In a survey led by the neuroscientist Nancy Andreasen, 30 writers from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop were interviewed about their mental history. Eighty percent of the writers met the formal diagnostic criteria for some form of depression. A similar theme emerged from biographical studies of British writers and artists by Kay Redfield Jamison, a professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins, who found that successful individuals were eight times as likely as people in the general population to suffer from major depressive illness.

Why is mental illness so closely associated with creativity? Andreasen argues that depression is intertwined with a “cognitive style” that makes people more likely to produce successful works of art. In the creative process, Andreasen says, “one of the most important qualities is persistence.” Based on the Iowa sample, Andreasen found that “successful writers are like prizefighters who keep on getting hit but won’t go down. They’ll stick with it until it’s right.” While Andreasen acknowledges the burden of mental illness — she quotes Robert Lowell on depression not being a “gift of the Muse” and describes his reliance on lithium to escape the pain — she argues that many forms of creativity benefit from the relentless focus it makes possible. “Unfortunately, this type of thinking is often inseparable from the suffering,” she says. “If you’re at the cutting edge, then you’re going to bleed.”

My friend John Unger was just saying something like this the other night:

“This waking dream we call the Internet also blurs the difference between my serious thoughts and my playful thoughts, or to put it more simply: I no longer can tell when I am working and when I am playing online. For some people the disintegration between these two realms marks all that is wrong with the Internet: It is the high-priced waster of time. It breeds trifles. On the contrary, I cherish a good wasting of time as a necessary precondition for creativity, but more importantly I believe the conflation of play and work, of thinking hard and thinking playfully, is one the greatest things the Internet has done.”

What’s everyone doing right now that you think sucks? What’s in fashion in your arena that you think is stupid? What do you think has outlived its place in the spotlight? Then start defining yourself by opposing that thing.

love makes us think differently in that it triggers global processing, which in turn promotes creative thinking and interferes with analytic thinking. Thinking about sex, however, has the opposite effect: it triggers local processing, which in turn promotes analytic thinking and interferes with creativity.

Why does love make us think more globally? The researchers suggest that romantic love induces a long-term perspective, whereas sexual desire induces a short-term perspective. This is because love typically entails wishes and goals of prolonged attachment with a person, whereas sexual desire is typically focused on engaging in sexual activities in the “here and now”. Consistent with this idea, when the researchers asked people to imagine a romantic date or a casual sex encounter, they found that those who imagined dates imagined them as occurring farther into the future than those who imagined casual sex.

According to construal level theory (CLT), thinking about events that are farther into the future or past - or any kind psychological distancing (such as considering things or people that are physically farther away, or considering remote, unlikely alternatives to reality) triggers a more global processing style. In other words, psychological distancing makes us see the forest rather than the individual trees.

A global processing style promotes creative thinking because it helps raise remote and uncommon associations.

“Ideas” seem to have a mystical quality for most people, but the only reason there’s anything at all mystical about them is that people assume there must be something mystical about them. Every idea is a juxtaposition. That’s it. A juxtaposition of existing concepts.

…

When you were a baby you were putting together huge ideas on a second-to-second basis, as you were absorbing and figuring out the world to the point of being able in some small measure to cope with it. Didn’t matter that probably none of those ideas were new – the only time it didn’t matter – it only matters that you had, have, it in you. That you’re here now is proof of this.

via eddie campbell

Terrific interview with my favorite writer, Lynda Barry:

On folk-dancing:

I think these old folk dances have something very big in them. The kind of movement they contain is transformative and restorative. You know, when country line dancing was starting to be a big thing, I’d hear people put it down. Cool people hated country line dancing. But I was so excited by it. It meant that anyone in the room could get up there and move around to the Boot Scootin’ Boogie. They could be all different shapes and sizes. Even that crazy chicken dance makes me happy. The Electric Slide makes me happy. Cool people are wrong about so many things.

On the computer vs. your hands:

Well, I love and adore my computer. Very much. I also love and adore reality shows, bratwurst, celebrity gossip and drinking straight whisky. I love YouTube fads like “Keyboard Cat”. But I only love these things because I have something else. It would not be hard for me to give up my computer if had to chose between it and my hands.

There is something about making a thing with ones hands in the physical world, which is a world without a delete key or a “step backward” option, that allows for an image to be awkward or seemingly wrong. It allows the things we are unsure about to exist anyway because we have no choice. We can’t push a button to make them disappear. And for me it’s been the awkward, wrong, seemingly small things that always turn out to be the entry point into the image. On a computer those things don’t have long to live. And they disappear completely. Where do they go?

Also, writing by hand is an exercise in spatial relationships as you write. You fit the letters together, an ‘O’ next to another “O” will be written differently than and ‘O’ next to an ‘I’ and all of it will fit on the line you’re working on. We just know how to do this at a certain point, and I believe that these small physical things that we’re doing at the same time we’re making an image have some bearing on the image itself.

At one point she also calls a piece of paper a “tiny dance floor” for a pen.