Muses of Madness

The brain is a fragile thing. It’s the first thing that jumps out at me reading Eric Kandel’s The Disordered Mind. By examining the literature on brain disorders, Kandel, a neuroscientist and Nobel prize winner, discusses how such fragility sheds light on our minds – and perhaps what it means to be human.

Each book chapter links a disorder to some characteristic of human function. The social nature of humans by examining autism. Human emotions are explored by studying depression and bipolar disorder. Schizophrenia sheds light on how we think and make decisions. Dementia allows us to study how memory works. Connecting mind to motion is studied through Parkinson’s and Huntington’s diseases. Addiction gives us information about pleasure and choice. And of course, there’s the big unanswered question: What is consciousness?

In today’s post, I explore Chapter 6 – Our Innate Creativity: Brain Disorders and Art.

You’ve probably heard a story or two linking creativity with mental illness. Kandel traces these ideas to 19^th century Romantic poets. While there are a number of celebrated instances of famous artists who have exhibited some sort of mental disorder, correlation does not imply causation. Kandel provides a quote from Rudolf Arnheim that summarizes the main findings. “Present psychiatric opinion holds that psychosis does not generate artistic genius but at best liberates powers of the imagination that under normal conditions might remain locked up by the inhibitions of social and educational convention.”

That being said, we do know some things about creativity from a biological view. For one thing, it seems to involve the lifting or removal of inhibitions. The left hemisphere of the brain responds repeatedly when presented with a stimulus of some sort, for example an object to view. The right hemisphere, on the other hand, responds only when the stimulus is novel. Keep showing the same object and the right hemisphere gets ‘bored’. The interesting part: Patients who develop frontotemporal dementia, a disorder “in the left hemisphere [that removes] its inhibitory constraint over the right hemisphere” develop otherwise unexplained creative impulses that previously may not have existed. A different study on jazz pianists found that when improvising, “their brain was damping down their inhibitions normally mediated by the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex”.

When I was a kid, hearsay suggested that left-handed kids were more creative than right-handers. (I’m a right-hander.) Left-handed folks typically have a more active right brain hemisphere which, according to Kandel, “is more concerned with putting ideas together, seeing new combinations…” On the other hand, literally, us right-handed folks have more active left hemispheres “concerned with language and logic”. Those are probably sweeping statements referring to some sort of ‘average’ right-hander or left-hander but I have not delved into the details. Apparently, there is evidence that the left hemisphere inhibits the right hemisphere, and thus damaging the left side releases these inhibitions.

Examples provided in this chapter are mainly about artists and painters, although by extension you would expect writers, sculptors and musicians to also be included in this category. The correlation between artists and mental illness is what has been most extensively studied at this point. Kandel traces connections between ‘psychotic art’ to Dadaism and surrealistic art – think Salvador Dali paintings. There is a mention of economics Nobel Prize winner John Nash, made famous through the book and movie A Beautiful Mind. When asked by a fellow mathematician how he could possibly believe he was being recruited by extra-terrestrials, Nash responded: “Because the ideas I had about supernatural beings came to me the same way that my mathematical ideas did. So I took them seriously.”

In ancient Greece, the source of creativity came from goddesses known as Muses. With brain disorders, could these be Muses of Madness? I’ve occasionally been struck by wild ideas, dream-like in state. I haven’t attempted to enhance these experiences with psychedelic substances. I don’t think of myself as particularly creative – but I feel I have more creative ideas now than I did when I was younger. That seems backwards at first glance, but studies suggest that part of creativity involves making freer associations between things you have learned as they incubate in the unconscious. If you have little knowledge in a particular area, you’re unlikely to exhibit creativity in that domain. I’d like to think that as I have pondered chemistry more deeply, while widening by breadth of knowledge in other areas, that I’m at least capable of increasing in creativity of thought. I also shouldn't forget that creativity can encompass both the technical and entrepreneurial.

One thing I do fear is losing my mind. Reading the afflictions of those with mental disorders is troubling because the brain is a fragile thing. How the brain embodies the mind (or is it the other way around?) is an enigma – one that is unlikely to be solved only by neuroscience. Certainly, mind and brain are closely connected, and the fragility of one manifests in the fragility of the other. That being said, I’m amazed at how robust human minds can be. From abstract thoughts to how sights and smells conjure memories, half-baked and re-baked with each retrieval, some embellished while others fade away. How we teeter on a knife’s edge between sanity and madness.

Below: Salvador Dali’s “The Persistence of Memory”