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Some comments are being censored and excluded due to the use of (what I consider to be) crude language.
This is a shame when commenters make interesting points; but sometimes I can see no way to edit a comment without large-scale re-writing.
I don't use crude language in the blog and I will not allow it in the comments.
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Was it me? If so I apologize.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, I have been reading further in Lehrer's Imagine. It seems that you are right about creativity being related to dream states. The prefrontal cortex shuts down during dreaming and having that part of the brain shut down, which can be due innate structure, training, or even sometimes disease, is strongly associated with creativity. On the other hand I still sympathize a bit with the anti-dream crowd too. Most of the associations generated in dreams are junk. Much like the associations generated in schizophrenia.
On another note, being more intelligent may make you less creative:
http://www.bakadesuyo.com/when-is-being-smart-a-disadvantage
Though intelligence may be necessary for you to make good use of your creative insights. Hence the rarity of genius, which has both.
@Thursday
ReplyDeleteNo, not you.
I think the use of deliberately crude language in the context of hyper-intellectual debate may be the influence of Mencius Moldbug and his secular Right neo-Nietzchian hardmen, or perhaps GNXP...
Amusing in its way and when well done - but not here.
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I can't take credit for the dream-creativity idea - I got it from Eysenck (or rather it was Eysenck who convinced me of it - the idea is many centuries old).
But I think creativity (of this type) very likely is somewhat negatively-associated with intelligence, especially on an international level.
The situation in some parts of Europe may have been unique - with some kind of natural selection that had gone just far enough to increase intelligence and diligence enough, but without destroying creativity. Perhaps a rather delicate balance. At any rate, it didn't last very long!
I also think that it may be possible to trace creativity to people who have risen in class - perhaps genius is more common among the unusually-intelligent people risen from lower classes, than from among people with many generations of intellectual middle class ancestry - but I'm not sure of this.
At any rate, most intelligent and successful people are nowadays utterly un-creative (e.g. all modern graduates of elite colleges). Think of the most prestigious 'poets', artists and musicians nowadays: completely un-creative people.
And most of the genuinely creative people are too un-intelligent (hence uninformed) and/ or too fickle/ drunken/ chaotic to produce anything of interest or value to other people.
I did not think my last comment was crude, but it evidently didn't make it through the BGC filter. =)
ReplyDeleteFair enough, and I am sorry if I have offended. But what is obviously crude language to you is not necessarily obvious to other people. It would help if you could be more specific about what constitutes "crude"
ReplyDeleteI try to have a blog such that the comments are (in various ways) an optional but enhancing part of the posting itself: expanding, modifying, creating a pleasing atmosphere etc.
ReplyDeleteIn terms of what is acceptable - the style of my postings are the guide - I try to avoid language that is crude both in the sense of swearing and also (especially since I am blogging under my real name and address) I am writing in a euphemistic code and seldom give specific examples of the phenomena under discussion.
This would not have been necessary 50 years ago, but it is necessary when living in a totalitarian society; a fact that most commenters implicitly recognize in that that they use pseudonyms.