[warm-up, creative parenting]

Did you play this game as a child? It bears repeating and is a great thing to do with your own kids. It’s non-competitive, free, interactive and instructive, for adults as well as children. Plus, if you bring a creative slant to it, it can be an experience that teaches about the close relationship between smell, memory and creativity.

THE GAME:

Place a series of smells under the noses of blindfolded people and ask them to name them.

Best played in the kitchen.

That’s it.

However, it’s not as easy as it would seem to be. Sometimes the smell is as familiar as your own name but the word for it will not come. This is probably because in order to do this we have to utilize two separate parts of the brain. The part that identifies smells as familiar and known—and the part that puts a word to that familiar and known smell, ordinarily with the assistance of sight.

It would be a great game to play at a Halloween party since this holiday is already so much about masks and the senses. Make it part of your “Haunted House” and have the kids identify a few ‘bad’ smells along with the good or neutral.

If you’re just playing this at home, talk to your kids about the brain and memory. Sit down with them and do a quick free-writing exercise just to see what the non-verbal sense of smell has aroused in your c-minds. If your children are too young to write, let them dictate their stories.

You can also use some of your game smells as the basis for art work. After you’ve played the Smell Game, tell your kids they can make art with the ingredients. Explain that this art work may not be as lasting as if you were using paint. It might be a good time to teach them words like “transient,” “ephemeral,” and “fleeting” and to talk about art and artists who make art that is intentionally so.

Smell Art Ideas:

Sprinkle jello on a paper and let them use their fingers to make art (this is a great sensory-rich way to help them learn to write their letters and numbers, but save that for another more structured time ) Enhance the smell factor by letting them dip their fingers in lemon juice first!

Dip paper in strong tea, coffee, fruit juice.

Use berries to make dyes, paint with them!

Finger paint with (a little) peanut butter. (Maybe even jelly, too?)

Put glue on the paper and use aromatic spices as you would glitter.

Take one item—how about a lemon?—and do a whole picture out using all parts of the lemon.

And, this is a whole other article, but don’t forget: edible art! Pancakes with food colouring, popcorn ball people, rice cake worlds.

LINKS

Here’s a lovely website
http://library.thinkquest.org/C0110299/html/index.php made by three young people about the brain and the mind, including pages on creativity (take the How Creative are you? quiz), the senses and memory.

The Ephemeral Arts - check this one out. it’s all about ephemeral arts on the Indian sub-continent; here’s another link to the same site, one that gives examples of these kinds of art. Use them with your kids!

Stayed tuned for my own Ephemeral Arts article. Coming soon!

Have fun and never forget that anything you can do with kids and creativity, you should be doing for yourself anyway. Tapping into our childhood well, keeps creativity flowing strong!

[-quick tip, practice-]

A Quick Creative Practice
~simple habits can have profound impacts~

“The smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls, ready to remind us…..” Marcel Proust, French writer.

Whether you’re on a high energy creative roll or in a loggy slump, paying attention to your senses always makes good sense.

The kind of creativity you’re engaged in will tend to dictate the sense organ that you primarily use—though sight wins hands down. Music - hearing, Photography - sight, Cooking - taste, Pottery/Sculpting - touch and what about that OTHER one? Ah, yes, smell!

Since that’s the sense that tends to be used least, try going on a smell adventure for a way to inspire, to perk up your creative juices. As I have detailed recently, cooking that is done with intention, can be a great creative catalyst for this very reason.

Cook something that has smells you really love—or hate! Even if you don’t, cook you can make lemonade, cocoa, peppermint tea. Or just bite into and eat one perfect peach, making sure that you are aware of the smell as you do it. There are smells all around us all the time, right? Paying attention to them is the key.

Smells can be a switch, a direct neurological link to a memory, a feeling, a moment in time. It’s simple and effective. Researchers believe that this feeling of directness to a smell or taste induced memory has to do with the fact that these senses are our only chemical ones.

Sense memories are most often associated with the art of acting, but they are also intimately tied with writing, music and art as well. We create out of who we are, so what could be better than to use this primitive, chemical-sense to heighten our abilities in order to create our own truth?

After exposing yourself to the smells of your choice, try doing a ten-minute writing exercise or quick sketches. Use the mental stimulation to create something just from the sense of smell. Have fun!

Here’s an excellent article on the science behind the sense of smell and memory.

[-exercise, writing-]

If you’re having trouble getting started in fiction or need a helpful exercise, try this:

ONE TRUE MEMORY/TWO LIES

• Choose one real childhood memory.
• Make up a lie that relates to that true incident.
• If you think of them as lies instead of ‘using your imagination’ it won’t throw you into a creative crisis of confidence.
  Lie innocently … as a child might.
• Then make up one more lie, this one more brazen. Have fun with it!
• Write for 20 - 30 minutes about these three and see what happens. Try this every day for a week without looking back at what you’ve written. Next week you can evaluate if you have anything that you’d like to expand upon but as a beginning, keep it in the realm of - you guessed it - practice

.

TRIGGERS

Is your MIND BLANK? Suddenly you can’t think of anything that happened to you in your childhood?
Here are some triggers:

• * source of heat
• * what we ate on Sundays
• * report cards/grades

Originally published in the July 2005 issue of The Practically Creative Quarterly, theme: space and spaces