A moving portrait of a father and daughter relationship and a case for late-stage creativity from Emily Urquhart, the bestselling author of Beyond the Pale: Folklore, Family, and the Mystery of Our Hidden Genes. “The fundamental misunderstanding of our time is that we belong to one age group or another. We all grow old. There is no us and them. There was only ever an us.” — from The Age of Creativity It has long been thought that artistic output declines in old age. When Emily Urquhart and her family celebrated the eightieth birthday of her father, the illustrious painter Tony Urquhart, she found it remarkable that, although his pace had slowed, he was continuing his daily art practice of drawing, painting, and constructing large-scale sculptures, and was even innovating his style. Was he defying the odds, or is it possible that some assumptions about the elderly are flat-out wrong? After all, many well-known visual artists completed their best work in the last decade of their lives, Turner, Monet, and Cézanne among them. With the eye of a memoirist and the curiosity of a journalist, Urquhart began an investigation into late-stage creativity, asking: Is it possible that our best work is ahead of us? Is there an expiry date on creativity? Do we ever really know when we’ve done anything for the last time? The Age of Creativity is a graceful, intimate blend of research on ageing and creativity, including on progressive senior-led organizations, such as a home for elderly theatre performers and a gallery in New York City that only represents artists over sixty, and her experiences living and travelling with her father. Emily Urquhart reveals how creative work, both amateur and professional, sustains people in the third act of their lives, and tells a new story about the possibilities of elder-hood.

“A brilliant travel guide to the coming world of AI.” —Jeanette Winterson What does it mean to be creative? Can creativity be trained? Is it uniquely human, or could AI be considered creative? Mathematical genius and exuberant polymath Marcus du Sautoy plunges us into the world of artificial intelligence and algorithmic learning in this essential guide to the future of creativity. He considers the role of pattern and imitation in the creative process and sets out to investigate the programs and programmers—from Deep Mind and the Flow Machine to Botnik and WHIM—who are seeking to rival or surpass human innovation in gaming, music, art, and language. A thrilling tour of the landscape of invention, The Creativity Code explores the new face of creativity and the mysteries of the human code. “As machines outsmart us in ever more domains, we can at least comfort ourselves that one area will remain sacrosanct and uncomputable: human creativity. Or can we?...In his fascinating exploration of the nature of creativity, Marcus du Sautoy questions many of those assumptions.” —Financial Times “Fascinating...If all the experiences, hopes, dreams, visions, lusts, loves, and hatreds that shape the human imagination amount to nothing more than a ‘code,’ then sooner or later a machine will crack it. Indeed, du Sautoy assembles an eclectic array of evidence to show how that’s happening even now.” —The Times

With few exceptions, scholarship on creativity has focused on its positive aspects while largely ignoring its dark side. This includes not only creativity deliberately aimed at hurting others, such as crime or terrorism, or at gaining unfair advantages, but also the accidental negative side effects of well-intentioned acts. This book brings together essays written by experts from various fields (psychology, criminal justice, sociology, engineering, education, history, and design) and with different interests (personality development, mental health, deviant behavior, law enforcement, and counter-terrorism) to illustrate the nature of negative creativity, examine its variants, call attention to its dangers, and draw conclusions about how to prevent it or protect society from its effects.

What is the nature of human creativity? What are the brain processes behind its mystique? What are the evolutionary roots of creativity? How does culture help shape individual creativity? Creativity: The Human Brain in the Age of Innovation by Elkhonon Goldberg is arguably the first ever book to address these and other questions in a way that is both rigorous and engaging, demystifying human creativity for the general public. The synthesis of neuroscience and the humanities is a unique feature of the book, making it of interest to an unusually broad range of readership. Drawing on a number of cutting-edge discoveries from brain research as well as on his own insights as a neuroscientist and neuropsychologist, Goldberg integrates them with a wide-ranging discussion of history, culture, and evolution to arrive at an original, compelling, and at times provocative understanding of the nature of human creativity. To make his argument, Goldberg discusses the origins of language, the nature of several neurological disorders, animal cognition, virtual reality, and even artificial intelligence. In the process, he takes the reader to different times and places, from antiquity to the future, and from Western Europe to South-East Asia. He makes bold predictions about the future directions of creativity and innovation in society, their multiple biological and cultural roots and expressions, about how they will shape society for generations to come, and even how they will change the ways the human brain develops and ages.

