Creative Learning happens when we are not concentrated on mistakes but on patterns.
A creative process consists of recursive pattern recognition and play with those:
Pattern recognition
Pattern elaboration and refinement (+ new information Input)
How can we develop a taste for patterns and become creative?
One of the biggest killer of innovation, is the fear of mistakes. Fear of being critized and not perfect. Fear of not being enough. Perfectionism means that the tension between “Is“ and “Should“ creates personal suffering. Constantly comparing situations to the “Should“. Seeing everywhere mistakes.
The artist has no “Should“ but perceives patterns in the “Is“ state and crystalizes his work towards those patterns.
Nature demands us even to make small mistakes. It is the mistakes that explore beyond our skill set. Mistakes provide us with feedback how the world looks beyond our well planned recipes and concepts. If such a mistake gives us valuable information, it can be perceived not as a mistake but as a playful violation. A creative birth of something beyond our knowledge.
For a biological system to be stable, its subsystems must be imperfect, unstable and in constant variation.
A famous example is cell death, we need cell death in order not to die from cancer.
Unfortunately, we are also cells of greater systems: individual death, the Grim Reaper is essential for long-term survival of our species.
Without death of individual animals, there is no generational change of genes and therefore no adaption to changing environments.
Evolution plays Infinite Games.
Let’s imagine an acrobat who is walking on a rope which is mounted in windy heights between two skyscrapers. For walking on the rope our brave man is constantly wiggling with his hands and upper body, which helps him balancing. Sometimes he is moving more to the left, sometimes more to the right.
What would happen if he would ask himself for the perfect position to stay on the rope? How should I hold my hands? How should I move my legs? Our poor acrobat would fall quite soon. For the conscious goal of keeping stable balance, he must allow for unconscious and messy dynamic of his hands and upper body.
Like the acrobat on the rope, we need to embrace imperfect wiggly and enjoyable messy dynamics in order find balance on a greater scale.
“Suppose Mozart had tried to be original? It would have been like a man at the North Pole trying to walk north, and this is true of all of the rest of us. Striving after originality takes you far away from your true self, and makes your work mediocre.”
— Keith Johnstone
A healthy heart does not tick evenly, but instead, when looking at the milliseconds between heartbeats, there is constant variation. This “Heart Rate variability” (HRV) has been found to be associated with mortality and improved psychological well-being. A healthy organism constantly adapts the heart rate to current requirements via autonomous physiological regulation pathways. Stress hormones increase heart rate and blood pressure (cardiac output) and decrease HRV.
Our sensitivity decreases with stress level. The same is true for our mind, in stressful situations our attention narrows, most adaptive processes and pattern recognition turn off.
When being hunted by a lion, we will not reflect on life and our philosophical position in the universe. We will not even feel a mosquito bite while running for our lives. Yet when we are relaxed half sleeping in our dark bedroom, we can hear a mosquito from many meters away and philosophical problems might seem psychologically tense.
For becoming creative we need to have a relaxed wide awareness. A calm mind is sensitive enough to pick up new information and digest it, associate it with old ideas and recognize new emerging patterns. For this we need free time scheduled. Time that allows our mind to wander. Time where we are not hunted by emails and deadlines.
And we have to give ourselves time. Time to calm down. Time to let our thoughts settle. In the sound of silence, we can find the most beautiful melodies.
The next thing is to learn acting without judgement. Allowing benign violations of our patterns and recipes. Becoming playful with behavioral variations. Stress your concepts. Bend and break them. Get used to free acting. Speak, write, draw and sing without thinking. Without considering any “Shoulds“. In the first step allow everything to emerge.
With such exploring mind, you will recognize patterns in your drawings and writings. Collections of new information build up emergent patterns and when we are relaxed enough we can recognize those.
Our internal reward system will send then pleasure signals (“Good Boy!“) for our pattern recognition.
This leads to increased intrinsic motivation of searching for new patterns and can widen our awareness further.
This intrinsic motivation makes us fall in love with our activities. We don’t care then anymore about what other people will think or what career steps we can achieve.
Our only lord will be the patterns we recognize. We will serve the topic and not the opinions of others. We will only care about the patters, we recognize.
We will start to agree and disagree with ideas. This is the moment we develop taste for our craft.
When surfing this wave of emerging patterns, we act of out of intrinsic joy and not fear of being not good enough.
Art happens, if we enjoy the aesthetic of our mental representations, the patterns we recognize and play with.
In this way we find taste and intuition for patterns.
Now get out there, you naughty child! Create and Play!!