Creating Minds. Howard Gardner.

Creating Minds: An Anatomy of Creativity Seen Through the Lives of Freud, Einstein, Picasso, Stravinsky, Eliot, Graham, and Gandhi.
Howard Gardner.
New York: Basic Books: A Division of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. 1993.

A study of the nature of human symbolization. Distinguishes between creative thinking which is diverse and convergent thinking that uncovers the right answer.

Notes that art and creativity are not synonymous. You can have art that is lifeless and boring and creativity in many fields that are not considered art.

Notes that the people he studied created great works of art at a time of two world wars and a Cold War.

Other characteristics of the creative person: sacrificed all, especially a rounded life. Freud created through examining his own thoughts and feeling. Other people don't understand or sympathize with what you are doing. Einstein posed and thought about questions when young. Relates childhood to later creativity. For Einstein, monotony provided the conditions that stimulated his creativity. Willing to tackle the unknown. Einstein's creativity over by age 40. Initial disappointments and persevered. Experimentation. Outgrew first teachers. Feelings of no limits to what they could accomplish. Enormous drive and energy. Picked up features from models. Absorb influences but retain distinctive individual features. Talent is God-given; must use it.

Sometimes can articulate vision in words as well as in chosen medium. Sometimes can't. Demands and rewards rereading. Plagiarize but make the material better. Creators must keep on moving. Craftspersons: worked on product for months, even years. Dancers cherish the single performance; shun the screen. No pattern or precedent. Makes you think. Devastated by criticism but still willing to take risks. Three decades in life of creative person: craft first learned; breakthrough; major culminating work. Auden: Poems are not feelings, but words. Artists able to objectify feelings; don't want to be understood, but felt. Mediocrity only cardinal sin. Gandhi developed philosophical positions and then lived them; his creativity was in mobilizing others. Despondency when work not going well; breakdowns. Questions tradition.

Other thoughts: Poets die young; fiction is the art of middle age; essays the art of old age. Most of us think one way, speak in another, and act in a third.

"...human beings may be condemned to oscillate back and forth between periods of innovation and tradition, between modernism and historicism, between creative breakthroughs and periods of stasis or regression...."