Demiurgically aMusing: Lightning, Memory, and Reason
What fragrant yet unnoticed flowers
Crossed my path today?
What brilliant
Undiscovered colors
Could have lit my way?
What nature-scenes is Mnemosyne
Unable now to use?
What hidden action
Could have bred
A gentle, laughing Muse?
Ahh Creativity! That mystic, generative celebration of the human spirit;
that seemingly panoptic calibration of the forces of nature;
that sweetest manifestation of the human will.
Wherefore and where from comes creativity?
I’ll tell thee—
It comes from lightning—
Or rather, it would not be possible without it.
Zeus, principle deity of the Olympian pantheon, was the god of lightning. . .
Perhaps Aunt Mnemosyne caught little Zeus’ eye at a family celebration,
Or maybe he was impressed that she always remembered his birthday because,
well . . .
she never forgot anything.
Mnemosyne was the goddess of memory . . . she was memory personified.
Eventually his school-god crush turned to genuine romance. He took the form of a shepherd and he slept with his dear auntie in the hills of Eleuther for nine nights in a row (a serial monogamous record for Zeus).
From this union of lightning and memory were spawned nine daughters directly responsible for all human creative endeavor—
THE MUSES
So Creativity is the progeny of Memory and Lightning.
Modern thinkers, inspired no doubt by sweet Urania,
Have come to understand this relationship between Zeus and Mnemosyne through the observation of the brain.
Memories are physically stored within the squishy confines of the cerebral cortex.
This is how coma victims, brain dead for weeks, can wake from their slumber with near perfect recollection. Memories are stored independent of the electrical impulses tickling your axons and dendrites, but to produce creative functioning, they need lightning.
Creativity, then, must occur within this junction of memory and electricity, but what good is unbridled, electric creativity?
See that guy standing in the middle of the Muses playing the lyre? That's Apollo,
the god of reason, among other things.
Hesiod explained that Apollo (reason personified) was the director of the Muses.
Without a director, the Muses would be little more than a cacophonous burst of sensory overload,
So Reason directs Creativity.
Urania's brain scientists have creatively identified the prefrontal cortex as the director (as a kind of biological Apollo) that orchestrates the interaction of the Muses.
The Creation of Adam-
In the Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo shows God's hand coming out a giant prefrontal cortex to complete The Creation of Adam.
Facilitating and inspiring creativity and learning. - How can you, as a teacher, use technology to advance the creative process, inspire ingenuity, and support knowledge construction for your students?
Electricity, Memory, and Reason
Secrets of creativity-
All of the elements of ISTE Standard #1 provide intuitively useful foci for educator's who wish to advance creativity through digital technologies.
Teachers who want help from the Muses in inspiring their students must understand there are no muses without Mnemosyne:
The subject-matter must directly correlate with the student's experiential frame of reference.
Furthermore, analysis of the mythological and biological elements of creativity inspires an important, counter-intuitive insight:
Thinking inside the box:
Let Apollo do his job by defining problems and the parameters of potential solutions to inspire greater creativity.
Explore technologies in ways which make the hitherto impossible
possible.
Digital arts and creativity
.
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