Winston Churchill on “painting as a pastime”
I’m just back from a trip to England, where I was doing interviews and archival work for Rest. While most of my time was spent in the British
Nature and creative problem solving: how days in the wood boost creativity
This morning via Michael Hyatt, I came across a 2012 study on "Creativity in the Wild: Improving Creative Reasoning through Immersion in Natural Settings:" Adults and children are
“…very gradually build up living and creative structures within us”
The Swedish neuroscientist Ragnar Granit gave what I regard as a remarkable talk about research and deep thinking as activities requiring personal development and transformation. It's a great
Wilder Penfield: “Rest, with nothing else, results in rust”
"Rest, with nothing else, results in rust," Wilder Penfield wrote in his great essay The Second Career: "It corrodes the mechanisms of the brain." The essay was an argument against
Michael Corballis: “we are programmed to alternate between mind-wandering and paying attention”
It seems we are programmed to alternate between mind-wandering and paying attention, and our minds are designed to wander whether we like it or not. In adapting to
“men of lofty genius sometimes accomplish the most when they work the least”
From Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Artists (1912 translation), pp. 96-97: [Leonardo da Vinci] also painted in Milan, for the Friars of S. Dominic, at S. Maria delle
“intellectual refreshment withers the parasitic and nasty vegetation that smothers the good seed”
Santiago Ramón y Cajal's Advice for a Young Investigator (translated by Neely Swanson and Larry W. Swanson, and published by MIT Press) has some great stuff about research, rest, and
John Le Carré: “I was always very careful to give my country second-best”
John Le Carré, talking in the Paris Review about working on his first book while commuting to work: In those days English newspapers were much too big to
Erno Rubik, Graham Wallas, and the invention of the Rubik’s Cube
Just over forty years ago, Erno Rubik invented what is now one of the most famous puzzles ever: the Rubik’s Cube. Recently I saw an interview with Rubik
“the stage of incubation should include a large amount of actual mental relaxation”
From Graham Wallas, The Art of Thought: Voluntary abstention from conscious thought on any particular problem may, itself, take two forms: the period of abstention may be spent