In an article on neuro creativity (RSA Journal article Summer issue 2009) Adam Zeman, Professor of Cognitive & Behavioural Psychology, Peninsula Medical School links innovation to
- humans in community,
- mirror neurons,
- introversion and creativity,
- the literal power of imagination (how an image summoned up with your eyes closed has more neural impact than an image generated through sight of the external world).
He describes the counter tendencies of inveterate rule breaking and inveterate rule making, weaving together the significance of dis-inhibition, playfulness, willingness to receive the gifts of the unconscious brain’. His work reminds me of that by Richard Kessler (see his ISPSO Presentation) which explores the scientific evidence for the role of dream as a form of thinking. I recently read an article in the London Review of Books which quoted from Christopher Bollas in The Evocative World Object, where the role of everyday experience in reverie is recounted:
‘You are riding in a train, absorbed by the sights flying by. It passes an airport, crosses a canal, traverses a meadow, climbs a long, low hill graced by rows of vineyards, descends into a valley choked with industrial parks … Each location evokes sets of associations. The airport reminds you of the coming summer and your holiday abroad. It recalls the plane that brought you to this part of the world in the first place; the never-ending expansions of airports … Crossing the canal you think of a longed-for trip on a canal boat, yet to be accomplished, signifying the potential remainders of a life … You think of your mother and father-in-law’s former house which was alongside a small canal. You might also think of the dentist and a root canal. And so it goes.’
And Bollas conjectures that these kind of day-to-day reveries go into our dreams where they get ‘thought about’ and re-related. Jonathan Lear comments: ‘
For Bollas, following Freud, psychoanalysis is a peculiar extension of such ordinary meanderings of the mind. Indeed, Freud likened free association to sitting by a train window and describing the passing sights to a fellow passenger. He discovered that if one could allow one’s mind to wander but at the same time monitor its journey, one found all sorts of weird connections. In general, the thoughts would not display a rational structure, yet via temporal or spatial contiguities, similarity of sounds, memories of smells or tastes, metaphorical jumps, sharing a syntactic shape and so on, they would reveal strangely familiar lines of thought, moving out in many directions, of which one had been unaware. Freud’s achievement, in Bollas’s view, is not the discovery of the repressed unconscious, which he thinks has been fetishised, but ‘Freud’s insistence that the most valued material is to be found in the seemingly irrelevant’, his view of ‘the quotidian as a valued source of human truth’.
This day-to-day, detailed, jumbled, shapely flow carries a latent narrative – it seems to me to be the stuff on which our capacity for intimate innovation can act.
Slingshot