinkertoys: A Handbook of Creative Thinking Techniques. His newest book Creative Thinkering: Putting your Imagination to Work has just been released and is now available at most major bookstores. www.creativethinking.net
http://wakeup-world.com/2012/01/23/12-things-you-were-not-taught-in-school-about-creative-thinking/
The Sufi says, 'The Kaba, the divine place, paradise, is the heart of the human being'. That is why he has respect for every heart. Every heart is his Kaba, his shrine. The human heart is the place toward which he bows, for in this heart is God."
I have just completed an edited book on the various applications of art therapy and art making in health care settings. In working on this book, I recalled many children and adults living with serious or chronic illnesses or physical challenges that I have encountered in art therapy sessions over the last two decades. Many have had cancer, others have struggled with autoimmune illnesses like
Buddha Blossom, mixed media collage by Michaela
At the age of 43, Michaela was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. For most of her adult life she was a triathlon athlete and a self-proclaimed “health nut” who was careful about her diet and health; she was also nurse who worked in the adult oncology unit and assisted in surgery at a university hospital. Because of her medical background as a nurse Michaela knew in great detail what a diagnosis of ovarian cancer meant and the challenges that were ahead of her, including treatment that would be physically exhausting and often toxic in order to rid her body of cancer. When I met her for our first few art therapy sessions, Michaela explained to me that she wanted to include art making and creative writing as part of her treatment. She jokingly referred to her illness as “cancer schmancer,” maintaining a uniquely positive attitude during what were months of debilitating side effects of chemotherapy and fatigue resulting from radiation. From the outset, Michaela committed herself to do whatever possible to treat not only the disease, but also to explore the “psycho-social-spiritual” effects of the illness on mind and body with everything available including art therapy.
Michaela's anger drawing
A year after surgery, chemotherapy and radiation treatments, Michaela’s cancer went into remission. She began long distance running again, took on more responsibilities at work and became more hopeful about her prognosis because there was no evidence of cancer according to tests. The remission was short-lived and nine months later her cancer returned in an inoperable Stage 4 form in her liver and lungs. Right after this recurrence her husband of 13 years decided that he did not want to remain in a marriage to a terminally ill wife and filed for divorce. As Michaela said, “things really have hit rock-bottom” and she subsequently experienced a month of severe grief reactions and depression due to the divorce and her prognosis. Fortunately, she had extensive social support from family and friends who were available to help Michaela during the inevitable progression of the cancer and the loss of a primary relationship. In many art therapy sessions during this time she depicted what she called the “struggle between life and death” and we talked about the process of dying and if there was indeed an afterlife, soul or spirit. Art making and writing strengthened Michaela’s resolve to find peace from any lingering anger and sadness about simultaneously having cancer and enduring a divorce.
As Michaela became more physically debilitated, her visits to my office became too exhausting and I brought art materials to her apartment. In these final sessions before she became too ill to participate, I helped Michaela organize her writing journals and create colorful binders for them. She
Michaela's drawing of depression
Michaela’s story is both compelling and inspiring to all those who confront mortality when living with a diagnosis of cancer or other condition. From working with Michaela, I learned much of what I now believe about the role of art expression as therapy for individuals and families with life-threatening or chronic illness. Michaela and I never discussed art therapy as a “cure” for her cancer, but we often talked about how her creative expression through art and writing were part of her “healing” in the sense of coming to terms with her illness, a divorce and eventually the process of dying. After Michaela died peacefully at home with her family and hospice care at bedside, I continued to work with her parents and her brother to help them through their grief. A large part of our family sessions were not only focused on commemorating Michaela’s life through art expression, but also in collecting, reviewing and framing many of the artworks she created during art therapy. Her writing journals became a treasured legacy and a record of a life well lived and well loved by family, friends and colleagues.
The creative process of art making within the context of therapy provides an experience that is not clearly categorized as psychosocial, rehabilitative or health-giving. In brief, it is art therapy’s ability to provide patients with the chance to re-author the dominant narrative of their illness or physical disability and provide a way to explore what is referred to as “posttraumatic growth.” Returning to Michaela’s story and as a person with cancer, art therapy ultimately not only became a way to find meaning and express the story of her experiences with a cancer diagnosis, treatment and the process of death and dying, but also provided a medium for reframing her cancer narrative. Art expression often becomes a pathway for transforming feelings and perceptions into a new life story and, as a result, creating a new sense of self. This “re-authoring” of one’s life story may be different for each person, and it often includes one or more of the following aspects: development of new outlooks; discovery of answers to the unanswered questions; revisions in the way one lives life; creation of solutions or a resolutions to personal struggles; creation of a new “post-illness” identity; or discovery of an explanation for why one’s life has been altered by illness, disability, or physical trauma. It is a form of “meaning making” that can be ultimately helpful in an individual’s adjustment and acceptance of serious or life-threatening conditions.
