About

What is The Creative Mind Lab?

Welcome. The Creative Mind Lab is an experimental center where art and neuroscience combine to catalyze creative potential, invigorate the ability to leap into the unknown, and achieve creative breakthroughs in any field of endeavor. It is a training of brain plasticity, body intelligence and emotional presence. We allow our full selves to emerge and strengthen so that our creations are deeply unique and powerful. 

The Creative MInd Lab’s inquiry and training is based in The Rubinstein Method, a Ten Facet training system I developed by combining my own fascination with neuroplasticity, or the ability for the brain to reshape and revive at any age, with my forty+ years of experience as an award-winning theater director, teacher, and mentor.

Living is a creative act. Connection is a creative act. Communication is a creative act.

At the lab, students practice the Ten Facets sequentially and under the guidance of me or other trained leaders, learning first to deepen and expand connection to the self, then moving on to connect our more deeply known self to the exterior world. The Rubinstein Method is useful for people of all stripes and interests– from the scientist working to cure  a deadly virus, to the artist revealing our human condition, to the parent caring for their baby in their own unique way.  

At the Center we seek answers to questions like: What is possible when artists think more like scientists, and scientists think more like artists? Can the creative powers we all are born with be exercised, strengthened and enhanced? How do we prime our minds and our bodies to unlock what is novel and useful?  To achieve those flashes of creative insight that seem to come like lightning out of the blue?

Learning Creativity is Possible.

An athletic creative mind deepens emotional presence and communication. It leads to creative breakthroughs, in part by strengthening our ability to cope with obstacles and transform collisions into inventions. The Dalai Lama says that "Constructive creativity needs to be provoked." The Rubinstein Method provokes, cultivates and trains in order to make the artistic and scientific parts of our brains equally athletic. My goal is to help students break through learned limitations in order to put something new and vital into the world.

The Rubinstein Method includes practical exercises done easily anytime or anywhere. Whether you are practicing on the floor of a room, on a park bench, while walking your dog or while doing the dishes, these practical exercises can help light up your creative mind and heart: twin harbors in rapidly warming seas. 

Invigorate your Creative Mind now.

As technology and digital omnipresence replace human connection and presence, the psychic, social, and physical costs to us are becoming terribly clear. The pendulum has swung toward information and away from experience—leaving us without the integration that allows for the full-spectrum of our humanity. Albert Einstein tells us that “Nothing changes unless something moves.” The Rubinstein Method uses movement, or embodied training, to help re-pattern the brain in an attempt to swing the pendulum back to the intuitive self, located in the body.  By doing so, we can learn to re-integrate with our deeper selves and potential, achieving things we may have formerly thought beyond our grasp.

We offer these free practices, as well as online and in-person workshops, recorded conversations, video examples, and private coaching. If you are launching a new project or feeling stuck in an old one, searching for inspiration, adrift in bewilderment and yearning for answers, or facing a dragon in this new age, let the Rubinstein Method for training the creative mind be your guide. 

A vital, creative mind sparks the leaps and innovations that can enrich your own experience and assist in our very survival as a species.

History

In 2010, my UC San Diego colleague Professor Lisa Porter and I embarked on a university-funded research project to investigate the creative brain. Our task was to study and then physically practice, or embody, current neuroscience research on the creative mind (brain, heart and gut). We then synthesized those findings with the theatre training both Lisa and I have developed over our careers teaching, directing and stage managing. We isolated 10 neuro-cognitive capacities we call the 10 Facets of the Creative Mind. I then developed an embodied system for training each of these Facets: The Rubinstein Method.

Since then I have taught artists, scientists, engineers, and economists to break through their own limitations in classes and workshops ranging from Cultivating the Creative Mind and Communicating Science Research at UC San Diego, to my pandemic-era online workshops Coping and Creating. As a consequence of this work, I am convinced that creativity can not only be taught, but will flourish in the minds and hearts of those who practice the The Rubinstein Method.. 

Contact us at creativemindlab7@gmail.com to find out more.