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Most people, Dr. Ellenbogen says, think of the sleeping brain as similar to a computer that has “gone to sleep” — it does nothing productive. Wrong. Sleep enhances performance, learning and memory. Most unappreciated of all, sleep improves creative ability to generate aha! moments and to uncover novel connections among seemingly unrelated ideas.

[…]

Some sort of incubation period, in which a person leaves an idea for a while, is crucial to creativity. During the incubation period, sleep may help the brain process a problem.

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Dr. Ellenbogen’s research at Harvard indicates that if an incubation period includes sleep, people are 33 percent more likely to infer connections among distantly related ideas, and yet, as he puts it, these performance enhancements exist “completely beneath the radar screen.” In other words, people are more creative after sleep, but they don’t know it.

Here’s the science to the creative benefits of sleep, aptly called “the greatest creative aphrodisiac.” Decades earlier, T. S. Eliot championed the notion of “idea incubation” and even longer ago, Thomas Edison used power-naps as his secret weapon. 

Pair with the science of what happens when you sleep and how it affects your every waking moment.

(via explore-blog)

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Our creativity comes from without, not from within. We are not self-made. We are dependent on one another, and admitting this to ourselves isn’t an embrace of mediocrity and derivativeness. It’s a liberation from our misconceptions, and it’s an incentive to not expect so much from ourselves and to simply begin.

Kirby Ferguson at TED

(↬ swissmiss)

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A lifetime of mediocrity is a high price to pay for safety.

The Accidental Creative by Todd Henry
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The creative door

Today has been an amazing day all around. Friends have gotten bites on job applications, Jake has been an absolute beast of salesover at his studio, and I’m about to wrap up A God Grown Old outline version 1.0.  So I’m certainly not here to complain or bitch and moan – I just have an interesting thought and quandary.

I’ll occasionally browse Tumblr’s tags just to see what’s out there.  I find it to be a great source of off-the-wall ideas and inspiration, since I don’t exactly go in there looking for anything in particular and it’s rare that none of those pretty little slides don’t catch my fancy. Sometimes I see stuff like this, though, and I wonder: is there a creative door in my head I just haven’t unlocked yet?  The imagination it must take to envision and then produce those images is…staggering.  Yet I know that I have a creative power…I just think it’s not quite tapped yet.

I wonder, then, how to unlock that creative door.  I’m aware of part of my problem: a fear of failure, or, rather, a fear of wasting time.  Wasting time is, I tend to imagine, what happens when I get really excited about an idea and then show it to someone and all they can do is “thpppt” at it.  Perhaps that’s also the fear of being rejected, since actually opening that creative door means exposing truer and truer parts of myself to the world.

I would love to find some resources, exercises, and essays on how to be more creative (possibly avoiding drug use. I’m not quite in need of mushrooms yet).  Does anyone know of some helpful links or books I could check out?  Or some activities/exercises I could try out?

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Our inspiration and mission!

One day, we (August and Jill) found an article on Buzzfeed called 50 Unexplainable Black & White Photos.  We were both intrigued and felt that each image demanded a story – so we have set out to write all 50 stories within the year 2012.

Each week, barring two, a new story will be posted on a Wednesday to go along with one of the images. The image and the story, which will usually be a flash fiction piece between 1k and 2k words, will be posted with credit given to the writer for that week.

Hope you enjoy the spooky, uncanny, imaginative stories we come up with!