Cathy Malchiodi, PhD, LPCC, LPAT
© 2012 Cathy Malchiodi
(CNN) -- Michael Jackson was on to something when he sang that "A-B-C" is "simple as 'Do Re Mi.'" Music helps kids remember basic facts such as the order of letters in the alphabet, partly because songs tap into fundamental systems in our brains that are sensitive to melody and beat.
That's not all: when you play music, you are exercising your brain in a unique way.
"I think there's enough evidence to say that musical experience, musical exposure, musical training, all of those things change your brain," says Dr. Charles Limb, associate professor of otolaryngology and head and neck surgery at Johns Hopkins University. "It allows you to think in a way that you used to not think, and it also trains a lot of other cognitive facilities that have nothing to do with music."
The connection between music and the brain is the subject of a symposium at the Association for Psychological Science conference in Chicago this weekend, featuring prominent scientists and Grammy-winning bassist Victor Wooten. They will discuss the remarkable ways our brains enable us to appreciate, remember and play music, and how we can harness those abilities in new ways.
There are more facets to the mind-music connection than there are notes in a major scale, but it's fascinating to zoom in on a few to see the extraordinary affects music can have on your brain.
Making music sound 'better' Ear worms
Whether it's "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" or "Somebody That I Used to Know," or even "Bad Romance" or "Bohemian Rhapsody," it's easy to get part of a song stuck in your head, perhaps even a part that you don't particularly like. It plays over and over on repeat, as if the "loop" button got stuck on your music player.
Scientists think of these annoying sound segments as "ear worms." They don't yet know much about why they happen, but research is making headway on what's going on.
The songs that get stuck in people's heads tend to be melodically and rhythmically simple, says Daniel Levitin, a psychologist who studies the neuroscience of music at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec. It's usually just a segment of the song, not the entire thing from beginning to end. A common method of getting rid of an ear worm is to listen to a different song -- except, of course, that song might plant itself in your thoughts for awhile.
"What we think is going on is that the neural circuits get stuck in a repeating loop and they play this thing over and over again," Levitin said.
In rare cases, ear worms can actually be detrimental to people's everyday functioning, Levitin said. There are people who can't work, sleep or concentrate because of songs that won't leave their heads. They may even need to take the same anti-anxiety medications given to people with obsessive-compulsive disorder, drugs that relax the neural circuits that are stuck in an infinite loop.
How we evolved to remember music
Given how easily song snippets get stuck in our heads, music must be linked to some sort of evolutionary adaptation that helped our ancestors.
Bone flutes have been dated to about 40,000 to 80,000 years ago, so people were at least playing music. Experts assume that people were probably singing before they went to the trouble of fashioning this instrument, Levitin said. In Judaism, the Torah was set to music as a way to remember it before it was written down.
"The structures that respond to music in the brain evolved earlier than the structures that respond to language," Levitin said.
Levitin points out that many of our ancestors, before there was writing, used music to help them remember things, such as how to prepare foods or the way to get to a water source. These procedural tasks would have been easier to remember as songs. Today, we still use songs to teach children things in school, like the 50 states.
What about remembering how to play music?
When you sit down at the piano and learn how to play a song, your brain has to execute what's known as a "motor-action plan." It means that a sequence of events must unfold in a particular order, your fingers must hit a precise pattern of notes in order. And you rehearse those motor movements over and over, strengthening the neural circuits the more you practice.
But musicians who memorize how to play music often find they can't just begin a remembered piece at any point in the song. The brain has a certain number of entry nodes in the motor-action plan, so you can only access the information from particular points in the song.
"Even though it feels like it's in your fingers, it's not," Levitin said. "It's in the finger representation in your head."
Music and pleasure
Music is strongly associated with the brain's reward system. It's the part of the brain that tells us if things are valuable, or important or relevant to survival, said Robert Zatorre, professor of neurology and neurosurgery at Montreal Neurological Institute.
One brain structure in particular, called the striatum, releases a chemical called dopamine in response to pleasure-related stimuli. Imaging of the brain can reveal this process is similar to what happens in your brain in response to food or sex.
But unlike those activities, music doesn't have a direct biological survival value. "It's not obvious that it should engage that same system," Zatorre said.
Musicians can't see inside their own brains, but they're aware of moments of tension and release in pieces, and that's what arrangers of music do.
Zatorre and colleagues did an experiment where they used whatever music participants said gave them pleasure to examine this dopamine release. They excluded music with words in order to focus on the music itself rather than lyrics -- the melodic structure, for example.
At the point in a piece of music when people experience peak pleasure, part of the brain called the ventral striatum releases dopamine. But here's something even more interesting: Dopamine is released from a different brain area (the dorsal striatum) about 10 to 15 seconds before the moment of peak pleasure.
Why would we have this reaction before the most pleasurable part of the piece of music? The brain likes to investigate its environment and figure out what's coming next, Zatorre explains.
