Creative Perception
In the back part of the brain, a good third of it’s use is for interpretation of visual perception.
That visual perception is recreated in our brain based on the visual input transmitted from our eyes. It forms our visual memory. We use that memory in order to re-live places visited, things done and in general increase our fitness for life. We can trigger that memory independently, in order to use it without feeding the information to our visual cortex. It is that same procedure we use to ‘mesh’ different schema of the world together in order to create new things in our minds. These new things are the future memories, that is our imagination. With the creation of it we are able to visualise an object or a world in future for us. It is this world which we can further flesh out by having a short and long term imagination/ visual memory. In order to link all of the information together we have a story as a lynchpin acting as glue. It is these cause and effect elements which further increasing our future prediction and perception of our environment and thus creating evolutionary survival fitness. The story of cause and effect can be linked and reinforced further with chemical impetus driven by emotions. The two are linked together. This system combined forms the foundation for our imagination and story telling ability. Without it we would have a limited memory and lower survivability as well as decreased ability to manipulate object. It is by having a ‘patient’ evolutionary trait that we can imagine and create a story giving us the reason to create something for the future. We imagine the rewards as well as the visceral object. It is part of our dna and henceforth architecture of cortex and the visual interpretation of the sight altogether.
As creatives feeding our imaginations is paramount in order to keep ourselves fresh and our work novel.
Visual creativity relies on reference, but also, on more ephemeral element of re-restructured memories. Linking together all the various schema we have in our mind into a new whole. Weaving a painting, building a picture, feeling a story and ultimately creating a world.
As with everything the more of this we do the better we become at it. By recognising & actively identifying the elements which constitute our internal visual database, our inner world, our idiosyncratic umwelt we can choose how we use it. We can garden it, adding and reinforcing those elements to complete a fragmented imagined picture. We can feed it new particularly chosen information, or we can rely on our emotions to act as a ‘gut feeling’ towards something entirely new to us. By learning to see we can position ourselves better to be seen. Our perception of the world is a powerful and fundamental ability for our imagination. It is always on and processing data. Knowing this we can train it, feed it and choose how to wield it.
