Create Culture = Brain Power!

Longtime family friend and honorable Culturalist@ Annie Stanfield Hagert recently sent me a link to the "Perspectives on Creativity 2010" conference to be held at Holy Family University in Phili during March of this year. The conference looks great and as I read through the website my mind started rolling into how the brain reacts to the arts, travel, and culture.

Whether by my own free will or through some series of events predetermined by a higher power I found a video detailing Oliver Sacks's brain as it reacted to Bach and Beethoven. Wow! Note to self, the next project for Create Culture should be to provide brain imaging as visitors scroll through the Gallery or for example, listen to N. Ravikiran in a mind blowing concert at Stanford.

Then I found this great blog post by Jonah Lehrer (who appears to be a complete genius). In this post Jonah describes why travel is so exceptional for the brain. He writes and I quote, "....our thoughts are shackled by the familiar. The brain is a neural tangle of near infinite possibility, which means that it spends alot of time and energy choosing what not to notice. As a result, creativity is traded away for efficiency; we think in literal prose, not symbolist poetry. A bit of dis-tance, however, helps loosen the chains of cognition, making it easier to see some-thing new in the old; the mundane is grasped from a slightly more abstract perspective. As T. S. Eliot wrote in the Four Quartets: "We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started an know the place for the first time."

So my argument (tounge and cheek) and battle cry to you is that Create Culture will make you smarter. Don't worry about brain teases or eating right or doing push ups with your brain. No, to get the synapses firing browse this site, devote yourself to your art and travel the world valuing cultural traditions, exchanging ideas, and/or pushing the boundaries of your art form!