Kismet Arts Tangent

Your Creative Brain .Seven Steps to Maximize Imagination, Productivity, and Innovation in your Life By Carson, Shelley (Book – 2010)

Summary: Shelly Carson, PhD, goes through her acronym, CREATES, as she describes neuroscience behind creativity and the mildly surprising lack thereof. Connect, Reason, Envision, Absorb, Transform, Evaluate, and Stream are the steps to creative output. Some tips for a better creative environment, listen to music, though any noisy place will do. Milk those times you feel angst or just pathetic.

Review: I wasn’t completely inspired by this book. Too many exercises and quizlets to really feel like the author was invested in something transformative as art, but rather that you feel that you are getting something out of the book. I really appreciated her sentiment about how art and creative endeavors take a while to get good at. I also liked how she mentioned one of my favorite people Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, and the delightful concept of flow.

Rating: 4 exercises where you are writing down everything you hear

Favorite part: “Scientific research is remarkably consistent in finding that expertise in most fields takes about 10 years to develop.” p.328. I thought this was comforting and it should be a relief to those who took on a project that they didn’t have much experience in and found that they were disappointed that they weren’t pros by the end.

Wine-pairing: 50 First Dates (2004) Directed by Peter Segal. With Adam Sandler, Drew Barrymore. I really enjoyed Lucy’s character because when she paints, she’s really into it and it seems to come from a very happy sweet place. Art is about tapping into your mental landscape and finding the right motivation to inspire you to soar higher than you think you can.

Artscience: Creativity in the Post-Google Generation By Edwards, David A. (Book – 2008)

Summary: This is a captivating book really making the case for the necessary art and science connection. Artists like Diana Dabby (who used chaos theory to create piano variations) and Julio Ottima who used, painting to tap into liquid diffusion properties work, are the leaders in creativity in their respective fields, using all their resources to achieve breakthroughs in thinking. Other artscientists mentioned and worth looking into: Theda Radtke, Benoit Mandelbrot and Buckminster Fuller.

Review: This is an inspirational book, though heavy on the emphasis on higher education. The artscientists mentioned are involved with universities and have immersed themselves into their idea. They are committed people who have their basic needs met and have moved to the next level of exploration that require most of their time and energy. I want to be somewhat critical of innovators that neglect a sense of balance, but what I am is jealous that I don’t have an idea that captivating. This wasn’t so much as a great book, but an introduction to great people, the kind that think outside the realm of what’s accepted and normal.

Rating: 7 comprehensivists

Wine-pairing: A Beautiful Mind (DVD – 2002) The story of John Forbes Nash, Jr in a very cinematically pleasing format. I love how they depict mental processes visually by using technology, focusing the camera in some places, computer generated effects to highlight components otherwise unnoticeable by the average movie watcher. I enjoyed the scenes where he draws formulas on the windows. Art, science and madness are not that indistinguishable.

The Age of the Infovore .Succeeding in the Information Economy By Cowen, Tyler (Book – 2010)

Summary: Tyler Cowen makes his case about how “nerds” rule the world… at least the world of information technology. He discusses the particular “neurodiverse” tendencies of people with Asperger’s and notes the famous scientists and authors in history with this mild form of autism. This syndrome gives the autist more focus and visual skills in a way so advantageous, they will be the leaders of the future of rapidly evolving technology.

Review: Cowen talks about Buddhist’s meditative powers to alter their neuro-structures and about Holmes’ brilliant deductive skills but poor social skills. This book, though short and not very technical, describes a world where people who think differently have the advantage. I take my mental world (as Cowen puts it, interiority) very seriously. Cowen asserts that in times of economic struggle, people turn inward, investing in themselves through self-education and inexpensive entertainment like books and the Internet. I espouse Louis Pasteur’s saying “fortune favors the prepared mind.” Technology is changing the way we interact (less in person real-time conversations) emboldening Aspies to express their ideas and connect with people in new ways.

Rating: 6 atonal pieces of music that appeal to a special set of aesthetics

Favorite part: “Truly good IM conversations are like overlapping polyphonies, with swells and peaks, breaks and moments of great intensity and also humor…. It’s a cross between the emotional tie of the mambo and the intellectual connection of rapid-fire debate. It’s a new canvas on which to paint stories of friendship and sharing.” P.70

Wine-pairing: Wednesday Is Indigo Blue: Discovering the Brain of Synesthesia By Cytowic, Richard E. (Book – 2009). We need to embrace and exploit the strange way our brains twist and make associations. What do you see in your mind’s eye when you think of a calendar or when you’re counting? Do you hear your mind’s voice or see tickertape with numbers? What colors are those numbers?

Physics of the Impossible by Michio Kaku

Summary: This book divides technologies and concepts into three types of impossibilities, type 1 (force fields, ray guns, telekinesis), type 2 (UFOs, telepathy) and type 3 (wormholes, time travel) based on their resonance with scientific knowledge today and energy capabilities (this separates civilization types like ours a type 0 civilization uses fuels from dead animals and such, whereas a type 1 utilizes all the sunlight that reaches Earth. Type three milks the energy of the universe (like from black holes and such).

Review: Oh boy, Oh boy! Technology is sweet. Just like traveling to the moon, impossible, right? I love this book because it sneaked science in me when I just wanted to know if telepathy was something I could master in my lifetime. Unfortunately that is a particularly unproven thing. But, Michio Kaku’s spring of hope is eternal. I sadly as the week went by, didn’t retain all the interesting physics that have yet to be completed, yet to be born. If someone is going to solve the puzzles of the universe, I doubt it will be me all alone in my small nanobot-less brain.

Rating: 7 pockets of dark matter that we can someday harness for energy

Favorite part: “We are haunted by the awareness that infinitely many slightly variant copies of ourselves are living out their parallel lives and that every moment more duplicates spring into existence and take up our many alternative futures.” –Frank Wilczek p. 244

Wine-pairing: The Singularity is Near by Ray Kurzweil. I think you need to hope of the impossible, the sense of a distant ersatz horizon, for the conclusions that Kurzweil reaches about humanity, technology, and our exceedingly advanced future.