快猫短视频

The writer: All in my head

I HAVE a problem with writing. It started on a particular day, seven years ago. That day everything changed somehow and all the changes were of the utmost importance. I had to record them. One day I noticed that I was crouched on the floor of a bathroom in the building where I worked as a neurologist, writing on toilet paper because the idea couldn鈥檛 wait until I got back to my office. When there was no paper, I wrote on my forearms. As my ideas got more intense, I even wrote on myself while I was driving.

The change in my writing came 10 days after I gave birth prematurely to twin boys, who died. They were so small 鈥� one held my finger before he died, and his hand hardly fitted around it. For nine days my grief was 鈥渁ppropriate鈥�. On the tenth, I woke wildly excited, filled with hundreds of ideas pressing to be written down.

I holed up in my office to write, and family and friends worried that I was depressed. But depression and mania can come in complicated mixtures: my mood, while sorrowful, was also manic. I didn鈥檛 want my agitation, or even my grief, to end. It felt as if my grief had brought a magical kingdom of sorrow so close to this one that I could reach into its shadows and bring back dream fruit. It was a kingdom where beauty can鈥檛 be separated from pain.

In my transformed state, I saw meaning everywhere, which made the world radiant but also terrifying. Metaphors came alive. The rhythmic swoop of telephone wires had a faint message I needed to decipher and transcribe. Aesthetic experience? Psychosis? The distinction seemed to be missing the point.

Sometimes, writing felt like a disease that took me away from family and friends. Other times, it filled me with pleasure and energy: I felt I was taking dictation from the muse. Most of what poured out was trash, but by picking through it I have had two books published which won awards, with a third in press and a fellowship to finish a fourth. Writers and artists with unusual creativity problems started to refer themselves to my clinic. That led to a research grant to study biological factors in creativity.

鈥淚n my transformed state, I saw meaning everywhere鈥�

Such social approval is always pleasant, but in someone with a tendency as odd as mine it is also key to my being able to claim that I am merely mad about my work, not mad.

After four months, the urge to write left as suddenly as it had come. For the next month, it took a great deal of concentration to even lift my arm. I didn鈥檛 feel like a blocked writer, but as if I were not a writer at all. The state was almost peaceful, a rest cure from the agitation of the previous months. If I tried to write or speak, though, I felt I was suffocating, my lungs full of water.

A year after my twin boys died, I delivered, in an odd symmetry, premature but healthy twin girls. Again 10 days after the birth, I switched into a manicky, hypergraphic state. My doctor suggested a mood stabiliser. The first one was not a success, but after several tries we found a regime that has smoothed out the sharpest peaks and valleys of my writing. Without, luckily, flattening them completely.

These days my excited writing has a seasonal rather than a post-partum pattern: it peaks in late summer, and early each winter it goes into hibernation.

When my writing is driven, writing seems one of the glories of humankind. When I write as a scientist, writing seems a product of the brain. I try to keep my passionate and scientific writing separate because convention demands it. Doing so is artificial, though, and even deceptive 鈥� bloodless prose often hides the true motivations for a scientist鈥檚 research. I study the drive to write because it is something in my brain that torments me, something that needs treatment. But never, I hope, a complete cure.

The neurologist: All in my brain

BECAUSE I am a neurologist, I could easily summon up a Greek word for my symptoms: hypergraphia, an exaggerated desire to write. And it had a pedigree. Norman Geschwind, a neurologist at Harvard Medical School, showed that hypergraphia comes from a change in the brain鈥檚 temporal lobes. These regions, located between the ears, are important for speech comprehension and emotional meaning. Geschwind noticed a cluster of personality traits in some people with temporal lobe epilepsy. This cluster is sometimes called the Dostoevsky syndrome, after the novelist who had all of these traits.

So do the temporal lobes also control non-literary creativity? A form of senility called front-temporal dementia suggests they may. In people whose temporal lobe is most damaged, mood swings and compulsions are far more prominent than cognitive problems until late in the disease. Neurologist Bruce Miller of the University of California, San Francisco has recently described a number of these people who, with no previous interest in art, suddenly begin composing music or painting even though the rest of their abilities were collapsing.

In these patients, the intact frontal lobe may be as important for their creative bursts as the temporal lobe deficits. Ingegerd Carlsson鈥檚 group in Sweden has shown that in normal, non-demented people, brain activity is higher in the frontal lobes of creative than non-creative subjects. There is mounting evidence that the front-to-back communication between the frontal and temporal lobes is more important for creativity than the left brain-right brain model of the 1970s, when the right brain was thought to be visuospatial and intuitive, while the left brain was linguistic, deductive, and did your tax forms.

Other disorders that affect frontal and temporal lobe activity also affect creativity: chief among them is manic depression. Mania and milder states of increased energy turn out to be much more likely than epilepsy to cause hypergraphia as well as pressured speech. And the temporal lobe is abnormally active in people who have manic depression, as captured by functional brain imaging and electro-encephalograms.

While there is sometimes thought to be a link between depression and creativity, that link may exist because depression is often coupled to rebound periods of at least mild agitation or mood elevation. Recent evidence suggests that depression correlates better with writer鈥檚 block than with creative bursts. Depression itself often brings with it a decreased desire to communicate, and a feeling that life and words have lost meaning. Interestingly, the behaviour of depressed 鈥� and blocked 鈥� people is often surprisingly similar to those who have had frontal lobe injuries. People with such injuries have poor judgement and lack creativity, whereas frontal lobe activity increases in creative people who are thoroughly engaged in creative tasks.

An important addition to the parallels above is the difference between the kind of aphasia (language deficit) that stem from frontal versus temporal lobe damage. Frontal lobe injury often causes Broca鈥檚 aphasia, in which patients have trouble generating speech, and are painfully aware of it. Injury to the temporal lobes, however, causes Wernicke鈥檚 aphasia, where patients have poor comprehension and are therefore not aware that they don鈥檛 make sense. Thus they actually speak more fluently, if emptily, than before. Broca鈥檚 patients are often depressed, whereas Wernicke鈥檚 patients can be manic or impulsive.

There have been plenty of attempts to boost creativity in 鈥渘ormal鈥� people. My colleague Shelley Carson and I, for example, are testing the hypothesis that creativity can be encouraged by exposure to a bright full-spectrum light for half an hour every morning to treat the brain鈥檚 seasonal response to short winter days. Preliminary results suggest there is indeed a significant benefit. Students do better on tasks from writing haiku to listing as many uses as possible for a paper clip 鈥� and many of them are not keen to return the light boxes at the end of the experiment!

Researcher Alan Snyder, based at the University of Adelaide, Australia, is working with transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). He has found that holding an electromagnet near the frontal lobe can influence creative skills, with volunteers showing dramatic improvement in drawing and mathematical abilities. Unfortunately, the abilities of the volunteers revert to their previous level within minutes of turning the magnet off.

The idea of trying to control the muse with pills and magnetic pulses is disturbing. But standard educational and behavioural alternatives are worrisome too: they are more expensive, slower, better at imparting knowledge than creative motivation. Although novel attempts to boost creativity may appear alien or frivolous, creativity is not a luxury, it is an essential. On the personal scale, lack of creativity can put employment in jeopardy. On a world scale, just think of all the pressing problems in need of creative solutions.