What if You Thought Less and Felt More?
Here’s a confession: I’m rubbish at remembering plots. Really terrible. And this is not just an affliction induced by middle-aged neurological decline. Even at school I’d struggle to join in playground conversations about what had happened in last night’s episode of The Young Ones. Ask me if I’ve read a certain book or seen a particular movie and I’ll be able to tell you. Ask me what it was about and the best I’ll be able to muster will be a hazy recollection of plot, painted in the broadest of brushstrokes. It’s frustrating and not a little embarrassing, given my love of the arts. But while character and narrative are quick to evaporate there is always one thing that remains: how a work made me feel. I may struggle to recall who said what to whom, and when and where they said it, but I never lose a sense of the feeling of a book or film. And though it’s often hard to put that tonal quality into words, it is subtle and nuanced, as distinctive as a particular smell.
So why am I sharing this idiosyncrasy with you? Well, of late I’ve been wondering if we give the intellect rather more credit than it’s due; if we prioritize thinking at the expense of feeling. As I write I’m sitting in my studio surrounded by shelves of books on the creative process. And in those books you’ll find many thousands of words devoted to the default neural network, the role of the prefrontal cortex, the theoretical benefits of flow and so on and so forth. Intellectual exploration that is both valid and insightful - but all of it foregrounds the head over the heart.
What if we invert those priorities?
What if we make feeling the star and give thinking a supporting role?