While sketching out upcoming posts for “Creative Synthesis” at Psychology Today, I decided to see what readers seem to like and whether there is a pattern. The top post there in terms of views is “What Does It All Mean?” (about existential bibliotherapy):
“The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya shows how easily bright and creative young people can find themselves standing on an existential precipice, asking important questions that have no easy answers. Such questioning can be triggered by something as normal as a baseball game, as Haruhi explains to the book’s narrator, Kyon:
‘During elementary school, when I was in sixth grade, my whole family went to watch a baseball game at the stadium. I wasn’t particularly interested in baseball, but I was shocked once we got there. There were people everywhere we looked. The ones on the other side of the stadium looked like squirming grains of rice packed together. I wondered if every last person in Japan attended this game.’
She asks her dad how many people are at the game and later does the math to learn what a tiny percentage of the country’s population were all of those people in and around the stadium: ‘Not only was I just one little person in that sea of people in that stadium, but that sea of people was merely a drop in the ocean.'”
Here are the next four most-viewed posts:
- Multipotentiality: When High Ability Leads to Too Many Options (The stress and indecision of being well-rounded)
- High School Years: College Prep or Life Prep? (Adolescence is about so much more than preparation for college)
- Slow Intelligence (Ways to slow down and think better)
- Many Ages at Once (The science behind the asynchronous development of gifted children)
Is there any topic about creativity or psychology that you would like to see explored?