Daydreams, play, and creativity: this book takes you down the rabbit hole

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What sets the successful apart from everyone else? What kind of hard science backs up a quality like creativity? And what does LSD have to do with creative intuition?

If the ‘science of creativity’ sounds like a paradox to you, then you’re at the right starting point

If the “science of creativity” sounds like a paradox to you, then you’re at the right starting point to answer these questions, according to Wired to Create: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Creative Mind.

Scott Barry Kaufman, a PhD and scientific director at the Imagination Institute at the University of Pennsylvania, and Carolyn Gregoire, a senior writer at Huffington Post, have teamed up to try to make ingenuity a little more understandable.

I thought they succeeded in making things even more confusing, but I came away with a few concrete things I didn’t know before.

Photo credit: Pixabay.

“As you’ll notice, this book presents many paradoxes – mindfulness and mind wandering, openness and sensitivity, solitude and collaboration, play and seriousness, and intuition and reason,” they write.

Creative people have messy minds

The paradoxes are a little annoying, but maybe confusion is a necessary step on the way to understanding creativity.

“Creative people have messy minds,” it states simply, before launching into tales of what it calls “protean shapeshifters,” people like Josephine Baker, who wore the hats of an actress, singer, dancer, French spy during World War II, and civil rights activist, among others.

Wired to Create over-cites research from too many sources at a rapid-fire pace, so taking it in all at once can be overwhelming. Still, taking lessons from hither and thither can help you piece together your own action plan for creativity.

People want creativity – in hindsight

Throw it back to your childhood