The Amygdala in 5 Minutes
/via bigthink.com
Neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux gives a short primer on how the brain’s emotional processor works.
It Turns Out There Is Accounting for Taste
/After analyzing the data, the researchers concluded that people’s aesthetic tastes can be broken down into five “entertainment-preference dimensions.”
They are: Aesthetic (which includes classical music, art films and poetry), cerebral (current events, documentaries), communal (romantic comedies, pop music, daytime talk shows), dark (heavy metal music, horror movies) and thrilling (action-adventure films, thrillers, science fiction). The first two fall under the general heading of highbrow, while the final three are labeled lowbrow.
Most people go back and forth between the dimensions but tend to prefer one over the others. Works of art encompass all of them at once.
Pixar's Randy Nelson on collaboration
/Fantastic. In 9 minutes he adresses collaboration vs. cooperation, how one must be able to translate ideas and most importantly be interested.
The Method Behind Chef Wylie Dufresne's Molecular Gastronomy Madness
/via bigthink.com
“…one of the things that we like to do, one of the formats that we play with a lot and I think successfully is, we will take something very familiar and serve it in an unfamiliar way, but then we will take things unfamiliar and serve them in familiar ways…”
Most of his philosophies about food apply to any kind of creative work. His reconstructed eggs benedict are mind boggling, and delicious.
The Itch of Curiosity
/The first thing the scientists found is that curiosity obeys an inverted U-shaped curve, so that we’re most curious when we know a little about a subject (our curiosity has been piqued) but not too much (we’re still uncertain about the answer). This supports the information gap theory of curiosity, which was first developed by George Loewenstein of Carnegie-Mellon in the early 90s. According to Loewenstein, curiosity is rather simple: It comes when we feel a gap “between what we know and what we want to know”. This gap has emotional consequences: it feels like a mental itch, a mosquito bite on the brain. We seek out new knowledge because we that’s how we scratch the itch.
via wired.com
This is why it is so important to remain exposed to subjects beyond what we find interesting in order to enhance creative thoughts.