Creativity Is Not A Trait That We

I Always Wanted To Be A Scientist, I Always Thought I'd Be A Scientist, That Was The Narrative I Was Carrying Around. I Worked In A Neuroscience Lab As An Undergraduate And Then After, Almost Five Years In Total, But I Realized I Just Wasn't Good At Science. I Didn't Have The Discipline For It.

Creativity Is A Spark. It Can Be Excruciating When We're Rubbing Two Rocks Together And Getting Nothing. And It Can Be Intensely Satisfying When The Flame Catches And A New Idea Sweeps Around The World.

How Do We Regulate Our Emotions? The Answer Is Surprisingly Simple: By Thinking About Them. The Prefrontal Cortex Allows Each Of Us To Contemplate His Or Her Own Mind, A Talent Psychologists Call Metacognition. We Know When We Are Angry; Every Emotional State Comes With Self-awareness Attached, So That An Individual Can Try To Figure Out Why He's Feeling What He's Feeling. If The Particular Feeling Makes No Sense—if The Amygdala Is Simply Responding To A Loss Frame, For Example—then It Can Be Discounted. The Prefrontal Cortex Can Deliberately Choose To Ignore The Emotional Brain.

Creativity Shouldn't Be Seen As Something Otherworldly. It Shouldn't Be Thought Of As A Process Reserved For Artists And Inventors And Other 'creative Types.' The Human Mind, After All, Has The Creative Impulse Built Into Its Operating System, Hard-wired Into Its Most Essential Programming Code. At Any Given Moment, The Brain Is Automatically Forming New Associations, Continually Connecting An Everyday X To An Unexpected Y.

And So We Keep On Thinking, Because The Next Thought Might Be The Answer.