Two Sylvias' Weekly Muse: November 6, 2022

Issue 28

Hello Muse Subscribers!

As a creative person, do you ever ponder exactly where the ideas for your writing come from? Do you sometimes feel like the innovative ideas for your poems or visual art hit you from out of the blue, almost magically and without effort?

In The Runaway Species: How Human Creativity Remakes the World, neuroscientist David Eagleman and Rice University professor and composer Anthony Brandt discuss the origin point of creative ideas. Rather than viewing our flashes of inspiration as coming from somewhere “out there” and beyond us, Eagleman and Brandt believe that our innovation is rooted deeply within us, and when we have a fantastic and unique idea, we are drawing upon our past experiences (even those that are subconscious) in combination with our immediate, present life. In other words, most of our “revolutionary thoughts” are simply a recycling and re-forming of already existing data and experiences.

Eagleman and Brandt propose that there are three basic ways that a…