John Lennon, Mozart and Creation

John Lennon would awaken from sleep with fully formed songs composed in his dreams. Mozart, while walking down a street, would spontaneously hear a completely new musical tune in his head.

In 1962, Harvard psychologist Jerome Bruner published, “On Knowing – Essays for the Left Hand.” It was a treatise on how "knowing" is shaped and how knowing in turn helps create language, science, literature, and art.

Wolfe, Hemingway, Tschaikowsky and many others have mused on the creative process. They told us what it felt like to be inspired. About the productive, creative state.

Lennon was almost embarrassed with the completeness and the ease of finishing his dream-created songs - telling friends that he didn't want to put down them down just because they came so easily. One of these is “#9 Dream.”

Mozart told us the same; that the music just entered his mind: “…thoughts crowd into my mind as easily as you could wish. Whence and how do they come? I do not know and I have nothing to do with it… Once I have my theme, another melody comes, linking itself to the first one, in accordance with the needs of the composition as a whole: the counterpoint, the part of each instrument, and all these melodic fragments at last produce the entire work.”

Importantly, these two geniuses needed more than just the intuitive raw material. They needed intellectual technique - highly developed musical, technical, mathematical, and production skills. Could it be that certain brains, certain souls, have a greater power to dissolve the barriers between the left and right brains?

In her Brain Pickings blog (http://bit.ly/1BN7XgU) Maria Popova describes Bruner’s “On Knowing” work as: “…lamenting how the artificial divide between intuition and intelligence limits us…”

There is much more to Bruner’s treatise. He identified different kinds of creativity: predictive, sudden and visionary. He also believed that the left and right worked together in two steps – a creative, inspirational step and a step where technique is applied to finish the process.

This process, where left and right come together, is exactly what Mozart described about his creative techniques. Without it, there would be no Don Giovanni - and no Imagine.

And no iPhone. It’s also what Steve Jobs reveals in his autobiography – it’s the left/right genius that made Apple into Apple.

Thus, when the inspirational, dreamy left and the pragmatic, perfectionist right work in perfect symmetry, creation happens.

We get Mozart symphonies, Beatles songs and iPhones.