Tag Archives: creativity

From the Neuron to the Coffee House to the Internet: Steven Johnson’s TED Talk on How Ideas Have Sex

Great, great TED talk. From the neuronal network in your skull to the coffee house to the Internet, the idea world is rhizomatic.

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Are You My Missing Piece?

Steven Johnson on why the Internet-connected world may be a historic boon to human creativity and collective intelligence.

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Nietzsche in a Nutshell

__________ Once you perceive that you are flung into a cosmos in which God is dead (or silent), and your ultimate questions are unlikely ever to be answered, it’s time to stop worrying about who or where you are really—what the truth is—and just, say, make lion-man totems … Continue reading

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Write Better Than You Do: Four Writing Tips From 2000 Years Ago

Want to write better than you do? Consider trying these four ancient tricks: Focus on the sublime. The Greek writer, Longinus (first century CE), is among the first persons to address what would become a recurrent theme in the history … Continue reading

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Want to Think Clearly and Creatively?

Get some sleep. This today at the Daily Beast: When a person lies down to sleep at night, the brain undergoes a process that is crucial to learning, memory, and performance in ways that scientists are only now beginning to … Continue reading

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The Bed, the Bath, the Bus—and the Motorcycle: Where Craig Venter Gets His Ideas

Thinkers tend to refer to the “bed, the bath, and the bus” as places where they get their ideas, and Virginia Woolfe famously wrote of the need for a room of one’s own. Likewise, Daniel Dennett recently praised his morning … Continue reading

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Creative and Critical Thinking Watch: Susan Cain on the Power of Solitude

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Go West, Young Species? Like Ulysses and Darwin, Launch Out?

Exploiting an open territory appears to be a larger driver of big evolutionary changes than getting into an already crowded market and competing for local territorial niches, suggests a new scientific study that, at first glance, might seem to contradict Charles Darwin’s … Continue reading

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Thoreau 2.1: Jay Shafer’s 100 Sq. Ft. Home

I find Jay Shafer’s Thoreau-like experiment elegant and inspiring. Who needs a mortgage if you have creativity?

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Entering the Twilight Zone via Solitude and Day Dreaming, and Maybe Meeting the Devil (or Rod Serling)

Last week, I wrote a meditative piece on the role that solitude plays in the life of the mind, and how I felt it to be akin to entering Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone (see here). I suggested that if you expose … Continue reading

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Solitude: How to Expose Yourself to the Twilight Zone for Real

This past weekend I was thinking about the importance of solitude to the life of the mind, and it occurred to me that it is useful to think of solitude as a place of exposure. Solitude, in other words, is where we … Continue reading

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Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Circles” (1841): The Creative Vitalist Lost in Space?

Below are a few excerpts from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “Circles” (1841). In this essay he likens the creative artist’s framing imagination to something like the growing layers of an onion building themselves over the dark inner depths of the ontological mystery. Emerson’s thesis is in his … Continue reading

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To See a World in a Grain of Sand

And an instrument in a Jeep:

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