Among the handful of things I find myself repeating to students is the phrase “Your brain is smarter than you are.” This is merely a way of counseling them to listen, to trust their intuitions, dreams, and instincts. To act more impulsively and unselfconsciously. There is of course another sense in which we must be smarter than our brains, as it can be a bit reptilian in its promptings, and thus art’s usefulness arises in part because the animal life is given a world space in which to exercise itself (and we get to propitiate ourselves to it), subject there only to laws of probability and the exigencies of form, rather than the conventionalities of the so-called appropriate, which our brains will have none of even if as we are trying to keep the organism alive in our confined social spheres.
So of course I like this comic at the Oatmeal, “If my brain were an imaginary friend,” because of course my brain is my very real imaginary friend.
The writer is at once the most skeptical and most trusting creature on earth. Everything is circumspect, but everything worthy of inspection, as everything has its secrets to give up, if only you know how to listen. And your brain knows, if only you’d let it. Some people dream in music scores, I often dream in text, and often wonder if the books it writes are any good.
Here is John Cleese talking about how his brain has helped him solved writerly problems. So go out (or go in rather) and listen to your brain today. It really is smarter than you are.