brettworks

“Instinct and intuition. What drives the basic mental operations that are involved with creating? In other words, what is the source of our ‘agile, inspired imaginations’? Primarily our instincts and intuitions. Instinct is the more primal of the two. It comprises thought and behavioral impulses that we share with other members of our herd (or sub-herd) and that are imprinted in us either genetically or through conditioning. Intuition, on the other hand, is knowledge that we have synthesized from all of our observations and experiences of how the world works, underpinned by our instincts.

Both instinct and intuition are ways of knowing that come to us as inklings, feelings, hunches, flights of fancy–sometimes even as ‘voices.’ In other words, from somewhere other than the conscious ensemble of the ‘me-self.’

In practical terms instinct and intuition work by nudging us in one way or another to place a dab of red paint here…add more sugar or cinnamon there…leave out the punctuation…or turn a ritual of life into a dance” (41).

“Questioning. Asking questions repeatedly–incessantly–is an ongoing feature of the creative process. ‘Are my premises sound?’ ‘How can I go deeper?’ ‘What’s missing?’

Often our questions are asked directly. But sometimes they’re posed as statements: ‘This is terrible’–which is usually followed by ‘What can I do to fix it?’ Sometimes our questions are disguised as feelings: ‘This doesn’t feel right,’ which translates as ‘Exactly what doesn’t feel right?’ And ‘What is the reason for that?’

How is it that we can both ask and answer the same question? We just can. And that’s fortunate because our questions frame and direct the thinking that determines the answers that eventually come to us. The more distinctive and interesting our questions, the more distinctive and interesting the responses that arrive. And they do arrive, if we keep an open mind, either as direct statements, epiphanies, intuitions, or dribbled out in bits and pieces, as in dreams” (46).

Leonard Koren, On Creating Things Aesthetic (2024)