Art Widens Experience Thus Making People More Sensitive and Selective?

This excerpt is from the new book Wired to Create: Unravelling the Mysteries of the Creative Mind, past psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman and HuffPost Senior Author Carolyn Gregoire.

"The truly creative listen in any field is no more than this: A human creature built-in abnormally, inhumanly sensitive."

— Pearl Southward. Buck

Recalling his recording sessions with the young Michael Jackson, producer Quincy Jones said that "Michael was so shy, he'd sit down and sing behind the couch with his dorsum to me while I sat with my hands over my eyes -- and the lights off."

From watching his electrifying performances onstage, almost people would never judge that Michael Jackson was a securely shy and sensitive person. From the time he was a immature boy, the King of Pop exuded energy, strength, and charisma onstage, while his personal life was characterized by crippling sensitivity, loneliness, and struggle. As Jackson heartbreakingly said, "Information technology hurts to exist me."

Jackson's biographer J. Randy Taraborrelli all but gave up on trying to make sense of the many paradoxes that divers Jackson's personality. "I think that when you're talking virtually Michael Jackson and y'all endeavor to analyze him, it'southward like analyzing electricity, yous know?" he wrote. "It exists, but you don't have a clue equally to how it works."

The merely thing that seemed to really make sense to Jackson himself was music. The vocalist opened up in an interview with Oprah Winfrey, maxim, "I feel I was called every bit an musical instrument to give music and beloved and harmony to the world." By channeling his sensitivity and suffering into his piece of work, Jackson found a sense of meaning and a way to escape from the loneliness and isolation that oftentimes overwhelmed him.

The paradoxes of the performer

Jackson embodies a personality contradiction seen in many performers: They are both incredibly "out there" and open, and also highly sensitive. Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi identified openness and sensitivity as oppositional personality elements that not just coexist in creative performers, simply form the core of their personalities. This paradox helps explicate how performers can be bold and charismatic on the one hand and emotionally fragile on the other.

"Creative people'south openness and sensitivity frequently exposes them to suffering and pain, still also to a great bargain of enjoyment," Csikszentmihalyi wrote. "Being alone at the forefront of a field of study also leaves you exposed and vulnerable."

The fact that many seemingly extraverted performers are also highly sensitive people can also be found in the complex personalities of metal stone performers. Psychologist Jennifer O. Grimes went to three major metal rock tours, including Ozzfest, one of the largest (and wildest) in the world, where she conducted thorough interviews with 21 musicians from the diverse bands in placidity backstage rooms. What she plant from these conversations was that most of the musicians exhibited the contradiction of openness and sensitivity (also every bit introversion and extraversion) in their personalities.

Onstage, the musicians appear to be the prototype of extraversion: bold, loud, and wild. But backstage, Grimes saw a different side of their personalities. They required alone fourth dimension to recharge and solitary activities like reading, playing their instruments, and writing to "rebalance." The musicians she spoke to reported that when they were onstage, they were "in the zone" and able to "tune out" external stimuli unrelated to their performance. Many of them reported a heightened sensitivity to their surroundings and an intensified feel of sensory input like audio, lighting, and scents. They were frequently prone to daydreaming and had an appreciation of fantasy, and they said that listening to or creating music allowed them to recharge when they felt overstimulated.

All of the musicians likewise said that they experienced unusual perceptions— meaning that they had perceptually rich experiences that reflected a loftier level of sensory sensitivity, such as "hearing the confluence of a multitude of sounds and tonal qualities that make up a single bell chime."

Taking in the world with heightened sensitivity can be both a approving and a curse , and it often requires spending more than time solitary. Grimes writes, "Sometimes, individuals seek to 'block out' overwhelming stimuli, and sometimes greater intensity and focus are desired. 1 subject reported that his hypersensitivity to his environment is so powerful that he finds information technology effortful to associate with his surround."

The subjects all described music as a manner to limited themselves, connect with others, and observe personal fulfillment. They also tended to agree that creating art was an important fashion for them to bridge their inner selves and their outer worlds— pretty sensitive- sounding comments coming from hard rock musicians!

Unusual depth of feeling

Grimes's findings suggest that behind the external appearance of any highly creative person are layers of depth, complexity, and contradictions. Non only performers merely creative people of all types tend to exist acutely sensitive, and conversely, sensitive people are ofttimes quite artistic.

Hither's another example: Mark Salzman, a friend of the smashing cellist Yo‑Yo Ma, describes Ma as i of the most joyful people he's met. Simply he noted that the musician isn't always cheerful— he likewise experiences negative emotions as deeply as he does positive ones. "Yo‑Yo is so responsive to what is going on effectually him ... If you put him in a room with people who are grieving, he will be as lamentable as anyone," Salzman said.

