Main description:

In those moments when focus on creative work overrides input from the outside world, we are in a creative trance. This psychologically significant altered state of consciousness is inherent in everyone. It can take the form of daydreams generating scientific or creative ideas, hyperfocus in sports, visualizations that impact entire civilizations, life-changing audience experiences, or meditations for self-transformation that may access states beyond trance, becoming gateways to transcendence. Artist and psychologist Tobi Zausner shows how creative trance not only operates in scientific inventions and works of art in all media, but is also important in creating and recreating the self. Drawing on insights from cognitive neuroscience, clinical psychology and post-materialist psychology, this book investigates the diversity of the creative trance ranging from non-industrial societies to digital urban life, and its presence in people from all backgrounds and abilities. Finally, Zausner investigates the future of trance in our rapidly changing world.

Contents:

Introduction: the pervasive state of trance; 1. The multifaceted creative trance; 2. Consciousness and creativty theory in a creative trance; 3. Unconscious origins of the creative trance; 4. Empathy and dissociation in the creative trance; 5. Evolution, altered states, and the creative trance; 6. The creative trance and the brain; 7. Dynamics of the creative trance; 8. Dyslexia, attention deficit disorder, and the creative trance; 9. Illness and transformation in the creative trance; 10. Different abilities and the creative trance; 11. Dementia and the creative trance; 12. Altered states of a lifesaving creative trance.