"But then when we show it to a synesthe, he says, oh, I see a red triangle against a green background, and he saw it virtually immediately, in other words he saw it in a matter of two or three seconds instead of taking twenty or thirty seconds... so if he's crazy, how come he's better at it than we are? Okay, so this shows that in fact he's not confabulating, he's not making it up, he's literally seeing those things." - ⓞnor

That's wonderful. Slides 4 and 5 do such a great job at demonstrating the phenomenon. - DeWitt Clinton

Also, I love the guy's voice. - ⓞnor

I was going to say that, too. - DeWitt Clinton

This guy writes interesting books, too. - Melinda Owens

Yeah, I couldn't decide about the second half, he seemed to be making some sweeping statements about the nature of art without a lot of support. But it was entertaining and thought provoking. - ⓞnor

yeah, he's entertaining enough that you keep listening. if much of what he says is fluff, it's fluff that seems mostly right. His signature statement, in his discussion of findings from his clinical patients (I think with phantom limb pain) is "if I showed you a talking pig, would you complain that I only had n=1?" - j1m

I'm not sure about some of his claims in the first part. Synesthesia and "creativity" may be a result of failure to prune connections, but there's a theory that autism is too. (It would make sense in terms of some of the sensory filtering problems some autistic people have, and the heads and brains of autistic children tend to be larger than normal.) Autistic people are not thought to be prone to synesthesia or to be particularly creative. - Melinda Owens

Well, he presents this awesome picture of a horse drawn by an autistic child. Which doesn't prove anything about creativity in general, I don't think, but... - ⓞnor

OK, but autistic people are not thought to be more creative than the general public... The claim that synesthesia and creativity are the result of less pruning can be supported by doing simple thing like imaging artist's heads, and he doesn't present any evidence to support that. And the claim that autism can be the outcome of less pruning has more evidence behind it, and autism is pretty different from synesthesia. - Melinda Owens

Ha. I should have listened to the rest of the presentation first. Even when he talks about the horse drawn by Nadia, the autistic child, he doesn't call her creative, he calls her brain-damaged and says that her brain damage happens to allow her to isolate form well. - Melinda Owens

I can't help but think that with what we know now, theorizing about how creativity works in the brain is like speculating about which chip in a computer is responsible for firefox crashing. - ⓞnor

Good analogy. Pruning, after all, is about half of what goes on in development. - j1m

What strikes me about this is the moralizing, normativizing language. It's a wonder we can do any research at all in this area given the use of crazy, damage, etc. which already channel if not constrain our cognitive responses to these phenomena. - Daniel Dulitz

Universal principles of art? Ridiculous argument. Are we back in the nineteenth century (e.g. biological determinism)? If this talk was given to an art history or film or literature audience he'd be torn apart. - joneilortiz

why don't you think there are universal principles of art? - j1m