Sociology and Complexity Science Blog: The Atlas of Social Complexity. Chapter 16: Mindfulness, Creativity

26/11/2024

The Atlas of Social Complexity. Chapter 16: Mindfulness, Creativity

As I stated in my previous post, the second major content theme in The Atlas of Social Complexity is the Dynamics of Human Psychology. So far for this theme, I’ve given a basic overview, found here. I then moved on to the first theme, Human psychology as dynamical system (Chapter 13). From there I reviewed Chapter 14: Psychopathology of mental disorders and then Chapter 15: Healing and the therapeutic process.

The focus of this post is CHAPTER 16: Mindfulness, imagination, and creativity

OVERVIEW OF CHAPTER:

The human brain is a portal between the physical world and mental life. With the brain (as its own form of structure and organisation) acting as a bridge, the two domains, the physical and the mental, are not separate but deeply intertwined, such that life and reality regularly relent to the powers of imagination and creativity, meanwhile the mind is entirely embodied, including the metaphors by which we live.

Humans dream of flying and traveling past the speed of light; they imagine superheroes and demons; they create gods and monsters; they envisage lives outside the laws of physics, where reality is bent to their goals and desires and their hopes and dreams. Some humans dream the sublime and beautiful, others dream disturbing nightmares. They are all still dreams to which reality and nature regularly relent.

As Oscar Wilde famously stated in The Decay of Lying (1891) “Paradox though it may seem – and paradoxes are always dangerous things – it is none the less true that Life imitates art far more than Art imitates life.”

It is at the nexus of mindfulness, imagination, and creativity that the arts and humanities collide with the complexity science study of cognition, emotion, and consciousness.

To explore this nexus, the focus of this chapter, we examine the five key issues that need to be addressed.

The first is that we need to be clear what mindfulness, imagination, and creativity mean.
The second is understanding the different levels or degrees of creativity.
The third is the adverse impact that hyper-specialisation has on these topics.
The fourth is the continued restriction of creativity to a mental act, which ignores emotions, as in the case of spontaneous creativity and flow.
The fifth is how creativity draws on our embodied minds and social life.

We end the chapter exploring what we see as the most promising inquiry in these areas. This chapter can be read in tandem with Chapter 32 ‘The Unfinished Space’.

One examples is the work of Orion Maxted[1] . Maxted is a British theatre performance artist based presently in Amsterdam. He studied computing, music and performance art and holds an MA in theatre. His work explores hybrid forms of performance that explore the nexus between complex systems, cybernetics, computation, language, musicality, and theatre. He calls this nexus ‘algorithmic theatre’ as the computational modelling taking place is done entirely by people, mostly through the usage of language. Several examples of his algorithmic theatre, such as flocking or flow, theatre of mind and the brain, can be seen online.[2] The Theatre of Mind is an experimental piece “to transform the theatre and the audience into a collective intelligence, aka, a mind – achieved by connecting the audience together via mobile phones in a distributed-intelligence network or swarm intelligence – and creating feedback loops between what the audience collectively write, and the ideas that come into existence live on stage”.[3] The purpose of the piece is to ask such questions as: “Do the mind and the world share a common structure? Is the world becoming an increasingly interconnected ‘global brain’? And if so, how do we get the best ideas to rise to the surface and think about the survival of the group?” [4] What makes Maxted’s work so valuable is that, as a way of expanding the focus of the science of mindfulness, imagination and creativity, which is driven to seek answers, he finds value in pushing us to also ask other or different types of critical questions – which is just as powerful.