What it takes to be creative?

Today went remarkably well, considering the pollen levels. I read a fascinating 1992 article by Jean Mandler, with the amusing title, "How to Build a Baby: II. Conceptual Primitives." She uses research on studies with very young babies to discuss how babies may get such conceptual basics as animacy, agency, and containment, and she links this closely with Johnson and Lakoff's idea of image-schemas. I liked the article because it gives me some new foundations and language for ideas I've been working with for a while.

Meanwhile, for class I read some speculations on creativity by Antonio Damasio (the neuroscientist who discovered that humans cannot reason effectively without emotion). Damasio thinks that creativity requires the following (and I don't entirely agree with him, but I like the list):

• Motivation and courage


• Extensive experience and apprenticeship (presumably to develop some of the other requirements)


• Insight into the workings of the self and of other minds


• Strong generation of representational diversity, by which he means being able to create a lot of combinations of other mental images


• Working memory with a large capacity, by which he means the ability to hold these new ideas actively in one's mind and manipulate them


• Ability to recognize novel representations - realizing when you've come up with something new


• A sharply tuned decision-making apparatus, that is, being able to decide what's worth spending time on and what is not