Good question. Never thought about the numbers of ideas boxes I can have in my head…I don’t keep them in. I’m presently in a creativity process and if I don’t lay down the ideas on a paper or in my computer, they are lost…I can’t exactly remember what was seems clear and almost“the idea“that I had two hours ago!
Inspiration comes when it comes…but when The lemon is overpressed,I get back to the bank idea in the memory boxes of my computer and work on!
So, maybe the number of boxes can change day by day. Good days equals a lot of boxes(how many???) and bad days….
I’m curious David, to know how many boxes in my head…website related to ?
Lalou

The idea of 15 boxes blows my mind! I guess since I am not an intrinsically creative soul, my mind doesnt work that way. My model is more like a Brita water filter where I can have an idea in my mind and it needs time to filter through and process before I can add a new one. I usually work on one topic at a time and fully immerse myself and dont start the next one til its actualized. Only then can I start another.

I wish i had boxes (though I’m not convinced I would have enough stuff to fill them! lol!)

p.s. I think you have a hippie soul… and that’s a good thing… i was raised by hippies!

i have not found the model yet but at my current state of mind, my model for creativity would be a 30feet deep pool with an area of 1kmx1km. i am working so hard on organizing my thoughts and ideas. my imagination and creativity is easily stimulated. although i do prioritize on my creative endeavors.

im cool with hippies.

I have to wrap my head around it somewhat. I work in crisis so my mind is constantly switching gears. I may be on two crisis calls, having someone going into seizures, another struggling with drug withdrawal, supper burning, and a stalker outside. My mind has to be respond quickly to what needs to be dealt with immediately. So sometimes, the request for a curling iron completely leaves my mind frame *poof*. My job makes me deal immediately with the relevant and anything else is a bonus. I KNOW that alot of ideas, maybe good ones, get lost into oblivion but this is what works I guess with what I do. I wish I could be that organized, but there is just so much inpredictability that being in the moment of creativity is more important to me then building a creative structure. But our careers are different and require different things but it got me thinking about the discipline and intelligence in the music industry far sure. So my max boxes, I’ll think about it, as I haven’t ever gone there before.

very interesting question!
well, actually, i have stigmatized myself looong time ago that im not a creative person. and thats why i always admire those creative ones so much. i have been trying to increase my creativity too. a book said that a man’s creativity can be developed by some processes of practicing.

in order to answer to this interesting question, i just easily test myself by counting my immidiate thoughts of a topic that i set up. and the results come out that my maximum boxes have never reached more than 10!! the average is just at 7-8..hehehe

im curious too, how did you count your boxes, david?
and yeah, i like hippie’s viewpoint.

im loving all your replies and analogies

I wish my brain were that organized. I am not an unorganized person, but honestly my brain is a bit of a jumble. A clam jumble, but I don’t think of putting my creative ideas in “boxes” in my brain. I very often forget my ideas if I don’t do them right away or at least write them down. Writing them down hardly ever happens, so normally I just do it. Like yesterday, I wanted to sew something, I have no patterns to work with except pj pants and a hat.. I wasn’t feelin the hat and I don’t want to wear pj pants in the summer, so I asked a friend if he wanted a pair… I got it all cut out and sewn, but I still wasn’t feelin the “copy and paste” idea.. I guess that is why I only have like 2 pattrens for making clothes. So.. I made a skirt…. didn’t really think about it before hand the idea just popped in my head and I just picked up and old pair of jeans and went with it… found some other nice fabric… and then I made a skirt… a kick ass skirt too.. I hardly ever end up making something that I will actually wear, I usually give it away.. anyway… I do have ideas in my head of things to do, however, they are just everywhere and I’m alright with that. Most of the time the best things just seem to happen… Without storing the idea in my head to begin with. I find it SO interesting the questions you’ve been asking lately.. it gets my brain all in deep thinking mode and that is a great spark for new ideas…

Yes! I see what you mean! It really can be called “boxes’. Mainly it feels like this because it’s need to release/fill again. I stopped count mine. Now I see this creative space like parallels and verticals, like 3D form, where all can exist at same time. It’s like labyrinth of ideas.
When you let it out, how do you manage to carry it through later? Or does it stay incomplete?

I love that way of saying this and I agree with you completely on this

I’m curious, like bui asked…how DID you manage to count the boxes?? Because I’d like to find out how many I have in my head. I can relate to stormy because in my field of study (nursing) I usually have to work with what’s relevant and recall important pieces of information that I either come across or is passed along to me. Somehow I’ve carried over the same way of thinking to other aspects of my life. My mind is constantly running on some kind of creative energy that I can’t really capture. So unfortunately ideas that flow into my head are lost if I don’t get a chance to record it down somewhere “for future reference” for when I get more time to invest more energy into them.

From following up on the work [through your website of course :)] you’ve accomplished on your new album in the amount of time you did, I wonder how on earth you manage to organize all your ideas, how you choose which to discard and which to stick with. I find the more options I have, the more pressure there is to choose the “right” one, therefore the more nerve wracking. Then again, with art options are limitless. Like Svetlana said, it’s like a labyrinth. So…how??

@ lillian
its really just a guesstimate:) im exploring the idea that the web helps allow creativity to flow, if we allow ourselves to let it out.

