The Creative Brain

These notes are from Ned Herrmann's book The Creative Brain

Creativity and the Whole Brain

Prevailing mythology has it that creativity is the exclusive domain of artists, scientists and inventors - a giftedness not available to ordinary people going about the business of daily life. Partly as a result, ordinary people often hold the creative person in awe, finding little gradation in genius. It's either the Sistine Chapel ceiling or nothing.

What makes the difference for people who've moved into creative functioning? The keys are these:

  1. An understanding of the creative process and its component stages, and how the four modes of knowing come into play at each stage.
  2. An understanding of what hinders each mode at each stage
  3. A commitment to heightening one's own creative awareness and functioning.

What is creativity, anyway?

Creativity in its fullest sense involves both generating an idea and manifesting it - making something happen as a result. To strengthen creative ability you need to apply the idea in some form that enables both the experience itself and your own reaction and other's to reinforce your performance. As you and others applaud your creative endeavours, you are likely to become more creative.

Defining creativity to include application throws the whole subject into a different light, because:

  1. While ideas can come in seconds, application can take days, years or even a lifetime to realise.
  2. While ideas can come out of only one quadrant, application ultimately calls on specialised mental capabilities in all four quadrants of the brain.
  3. While ideas can arrive in a single flash, application necessarily involves a process consisting of several distinct phases.
Defying creativity to include application also makes creativity totally applicable in the world of business, when it tends to go under the label of problem-solving.

Creative People

In terms of creative expression, the world, in my opinion, consists of:

  1. The already creatives - people who actively exercise their creative gifts for pleasure and profit;
  2. The sometimes creatives - people who experience moments of creative brilliance, but only occasionally;
  3. those who can be creative, but who have yet to tap into that potential.

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Last updated: 4th August 1999