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DemonKia -> RE: ""Disorderly genius: How chaos drives the brain" (7/2/2009 9:34:23 PM)
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This is very familiar to me, philosophy.
Another analogy I think about is that I'm kind of like a baleen whale, filtering vast tonnage of water for the little bits of krill . ... . I take in enormous amounts of data -- text, video, audio, playing games -- with & without intent & purpose. My mind digests the data & forms connections that I'm not even aware of or directing consciously.
I have my projects that I work on, my 2 or 3 sci-fi / fantasy universes & a coupla non-fiction things, but I know that I don't know what all applies & what doesn't, so I strive to feed it all without over-controlling or getting excessively goal-oriented about the whole thing.
One of the creative touchstones that I think about in reference to what we're discussing is the guy who figured out the shape of the benzene molecule, a chemist. He'd been struggling to figure it out, & then he had a daydream about the serpent Ouroboros swallowing it's tail, & it inspired him to identify the correct shape. He had presumably been doing much linear thinking & figuring, but it was the rather non-linear process of reverie that was his 'flash of genius'. Or, at least, that's my take on it . . .
& Calla, the computer & the word-processor have been a boon for me, making it easy to keep clean page in front of me . . . . When I had a typewriter I got slowed down by the text I generated . ... & I have a process when I'm doing a lot of hand-writing, I keep a second page of blank paper that I use to continuously cover the text I'm writing as I go ....
quote:
ORIGINAL: philosophy
....for me, the key is emergence. My personal creative process requires me to just take in as much data as i can, both relevant and apparently irrelevant. i solicit opinions which i don't really listen to, but that i take care to hear. i look out the window. i make sure the TV is on in the background. i'll play spider solitaire.......
...and then, usually, the answer presents itself. The shape of the new idea. It's not fully formed, more like the DNA code than the organism itself.......however if i trust my process, let it follow through true to that initial flash....then i'm always rather surprised at how many problems it solves. It's like a road. One can't apprehend the whole road, one just starts at one end and wanders along it.......get too distracted by flashy side roads and you lose the destination.
Oh, i don't know.....the above is sort of how i think but writing down such a thing inevitably seems somewhat wrong. Embrace the chaos, don't emrrace the chaos.........just don't deny its existence.......and insight will follow.
(the above brought to you by the Society of Badly Explaining Deeply Personal Processes)
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