"Action is the foundational key to all success." -Pablo Picasso

Lockers have officially arrived at the Upstairs of South Dining Hall at Kutztown University! My eyes could not believe it when I saw it! The Safe Sack group actually made a difference! We accomplished our goal and it feels fantastic! Now every time Katie Schreck and I go upstairs to eat at South Dining Hall we just have these huge goofy grins on our faces. The first time we actually saw the lockers people thought we were a little crazy because we were jumping up and down!

            We officially turned in project two last Thursday. This semester is just flying by so quickly! I cannot even believe it! Even though I was a little frustrated on Tuesday, I was still happy that we did the peer reviews. I ended up using two academic journal articles. You were only supposed to choose one…… 

Required sources: Locate one scholarly journal article, one book chapter, and one alternative source of your choosing (for instance, a TED talk video, etc.).

Whoops. You see I thought that the one alternative source meant that it could be anything. This is why I was so happy we had the peer review and that Vanessa caught that for me. But I ended up choosing a TED talk video as my third source. Then everything turned out to be fine with my source choices! I chose the video titled Elizabeth Gilbert on Nurturing Creativity. Elizabeth Gilbert argues that writers and creative people should not be afraid of their work and need to find ways to recalibrate. I really enjoyed this TED talk video. Elizabeth Gilbert wrote the book Eat, Pray Love. She originally chose writing as a career because writing is her love, and her fascination of writing.  At the start of her career multiple people had a similar question, and asked if she was worried that she may never have a bestseller book. Being only forty this mind set is a concern to her because she feels she has at least four more decades of writing, and is not ready to stop writing books as a profession.  She said that she was afraid and had this advice to offer “Don’t be afraid. Don’t be daunted.  Do your job.”. I love that quote of Elizabeth Gilbert! Don't be afraid to follow your dreams! If you work hard, some day it will all pay off!!

"Creativity is magical, but it's not magic." -Charles Limb

3/16/11

Yesterday in class we did a creative group activity to get our brains pumping. I was partnered with the lovely safe sack group! The activity was that we had to create a story and each member would add the next sentence until the page was filled. It was quite amazing how our story went from George Harrison to then to Charlie Sheen and then to Miss Kathleen Schreck. Plus it was about George Harrison trying to find the magic ketchup bottle and currently Kathleen Schreck was the owner. Wow! Do we have some come creative brains in the Safe Sack group!

3/17/11

http://blog.ted.com/2011/01/05/your-brain-on-improv-charles-limb-on-ted-com/

Today in class we watched this Ted Blog. Charles Limb is testing creativity in a very unique way. He is testing it through an fMRI scanner and through jazz improvisation. He has a jazz artist come in and memorize a short jazz piece of music for piano. Then he would make them play it in the fMRI scanner to measure their brain activity. Limb would then have them improvise on the jazz combo and measure the differences on their brain activity. The brain shows a lot more activity on the improvised piece of music compared to the memorized piece. Charles Limb also did a similar test but with rap. Once again he would have a rapper come in and memorize a piece of music. Into the scanner they went and the brain activity was measured. The rapper would then free style the rap. Brain activity was more active on the improvisation.  I found it very experiment interesting because am very passionate about music! I also really enjoy jazz music. It’s amazing how people improvise music off the top of their head. That’s something that takes a whole lot of training and hard work. The only negative thing about this experiment was he has only tested two styles of music. Plus he has only tested one type of instrument for jazz. I shared this with a few of my music major friends and they enjoyed it as well!

On Creativity – “You need to have a weird association with the frontal lobe of your brain.” –Charles Limb