Living a bigger life
It is said that insight is the movement from the known to the novel. It’s called divergent thinking, and the scientists have developed a test for it.
You are given a brick – a house brick. In one minute, how many new uses for that brick can you think of?
Some people are easily distracted. Mid sentence, the topic shifts. Something new has come into view. A song obstructs the train of thought. Creative insight might thrive on unexpected connections, but it is hampered by distractions.
This post is another in a short series capturing key points from a recent …
This post is building on my recent ponderings about creative insight. It’s a selection of posts summarising a great documentary I saw but my Mum missed – Horizon’s “The Creative Brain: How Insight Works”, broadcast recently on SBS. So far, I’ve written about the way creative insight is …
When I was young, I could only wink with one eye. Silly. Winks are only one eye. No, I mean I could only wink on one side. Yesterday, I managed to wink on the other side. It wasn’t a proper wink, with scrunched up muscles, deeper wrinkles and a crooked smile. The right lid closes with barely a scrunch. I closed the right lid and viewed the world only through my left eye.
But why am I winking at all? Yesterday, I pondered the fact that information from the left eye travels to …
The word, collage, comes from the French coller, “to glue”. It’s a very pre-digital activity.
I started using collage as a way of salvaging photographs and paintings that didn’t work. It evolved into an end in itself when I found myself picking up the camera for the sole purpose of creating a collage.
Photography is often described as a way of seeing. Dissecting the images and re-arranging them pushes that idea further. The action reminds me that …
I believe in exploring. I can’t imagine what it must be like to not want to explore.
I was very fortunate to grow up on a farm where there was space and opportunity to indulge childhood fearlessness in adventure. Once we were old enough, my siblings and I spent much of our play time unsupervised. There were five of us and only two adults. I suspect our parents realised quite early that we had some practical common sense about us, and they did teach us the basic rules of life – that actions have consequences and that some things are out-of-bounds for very good reasons. Well, actually it was my uncle who probably taught those lessons best when …
