On the mind blog

On the mind blog2018-08-21T13:41:58+00:00

A blog about creativity and parapsychology… including latest academic research and survey results on women writers’ creative processes, plus individual paranormal experiences.

This is where I don my psychologist’s hat and talk about creativity – what it is, how it works, ways of helping it along. And about parapsychology, that fascinating scientific backwater that explores phenomena, such as precognition and reincarnation, that are not currently explicable via standard models of perception.

Photo credit: Flickr/Alev Adil

Mental ‘warm-ups’ improve creativity

Research by Wilma Koutstaal at the University of Minnesota suggests that people in creative occupations benefit from mental ‘warm-up’ activities just as much as athletes do from a physical warm-up. [...]

The defiance theory of creativity

This year is the 50th anniversary of the Journal of Creative Behaviour, one of a very few academic journals publishing reputable peer-reviewed research into creativity in all its many forms. [...]

How to beat writer’s block

One of the many surveys we’ve conducted at Mslexia was about writer’s block: how many women suffer from it, what form it takes, how they deal with a block when [...]

Bolshy women are more creative

A team of psychologists in Poland has been looking at what personality traits are associated with creativity in men and women. The results of several large-scale investigations reported in the [...]

3. Read something new

The poet Wendy Cope says she can always tell when she’s entering a particularly fecund creative period because she starts to read lots of poetry. If you never read a [...]

Load More Posts