The new physics gives scientific evidence of each person’s potential power and connections to the world. Split-brain research and the triune brain findings establish that everyone has an inner creative resource with great breadth and depth. Pribram and others provide an integrated scientific justification for believing in your own experience of creativity. If the world is a hologram, that means your perceptions form your world; that your thoughts (in the form of holograms) can have an effect on what you actually experience as the world; and that what lasts inside you is what is manifested as the entire world. If the universe is biographic, its concreteness is an illusion created by your own mental construction.

You can also stimulate the hemispheres of your brain by simply paying attention to them. Psychologists Robert Masters and Jean Houston, at the Foundation for Mind Research in New York, have devised several exercises for doing this. These are described in their books, including Mind Games, Listening to the Body, The Possible Human, and Psychological Method Exercises.

With our super-plastic neocortices and well-organized senses, Homo sapiens are the gluttons of the informavore world. We are uniquely skilled at acquiring, processing, and ordering information, and uniquely versatile when it comes to letting that information shape who we are. And when we are deprived of sensory information, like a prisoner in solitary confinement, we conjure sometimes fantastical information-rich worlds from the darkness to feed our inner informavore.

This finding makes perfect sense. Creative work requires that your mind feel a level of freedom. If part of what you focus on is whether or not your performance will get you that big check, you are not in that open cognitive space where the best ideas and most innovative possibilities reside. You do worse.

If the brain is to stay healthy, it must remain active, wondering, playing, exploring, and experimenting right to the end. Such activities or dispositions may not show up on functional brain imaging or, for that matter, on neuropsychological tests, but they are of the essence in defining the health of the brain and in allowing its development throughout life.