Train Your Brain to Flourish
Use creativity and imagination to flood your hippocampus with dopamine
In my last post I recommended the book Your Brain on Art: How the Arts Transform Us by Ivy Ross and Susan Magsamen. I passed on their message that the simple act of doodling is a way to start the day free from anxiety and worry. Have you tried it? Have you read the science? It is fascinating! But, as I said in my last blog, it is not my goal to lecture on neuroscience. Just know that your hippocampus is an area of the brain that engages in curiosity and when satisfied will dispense dopamine, the feel good hormone. It is my goal this year to give you more options to exercise your creative muscle. Ross and Magsamen make the point that curiosity is the building block of flourishing. The title of this blog is a phrase from their book. They detail the proven link between a habit of attention, curiosity, wonder, and creativity to that of flourishing in mind and body.
.Play on the road and everywhere
The way you arrange a room, make a meal, post on a bulletin board, raise your children, engage in work or interact with art are all creative acts. I have a friend who when driving makes up stories about the traffic around her. She can make up a delightful story about a particular truck in traffic; where it is going, how the owner got such a vehicle with the strange name on the side, and whether it is part of a secret mission. She is a professional engaged in the arts so she has had years of actively pursuing imagination, creativity, targeted attention and wonder. However, I am convinced that rather than taking her creativity for a ride there is a practical side to this habit. She started telling these stories to keep her children from irritating behaviors in the car. Mothers are incredibly creative as they spin a world for their children, just listen and watch. Experience wonder at their skills.
Creativity belongs to everyone. You already engage. Do more
In this blog I will be urging you to strengthen your creative muscle by telling stories using art as a prompt. Like doodling, it can distract your brain from the constant vigilance, read anxiety, that your brain is prone to. If you have clicked on any of my art pieces on this website the sales page will open. On that page I write a few words about what I was thinking before or after I created the piece. When I tell you a snippet of a story about an art piece, I do not do it to convince you that there is one way to look at the piece. I write just a little to needle you into thinking and creating your own story.
“The creator stops being the creator once they finish the work. They then become the viewer. And the viewer can bring as much of their meaning to the piece as the creator.” Rick Rubin
Adding play to pears
I love to paint pears and I love to pretend they are talking to each other. Pears as a subject are relatively easy to draw or paint. You don’t have to be precise to make the object look like a pear. They come in many sizes and shapes with lumps and bumps and if you look closely there are many colors in their skin. The best part is that they don’t sit up straight. They lean at least a little one way or another. This is where the conversation comes in. Depending on which way you set them up to lean, especially toward or away from another pear, you can imagine them having a conversation.
Instructions for a story telling, creativity strengthening exercise
I invite you to use a piece of art to do some story telling. You could use one within easy sight of where you are sitting, or you could start your story telling using the pears that are on my website. Here are some questions to consider as you write freely without judgement about your writing skills, not trying to make a piece of literature but rather to record your thoughts, maybe just in lists or shorthand. It is the attention, noticing and the imagining that is most important. Writing a few thoughts gives you a record that helps prompt even more divergent ideas as you go back over them.
What do you see? Sit awhile and look. Refrain from judgement as to whether you like it or not, just record what you see.
What do you think is going on?
What does it make you wonder?
Bonus for extra flight of imagination: Imagine you are inside this painting. What role would you play? If you picked an object, imagine that you as the object has human senses. What would you see, hear, smell, feel while in this painting?
Do it again whenever you encounter art
If you had fun you may want to do this exercise out loud with a friend or family. The first three questions are based on an exercise called VTS, visual thinking strategy, developed at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. If you want to do more story telling about pears you are in luck, I will be releasing a new collection of pear paintings and prints before Valentine’s day. There will be hints and teasers in your mail and on social media before they are released for sale.
Appropo to Valentine’s day, the collection is called Pear-ing Up
Ideas presented here have percolated from the many books I have read about creativity and my experiences over the years. For this blog I revisited an old favorite by Eric Booth, The Everyday Work of Art; Awakening the Extraordinary in Your Daily Life published in 1997. Yo-Yo Ma wrote about this book: “… Everyday Work of Art shows us in hundreds of ways that perhaps the greatest art is the art of living. This book provides an insightful look at the wonder with which we can approach our lives and reminds us of the importance of perceiving the extraordinary in the ordinary.”
That is what I hope for you dear reader.