Aging and Creativity examines the effects of aging on creative functioning, including age-related changes in cognition, personality, and motivation that affect performance or output. The book reviews and summarizes both lab-based and real-world-based studies. Changes in working memory, speed of processing, learning efficiency, and retrieval from long-term memory are all discussed as factors influencing creativity, as are health changes and changes in social roles with later age. The book concludes with practical implications of age effects on creativity for older people in work and everyday life. Explores cognition and creativity from early adulthood through old age Considers creativity and aging from an evidence-based perspective Includes biological, psychological, and social approaches to aging and creativity Covers age effects on perception, processing speed, working memory, and long-term memory Discusses effects of health and social role changes with age on creativity Examines links between productivity, motivation, and creativity over age

Contemporary society has seen an unprecedented rise in both the demand and the desire to be creative, to bring something new into the world. Once the reserve of artistic subcultures, creativity has now become a universal model for culture and an imperative in many parts of society. In this new book, cultural sociologist Andreas Reckwitz investigates how the ideal of creativity has grown into a major social force, from the art of the avant-garde and postmodernism to the ‘creative industries’ and the innovation economy, the psychology of creativity and self-growth, the media representation of creative stars, and the urban design of ‘creative cities’. Where creativity is often assumed to be a force for good, Reckwitz looks critically at how this imperative has developed from the 1970s to the present day. Though we may well perceive creativity as the realization of some natural and innate potential within us, it has rather to be understood within the structures of a very specific culture of the new in late modern society. The Invention of Creativity is a bold and refreshing counter to conventional wisdom that shows how our age is defined by radical and restrictive processes of social aestheticization. It will be of great interest to those working in a variety of disciplines, from cultural and social theory to art history and aesthetics.

What's Next? Creativity in the Age of Entertainment is a memoir of observations of the interconnected causes of the creativity crisis that exists today in an environment where entertainment has replaced and compromised the arts, education, and business. The issues inhibiting creativity are interrelated and none exist in a vacuum. In an exploration of our creative environment today, Jan Karlin focuses on creativity as the background of the arts, innovation and culture, and the inspiration it provides throughout our society. The challenges she has observed in our cultural and work environments -- confused definitions, the disappearance of arts education and media coverage, misguided and struggling arts organizations, poor education for work and life skills -- are all a result of living in the Age of Entertainment.

This book chronicles the dawn of the age of creativity in business, when new ideas and practices based on creativity will drastically change the way we do business. Starting with an overview of the age of marketing, the book winds its way through the past and the present to show us the future of business, backed up with insights from sociology and psychology.

From ancient drawings to the genius of Leonardo and Einstein to the imagination that colors our everyday life: the drive to create, innovate and make something new is a big part of what makes us human. Explore this and more in this new special edition from TIME, The Science of Creativity.

An authority on creativity introduces us to AI-powered computers that are creating art, literature, and music that may well surpass the creations of humans. Today's computers are composing music that sounds “more Bach than Bach,” turning photographs into paintings in the style of Van Gogh's Starry Night, and even writing screenplays. But are computers truly creative—or are they merely tools to be used by musicians, artists, and writers? In this book, Arthur I. Miller takes us on a tour of creativity in the age of machines. Miller, an authority on creativity, identifies the key factors essential to the creative process, from “the need for introspection” to “the ability to discover the key problem.” He talks to people on the cutting edge of artificial intelligence, encountering computers that mimic the brain and machines that have defeated champions in chess, Jeopardy!, and Go. In the central part of the book, Miller explores the riches of computer-created art, introducing us to artists and computer scientists who have, among much else, unleashed an artificial neural network to create a nightmarish, multi-eyed dog-cat; taught AI to imagine; developed a robot that paints; created algorithms for poetry; and produced the world's first computer-composed musical, Beyond the Fence, staged by Android Lloyd Webber and friends. But, Miller writes, in order to be truly creative, machines will need to step into the world. He probes the nature of consciousness and speaks to researchers trying to develop emotions and consciousness in computers. Miller argues that computers can already be as creative as humans—and someday will surpass us. But this is not a dystopian account; Miller celebrates the creative possibilities of artificial intelligence in art, music, and literature.