Sam Gentle.com

Dissociation

One of my favourite improv games is called association and dissociation. You start by free-associating: walk around the room, saying things you see or think of, and using those to come up with more things that relate to them. Broom, janitor, Scrubs, Turk, turkey, christmas, ham – that kind of thing. After you'd been doing that for a while you would switch over to dissociating: the same, but think of things that have nothing to do with the previous thing. Pretzels, corn – wait, actually those are both salty snacks you get at events.

Dissociation was enormously more difficult and, I suspect, not even really possible. Much like with paper-scissors-rock, I'm sure a decent analysis could fairly easily predict us even when we're trying to be unpredictable. The exercise isn't actually to make an un-association, but to find less and less obvious associations, to stretch our associative system to the point where it can come up with something that seems unrelated. That's also what happens when some idea comes at you out of thin air, and I think it's very important to cultivate for the sake of creativity.

It's previously been observed that there is a connection between creativity and unhappiness. One theory is the tendency of self-generated, spontaneous thoughts to lead to neuroticism and also creativity. Another is that unhappiness improves certain kinds of processing, particularly focus and attention to detail.

Those are both very interesting results, but I'd like to add my own speculation: perhaps there is a link between unhappiness, escapism, and the creative power of dissociation. Escapism is a common symptom of unhappiness, and losing interest in familiar things is a common symptom of depression. Perhaps, by making the familiar uncomfortable, unhappiness causes us to be more dissociative, and therefore more creative.

If that is true, it would be particularly good news for creativity. It would be a shame if being unhappy was a good strategy for improving creativity. However, if that dissociative mechanism can be learned separately, then happiness and creativity can go together just fine, and any time you would spend practising unhappiness could be better spent practising dissociation instead.

Walrus!