Interessanter Artikel in der heutigen NYT über die Möglichkeit, Kreativität zu fördern, indem man Personen mit „absurden“, d.h. nicht logisch erklärbaren, inkohärenten bzw. „unheimlichen“ Situationen konfrontiert:

“ In addition to assorted bad breaks and pleasant surprises, opportunities and insults, life serves up the occasional pink unicorn. The three-dollar bill; the nun with a beard; the sentence, to borrow from the Lewis Carroll poem, that gyres and gimbles in the wabe“.

„An experience, in short, that violates all logic and expectation. The philosopher Soren Kierkegaard wrote that such anomalies produced a profound “sensation of the absurd,” and he wasn’t the only one who took them seriously. Freud, in an essay called “The Uncanny,” traced the sensation to a fear of death, of castration or of “something that ought to have remained hidden but has come to light. At best, the feeling is disorienting. At worst, it’s creepy“.

Natürlich muss ich mir was einfallen lassen, wenn mir plötzlich ein rosarotes Einhorn gegenübersteht:

“We’re so motivated to get rid of that feeling that we look for meaning and coherence elsewhere,” said Travis Proulx, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and lead author of the paper appearing in the journal Psychological Science. We channel the feeling into some other project, and it appears to improve some kinds of learning“.

Das ist das, was wir als Künstler täglich tun, „We channel the feeling into some other project“, und das ist der Beweis:

„Still, the new research supports what many experimental artists, habitual travelers and other novel seekers have always insisted: at least some of the time, disorientation begets creative thinking“.

Und jetzt lesen wir noch eine Geschichte von Franz Kafka:

“The fact that the group who read an absurd story by Franz Kafka identifies more letter strings suggests that they were more motivated to look for patterns than the others,” Dr. Heine said. “And the fact that they were more accurate means, we think, that they’re forming new patterns they wouldn’t be able to form otherwise.”

Ich frage mich jedoch, was passiert, wenn du dich als Protagonist einer „absurden“ (Kierkegaard), „unheimlichen“ (Freud) oder „kafkaesken“ Realität wiederfindest und nicht als Leser im gemütlichen Ohrenstuhl?“

Ney York Times – Article: How Nonsense Sharpens the Intellect