Exploring Your Creative Genius: Episode 157
In this week’s episode I shared neuroscience research projects that identified and explored the biological changes that occur in our brains as we move from our 50’s into our 60’s.
Considering these changes, one of the scientists, Dr. Bartzokis from UCLA, suggested we now have ‘a biological explanation for wisdom.’
That wisdom that grows as we age has been studied by social scientists since the 1970’s. They call it ‘Crystalized Intelligence’. It’s our ability to mine all our knowledge and experiences to find fresh relationships and new insights. It grows over our lifetimes but really comes on strong in our late 50’s and into our 60’s and continues to serve us as long as we stay mentally active and keep feeding it with new experiences and fresh challenges.
There are three important places this shows up.
-As we age, we are much better at managing ambiguity. We are more confident and more adept at making decisions even when we don’t have all the information we would like to have.
-We are better at holding two conflicting ideas in our heads at the same time while finding ways to make choices and decisions that take from each idea.
-And as I said on the show, perhaps my favorite is how our situational intelligence improves as we age. We are all multi-faceted creatures and as we age, we become increasingly sophisticated in our ability to find the facet that will best serve the situation.
You become better at realizing it’s time for you to bring your leadership experiences to the team. Or time to step back and let another take the lead. It’s time for your thoughtfulness or it’s time for your goofiest.
I also mentioned the Washington Post article that surveyed several research projects exploring creativity in aging populations. Taken together, the research finds that folks who live creative lives—of the artistic variety, or a daily creative approach to life of openness and eagerness for new experiences or learning—live longer lives and live more joyfully, and holy mostaccioli, what’s better than that?
(Here’s the link, if you’d like to know more)
And I am offering to do a free creativity workshop for your non-profit—your book club, your church group, your neighborhood association. If you are interested contact me at carlnordgren14@gmail.com and we’ll work something out that serves you.
“Exploring Your Creative Genius” takes an expansive view on what it means to be creative and entrepreneurial in an ongoing conversation led by Carl Nordgren — entrepreneur, novelist, and lifelong student with decades of experience growing his own creative capacity and assisting others to do the same in exciting new ways!
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