You could call Lynda Barry a creative polyglot. She is best known as a cartoonist, but her work transcends all mediums: she is also an author, playwright and former radio host. Today, she teaches at the University of Wisconsin, where she is Professor of Interdisciplinary Creativity. But if you asked her, she wouldn't tell you that she's necessarily more creative than anyone else. His big thesis is that everyone has innate creativity. And in addition, this buy email list creative impulse has a real biological function. "When I look at human evolution, our ancestors they all sang and marked and told stories.

And what's interesting is that the music persists, the art persists, the drama, the theatre, it all persists, so it must have a survival function,” she tells me. "I started working with a very wide variety of people, from PhD students to people incarcerated in a medium-security prison in Philadelphia, and wide age ranges, from three-year-olds to the buy email list elderly, to see if what I was thinking about this idea that we all have this thing - I'll call it creativity - if we all have this ability to do things that make us feel better. I wanted to see if that was true in all areas. And for the most part it is, and it's really about memory and storytelling.

Creativity has a biological function According buy email list to Lynda, this survival function that creativity serves is multi-faceted – it's good for our cognition; it's good for our mental health. “We understand the world through metaphor in many ways, just the way we explain the world to ourselves,” she says. She likens creativity to an organ like the liver or the kidneys: “I always think it's about our external organs. You know, we have our internal organs, but we also have culture. As our conversation continues, Lynda becomes frustrated with the limitations of talking on the phone; she wants to show me what she means, not just tell me about it.