What changes, of course, is that, over the years, we adults are taught what's right and wrong, what's good and bad, what's proper and improper and we've internalized all that training and education into our own private internal "critic" who often stops us from being creative even before we start. That's that little voice that says "that isn't good enough."

Sigmund Freud once lamented "What a distressing contrast there is between the radiant intelligence of the child and the feeble mentality of the adult."

However, we know now that where there's life (and you ARE still breathing, aren't you?) there's always hope. For all of us.

What reminded me of Vance's talk was an online article I ran across today by musician/composer/sound engineer Brian Eno who has made some of my favorite musical recordings over the decades. In it, he encourages all of us to sing. He relates his own successful efforts to get together with friends to have fun singing "a capella," that is, without instrumental accompaniment...like choruses and doo wop groups do.

Besides the musical creativity and the fun involved in singing a capella with your friends, there are health and psychological benefits as well, plus a social learning component as you have to learn to blend your voice (tone, rhythm and breathing) with the other singers.

And, I'll go one further. I imagine that getting together regularly to sing with others (or play African hand drums with others, or go ballroom dancing, or picking up a brush and painting just for the sheer pleasure of it) helps us exercise the same creativity muscles that we exercised as a child before we forgot that we could sing, dance, draw and do all manner of enjoyable things.

Sounds like a good idea to me.