Humour - Creativity - Sex

Travelling between the Aha! Experience and the Ha! Ha! experience.

Laugh!

Creativity and Humour are closely related as many aspects of the creative process can be understand in terms of humour.
Developing skills in creativity will help you create humour, and appreciating a wide variety of humour will help develop your creativity. Humour means having fun, and creativity needs a good dose of fun and play.

I have always enjoyed humour and I still have some limericks I copied from a book. My favourite comedy includes Monty Python, Fawlty Towers, Absolutely Fabulous, Mister Bean (Rowan Atkinson), Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, The Simpsons, and for some very light relief, the very silly Mel Brooks spoofs: "SpaceBalls", "Robin Hood, Men in Tights".

Edward de Bono writes about humour in his book I am Right, You are Wrong:

Humour is by far the most significant behaviour of the human mind. Why has it been so neglected by traditional philosophers, psychologists and information scientists?

Humour tells us more about how the brain works as mind, than does any other behaviour of the mind - including reason. It indicates other thinking methods, something about perception, and the possibility of changes in perception. It shows us that these changes can be followed by instant changes in emotion - something that can never be achieved by logic.

Humour is so significant because it is based on a logic very different from our traditional logic. In traditional (Aristotelian) logic there are categories that are clear, hard-edged and permanent. We make judgments as to whether something fits into a category or not. This is labelled rock logic.

Imagine your path of thinking following definite paths. There are potential side-paths but these have been temporarily suppressed by the dominant track. If 'somehow' we can manage to get across from the main track to the side-track, the route back to the starting point is very obvious. This moving sideways across tracks is the origin of the term 'lateral thinking. If 'somehow' with which we might cut across patterns is the essence of humour and is provided in deliberate creative thinking by the actual techniques of lateral thinking, such as provocation.

The significance of humour is precisely that it indicates pattern-forming, pattern asymmetry and pattern-switching. Creativity and lateral thinking have exactly the same basis as humour.

Sex

The largest sex organ in the body is not between the legs - but between the ears! As a general fitness activity, physical sex can provide one of the most complete work-outs, involving extreme levels of aerobic, strength and flexibility fitness.
Sex also stimulates the intellectual skills, and the same principles apply to it as apply to most other things in terms of learning, memory, creativity and pleasure. The more cortical skills and the more senses that there are involved, then the more complete, stimulating and literally 'orgasmic' the experience is.

It is easy to see, from the brain's point of view, why romance is so intellectually stimulating, motivating, memorable, remarkable and wonderful, as well as being something that we all wish to enjoy - because all the cortical skills are used and all senses are totally involved. Intense conversations, flowers, planning, foods, wines, poetry, beautiful locations, nature, aromas and touch are all the pleasurable ingredients of romance. It is this combination of sexuality, love and total focus that has inspired many of the world's great geniuses to their greatest works of art, poetry, literature, music and conquest. The works of Beethoven, Picasso and Dali were often claimed by their creators to be inspired solely by this triumvirate.

The multiple intelligences and sexuality are all part of the same finely woven fabric. This explains why most of the world's great geniuses, no matter what their field, were known for their prodigious sexual appetites, which were once thought to be an aberration rather than a signature of genius. Intelligence, in its widest interpretation is sexy!.

Notes based on Tony Buzan's Book of Genius published by Random House 1994