Book Review: Boosting Your Creative Brain Powers!

Michelle Casey, "Forces Compel Me", Collage in progress, July 2011

There’s a popular myth out there that states only some of us have the “natural” ability to be creative. My Aunt always laments that her daughter doesn’t have a “natural” talent for making art like me; this never fails to irk me. I firmly believe that although we may not have all been born with an aptitude to produce art that that doesn’t mean we can never develop the talent for it.  Furthermore, being creative doesn’t just include being able to make art… remember that time you spontaneously decided to add a dash of something extra to spice up a recipe?  Or the time you composed a digital music playlist of your favourite tunes?  Well, right then and there you were engaging creative acts!  Like other professionals, artists practice on a regular basis to improve their skills and expand their imaginations and knowledge to extend the boundaries of art.  If that’s how we get better, than that’s how people who don’t think they’re creative can also unlock their creative potential!

This is the impetus for Shelley Carson’s book: Your Creative Brain: Seven Steps to Maximize Imagination, Productivity and Innovation in Your Life.  Because our world’s changing so rapidly due to new technologies and globalization, Carson feels it’s more important than ever to be able to develop our creative powers in order to develop new survival skills to improve our personal and professional lives in this twenty-first century.

Directed at wanna-be creatives and stifled creatives alike, Carson’s book revolves around the CREATES brain states model.  She devotes a chapter to the seven creative brain states in this model: Connect, Reason, Envision, Absorb, Transform, Evaluate, and Stream (a perfect acronym!).  Unlike previous texts on creativity I’ve read which stress the right-brain’s role in accessing the more artsy/emotional side of our being, she reveals both sides of the brain, left and right, are crucial to developing our creative ideas/goals at various stages and nurturing them to fruition.  Having readers assess early on in the text which of the brain states they feel most comfortable in and which ones they need to improve on, helps them navigate more easily through the book.  If you don’t like assessment tests, you can also discover this by reading each of the short chapters assigned to visualizing and defining each creative area of the brain.  At the end of every chapter she provides several short exercises you can do on a daily/weekly basis to develop each brain state.  For example, to stimulate the Absorb brain state, which increases your ability to observe details of the world around you, she has you exploring your personal environment through the senses, trying new foods as well as incorporating various techniques into exercise, sleep and meditation rituals.  As a further incentive to doing these exercises, she also provides a token point reward system to spur readers on.

I enjoyed reading Carson’s clear, humorous writing style and found it to be an excellent read for the lay person.  Learning how brain states have helped diverse creatives from Frida Kahlo, J.D. Salinger and Tchaikovsky to Albert Einstein was exciting and inspiring.  That her findings can be made concrete through fun, easy and practical exercises is amazing.  I’d already found some of her suggestions such as taking walks, surrounding oneself within nature and using instrumental music to induce a productive creative state of mind beneficial, and discovered many more great ideas in her book.  I particularly enjoyed reading the chapters on the Stream and Transform brain states.  By improving our Stream brain state, we can learn how to maintain a spontaneous flow of ideas to get ourselves “in the zone” while creating.  Using the Transform brain state, we can learn how to constructively channel and integrate our negative emotions into our work.  Some of you may find the chapter on the Envision brain state, which helps in visualizing and manipulating mental images, useful for vision board projects.  Furthermore, I like Carson’s suggestion that we view the problems we encounter in our daily lives as opportunities for change, creativity and innovation.  Throughout the book she convincingly conveys how developing our creative powers can help us not only in producing art but also in improving other aspects of our lives – she sees us all as potential inventors and innovators in the making!  After trying out a few of her exercises while working on pieces for my latest show, I found they helped me to focus my attention for longer periods of time on my work even when several crises threatened to de-rail me; her book was well worth the purchase — I highly recommend it! 

Also check out Women’s Health magazine for a good overview and exercise suggestions from the book.