{"id":1212,"date":"2016-06-06T09:44:37","date_gmt":"2016-06-06T07:44:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/?p=1212"},"modified":"2016-06-06T09:44:37","modified_gmt":"2016-06-06T07:44:37","slug":"the-biology-of-creativity-a-second-approach","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/2016\/06\/06\/the-biology-of-creativity-a-second-approach\/","title":{"rendered":"THE BIOLOGY OF CREATIVITY: A SECOND APPROACH <\/strong>"},"content":{"rendered":"

I published a post back on 26 April in which I quoted from an interview with American neurologist Alice Weaver Flaherty, author of the book The Midnight Disease<\/em> (2004), an essay on neurology and literary creativity. I have read now her volume and although I do not wish to offer here a formal review I certainly want to consider (or re-consider) a few ideas based on Flaherty\u2019s claims. I do not hesitate to recommend The Midnight Disease<\/em> not so much for the rotundity of its arguments but for their many flaws, as they offer plenty of food for thought. <\/p>\n

By the way, Flaherty finds it necessary to justify why she has written a book despite being a scientist, since her colleagues communicate with each other by publishing papers. \u201cA melancholy fact,\u201d she writes, \u201cis that in the sciences, the book has become as marginal a literary form as the sestina or the villanelle\u201d. Torn between her impression that academic books will soon disappear under pressure of online paper publication and her need to narrate \u201can unusual personal experience\u201d (the sad death of her two premature twin boys), Flaherty tells supercilious scientists that \u201cwriting this book was something I could not stop myself from doing\u201d.<\/p>\n

Flaherty, who has always written, went through a very serious post-partum depression which manifested itself, among other symptoms, through \u2018hypergraphia\u2019, \u201cthe medical term for an overpowering desire to write\u201d. This, she explains, is due habitually to alterations in particular brain areas and overlaps only partly with \u2018graphomania\u2019, or \u201cthe desire to be published\u201d. Hypergraphia, she speculates, seems connected with the temporal lobes, the brain areas in charge of facilitating our understanding of meaning. Many hypergraphic patients appear to have suffered temporal lobe epilepsy. <\/p>\n

It is important to clarify that hypergraphic writers are dominated by a mania for writing, by an unstoppable drive to scribble, no matter what the results are in terms of quality for, remember, this is a pathology. The \u2018problem\u2019, as noted in my April post, is that this is a condition for which sufferers demand no treatment, as they derive pleasure from writing. If you\u2019re reading this and thinking \u2018oh, well, I am certainly not at risk of being labelled hypergraphic\u2019 you should be aware that many of us, readers, appear to be hyperlexic. Do you belong to the \u201csubset of avid readers whose reading has an especially compulsive quality\u201d? Do you need a book to prevent you from reading \u201cthe newspaper used to wrap the fish\u201d? There you are: you\u2019re hyperlexic \u2013the proud owner of a brain in thrall to an unruly bunch of print-mad neurons. I can see the t-shirt: \u2018Hyperlexia rules!\u2019<\/p>\n

Flaherty\u2019s sweeping statement that \u201cA surprising proportion of writers are manic-depressive\u201d, is open to all kinds of jokes (\u2018no wonder they\u2019re depressed seeing the state of the book market\u2019\u2026 and so on). Surely, you can see for yourself that a) not ALL writers are manic-depressive (or have epileptic temporal lobe seizures like Dostoevsky), b) not all manic-depressives become published writers and c) if this were the case, creative writing courses should start by plunging their students into deep misery at once. An additional problem that Flaherty simply hints at is whether writer\u2019s block, presented as a mental condition treatable with the right combination of pills and therapy, \u201cmay be culturally determined\u201d. The phrase \u2018writer\u2019s block\u2019, Flaherty explains, was coined by American psychiatrist Edmund Bergler and although many writers from other nations suffer from block, \u201cthere is a paradoxical sense in which suffering from writer\u2019s block is necessary to be an American writer\u201d. Flaherty names Russian-born, hypergraphic (=absurdly prolific) Isaac Asimov as an interesting exception but she seems confused by him; her list of writers \u201ccontains few genre writers because of the convention that genre writing isn\u2019t quite writing\u201d. It\u2019s just hypergraphia, you know?<\/p>\n

Funnily, although I intended to keep the tone of this post as straight-faced as possible my repressed sneering is surfacing throughout\u2026 Perhaps this is because I\u2019m scared that Flaherty is right in her main claim: that the mind has a material basis in the brain; hence, alterations in the brain result in abnormalities regarding the average mind. Basically, she speculates that the passion for writing and reading might fall within the gray area of the brain alterations that, while not being pathological, are uncommon and even exceptional (abnormal?). We write and read with glee because, in short, we have funny temporal lobes that connect in a funny way with our limbic system. She may be making a totally valid point: if Usain Bolt\u2019s body is worth studying for what it says about the abilities of record-breaking athletes, then perhaps Toni Morrison\u2019s talent as a writer stems from the subtle chemistry of her brain. As Flaherty writes, \u201cBy scanning people thinking creatively (with the usual caveat that judging creativity is difficult), researchers may soon be able to see which patterns of brain activity underlie creativity\u201d.<\/p>\n

