Practical Tools and Wise Quotes on All Matters Creative

8.6.2. Emotional States

How To Invent (Almost) Anything > 8. The Motivating Fire > 8.6. How The Brain Does It > 8.6.2. Emotional States

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At any one time, we are in a mental and emotional ‘state’, being angry, happy, disconnected or attentive. We can also be in a creative state, where ideas flow easily to mind, where we are engaged and productive.

Can we change our own mental state, or are we at the mercy of subconsciously-driven emotion? The fact is that we can turn the tables, and with careful conscious thought we can affect our subconscious. The side-panel ‘how to get into a creative mental state’ uses the way that we store feelings alongside memories of events to re-access the creative state. It also adds a couple of other mental tricks to amplify the state and to create a trigger to help get into a creative state even faster by using the basic Pavlovian stimulus-and-response mechanism.

You can find many triggers which might work for you–consider the triggers used by these famous artists:

• Rudyard Kipling only wrote in black ink.
• Immanuel Kant wrote in bed, at the same time each day, staring at a tower outside his window.
• Schiller kept rotten apples in his desk and put his feet in ice-cold water.
• Ben Johnson drank lots of tea while listening to a cat purring and smelling orange peel.
• Wagner composed while stroking velvet while Mahler preferred fur.
• Beethoven poured cold water over his head.
• Brahms polished his shoes.
   

Further parts in this section:

• 8.6.1. Emotions
• 8.6.2. Emotional States
• 8.6.3. How to Get Into a Creative Mental State

Other sections in this chapter:

• 8.1. An Evolutionary Background
• 8.2. The Evolutionary Ruleset
• 8.3. The General Adaptation Syndrome
• 8.4. Basic Drivers
• 8.5. Transactional Analysis
• 8.6. How The Brain Does It
• 8.7. Goals
• 8.8. Invention 'So What?'

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