Archive of March 2009
2009.03.19
Elizabeth Gilbert on Nurturing Creativity
I have a couple of draft posts, soon to be published. They would have been up by now, but my laptop crashed last week and I had to get a new one. Not only that, but when it crashed, it took my senior thesis with it. So I spent many hours transcribing the 20 pages I have so far while also trying to meet new deadlines. Luckily, I have an extremely understanding and immensely awesome thesis professor.
So in this deficit of psygeek posting, here is a video I found intriguing:
Here's the link to the original article the video comes from. I'm not sure I agree with her about the whole genius outside of the body, feeding you this creativity that makes your work marvelous, but I think she makes excellent points about the burdens of being labeled a genius and about what it's like to make great works.
2009.03.18
Dreams
Do you believe that dreams have meaning? Or do you think that dream material is a product of the random firing of neurons in the brain which is then translated into some sort of dream, and given a plot? I think it's ridiculous that anyone might think that dreams have no inherent meaning at all.
If they didn't have meaning, why would we have wish fulfillment dreams? When we're really excited for that rock concert that's coming up, we dream of going to the concert and having the time of our lives. Trauma victims often relive their experiences in dreams, over and over. When we're stressed out and need a break, we have dreams of going on vacation and sipping martinis on the beach. If dreams didn't have any meaning, they wouldn't make any sort of sense.
The first marker in knocking down this argument is the simple fact that, even if subscribe to the theory that dreams are the product of the random firing of neurons in the brain, there would still have to be some meaning to them because the neurons that would fire would most likely be the ones that see more activation when we're awake; they would probably be closely related to what we think about all day long. We see something strange, it stands out, when we go to bed, we dream about it. That's pretty straightforward. Our dreams would still be based upon our experiences and what we know.
The notion is silly, is what it is. It's entirely possibly that I'm biased, I take the Freudian perspective for a lot of things. A lot of what Freud has to say in his theory of psychoanalysis makes sense.