"As you're anticipating a moment of pleasure, you're making predictions about what you're hearing and what you're about to hear," he said. "Part of the pleasure we derive from it is being able to make predictions."
So if you're getting such a strong dopamine rush from music -- it could even be comparable to methamphetamines, Zatorre said -- why not make drug addicts listen to music? It's not quite that simple.
Neuroscientists believe there's basically one pleasure mechanism, and music is one route into it. Drugs are another. But different stimuli have different properties. And it's no easier to tell someone to replace drugs with music than to suggest eating instead of having sex -- these are all pleasurable activities with important differences.
Rocking to the beat
Did you know that monkeys can't tap their feet to songs, or recognize beats?
It appears that humans are the only primates who move to the beat of music. Aniruddh Patel at the Neurosciences Institute in San Diego, California, speculates that this is because our brains are organized in a different way than our close species relatives. Grooving to a beat may be related to the fact that no other primates can mimic complex sounds.
Curiously, some birds can mimic what they hear and move to beats. Patel's research with a cockatoo suggests the beat responses may have originated as a byproduct of vocal mimicry, but also play a role in social bonding, Patel said. Armies train by marching to a beat, for instance. Group dancing is a social activity. There also are studies showing that when people move together to a beat, they're more likely to cooperate with each other in nonmusical tasks than if they're not in synch.
"Some people have theorized that that was the original function of this behavior in evolution: It was a way of bonding people emotionally together in groups, through shared movement and shared experience," Patel said.
Another exciting arena of research: Music with a beat seems to help people with motor disorders such as Parkinson's disease walk better than in the absence of music -- patients actually synchronize their movements to a beat, Patel said.
"That's a very powerful circuit in the brain," he said. "It can actually help people that have these serious neurological diseases."
There's also some evidence to suggest that music can help Alzheimer's patients remember things better, and that learning new skills such as musical instruments might even stave off dementia.
There still needs to be more research in these areas to confirm, but Limb is hopeful about the prospect of musical engagement as a way to prevent, or at least delay, dementia.
"That's a pretty amazing thing that, from sound, you can stimulate the entire brain," Limb said. "If you think about dementia as the opposite trend, of the brain atrophying, I think there's a lot of basis to it."
Music and emotions
You may associate particular songs with events in your life -- Green Day's "Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)" might remind you of your graduation day, if you had a graduation in the 1990s or 2000s, for example.
Despite variation in any given person's life experience, studies have shown that music listeners largely agree with one another when it comes to the emotions presented in a song. This may be independent of lyrics; musical sounds themselves may carry emotional meaning, writes Cornell University psychologist Carol Krumhansl in Current Directions in Psychological Science.
Educational shows such as "Sesame Street" have been tapping into the power of music to help youngsters remember things for decades. Even babies have been shown to be sensitive to beats and can recognize a piece of music that they've already heard.
Advertisers exploit music in many commercials to make you excited about products. As a result, you may associate songs with particular cars, for instance.
Here's one way you might not already be using music: Making a deliberate effort to use music to alter mood. Listen to something that makes you energetic at the beginning of the day, and listen to a soothing song after an argument, Levitin says.
Music as a language
Victor Wooten of Béla Fleck and the Flecktones isn't a scientist, but he has thought a lot about the process of learning to play music. For him, introducing a child to music shouldn't be different from the way a child begins speaking.
"I just approach music as a language, because it is," Wooten said. "It serves the same purpose. It's a form of expression. A way for me to express myself, convey feelings, and sometimes it actually works better than a written or verbal language."
Traditionally, a child learns to play music by being taught how an instrument works, and learning to play easy pieces that they practice over and over. They might also play music with other beginners. All the rules come first -- notes, chords, notation -- before they play.
But with language, young children never know that they're beginners, Wooten said. No one makes them feel bad when they say a word incorrectly, and they're not told to practice that word dozens of times. Why should it be different with music?
"If you think about trying to teach a toddler how to read, and the alphabet, and all that stuff, before they can speak, we'd realize how silly that really is," Wooten said. "Kids most of the time quit, because they didn't come there to learn that. They came to learn to play."
He remembers learning to play music in an immersive way, rather than in a formulaic sequence of lessons. When he was born, his four older brothers were already playing music and knew they needed a bass player to complete the band. "My brothers never said, 'This is what you're going to do,'" he said.
Wooten took this philosophy and created summer camps to get kids excited about music in a more natural way.
"It's rare that I ever meet a musician who doesn't agree that music is a language. But it's very rare to meet a musician that really treats it like one."
There you have it: Music that gets stuck in your head can be annoying, but it also serves a multitude of other purposes that benefit you. If you treat it like a language, as Wooten suggests, you might learn new skills and reap some of the brain health benefits that neurologists are exploring.
It's more complicated than "A, B, C," but that's how amazing the mind can be.
http://edition.cnn.com/2012/05/26/health/mental-health/music-brain-science/index.html
