The Big Sleep

ABSTRACT

This paper illustrates the link between creativity and psychotherapy as an art. Clinical examples are given first, followed by significant events that affected this therapist's creative activities. Then personal views of creativity arc described with the conclusion showing different aspects of creativity as applicable to psychotherapy.     

科学创造力与艺术创造力:启动效应及领域影响

如何有效地提升创造力,是创造力研究和实践领域的核心问题之一.而对创造力表达及其影响机制的把握则是创造力提升的必要前提.本研究计划通过实施科学创造力及艺术创造力的启动实验,以不同专业大学生为被试,来探索科学创造力和艺术创造力表达的个体心理机制,及外部影响的作用模式,从而厘清在动机启动、样例启动和自我启动之间,究竟何种启动模式对创造力的表达最为有效;进而,通过对来自理工科和艺术专业领域评分者对科学创造力及艺术创造力作品的评分比较,来考查两种创造力模式间可能存在的领域影响.经由以上的探究,试图为科学与艺术创造力的发展与促进提供科学依据和建构理论框架.     

Van Gogh, Chagall and pigeons: picture discrimination in pigeons and humans

The author has previously reported that pigeons can discriminate paintings by different artists. Here, I replicated the previous findings, carried out additional tests and compared discrimination by pigeons with that of humans. In Experiment 1, pigeons were trained to discriminate between paintings by Van Gogh and Chagall. After training, the subjects were tested with different paintings by the same artists. The subjects showed generalization to these paintings. The subjects maintained their discriminative ability for black-and-white paintings and partially occluded paintings. When they were tested with mosaic paintings, the number of correct responses decreased, depending on the level of processing needed. In Experiment 2, human subjects were tested with the same paintings. The subjects showed generalization and decrement of correct responses depending on the degree of mosaic processing. These observations suggest that the visual cognitive function of pigeons is comparable to that of humans. The convergence of higher visual cognition between the two species may stem from similar selection pressures on avian ancestors and our ancestors through their evolution. Accepted after revision: 19 August 2001 Electronic Publication     

Abstract: Scenario Planning,Art or Science?

This article will argue that there is a science of scenario planning; or at least a logos, a logic, a scenariology. Scenario planning is not predictive. But a good set of scenarios, scientifically developed, can reliably and predictably change minds. Scenario planning is both art and science. In joining the club of the sciences, scenario planning calls for a new kind of membership, or a new kind of science, one that, following Stuart Kauffman, relies on the importance of story. Hegel tells us that all stories, all narratives include a conflict between desire and the law, intention, and necessity. Scenarios provide a way for communities to frame their intentions. They thereby effect “downward causality” on the present in order to project the present toward a preferred future. In fulfilling the promise of this new kind of science, scenario planning breaks with positivistic science, but without falling into a postmodern nihilism. Without setting out to do so, the discipline of scenario planning introduces us to a new epistemology, a new way of knowing the truth. Drawing on pragmatism, Wittgenstein, and Richard Rorty, this article reaches the conclusion that, for scenario planners, the future replaces objectivity as the horizon for justification. What is true? We'll see.     

Community, Communication and Multiplicity in Proust

The essay examines the relation between the explicit aesthetic ideology of Proust’s Recherche and the structure of the “involuntary memory” that is supposed to serve as that ideology’s empirical basis. I challenge the apparent solipsism and idealism of the narrator’s aesthetics by focusing on the one experience of involuntary memory that he omits from his final reflections, in Time Regained, on the relation between memory and art: this is the involuntary memory, in the earlier volume Sodom and Gomorrah, of his dead grandmother, a memory that he describes there as an experience of true otherness. Through a close reading of this passage, I argue that Proust’s interest in involuntary memory implies a concept of literary art as above all ethical in nature, in so far as it is the only means by which individuals can emerge from the solitude to which they are otherwise existentially condemned. In both the Sodom and Gomorrah passage and a later passage from Time Regained this emergence is cast in terms of a rhetoric of multiplicity that emphasizes both the disturbing and the productive dimensions connecting literature with life.

The Copenhagen Neuroaesthetics Conference: prospects and pitfalls for an emerging field

Neuroaesthetics is a young field of research concerned primarily with the neural basis of cognitive and affective processes engaged when an individual takes an aesthetic or artistic approach towards a work of art, a non-artistic object or a natural phenomenon. In September 2009, the Copenhagen Neuroaesthetics Conference brought together leading researchers in the field to present and discuss current advances. We summarize some of the principal themes of the conference, placing neuroaesthetics in a historical context and discussing its scope and relation to other disciplines. We also identify what we believe to be the key outstanding questions, the main pitfalls and challenges faced by the field, and some promising avenues for future research.     

Potential: The valuation of imagined future achievement

The concept of potential is central to a number of decisions, ranging from organizational hiring, to athletic recruiting, to the evaluation of artistic performances. While potential may often be valued for its future payoffs, the present studies investigate whether people value potential even when making decisions about goods and experiences that can only be consumed in the present. Experiment 1 demonstrates that potential makes people more likely to consume inferior performances in the present. Experiment 2 manipulated temporal focus and demonstrates that focusing on the present (vs. the future) attenuates the effect of potential on enjoyment. Experiment 3 demonstrates that merely moving the performance into the past negates the effect of potential. And, Experiment 4 demonstrates that potential increases valuation only when value is tied to abstract, hedonic dimensions, but not when it is tied to concrete, utilitarian dimensions.     

The Arts and the Future City

The framework in which, better than in any other, cultural complexity becomes clear as a network of perspectives is the city: it is here that the greatest variety of subcultures, together with the widest range of contrasting modalities, seems able to handle its meaning. The city is at the same time an active place of cultural production and a passive and active place of memory keeping. It fuels styles and models of sensitivity also, and especially, through art and architecture. Therefore, it becomes itself a cultural model able to orient taste, but also to continually disorient it through agency. Starting from the revitalization of the cultural capital of the cities, art can play the important role of cultural magnet by catalyzing moods and emotions, conveying otherwise chaotic needs and languages, promoting new tolerance and social and cultural integration. However, in the meantime, from a secluded and distinct place that organizes the use of cultural and artistic products within recognizable boundaries, the city is becoming an undifferentiated place, a city-beyond, scattered and/or boundless. Characterized by the undifferentiated and the mutant, the uncertain and the liquid, the deformable and the relative, the space of art perception will be rethought within and without the city.