Art Essay

In everyday life, the vision of creative is appreciated highly. For example, research done on 1500 chief executives worldwide showed that creativity is the most important quality of leadership. Creativity got ranked as a crucial determinant of making the psychological article influential (Sternberg & Gordeeva, 1996). In the literature of science, creativity is known as the process of bringing something that useful and new into being. As to the hard work, effort, and training play a significant part in the process of creativity, one may think that for creativity to get achieved, there is an extension of conscious thought. However, several researchers have showed that the unconscious mind is essential to the performance of creativity. In addition, the significance of unconscious in creativity is stressed by several anecdotes about people hailed as the geniuses. For example, Poincare the mathematician who stated that his creative ideas came from unconsciousness and Einstein confirmed that he got a solution to a problem without being in a position to express it.  When it comes to art, experience of being creative tends to be the same. Schopenhauer (1970) states that everything real and everything primary, works the same as the forces of nature work, unconsciously.  

The Greeks had a positive view of the unconscious mind. Players and artists were told to contain ponder that would direct them in their art. Ponders were the offspring of Mnemosyne and Zeus, and they used to protect the sciences and arts. Like they viewed the origin of negative influences, the Greeks seemed to see the source of artistic intuition and inspiration as coming from the conscious mind, which is the invisible world.  They called the sources the goddesses. Whereas the box of Pandora got referred as then, unconscious mind was thought as the origin of woe.  One may enhance his view of it to incorporate it in an incredible source of scientific and artistic inspiration and knowledge (Sternberg & Gordeeva, 1996). An artist who has short of views may say that his muse has left him. This shows that the creation process is an unconscious process.  Presently, the unconscious mind is referred to as the unconscious mind.

At times, one can vividly show that the mind is influenced by the process of unconscious, and the influence is novel and can get verified. In art, a creative idea can be seen as a casual variation in pattern. However, when the muses give guidance that enhances our understanding in sciences, one may sense intelligence in the process of unconscious. Srinivasa Ramanujan the Indian mathematician (1887-1920) stated that the goddess of Hindu Namagiri told him his known formulae.  The formulae got to him while complete. However, he was left with the work of proving them. His friends in Cambridge did not expect he would pass on while he was very young. Hence, he did not have the opportunity to explore the source of his equation (Simonton, 1999). It is important to note in the magical ability, some of the equations were not right, and others were known already, but the majority was innovative and unusual.

Whereas one might say Ramanujan got his instincts from the unconscious mind, it is hard to explain how all that could be; however, it is real, and there are several examples of such happening. In the year 1665, the young Isaac Newton wrote the binomial formula which he got credited with discovering, but he did not leave a mark on how he came to discover it. It tends the formula just popped into his head. While the intuition of artistic can get considered as amazing, the scientific intuition is credible. The box of Pandora, the muses, or the unconscious can be considered as surprising, for example, when Mozart composes songs, and when Ramanujan the mathematician get a complete formula from nowhere, which are were famous previously. One can tend to imagine the unconscious mind works and calculate the views in the background. However, one can state the unconscious mind shows knowledge on the real world that was known previously.

In the year 1865, chemist Frederich Kekule struggled to know how the atoms found in molecule benzene got arranged. After falling asleep, he dreamt about a snake biting its tail and conjures up the benzene ring. This inventive discovery transformed organic chemistry, making the chemists able to write formulae. Frederich believed that his view was a convenience, however, after x-ray crystallography discovery; chemists were able to see the benzene molecules and directly verify they were exactly as Frederich had thought.  The unconscious mind did not just invent something new, but it had revealed the reality that could get verified for years later.  The example above is among the several showing how the unconscious mind can give works of innovation, beauty, also discovery as an act of intuition or revelation (Sternberg & Gordeeva, 1996).       

The most known example of intuition, revelation or sudden insight is the one of the ancient Greek Archimedes who was bathing and thinking on the problem of how to verify the gold of the king got diluted with lead. He got a sudden answer, got out of the bathroom and ran naked through Syracuse streets crying Eureka.  In this example, we see phenomena that arise from neither external world nor the conscious mind, but that rose from the unconscious mind.  Presently, people tend to assume wrongly the negative features of behaviors are from the unconscious mind and the right practices are from the conscious mind. Something like that was also sometimes believed  back when the mind was seen as having a devil, God, and man and unconscious components were seen as external things to the self (Schopenhauer,1970). The evil sides of people got referred to as the devil, the faithful person was the unconscious mind, and a person’s holy aspect got credited to God. In both cases of good and bad, the influences and experiences were believed to be outside the human that is the super conscious and unconscious.

The idea of the active unconscious got support from an experiment carried out by Parker, Bower, Regehr, and Balthazar. Those that took part were supposed to guess the target word, and they were given successive clues.  While the participants were clueless for some time, they came up with correct answers suddenly.  The prior guesses of the participants showed that they got close to the right answer before the right answer got to their consciousness.  Several creativity theories have showed the role of selecting and evaluating ideas as creative involves producing several novels and spotting the best single option.  In theories of cognitive, forming ideas is differentiated from evaluating ideas.  Nevertheless, the theory of social culture states that, it is simple to have an idea, but it is hard to enhance it so that it is accepted by the domain’s audience (Schopenhauer, 1970).

From the surveys done, one can tell that after a phase of unconscious thought, people are good at choosing the most attractive option among the options provided. In a distinctive unconscious thought experiment, the participants have to select the appealing alternative among many options. They immediately do so after getting the information or after a moment of distraction that the unconscious thought was presumed to be taking place. As judged from a normative perspective, the best decision the thinkers make the best decision.  It is presumed that the unconscious thoughts assist in making complex decisions since it is good in integrating, weighing and evaluating attribute information that concerns particular alternatives.

Conclusion

In a recent research, people do not use the word creativity to mean success of geniuses like Schopenhauer, Poincare, and Einstein. Instead, people focus on the two features of creativity: the ability to choose one’s creative idea and production of original thoughts.  One can conjecture that when one thinks about ideas unconsciously, it facilitates the selection stage of the process of creative (Simonton, 1999).  The findings of the present research can shed light on the work of the unconscious process in creativity and can give ways to develop the creative performance of an individual.

References

Schopenhauer, A. (1970). Essays and aphorism, London: Penguin.

Sternberg, R. J., & Gordeeva, T. (1996). The anatomy of impact: What makes an article influential? Psychological Science

Simonton, D. K. (1999). Origins of genius: Darwinian perspectives on creativity. New York: Oxford University Press.