Are people fascinated by so much in the world because of their intellectual development, or does consciously feeding our mind stimulate high level thought and creative ability?

Writer Steve Pavlina poses that intriguing idea in his book Personal Development for Smart People: The Conscious Pursuit of Personal Growth.

"What you learn in one area can often be applied to others," he writes. "For example, Leonardo da Vinci, considered a genius by any reasonable standard, achieved competence across a diverse set of fields, including art, music, science, anatomy, engineering, architecture, and many others.

"While some would argue that such wide-ranging interests were a result of his intelligence, I think it's more likely that they were the cause of it - or at least a major contributing factor.

"By exposing himself to such a rich variety of input, da Vinci found patterns that others never noticed. This vastly amplified his problem-solving abilities. What’s considered commonplace in one field often has creative applications in other disciplines."

One of the questions in a giftedness self-test from the Gifted Development Center is "Do you often connect seemingly unrelated ideas?" (From the page Self-tests : giftedness / high ability)

One way to help track those ideas and stimulate more awareness of a wider range of disciplines - which may turn out to be related - is to use mind mapping or idea mapping.

The image is from imindmap.com, site of Tony Buzan, author of The Mind Map Book.

Developing my series of websites has "forced" me to learn how to better understand html and css coding - something I fought, partly because it did not seem to fit in with my "artistic" passions to research and publish psychology and personal development information.

But maybe learning the html 'foreign language' has cognitive benefits.

A post on the Developing Intelligence site asks, "What if training ourselves on one task yielded improvements in all other tasks we perform? This is the promise of the cognitive training movement, which is increasingly showing that such 'far transfer' of training is indeed possible, while short of being 'universal transfer.'

"Interestingly, this phenomenon might be most likely to occur for some of the most abstract and challenging cognitive functions."

From Training The Mind: Transfer Across Tasks Requiring Interference Resolution.


In her article Everything Is Connected, Linda Dessau explains that in his book How to think like Leonardo da Vinci, Michael Gelb defines the concept of Connessione as "A recognition of and appreciation for the interconnectedness of all things and phenomena. Systems thinking."

Dessau adds that Gelb "describes the many 'playful, imaginary combinations' that Leonardo made... As artists we delight in 'playful, imaginary combinations' – we're in the business of creating things that didn't exist before.

"Our playfulness can be seen when we manipulate objects, words or ideas into new forms simply because it delights us to do it."

The photo is one example of that: painter Mark Ryden, who writes in his artist statement: "In the same spirit as those earlier collectors filling their cabinets of curiosities, I feel compelled to collect quite a variety of things.

"I draw artistic inspiration from the treasures I find at the flea market.

"I like old toys, books, photographs, anatomical models, stuffed animals, skeletons, religious statues, and vintage paper ephemera."

[From the page Painting.]


Many other artists and scientists also collect and are fascinated by a wide range of stuff and ideas in current and previous cultures.

In his article How to be a genius (New Scientist magazine), David Dobbs declares, "What we call talent or genius illustrates vividly what the past 25 years have taught us about gene expression - that our genetic potentials are activated and realised only through environment and experience.

"Natural buoyancy merely gets you off the bottom. You rise to the top by pumping yourself up.

"So is the ideal of innate genius dead? If not, should we kill it? Certainly a clear-eyed analysis shows that 'genius' is really a set of exceptional skills cultivated through disciplined study."


One of the central ideas of Polish psychiatrist and psychologist Kazimierz Dabrowski, MD, PhD (1902 - 1980) was that individuals having strong "overexcitabilities" (OEs) were good candidates for higher level development. These OEs are categorized as psychomotor, intellectual, imaginative, emotional and sensual, and many writers and educators use them as a basis for identifying gifted and talented individuals.

Intellectual Overexcitability is defined as "processing information, and decision making localized in the cognitive sphere. It is manifested as a drive to ask probing questions, quest for knowledge, theoretical thinking, reverence for logic, preoccupation with theoretical problems, etc.; most frequently associated with exceptional abilities in children."

[From Theory of Positive Disintegration as a Model of Personality Development For Exceptional Individuals, By Elizabeth Mika.]

You can learn more about his ideas in the areas of creativity and personality, and the power and pitfalls of overexcited, teeming brains, on the page Dabrowski / advanced development.


New research using Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) at UCLA indicates "Daily exposure to high technology - computers, smart phones, video games, search engines such as Google and Yahoo - stimulates brain cell alteration and neurotransmitter release, gradually strengthening new neural pathways in our brains while weakening old ones."

From Your iBrain: How Technology Changes the Way We Think [free preview], by Gary Small, Md and Gigi Vorgan, Scientific American Mind, October, 2008.

Another article on their work [Surfing the Internet Boosts Aging Brains, By Tara Parker-Pope, The New York Times, October 16, 2008] notes that "compared with reading, the Internet’s wealth of choices requires that people make decisions about what to click on, an activity that engages important cognitive circuits in the brain.

"A simple, everyday task like searching the Web appears to enhance brain circuitry in older adults, demonstrating that our brains are sensitive and can continue to learn as we grow older,” Dr. Small said.

In a letter to the editor of Atlantic Monthly, Dr. Small writes, “The average young person spends more than eight hours each day using technology (computers, PDAs, TV, videos), and much less time engaging in direct social contact. Our UCLA brain-scanning studies are showing that such repeated exposure to technology alters brain circuitry, and young developing brains (which usually have the greatest exposure) are the most vulnerable.

"Instead of the traditional generation gap, we are witnessing the beginning of a brain gap that separates digital natives, born into 24/7 technology, and digital immigrants, who came to computers and other digital technology as adults.”

Dr. Small [website] continues, “Today, video-game brain, Internet addiction, and other technology side effects appear to be suppressing frontal-lobe executive skills and our ability to communicate face-to-face. Instead, our brains are developing circuitry for online social networking and are adapting to a new multitasking technology culture.” 

[Quotes from Your Brain on Technology: Rewired and Addicted?, a blog post by Paul Barsch.]

Gary Small, MD and Gigi Vorgan are authors of iBrain: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind.


Writer Nicholas Carr comments in his article Is Google Making Us Stupid? (July/August 2008 Atlantic), "Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory.

"My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose."

But, he continues, "That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

"I think I know what’s going on. For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet."

Nicholas Carr’s most recent book is The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, From Edison to Google.

Also hear a Shrink Rap Radio podcast by David Van Nuys, Ph.D., with Jerry Trumbule, M.A. on "whether Google and the Internet are making us stupid."

A lot of us are information seekers, sometimes obsessively - as I note in my post We are infovores.

Laurie A. Sheppard describes in her article Curse of the Creatives some of the consequences we may suffer from seeking so much information and trying to do so much: “If you feel driven, yet overwhelmed by the many diverse life goals you're having difficulty completing, you've likely caught the 'curse of the creatives.'

"Your drivenness is caused by your self-expectation that you should do it all.”

She notes that a Times magazine article, The Multitasking Generation, said “decades of research (not to mention common sense) indicate that the quality of one’s output and depth of thought deteriorate as one attends to ever more tasks.” [Also see related news story: Multi-tasking adversely affects learning, and my article Multitasking - or optimal performance.]  

The title I chose for this article is partly a reference to the book My Teeming Brain: Creativity in Creative Writers, by Jane Piirto, Ph.D., who notes in her article Themes in the Lives of Successful U.S. Adult Creative Writers, that her book title comes from the poet Keats who knew the experience well, writing in a sonnet about his "fears that I may cease to be / before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain..."