The Creativity Personality

A found Hughes chapter on Creativity Personality to be very interesting. "Personality emerges form the interaction of heredity and environment, nature and nurture." (77) When i started to read about the seven types of intelligences the first thing i thought was " which one do i belong to". So i thought and said, "I think I belong to the interpersonal intelligence types because I have "the ability to understand and be responsive to others' desires, temperaments, and moods." (77) (But then again most of us are.) The section on Nature and Nurture regarding cultures and families growing up with music as a second language. To this is true because as a child my parents were always musically inclined. My dad played the guitar and sang and my mother love to listen to music and dance. She would have music on from the time she woke up to the time she went to sleep. She cooked and cleaned to it and danced with the brook stick. I know very old songs from their time that I still listen to and always enjoyed music and the arts because my parents raised me in this environment. The one thing that I never felt was obligated to follow in my parents steps. They always allowed me to be what I wanted to be.

I also found very interesting how many artists can not hold a physical relationship with a significant other. "Some artists are extremely isolated, but the satisfaction of exercising their gifts, of hearing their own voice, and of reaching others through work, outweighs the promise of alternative pleasures." (83) These artists find the passion in their work and are "in love" with what they do so this outweighs the physical pleasures.

In Walsh's reading we see again the shamanic behaviors and their journey to (ASC). These behaviors need to be addressed because they were often interpreted as pathological. I think personally that anything that is different to our norm is interpreted as something psychological. To the Westerners these sort of shamanic behaviors were out of this world and thus for interpreted as madness. "The risks of misunderstanding other cultures become particularly dangerous when altered states are involved." (Walsh 91) It is said in the reading that Westerners recognized a limited range of "normal" states : walking., dreaming and non- dreaming sleep. Anything out of this limited range is considered pathological. "For many years even of exceptional joy or compassion were often pathological. Mystical experiences, for example, were interpreted as neurotic regressions, ecstatic states viewed as narcissism, and enlightenment dismissed as regression to intrauterine stages. " (Walsh 91)

Many anthropologists tried to observe these so called "fits" that shaman where experiencing but many of then weren't medically trained to get an accurate diagnoses. So they thought these fits could be some type of epilepsy but it was very vague to determine so. Further more, like Walsh said, " To simply dismiss it as "hysteria" or dissociation would be an unfortunate error that would prevent us from exploring an unusual capacity of mind." (96)