I find something interesting on the web that I want to read about and then find it at the library. I’m reading several books at once, so I guess that’s several boxes. One book is about learning styles and another is about children and music. That applies to me because as a coach/chorepographer I have to switch gears according to the learning style,or to whatever type of music I am using. I have to put things in creative boxes or else everyone’s program will look the same. When I am in the zone I don’t like to stop working, but sometimes I have to because the lesson is over. When there is little creativity in my mind I keep checking my watch and say to myself…”Shoot, It’s only been 10 minutes?” That’s when I grab from things I’ve seen on youtube and mesh them together to make something of my own. It’s not often but I get the job done. Thank God for back-ups. It’s probably that way with music too…take a guitar piece, turn it on its head and there’s a brand new piece of music..voila.

I agree that by using the web we can quickly empty out our boxes for future reference and for the world to see, thus allowing more space and time to create even more wonder.
Perhaps there will be a time when all ideas will simply just manifest before our eyes without the need to rehash and contemplate. Thought as stream of conciousness just pouring fresh and flowing out freely to create the world around us, instead of us thinking around ideas of how to…and just do.

Maybe thoughts are just the middle men that bridge our higher conciousness to our actions in the physical plain.

Now you can sit and just create your story that you invision, just like that…your record is done. I on the other hand have 10,000 boxes it seems that I feel I need to sort through even before I take action. I think that it is best to empty all of the boxes and not start new ones until you are clear to create by focusing only on that stream of higher conciousness and releasing into the physical through spontanious action. Just being “in the flow”, and allowing whatever needs to come out, flow out without thought.
I know that my thoughts are a hinderance to my action, yet necessary for me to want to take those actions I need to take. Action without thought but with soul guiding the flow.
I think just writing this I have squashed thousands of boxes realizing. Like a spiral (DNA),I let them go until all I have left are important to my personal master plan for my life. You see all of my ideas and boxes all have to do with one focused purpose…and in that purpose - one giant action that incorporates many little actions, ideas, boxes and people, together. So I fill each box until I have all the parts I need, then when all the boxes I need are full I take sponatious action and use all those boxes as tools to complete my mission/action.
Wow thanks again!
I would have to say that the most beautiful accurate love song ever…is: (drum roll)
Alone in the Universe
How true it is!
Anyway these are my thoughts spawned by your thoughts at this moment. I like this Web! There is no relying on other people, no one stopping us now from connecting or reconnecting back with the WHOLE, the collective consiousness, the knowledge that we are all one.
Does that sound Hippieishy? I had some younger people call me a hippie. It felt like it was an offence yet my parents were hippie athesists and they taught me well to always think for myself. While true they had a very selfish attitude and sexually immoral behaviour, which I guess is symbolic of what led most of them to becoming yuppy scum who went full throttle into the industrial revolution of greed that is killing our planet today. My parents were never about the greed but I can see how belief systems associated with power can get distorted easily by the ego driven.

I guess the more accurate number of boxes in my head would be infinate, for every person and everything in existence through everytime…live inside my head…the part of my mind that is the one/the colective/higher WHOLE conciousness. Omnicience - all the knowledge (like the internet)at my access and disposal instantaniously.
The brain is the personal computer.

That’s what dreams are for…to sort out all our little boxes…throwing out the noise XO
D.U. “Superstar” …(A little “Mary Katherine Gallagher” from SNL to add humour)

Interesting idea, David! Now I know how to put all those ideas in my head so they won’t run rampage. I haven’t made an attempt to count them but I don’t think they go up to 15 at one time. Or I hope not….that’ll be hard to keep track. I don’t know how you do it, but I suppose those boxes and the web help.

Do you find you can manage to complete all those ideas that pop up, or do some of them just evolve into something else or dissipate away??

So far, I can’t seem to make every idea I have be created, only some get to see the light of day.

i wish I had boxes. that would be neat and tidy. my brain is like a huge pile of strainers … ideas get poured in but then they slowly leak out and mix with others. it never ends. I need a lab like Alexander Graham Bell set up in Baddeck, N.S. where he would invite scientists to work on wacky stuff.

Check out the following link and scroll down a bit to know what I’m talking about.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baddeck,_Nova_Scotia

ok … so this has nothing to do with music .. but hey

i think i need sorters to classify my boxes cause i cannot just have a certain number of ideas. I have few ideas in very different fields of creativity and i agree with the idea that, as long as you don’t get them out, they block new ones. Though, im not able to sort them all out as im not as multi-tasking as my mind wish i was. I have that one idea, im stuck with. Something i cant sort by myself and for which, i dont have the resources to concretize. The few people I talked to about it, we’re as certain as i am it would work… big time. Im talking about a business here, but its neither something I ever wanted to do. I should just forget about it i guess, but its almost obsessing me! funny how the human imagination works!

Great qstn! (either 200 or 9 depending on how i count).

Yey for hippies!!

i usually have one idea, if i’m thinking about someone else add another and if i’m feeling romantic and start thinking too much possibly a third but not usually most always on how my art is viewed after the case…what a funny topic to discuss
i’m really not sure what you’re talking about
you may be thinking too much

they say when you create something it changes the course of action its intended for, it bridges heaven and earth and transends all.

Well i reread something like that in the I ching

I made this Mental Process Mapping one day every week…. In average I have about 5 to 8 ideas that urgently push me to map them down with a piece of paper and a pencil.

Once they are mapped ideas like these can haunt my brain for as long as a year….

I decided to Print all these Undone Ideas and to create a book about all those Inspirations that do not come with any manuals to get more or less completed in the real world.

Wait a moment…what is the real world….Damn another idea to map out

The idea that you can say you have 15 boxes for ideas - in your head/mind - I find rather worrying. Either I’ve just got one idea and no box, or many ideas (sprouting from the one idea) and many boxes all with holes in and interconnectedness and moving and bouncing around and ethereal.