God must have been *really* bored one day…

[ornoth]

Here’s the assertion: your brain wants a rough balance of activity and rest.

If your brain has to work really hard most of the time, it has a tendency to seek out quietude when it can. If you’ve ever worked in a high stress position, you know how precious “down time” can be. On the other hand, if your brain doesn’t get enough exercise, perhaps it becomes restless. Once you reach a certain level of boredom, you start looking around for things to occupy your mind.

Let’s start with that latter state. I’m going to kick around the idea that “creativity” (in general) may be a symptom of your brain looking for things to occupy it. If you have the spare mental energy to noodle on things and wonder about this or that, you’re more likely to produce stuff we’d call “creative” than if your brain is overwhelmed and working hard all day. No?

The reason why I say this is because I think that the converse explains some things I’ve seen in myself. When I’m slammed at work and putting in twelve-hour days, the last thing I can imagine is sitting down and writing a story or designing a web site, even when I happen to find myself with ample time on my hands. But those are exactly the things that motivate and excite me when I’m not challenged at work and there are few demands on my limited attention.

Is “creativity” a symptom of your brain searching for something interesting to do? Does intense, focused work sap your brain of the desire or the impetus to create? I’m curious about others’ experience.

I’ve struggled in recent years to justify my self-perception that I’m a creative person. I rarely find time these days to write fiction, take pictures, or design web pages, and when I do… I keep finding myself stymied by a complete lack of creative energy or inspiration.

Should I attribute that to creative burnout from a very stressful career? Or is it just that I have become less creative with age? Or should I resign myself to the idea that I’ve never been a very creative person, since even my prior successes were mostly derivative in nature?

Whatever the cause, these days my brain seems to be less willing to jump into creative pursuits, but very attracted to just turning off the internal discourse and letting my mind just rest.

Comments

[dafyddcyhoeddwr.livejournal.com]

Is “creativity” a symptom of your brain searching for something interesting to do? Does intense, focused work sap your brain of the desire or the impetus to create? I’m curious about others’ experience.

You've heard this from me before, so this is really for the others reading your LJ.

I have absolutely experienced exactly the thing you're describing, though I personally wouldn't attach exactly your explanation to it. Then again, perhaps my expression of the phenomonon is simply another way to state the same thing.

Back at the beginning of the millennium, I had a *huge* project I was completely involved in at work. Two years of nearly constant work, iterations of program specs, mock-ups, revisions to specs, programming, revisions to programs, moving on to the next portion of the project, repeat again and again. During that time, my productivity on other creative fronts, writing most especially, suffered greatly. It didn't vanish, but it diminished. The explanation I put to it was simply that my creative reserves were being used for my programming project, and there wasn't anything left over for writing, or needlework, or whatever.

I've seen the same at other times, recently at the end of this past year when I had another project (a subset of the huge project from earlier, which I still support) occupying my brain, and I found myself coming home and playing computer games even though I knew I had stories that needed to be written, and even had the ideas for what they would be.

So, whether creativity is a function of an idle brain, or the mind has a limited reserve of creativity that can be occupied by one thing to the detriment of another, I think that the phenomonon is a real one. It doesn't necessarily mean that you're becoming less creative ... after all, I bounced back rather well after both work projects stopped plugging up my brain with code (expect another story, probably on Monday!).

[ornoth.livejournal.com]

Well, I guess the proof of the hypothesis would be testing it by putting myself into a non-stressful situation. My experience of that during my unemployment was that it really didn't help much, but that could have been exacerbated by all the work I was doing in graphic design school at the time.

Dunno. I just thought I'd share the idea that "creativity" might just be an expression of one's brain's nervous energy. I don't think it's entirely accurate, but it was an interesting idea.

Thanks for the response!