Shelley Carson, a lecturer with Harvard's School of Psychology has a new book, Your Creative Brain: Seven Steps to Maximize Productivity, Imagination and Innovation in Your Life. The seven brainsets she identifies in relation to creativity are: Connect, Reason, Envision, Absorb, Transform, Evaluate and Stream. I did the quiz on her website in which I scored very high on connect, reason, envision and absorb and very low on transform, evaluate and stream. I'm not sure what that means but first guess - I'd say I'm a thinker not a doer. My pathway is twice as high in spontaneous as deliberate. (But this is only valid if I was spontaneous rather than deliberate in answering the questions!)

In this video she talks about the connection between psychopathy and creativity, or the long-held belief that creative people are crazy. It seems research backs this up. To a point. So why is creativity something that is also thought to bring health and fullness to life. Because it does that too. When people are thinking creatively, there is a sense of being larger than yourself, a sense of clarity and connectiveness and a sense that ideas are in flight. This is a wonderful feeling and in people who are bi-polar, for instance, their manic periods are their most creative.

However, what interests me most about Shelley Carson's work is not what she says about the research that shows their is a connection between psychopathy and creativity but that after 13 years of research, she firmly believes that everyone has the capacity to be creative, that in fact, we are built (created?) to be creative. And that people can attain better health, a greater sense of well-being through exercising the creative brain. This is the premise of my proposed thesis, but in relation to the lives of women who are experiencing mid-life transitions.

This Amy Tan Ted talk expounds on all of this a little more.