Under the trained eye
The eye works as a paintbrush, coloring the world with a palette of vitality. Unfortunately, the constant bombardment of external stimuli torpedoes our attention, bankrupting...
A mind run riot
Creativity occurs when the imagination runs riot. The mind, an inherently jumpy organ, delves into its own fruitful space — probing fantastic and experiential possibilities....
Inseparable opposites
We’re always in the middle of fictional thinking — vacillating between what we’d like to do versus what we’re scared to do. Utopia and dystopia...
The spotlight of attention
Willpower rests on the brain’s set point for pleasure. Get used to indulging doses of dopamine, and the mind goes numb to any lack of...
In the spell of imagination
To remain in the spell, unmoored from the compass of time and place. The inner narrative reverberates off our surroundings. We become how we see,...
Writing takes guts
Writing is a bitch. It takes routine, grit, and lots of induced anxiety to show up every day and put pen for paper. There’s a...
Memes are a hurricane of influence
A meme is a hurricane of influence. It finds a human host, a signal booster, who spreads the meme before it takes on a life...
The bright rush of ideas
Where do good ideas come from, and how do they form? They come from extensive research bolstered by the ability to connect the dots between...
The invention of things
Most creativity depends on building on top of what’s already there. Novelty exploits and aggregates preexisting stems to manufacture new and different, which is all...
Swallowing the elements
Deliberately bad, mashed up, distorted like a Francis Bacon painting. Ugly art brings the worst of our subconscious to the fore as a means of...
Tackling the brain’s anxiety bias
We take out the wind of anxiety by going toward the fear. The nerves left alone in anticipation, attrit our resistance with cruel swiftness. Uncertainty...
We are nobody’s establishment
Good, bad, and ugly — honesty is what’s at stake. Of course, we strive for the perfect edited self. But such is a fallacy, as...