ANNA ABRAHAM - Author of “The Neuroscience of Creativity” - Director of Torrance Center for Creativity & Talent Development

Anna Abraham, Ph.D. is the E. Paul Torrance Professor and Director of the Torrance Center for Creativity and Talent Development at the University of Georgia (USA). She investigates the psychological and neurophysiological mechanisms underlying creativity and other aspects of the human imagination, including the reality-fiction distinction, mental time travel, social and self-referential cognition, and mental state reasoning. She is the author of the 2018 book, The Neuroscience of Creativity (Cambridge University Press) and the editor of the multidisciplinary volume, The Cambridge Handbook of the Imagination (2020).

“In the case of improv, where it's physical, it might be a slightly different experience as well compared to someone sitting in front of a page and trying to write because like those physical embodiments, whether it's in a sporting arena or any sport or where you're trying to improvise in front of a group of people... And verbally, of course, if it's standup comedy or that kind of improv, you are in a collective space.

Creative confidence is something that really can't be taught. And you can tell people 'you should be more confident,' but it's something that they have to...that can be cultivated by the person themselves. But usually what you see is this enormous confidence. Sometimes they'll say it with these sort of destiny kind of words. Like 'I was put here for this reason. I know that I have a purpose in life and that is...' And that stems from a sort of profound confidence about what they have to offer the world and what lies within them. And so I would say those two features are perhaps the things that those sorts of people embody.”

www.anna-abraham.com 

https://coe.uga.edu/directory/torrance-center 

www.cambridge.org/core/what-we-publish/elements/elements-in-creativity-and-imagination

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