Study of artists' brain injuries hints at roots of creativity - Paul Jablow

In 1997, when she was 44, a massive stroke cost painter Katherine Sherwood the permanent use of her right hand. Today, the Bay Area artist is painting with her left hand, her career more successful than ever. Back in 1980, an aneurysm from a previously undiagnosed brain abnormality required surgery that completely wiped out noted jazz guitarist Pat Martino's musical memory. Surgeons told him he had been two hours away from death, put him to sleep, and removed 60 percent of his left temporal lobe. Playing with a computer and listening to his old recordings, Martino, who lives in South Philadelphia, taught himself to play again and has made more than a dozen albums. In 2004 he won the Downbeat magazine readers poll as "Guitarist of the Year."

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The Magnificence of Failure - Malcolm McLaren, Handheld Learning Conference 2009

A wonderful reflection on learning, the arts and the creative journey by the late Malcolm McLaren.

Its True - Creative minds 'mimic schizophrenia - BBC News'

Artist Salvador Dali is known for his surreal paintings and eccentric personalit. Creativity is akin to insanity, say scientists who have been studying how the mind works. Brain scans reveal striking similarities in the thought pathways of highly creative people and those with schizophrenia. Both groups lack important receptors used to filter and direct thought. It could be this uninhibited processing that allows creative people to "think outside the box", say experts from Sweden's Karolinska Institute. In some people, it leads to mental illness.

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The World of Visualisers and Their MadMapping, as Opposed to Mindmapping

This picture was used to illustrate a supposedly erudite blog about how wiki conversations might be visualised. and I am at a loss how to make sense out of it. It may make sense in the moment for those attending, although I would doubt it. Ahhhhh!!!! The moment of madmapping as opposed to mind mapping is upon us as more and more visualisers and marker pen holders gain work by drawing “bad visualisations” on costly whiteboards, only to be removed immediately after the event whilst being photographed, digitised and copied into the vast bin of data pollution.

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