In his LA Times opinion article, USC professor Irving Biederman notes we are “infovores” and writes about the neurophysiology of that experience:

“The human eye makes three fixations a second on the world around it, and not at random. Our gaze is drawn to items we suspect have something new to tell us — posters, signs, windows, vistas, busy streets.

“Confined to a featureless physician’s examination room, we desperately seek a magazine, lest we be reduced to counting the holes in the ceiling tiles. Cornered at a party in a banal conversation, we seek to freshen our drink.

“Without new information to assimilate, we experience a highly unpleasant state. Boredom. Conversely, at one time or another, each of us has felt the joy of information-absorption — the conversation that lasts late into the night, the awe at a magnificent vista.

“Cognitive neuroscience — the science that seeks to explain how mind emerges from brain — is beginning to unravel how this all works. At USC, my students and I use brain scanning to specifically investigate the neuroscience behind the infovore phenomenon.”

Continued in his article The 411 to avoid boredom.

[Image from book The Know-It-All: One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World - by A. J. Jacobs]

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Eckhart Tolle:  “Become at ease with the state of ‘not knowing.’ This takes you beyond mind because the mind is always trying to conclude and interpret. It is afraid of not knowing.

“So, when you can be at ease with not knowing, you have already gone beyond the mind. A deeper knowing that is non-conceptual then arises out of that state.

“Artistic creation, sports, dance, teaching, counseling — mastery in any field of endeavor implies that the thinking mind is either no longer involved at all or at least is taking second place.”

From article: Don’t Take Your Thoughts Too Seriously.

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The image is from The Matrix Revolutions (2003). This statement is from a site for the book Journey to the Source: Decoding Matrix Trilogy, by Pradheep Challiyil, PhD :

“Morpheus tells Neo that, like him everyone is a slave to the false world of The Matrix. When we are in the prison of the mind, we really believe whatever we want to believe, under its influence. Our wonderland, our life of misery and suffering, is the rabbit hole we dig with our narrow notions and relations of our mind.

“We make ourselves a slave to the mind and its limited potential with our own notions.”

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creative potential, limitations of awareness, eckhart tolle on personal growth, consciousness and not knowing

“Many people die with their music still in them. Why is this so? Too often it is because they are always getting ready to live. Before they know it, time runs out.” – Oliver Wendell Holmes

The book The Michelangelo Method promises to use the Italian Renaissance painter, sculptor, architect, poet and engineer as a model for gaining insight into our own creative life, and releasing our music – our potential talents.

Here is an excerpt from the book :

Susan worked as a legal assistant for a major law firm. Her daughter, “the flower from my compost heap of a marriage” as she put it, had recently left for college on an academic scholarship.

With her daughter launched, Susan was left to consider her own path. She looked down at the ground below her. “Dull cement,” she said, “and my feet were planted in it long before I had a chance to choose.”

Susan wanted a change. She was dying for a change. But to what? She had no idea. And wasn’t it too late already? After all, she was nearly 42.

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In her article The Need for Others, Anne Paris, PhD quotes Loren Long, an “accomplished artist who has illustrated many books, including Mr. Peabody’s Apples by Madonna, I Dream of Trains by Angela Johnson” and others.

“My wife is not an artist, but she has great taste. I run everything by her, sometimes daily as I’m working on a project,” he said. “She is my first level of screening. If she likes it, then I feel the confidence to proceed.

“My publishers’ opinions are also very important to me. Not just because they determine if my work is adequate. I admire and respect them a lot. I want them to like what I’ve done. I guess that, in general, I always need someone to like my work.

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Some forms of creative expression – like acting and filmmaking – require collaborating with many other people; sometimes an artist needs isolation or works best alone.

Writer Erica Jong has commented, “Everyone has a talent. What is rare is the courage to nurture it in solitude and to follow the talent to the dark places where it leads.”

Much writing and advice on enhancing creativity focuses on the individual. But creating happens in a social context, and often depends on input and inspiration from others.

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In one of his podcast series, Eric Maisel notes “Criticism is a real crippler. I’m sure that you know that. But you may not be aware just how powerful a negative force criticism can be, how much damage it can do to your self-confidence, or how seriously it can deflect you from your path.

“Almost nothing does more psychological damage than criticism.

“Criticism comes at us from the past, as bad memories and as our own introjected ‘inner critic.’ It comes at us every day, at work and at home. It even colors our sense of the future.

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