PERIODIC CREATIVITY

The Creativity Ions

What does the chemistry of common table salt have to do with the creative process? Salt, NaCl, and sodium chloride are ionic bonds bonded together by the passing of the extra electron of chloride (a negative chlorine ion) to the space where there is a missing electron in sodium. These imbalanced electrons are called Ions. It’s pretty amazing to think that these two disparate elements, one unstable and the other poisonous, can come together to make a basic element of life, literally the salt of the earth.

This idea that everything we can see, touch, and feel is made of different combinations of atoms made me think about creativity. Ideas and creativity are just the rearranging of elements to make everything in our world an almost infinite combination of the 118 known elements of the periodic table. This got me thinking about the creative process’s positive and negative aspects. Most accepted models involve some version of identifying a problem, coming up with an idea, making it, testing it, and putting it into the world. These are all positive and necessary steps, but what about the negative aspects of these steps? I have a new model I call the Creativity IONS, which describes the six…