Creative Acts.

According to neuroscientist Rex Jung, creativity is living in some unexpected places.

Just as a slapdash explanation - Rex Jung has been doing research on something he calls transient hypofrontality. Basically, he's finding that what we call "creativity" comes out most effectively in people who can quiet down the super-focused, super-organized, straightforward frontal lobe patterns (what many people associate with "intelligent thinking") and ramp up the more meandering, indirect, inarticulated brain processes located in other parts of the brain. In layman's terms -- as I understood it -- that means people who can stop thinking so hard and let their nonlinear brain patterns take over are more likely to make unexpected linkages between different kinds of thoughts, and then come up with more novel solutions to meet situations. As Jung puts it, "You're getting outside your comfort zone where your brain has worn ruts in the road, and trying out other paths."

Remember that story about the mathematician who couldn't figure out how to measure irregular shapes, who finally took a bath and came up with the method of measuring by displacement ?

Now, I find all this very interesting. And here's why. I often feel that in rehearsal with Sinecdoche, we are practicing the brain. That's not so far off-key -- the brain is a muscle, and it has been shown that you can change the way your brain works with practice. And we get pretty twisted up, mentally, much of the time. But we also get twisted up physically. And our physical and mental twistings are often placed (by some very careful or malicious rule-making, depending how you see it) in counter point to each other such that to continue all the physical and mental tasks you've been set becomes impossible.

(Let me take a minute to illustrate, in case you're not in rehearsals. Today's task included flinging your limbs, all in different directions, with momentum. Then at a certain point arresting the momentum in mid-fling. So, if you're dancing these rules, you have to be sending each of your limbs in a different direction without engaging your muscles, tracking where they all go, and stopping them all in space - reversing the process you've started by flinging them - at the same time. While balancing on one foot with your head way off away from your feet. It's kind of like throwing a ball and trying to get it to stop in midair before you catch it.)

So, physical and mental tasks. Tough ones. Many of them. At once. And they accumulate.

And that's when all the crazy stuff happens. Maybe, without knowing it, we are forcing our brains out of rut-worn patterns and into something we don't know yet. Maybe we're actually building some kind of-- eh, transient hypofrontality muscles. Let's hope so.

I do know that this practice often builds to a point of insistent frustration, built of exhaustion and discomfort and desire to do the right thing and the certain knowledge that I am not, that makes me feel like steam is coming out of my ears, or like nothing could ever shake the various wrangling parts of my brain-body into a comprehensive order ever again.

And that's when I say fuck Belinda and do whatever I feel like doing. And that's when something clicks. And maybe that's when I've stopped using my go-to-it, get-it-done New Yorker brain and slipped into something more wide.

For more thoughts and more details from Rex Jung, check out the podcast: