About Ray Peat:
“That he sometimes completely stops reading and talking for several days because he believes too much verbalisation damages the brain. During those days he paints and does sculpture instead to stimulate the areas of the brain that are responsible for creativity and three dimensional thinking.”
By Ray Peat (from an e-mail):
"While I was (...) a psychology major, I did some surveys (1957) relating to creativity and types of thought and dreaming, following up some ideas I found in Brewster Ghiselin's book The Creative Process. I felt that the current US view of the brain as a computing device with nerves serving as wires and switches was completely inappropriate, even for understanding things such as the perception of odors and musical pitch, and around that time a practical study of creativity was published, in a book called Synectics, and I saw that Pavlov's colleague P.K. Anokhin had been developing a much better understanding of brain function. The fact that sensations and perception of space in dreams can be so convincing led me to feel that biological/metabolic processes in the brain reproduce in fairly direct or literal ways things in the external world, i.e., that our experience of internal colors and smells and sounds are probably a sort of electrochemical resonance within nerves---with a nerve and its surroundings, spatial parts of the brain, taking on energetic states with the frequencies that are closely analogous to the frequencies produced by the external objects, colors, chemical odors, sound vibrations, as well as other kinds of patterned relationships. If "photons" or electromagnetic interactions within the organism are the substance of consciousness, then the electronic properties of nutrients, hormones, and drugs are important, rather than their geometric form, as interpreted by the "lock-and-key" "receptor and ligand" doctrine. I think the active chemical in St. John's wort is hypericin, an anthroquine (very similar to emodin, in cascara, and to vitamin K and tetracycline), which is a large system of conjugated electrons, that interacts powerfully with our cellular regulatory systems.
(...)
I suspect that growing up with creativity involves opportunities that cause the brain to develop various sensitivities and resonances, and that the brain functioning in these ways calls up the energetic and hormonal resources that it needs, and ideally that includes an array of chemicals that enrich and intensify consciousness, allowing very complex internal experiences to be generated."
“That he sometimes completely stops reading and talking for several days because he believes too much verbalisation damages the brain. During those days he paints and does sculpture instead to stimulate the areas of the brain that are responsible for creativity and three dimensional thinking.”
By Ray Peat (from an e-mail):
"While I was (...) a psychology major, I did some surveys (1957) relating to creativity and types of thought and dreaming, following up some ideas I found in Brewster Ghiselin's book The Creative Process. I felt that the current US view of the brain as a computing device with nerves serving as wires and switches was completely inappropriate, even for understanding things such as the perception of odors and musical pitch, and around that time a practical study of creativity was published, in a book called Synectics, and I saw that Pavlov's colleague P.K. Anokhin had been developing a much better understanding of brain function. The fact that sensations and perception of space in dreams can be so convincing led me to feel that biological/metabolic processes in the brain reproduce in fairly direct or literal ways things in the external world, i.e., that our experience of internal colors and smells and sounds are probably a sort of electrochemical resonance within nerves---with a nerve and its surroundings, spatial parts of the brain, taking on energetic states with the frequencies that are closely analogous to the frequencies produced by the external objects, colors, chemical odors, sound vibrations, as well as other kinds of patterned relationships. If "photons" or electromagnetic interactions within the organism are the substance of consciousness, then the electronic properties of nutrients, hormones, and drugs are important, rather than their geometric form, as interpreted by the "lock-and-key" "receptor and ligand" doctrine. I think the active chemical in St. John's wort is hypericin, an anthroquine (very similar to emodin, in cascara, and to vitamin K and tetracycline), which is a large system of conjugated electrons, that interacts powerfully with our cellular regulatory systems.
(...)
I suspect that growing up with creativity involves opportunities that cause the brain to develop various sensitivities and resonances, and that the brain functioning in these ways calls up the energetic and hormonal resources that it needs, and ideally that includes an array of chemicals that enrich and intensify consciousness, allowing very complex internal experiences to be generated."
