"We need a more creative brain in this era."

Louise MacBain is CEO and President of LTB Group of Companies, which publishes around 50 art-related magazines, and website artinfo.com. A new profile article in New York Magazine [The Genius Collector, By Vanessa Grigoriadis] mentions her dinner parties, or, as MacBain calls them, “think tanks.” which have “glitter and politics, artists and Nobel Prize–winning scientists, with a sprinkling of spiritual leaders in the mix.”

In the article, MacBain asks, “Do we not need a more creative brain in this era? So many of the practices in our world were forged in the industrial revolution, but we are now in a new era. We must develop our brains with the energy and commitment we once used to develop our factories.”

Writer Grigoriadis adds, “The science of creativity has yet to produce even a definition of the term, but new genetics analysis and brain-imaging techniques have inspired promising research on creativity in topics like learning and recovering from trauma. The new breed of neuroscientists-slash-philosophers drawing connections between biology and human culture delight MacBain greatly, and she has funded a seminar at Columbia University titled ‘Art and New Biology of Mind,’ attended by scientists and Calvin Klein.

“But MacBain is in touch with creativity in a deeply personal, almost mystical way. ‘I am dyslexic,’ she says, making it sound almost like a confession. When she was young, she was called stupid. ‘I lost my confidence then,’ she says. ‘If you don’t have a fabulous memory to realize there’s two a’s or two p’s in a word, forget it, it’s as important as whatever’s in there, and what’s in there is the intuition to create something, which is truly more important. Later in my life, it took me a long time to figure out who I was, really.’ ”

[Photo from the Louise T Blouin Foundation ltbfoundation.org]

In her HuffingtonPost entry about one of her major projects: Dispatch from the First Global Creative Leadership Summit [in 2 parts], MacBain notes, “Exams like the SATs do not support the 21st century citizen. We need to have lessons in empathy and innovation alongside maths and science.”
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Technorati tags: talent development creative talent gifted adults Louise MacBain
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