Dear Skooter :: Arthur Koestler Music Creativity Essays

Dear Skooter, How is it going? It seems to be an eternity since I last talked to you. As for me I am over here at MIT working from sunup to sunset. There is little measure for fun anymore and I seem to have wooly-minded my sense of the little pleasures in life. That is what MIT will do for you. Well enough said abtaboo me, what about you? How is the band doing? Iremember last time I saw you guys performing was at the senior field day. You guys did great by the way. I miss the old days when we used to jam out, out in the garage with you playing the guitar and me beating away at the drums. Hard to believe that I enjoyed playing music so much that I havent fey a drumstick over here at MIT since I left in June. On another note it may seem a surprise tho I thought of writing to you because the other day I came across a short essay by Arthur Koestler discussing creative thinking and the triad domains that compose it the Haha, the Aha and Ah... . At first I thought his theories cou ld not relate to a musician because I mean what performing music has to do with laughing and crying. But as I fmished reading it, it seemed to make sense when I thought of what goes on when you perform on stage. In his essay Koestler introduces a new theory that describes the three domains of creativity that he discusses artistic originality, scientific discovery, and comicinspiration. To better understand the domains he paired each one up with a answer comic inspiration - Haha, scientific discovery Aha, and finally artistic originality Ah... Before I further dwell into describing his ideas we need to establish a term normally used by Koestler in his essay, which is bisociation. In bisociation, two or more different frames of reference are combined to coexist on several planes at once. The three reactions follow no set sequence, the Haha is caused by the collision of the bisociated contexts, and the Aha feeling can be associated with the word eureka who signals their fusion i nto a solution with right to it and the Ah... reactions signals an emotion brought on by an artist focusing on beauty. Do you see what I mean by not having understood what it has to do with creativity?