Intellect, Morality, and the Human Spirit

• Humanities are academic disciplines studying the expressions of human beings.
• Humanities explores and reveals what it means to be human.
• Philosophy, language, social science, history, literature, religion, and art are some examples of such disciplines.
• The humanities are a way of thinking about and responding to the world.
• The humanities are about human beings, their culture, and their intellectual achievements.
• The humanities stimulates intellectual inquiry and seeks answers to the central questions of the meaning of human life.
• Clarity of wisdom can be gained through a disciplined engagement with art, religion, music, dance, and drama.
• Through the humanities, people learn about themselves and others.
• The humanities are about what humans produced and why they produced it.
• The humanities reveal human psyche, nature, condition, behavior, and struggle.
• Art explores and reveals the human psyche and nature.
• Human behavior is the collection of behaviors exhibited by human beings influencing culture, attitudes, emotions, and values; art explores and reveals human behavior.
• Human condition is the disconnect between what we are and what we can be; art explores and reveals the human condition.
• Human struggle involves strenuous or violent efforts in the face of difficulties, the struggle for survival, to find the meaning of existence, and for rights; art explores and reveals human struggle.
• Struggles are communicated to others through art.

Intellect

• Intellect is the capacity for rational or intelligent thought, especially when highly developed
• Intellect is built by involving oneself in the arts as a viewer and/or participant.
• The more a person involves themselves in the arts, the more intellectual a person becomes.
• The left brain is associated with verbal, logical, and analytical thinking.
• The left brain excels in naming and categorizing things, symbolic abstraction, speech, reading, writing, and arithmetic.
• The left brain places things in sequential order
• People have been traditionally taught to master reading, writing, and arithmetic.
• The right brain functions in a non-verbal manner and excels in visual, spatial, perceptual, and intuitive information.
• The right brain processes information differently than the left brain.
• For the right brain, processing happens very quickly, is nonlinear, and nonsequential.
• The right brain looks at the whole picture and quickly seeks to determine the spatial relationships of all the parts as they relate to the whole.
• The right brain flourishes dealing with complexity, ambiguity and paradox and has been associated with the realm of creativity.

Importance of the Humanities

• The humanities are key to understanding the diversity and richness of all cultures.
• The humanities are socially useful for critical and imaginative thinking about the issues that confront us as citizens and human beings.
• The humanities allow people to accomplish certain mental feats by helping them gain empathy and a better sense of what other people's truths have been.
• Visiting a Holocaust museum enables Americans to better understand the pain and suffering Jews endured during World War II.
• Watching the movie "Roots” helps people better understand the history and suffering of African American people.
• An ethnic group of people or ethnicity is a population of human beings whose members identify with each other on the basis of ancestry or by common cultural, linguistic, religious, or territorial traits.
• Ethnicity is used in contrast to race.
• Race refers to a classification of physical and genetic traits perceived as common to certain groups.
• The most widely used human racial categories are based on visible traits like skin color, facial features and hair texture.
• Nationality is a relationship between a person and their state of origin, culture, association, affiliation and/or loyalty.
• Culture is the predominating attitudes and behavior that characterize the functioning of a group/organization, and the totality of socially transmitted behavior patterns, arts, beliefs, institutions, and all other products of human work and thought.
• Culture is also the expression of a population or community through their patterns, traits, beliefs and products.
• Art is a product made with the intention of stimulating the human senses, mind and spirit.
• The driving force for art is human creativity.
• An artist is a term applied to a person who engages in an activity deemed to be an art or maybe defined unofficially, as, "a person who expresses themselves through a medium".
• An artwork is normally assessed in quality by the amount of stimulation it brings about, how the art impacts, how many people can relate to the art, how much the art can be appreciated, and how much influence the art has on the past and human condition.
• Widely considered "masterpieces" possess these attributes.
• The humanities arts concern the human condition, struggle, psyche, behavior, and nature of the past, present, and future.
• Architecture, visual arts, applied art, crafts, dance, decorative art, design, drawing, film, language, literature, music, opera, painting, photography, poetry, sculpture, and theatre and performing arts are examples of what art is comprised of.
• Art terms to remember include folk art, applied art, fine art, craft, abstract, subjective (realistic), 3 dimensional, 2 dimensional and genre.

Elements of Creativity

• There is an elemental basis for the composition/product of any human creativity.
• The elements are the building blocks of creation; the elements are the basic recipe; there are basic ingredients needed to make a creative product.
• The elements of music include melody, harmony, rhythm, and dynamics. The elements of theatre include Actor, Audience, text (script), costume, scenery, sound, and props.
• The elements of drama include plot, theme, character, dialogue, and scenery.
• The elements of dance include centering, gravity, balance, posture, gesture, rhythm, movement in space, and breathing.
• The elements of Film include story, direction, camera work, and editing.
• Elements of Fashion: Line, shape, fabric, and texture
• The elements of Visual Art include color, Value, Line, shape, form, texture and space.
• The principles of art includes emphasis, balance, harmony, variety, movement, rhythm, proportion and unity; and that it takes Art Creativity in its elements, to a higher detailed level.

Explore the interplay of intellect and art, moral reasoning, and the mind-body connection. Understand the influence of culture on behavior. Discover the brain's role in decision-making and the power of 'mind over matter'.