Continuing on McGilchrist’s concept of the ‘interactive cognitive requirements’ of creativity, I want to expand on the first one: the generative requirements.
So, this is kind of interesting and I think it provides immense opportunity for anyone that values being creative. Basically, the argument is that although we cannot control the creative act, nor can we invoke it whenever we please, we can create the terms upon which the creative act will arrive.
This means there are things you and I can do to help the creative act happen (or generate) at some future point in time.
Here’s a list of the basic generative requirements.
- Attention
- General knowledge
- Making connections
We must attend to the world in certain ways and attend to certain things. We must grow our understanding of the human experience. And, we must be good at making connections, especially between things that are not seemingly connected.
If we do these things well, meaning attend well, grow our knowledge well, and make connections well, we are providing the terms upon which the creative act can happen.
Now, these are the things which we can do. There are things we must not do as well, and those will fall under the permissive requirements, which I’ll cover later.
It’s important to note here, we cannot control creativity. We cannot engage these things assuming that we’ll have the power to invoke the creative act on demand. But, we can do these things in order that the creative act can take place at some undetermined point in the future.
I’ll break out attention, general knowledge, and making connections in subsequent posts.