August 14, 2007 by Cynthia Sifonis.

I read a piece in Psychology Today about the relationship between Genius and Madness. Because the magazine’s articles tend to be on the “fluffy” side of science, I expected the usual “suffering, struggle, and madness accompany the creative muse……” from them. I was pleasantly surprised to see the writer of this article did not take this approach.

The focus of the article turned out being that it takes more than talent and inspiration to create - it also takes a LOT of hard work. Specifically,

“As with mental disorders, there is something mysterious and unexplainable about the creative process. But all significant creative leaps have two very important components—talent and technique. By far the most universal and necessary aspect of technique is dogged persistence, which is anything but romantic.”

The author also pointed out what many psychologists studying the personality traits of eminently creative individuals have noted - that most eminently creative individuals are persistent, hard working, and do not let setbacks or failures deter them from their goals.

“Even acknowledged creative geniuses find that endurance must follow intuition. Einstein’s ideas were not worked out in a day. It takes a great deal of discipline, and often many bouts of trial and error, to work out an idea. Follow-through is critical to the realization of an idea. Discipline is not a hallmark of minds in the throes of emotional distress. “Despite the carefree air that many creative people effect,” says Csikszentmihalyi, “most of them work late into the night and persist when less driven individuals would not.”

In essence, the article points out that it takes more than “out-of-the-box” thinking to create. Once the idea has been generated, it takes a great deal of effort and persistence to turn that idea into a reality whether the end product is a work of art, a new product, or a revolutionary new way of doing business.

Click here to read the full Psychology Today article 

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August 8, 2007 by Cynthia Sifonis.

I have been reading “Creativity, Cognition, and Knowledge.” It is a cognitive science account of the relationship between (of course) creativity, cognition, and knowledge. Edited by Dartnall, the book contains a series of essays exploring the way knowledge and the representation of that knowledge can give rise to creative output.

In Dartnall’s introduction, he made a comment concerning “Emmy,” a program written by David Cope. Emmy takes as input several musical compositions from a single composer and, using a series of simple rules and transformations, creates novel musical pieces in the style of that composer. Reports from those who have heard these novel creations say the pieces created by Emmy are difficult to distinguish from those of the composer on which the pieces were based. In addition, they have been described as “soulful” and “delicately finessed and preternaturally beautiful.”

Dartnall questions whether Emmy, or any other computer program for that matter, can be considered to be “creative”.

When I hear things like this I always wonder why this is an issue.

If a person can not distinguish the creative output of a computer program from the creative output of a person, and if the output would be deemed “creative” if created by a person, then why is the same output created by a computer deemed “not creative”?

Why does the source of the idea matter?

Read the rest of this entry »

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August 8, 2007 by Cynthia Sifonis.

This Analogy and Creativity Blog has been created as forum for my thoughts about analogy, creativity, and the relationships between them.

Because I find writing to be an excellent tool for clarifying my thinking about a topic, this blog should help me to better understand the topics about which I am writing.

Because the blog is a public forum for a discussion of these topics, I also hope to gain greater understanding of the topics through the input and feedback of others.

So join me in my exploration. Let us see what we can discover together.

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