IMAGINATION, CREATIVITY AND THE BRAIN

Neither wisdom nor truth are in need of imagination. For you only imagine ‘’things’’ you wish for, or dread, things which are not yet to come, whereas truth and wisdom are solid facts and are not in need of your garland of imaginaiton.

If you dare to place the garland of your imagination around the throat of truth, it would choke for lack of wisdom.

Imagination may distort or stagnate, but it can also ( at each quantum level) create an emotional impulse for a new decisive action until it is once again tempered through trial and error, intuition or objective reason.

Fiction add things that are not there or subtract things that are.

Facts are still only true if they actually correspond to the way things are.

Your imagination can be used foolishly if you let it be run by impulses and instincts or it can be used wisely if you use it to anticipate the upsides or downsides in the path of your primary objective and help you mitigate your risks/phobias and unrealistic rewards/philias. 

Human creativity and innovation appears to have simmered for hundreds of thousands of years with only a few innovations before reaching a boil some 100,000 years ago. Increasing population sizes seems to have catalysed breakthroughs in cortical free association, technology and symbol usage and so large social networks have actively spurred human creativity. 

Human brains make up only 2% of the total body weight, but use %20 of the body’s resting energy. Humans become most creative and adoptive when they face new challenges from the envoirement. Their creativity and adaptability helps them live longer.

Creativity, innovation and improvisation in their many forms activate different regions in the brain than do general memory and memorisation, as demonstrated by functional magnetic resonance imaging which measures blood flow, hemodynamic activity. 

Creativity is more responsible for how human’s evolved than any other attribute. Natural selective pressures (predation, oppression, challenge) initiate it. Creativity is a whole brain activity that engages all aspects of your brain. When you are creative your lateral prefrontal cortical regions undergo inhibition and shut down. These areas are involved in conscious self monitoring, self inhibition and evaluation of the rightness and wrongness of actions you are about to implement, due to outer injected values and social idealisms from other injected values and social idealisms from other outer authorities, your sure ego. 

Your medial prefrontal cortices turn on. These areas are involved in self expression and autobiographical narrative. They are part of the default network having to do with self. Creativity occurs when your brain reduces conscious self monitoring. When you become a masterful expert you can and will do this, but while you are an amateur you wont and dont. Creativity is maximised in you when you love what you do. We love being creative and we love to perceive creativity. Those ‘’magnificently obsessed’’ with what they love doing, well beyond their performance, and well beyond what opinions critics think practice and become the most creative. 

Your brain seeks creativity.