This depth of feeling almost certainly explains how we feel when we hear him perform. Many audience members at Ma'due south concerts are left, as Salzman puts information technology, "excited to the core." He writes, "You lot find yourself paying more attention to the person you're with, more aware of the pelting on the windshield on the ride home. You experience more grateful just to be live."

It's easy to see how one trait feeds into the other: To both the highly creative and the highly sensitive mind, there's simply more to discover, take in, experience, and process from their environment. To highly sensitive people, equally Pulitzer Prize– winning author Pearl S. Buck suggested, the globe may appear to be more colorful, dramatic, tragic, and beautiful. Sensitive people often choice up on the lilliputian things in the environment that others miss, see patterns where others see randomness, and find meaning and metaphor in the minutiae of everyday life. It's no wonder this type of personality would be driven to creative expression. If we retrieve of creativity equally "connecting the dots" in some fashion, then sensitive people experience a world in which there are both more dots and more opportunities for connection.

Are you an HSP?

Enquiry led by psychologist Elaine Aron has identified sensitivity as a fundamental dimension of human personality, finding that highly sensitive people tend to procedure more than sensory input and to pick up on more than of what's going on in both their internal and external environment.

An estimated fifteen to 20 percent of people are considered to be, in Aron's terms, highly sensitive, only amongst artists and artistic thinkers, that percentage is likely much higher. Loftier levels of sensitivity are correlated with not only inventiveness but also overlapping traits such equally spirituality, intuition, mystical experiences, and connection to art and nature.

Aron conducted interviews with people who self-identified as "highly sensitive." The Arons put upwardly advertisements looking for people who were "introverted" or easily overwhelmed by things like noisy places or evocative or shocking entertainment, selecting an equal number of men and women across a wide range of ages and occupations. They then interviewed each person for three to four hours on a range of personal topics, from their childhood and personal history to current attitudes and life problems.

Many respondents expressed a connectedness to the arts and nature as well equally an unusual sympathy for the helpless (animals, "victims of injustice"). Many besides expressed their spirituality ("seeing God in everything," going on long meditation retreats) equally playing an important office in their lives.

Later, psychologists identified two main factors on the HSP Scale: "temperamental sensitivity" -- relating to one's level of sensitivity to sensory input -- and a "rich inner life."

If you're interested in getting a sense of where you lot stand up on these ii factors, here they are:

Temperamental Sensitivity

i. Are you bothered by intense stimuli, like loud noises or chaotic scenes?

ii. Practice you go unpleasantly angry when a lot is going on around you?

three. Are you made uncomfortable by loud noises?

4. Are you easily overwhelmed by things similar brilliant lights, potent smells, coarse fabrics, or sirens close by?

v. Are yous hands overwhelmed by stiff sensory input?

6. Do you notice information technology unpleasant to take a lot going on at once?

vii. Do you startle hands?

8. Exercise you get rattled when you have a lot to do in a brusque amount of fourth dimension?

9. Does your nervous organisation sometimes experience and so frazzled that you just have to go off by yourself?

ten. Practise changes in your life milkshake y'all up?

11. Do you lot find yourself needing to withdraw during decorated days, into bed or into a darkened room or anyplace where yous can have some privacy and relief from stimulation?

12. Do yous brand information technology a high priority to arrange your life to avoid upsetting or overwhelming situations?

thirteen. Are you annoyed when people endeavor to get y'all to exercise too many things at one time?

14. When you must compete or be observed while performing a task, do you become so nervous or shaky that you do much worse than you would otherwise?

15. Do you make a point to avoid fierce movies and Television shows?

16. Do other people's moods affect you?

17. Are you peculiarly sensitive to the effects of caffeine?

18. Does being very hungry create a stiff reaction in you, disrupting your concentration or mood?

19. Practice you tend to exist more sensitive to hurting?

Rich Inner Life

xx. Do you detect and enjoy delicate or fine scents, tastes, sounds, works of art?

21. Are yous deeply moved past the arts or music?

22. Do y'all seem to be aware of subtleties in your environment?

23. Do you have a rich, complex inner life?

24. When people are uncomfortable in a physical environment do yous tend to know what needs to be washed to make it more than comfortable (like changing the lighting or the seating?)

From WIRED TO CREATE: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Creative Mind by Scott Barry Kaufman and Carolyn Gregoire. To be published on Dec 29, 2022 by Perigee, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a sectionalization of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2022 by Scott Barry Kaufman and Carolyn Gregoire.

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12 Famous Artists On Art And Life

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