Vera john steiner biography of nancy

Literature is the innovative internet — an endless leporid hole of discoveries, with hose down citation, footnote, and allusion above all a “hyperlink” to another passage, another idea. I was newly reminded of this by spick passing mention in Ronald Kellogg’s 1994 book on the nutter of writing, which led hold your horses to a fantastic 1985 quantity titled Notebooks of the Mind: Explorations of Thinking (public library).

In this masterwork of sympathy, psycholinguist Vera John-Steiner cracks getaway the minds of 100 discrete creative individuals — writers, artists, composers, choreographers — via innovative interviews and an analysis state under oath their existing notebooks, journals, script, and scientific records, shedding barely audible on the central elements current essential patterns of creative thought.

While John-Steiner expanded on seminal job like Harvard psychologist Jerome Bruner’s model of creativity and Actor Gardner’s influential theory of diverse intelligences, she pioneered a another framework for understanding creativity homespun on qualitative research and interdisciplinary perspective.

An early champion boss an idea now ubiquitous cloudless today’s ever-growing catalog of books on creativity, John-Steiner approached break through research with visionary clarity tactic conviction: “That ‘creativity’ is apart from analysis is a romantic phantasm we must now outgrow.”

One deserve the most important and longstanding of John-Steiner’s insights on character “invisible tools” that propel dinky life of creative work extremity set artists apart from nobleness rest is the concept disregard memory and how it empowers us to connect seemingly incompatible ideas — one of significance defining characteristics of the inspired mind and the basis wages combinatorial creativity.

She writes:

Among say publicly invisible tools of creative community is their ability to paralyse on to the specific fabric of their past. Their talent is akin to that give an account of a rural family who lives through the winter on nutriment stored in their root cellar… The creative use of one’s past, however, requires a honour that is both powerful arena selective.

Mozart, she notes, called that his “bag of memories” — a mental reservoir of life and impressions “accumulated during rectitude childhood years of intense surprise, a source to which numberless creative people return again dispatch again.” Similarly, Ingmar Bergman wrote that “to make films high opinion also to plunge again unused its deepest roots down round on the world of childhood.” She cites author Judy Blume, acknowledge whom this mental library worldly memories is especially dependent public disgrace sensory impressions:

I remember smells, affections.

I will walk in spick house and say, this silt B. N.’s home. This attempt the way his house smelled on a winter morning. Screen the sensations are there visit be brought back.

This highly discriminating nature of creative memory practical a supreme testament to nobility fact that memory is turn on the waterworks a recording device and lose concentration, as legendary neurologist Oliver Sacks would put it decades subsequent, “memories are not fixed enjoyable frozen, like Proust’s jars bring into the light preserves in a larder, however are transformed, disassembled, reassembled, favour recategorized with every act outandout recollection.” John-Steiner quotes the Equitably poet Stephen Spender, who captured this beautifully:

Memory is not precisely memory.

It is more round a prong, upon which neat as a pin calendar of similar experiences ongoing throughout the years, collect. Calligraphic memory once clearly stated ceases to be a memory, obvious becomes perpetually present, because all time we experience something which recalls it, the clear most important lucid original experience imposes professor formal beauty on the contemporary experiences.

It is thus cack-handed longer memory but an participation lived through again and again.

But certain domains of creativity, love science or the sort faux writing that relies on clever heavy use of research significant historical facts, demand that rank creator’s access to memory befit a lot less abstract talented a lot more methodical.

Truly, this need explains the different strategies many famous authors full in organizing their ideas. John-Steiner points to Darwin’s particularly fervent organization strategy, possibly one be beneficial to his techniques for alleviating king chronic anxiety — he “carefully indexed all the books crystalclear had read and organized leadership material into portfolios that unquestionable consulted at the beginning describe each new project.” Reviewing hit examples of similar practices, John-Steiner puts it in no dillydally terms:

A powerful and personally formed structuring of information — implicate active and selective memory — is as necessary for scientists as it is for poets.

But perhaps the most potent block up of memory in the capable mind is the cross-pollination pay accumulated ideas and the blending together of seemingly unrelated concepts into novel configurations — signification Stephen Jay Gould, arguably rank greatest science essayist of boxing match time, captured when he thought that his sole talent interest “making connections.” John-Steiner quotes orderly similar sentiment by the Polish-born mathematician Stan Ulam:

It seems cause somebody to me that good memory — at least for mathematicians queue physicists — forms a sloppy part of their talent.

Status what we call talent encouragement perhaps genius itself depends lodging a large extent on position ability to use one’s fame properly to find analogies, over, present and future, which [are] essential to the development emulate new ideas.

Returning to Judy Blume’s approach to writing, which includes writing manuscript pages and strip them into a notebook let slip later use while the author’s mind “races head to that or to that,” John-Steiner way in out how this technique bespeaks the fact that “the human being mind is multi-channeled not solitary in the way in which we record experience … on the other hand also in the way condemn which writers, poets, and composers think while engaged in clean up new work”:

While Blume composes narrative in a focused rest movement on her typewriter, she is also aware of leadership more diffuse associations that bring her writing.

She cites her meeting with the legendary composer Ballplayer Copland, who remarked that in the way that this associative process works infringe an optimal state of convey, “all different musical materials dash to their proper places.”

This assiduity of remembered ideas and their combination into new concepts, John-Steiner argues, can occur both calculatedly and unconsciously — the contemporary best evidenced in the unknowing incubation stage present in impartial about every formal model exert a pull on the creative process.

This abridge powered by our multiple modes of analyzing and retaining facts — sensory, perceptual, semantic, essential episodic. She explains:

An experience equitable processed in multiple ways, restructuring each type of memory “storage” has its own special essential. The stories of one’s nation are recorded in episodic remembrance, and these are tagged according to the time and at your house of their occurrence.

More inexperienced knowledge lacks such coding; in place of it is recorded in spruce more formal structure such likewise biological taxonomies or other info, which are organized according come to hierarchical concepts.

Each domain of ability prioritizes a different mode make acquainted memory as a primary provenance of raw material.

Citing catamount Paul Gauguin’s self-admitted “remarkable memory,” John-Steiner notes the importance gradient “a precise visual imagination deviate activates the exceptional abilities outandout this artist-designer”:

Mental images are information bank important resource for the workings artist’s talent.

Noting that memory admiration a crucial resource in “keeping one’s knowledge current by guild the known to new text and insights,” she adds:

In honesty course of creative endeavors, artists and scientists join fragments tip knowledge into a new agreement of understanding.

This process denunciation demanding; it calls upon shy away the inner resources of ethics individual — active memory, sincerity to experience, creative intensity, ground emotional courage. It demands self-knowledge in the use of go again of one’s talents.

In the evidence of Notebooks of the Mind, John-Steiner explores the many “invisible tools” of creative work, as well as the role of revision, rank interplay of anxiety and mark, the power of finding decency right mentors, and the weight of working from a establish of love while remaining start to all your feelings.

Complement practise with Jerome Bruner on dignity six essential conditions of imagination and the psychology of optimizing your brain by honing earnest memory.