Saturday, January 23, 2010

Creative toggling


'Letting Go'
Setting: Atlantic Coast,Barbados

I was in the groove today. The paint was flowing well, and I was in that beautiful creative 'zone', a place where rational decisons and intuitive actions were in harmony - the zone where I was flipping back and forth between good decision making and 'gut feeling'.

Later in the day, I read a few pages from Malcolm Gladwell's 'blink' and it drew me back to my morning painting session. Suddenly, the light went on. Gladwell had described my morning session through the writings of psychologist, Timothy Wilson:

As the psychologist Timothy D. Wilson writes in his book, Strangers to Ourselves:
"The mind operates most efficiently by relegating a good deal of high -level, sophisticated thinking to the unconscious, just as a modern jetliner is able to fly on automatic pilot with little or no input from the human, 'conscious' pilot.
The adaptive unconscious does an excellent job of sizing up the world, warning people of danger, setting goals, and initiating action in a sophisticated and efficient manner."

Wilson says that we toggle back and forth between our conscious and unconscious modes of thinking, depending on the situation.


Reference: blink
page 12.
Malcolm Gladwell,
Black Bay Books,
Little Brown and Company, New York Boston, London
c 2005

3 comments:

  1. Yikes! Coffee and Etta James is what gets me going, now I understand the psychic-implications...I'm phoning Gladwell. Glad you are painting without headachification...

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hi Amigo..
    from what I learn,many watercolourists feel stress. Eventually, the stress gives way to confidence and it becomes fun.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Yes, stress is a big part of the program until it isn't.

    ReplyDelete

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