Flaherty softens the impact of her chilling scientific claims by stressing that \u201cliterature can also help us to understand science, the way it is both driven and sometimes misdirected by metaphors and emotion\u201d. No doubt. Her arguments, however, are distressing (I can\u2019t find another word). A point Flaherty stresses is that medication is advanced enough so that, for instance, bereaved people need not go through the intense pain of their grief by simply taking the corresponding helpful little pill. She understands why many grieving individuals reject this chemical aid, believing that lessening the intensity of grief amounts to betraying their lost beloved. To be clear about this: Flaherty claims that the more we know about our brain the better our chances will be to control emotion and mood. Like many others, I resist this idea because taking pills is for me too closely connected with taking illegal substances but, then, most people get by in this way (read Roberto Saviano\u2019s analysis of cocaine consumption in Zero, zero, zero<\/em>\u2026). Yet, going through a very black mood this week I caught myself thinking, \u2018oh, boy, my temporal lobe is misbehaving, I wish I had a little blue pill\u2019 to go on (happily) marking exams.<\/p>\n

How does this connect with literary creativity? Patricia Highsmith once said that writers\u2019 favourite drug is coffee and, of course, there is a long list of literary and non-literary authors controlled by their chosen or unchosen addiction. In Flaherty\u2019s book writers are a bundle of brain and mind irregularities, as you can see, which ultimately begs the question of whether we prefer, as a society, happy individuals or unhappy authors. That\u2019s the only conclusion I can reach after reading her book since the well-adjusted, happy author seems not to exist in her vision of literary creativity. I wonder whether this is why literary biography always insists on presenting literary genius as practically a pathology (yes, I\u2019ve been reading Claire Tomalin\u2019s biography of bipolar, manic, hypergraphic Dickens). At least this is a pathology we admire.<\/p>\n

As I read The Midnight Disease<\/em> something else bothered me: the future of education. Education works on the principle that all children should start at the same point and be taught a little of everything, regardless of their abilities and preferences. Little by little, each child navigates their way into being an engineer or a star piano player (supply your own worst-case scenario). Primary and secondary education are, thus, a compound effort to teach children a common minimum denominator and to find out which particular abilities each child has. Now imagine a near future in which we will be able to scan the brain of a four-year-old while engaged in creative play and determine how his\/her brain conditions his\/her mind. This imaginary brain scan would have detected, for instance, my hyperlexia (\u2018wow, this one is a Literature teacher!\u2019) and my limited ability to imagine space (\u2018no stage designer, this one\u2019). Flaherty never says that she wants to see this implemented. However, her view that our minds are our brains implicitly suggests that we will be eventually classified in this way, just as we will be soon classified according to our genetic make-up. Pass me the happiness pill\u2026<\/p>\n

From an extreme, alternative point of view one might argue that education works poorly precisely because we wrongly insist on the egalitarian approach. A timely brain scan would save the little ones many painful hours of mathematics or of English soon to be forgotten \u2013which sounds tempting\u2013 and place the children with the most promising creative abilities on the fast track to\u2026 what exactly?? We are already hearing so much cant about the so-called \u2018exceptionally gifted\u2019 children that I shudder at what the further exploration of the human brain can do to human minds.<\/p>\n

Clearly, neurology can help us to overcome the accidents of life caused by malfunctioning brains (and it\u2019s impressive to learn the myriad odd ways in which brains malfunction). Nonetheless, it may be overstepping its boundaries\u2013 like all medicine today, with its suspicious endless pressure to connect good health with joining expensive gyms when you\u2019re young and with taking absurd amounts of prescription drugs as you age. There is, however, a fundamental difference between, say, correcting the ravages of diabetes and forcing literary creativity into a sort of medical freak show.<\/p>\n

There are also other dangers: if my students learn that I\u2019m hyperlexic (am I?… show me that brain scan), then they may reject my preaching in favour of non-stop reading on the grounds that they\u2019re not hyperlexic themselves. Or, as the trend seems to be now, they may claim that their massive use of the social networks, the internet and videogames, has re-wired their brains in ways that my 1960s hyperlexic brain is not equipped to understand.<\/p>\n

Pass me the little blue pill\u2026 <\/p>\n

Comments are very welcome! (Thanks!) Just remember that I check them for spam; it might take a few days for yours to be available. Follow on Twitter the blog updates: @SaraMartinUAB. You may download the yearly volumes from http:\/\/ddd.uab.cat\/record\/116328. See my publications and activities on my personal web http:\/\/gent.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/
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I published a post back on 26 April in which I quoted from an interview with American neurologist Alice Weaver Flaherty, author of the book The Midnight Disease (2004), an essay on neurology and literary creativity. I have read now her volume and although I do not wish to offer here a formal review I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":98,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,30],"tags":[408],"class_list":["post-1212","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cultural-studies","category-science","tag-research"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1212","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/98"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1212"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1212\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1212"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1212"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1212"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}