Twentieth-Century Pathological Writers and Their Creativity

Culturally constructed pathologies exhibited by three authors of the modernist period: Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and D. H. Lawrence, reveal an emotional trajectory from paralyzing depressive or obsessive behavior to explosions of creative genius channeled into experimental fiction. Each of these authors struggled with a personal history of psychological distress evinced by genetic, experiential, or cultural factors and exacerbated by traumatic events in childhood or adolescence. All three sought to handle posttraumatic stress through complex gestures of aesthetic reenactment in a process that might be described as scriptotherapy. Woolf epitomizes the tortured artist grappling with so-called madness. Throughout her canon, she self-consciously struggles with irreconcilable issues of gender, abjection, and mourning. What appears to have been bipolar disorder in Woolf’s own psychiatric history might well have engendered a lifetime of creativity punctuated by severe bouts of debilitating depression. Joyce struggled with a pathological fear of erotic betrayal that spurred an obsessional fascination with adultery and with the enigma of spousal complicity, a drama whose erotic perversities were later played out in his twentieth-century epic novel, Ulysses. D. H. Lawrence proved somewhat notorious for his pathological obsessions with sexual desire, homosocial bonding, erotic loss, and conjugal betrayal. These authors worked through pathological symptoms to convert the seeds of incipient madness into burgeoning works of literary genius. They incorporated the pain of traumatic loss into the triumph of aesthetic integration via the creation of radically innovative and experimental art.

Creativity of the Dream and Sleep State

Rapid eye movement (REM) sleep is a stage of sleep that evolved in part to provide a privileged time in each day when the brain is disconnected from sensory input and freed of intentional, directed thought. The neurochemistry and neurophysiology of the brain during REM sleep is optimized for the exploration of normally ignored connections and associations within the brain’s vast repertoire of stored information. This includes changes in the activity of dorsolateral prefrontal, anterior cingulate, and medial orbital frontal cortices and the hippocampus, and reductions in norepinephrine and increases in acetylcholine in the cortex. This exploration of normally weak associations is critical to the creative process, and REM sleep can thus be considered a period of unbridled creativity. Much of this creative process is reflected in the content of dreams. Even without waking dream recall, changes within associative networks produced by the brain mechanisms of dream construction can leave these brain networks—and the individual—primed for reactivation at a later time, leading to the “discovery” of creative insights. Some, but not all, of these brain changes are also seen during periods of quiet rest with activation of the default mode network (DMN). When active, this network can likewise provide a state of enhanced creativity. Nevertheless, REM sleep and dreaming provide a protected two hours every day when creative processes run at full speed.

Creativity and the Self-Made Worldview

Creativity is usefully viewed from the perspective of personal “worldviews.” which describe the mind as experienced subjectively, from the inside. The worldview of an uncreative person reflects what they’ve been told, while the worldview of a creative person reflects what they’ve done with what they’ve been told to create a self-made worldview. The capacity to generate such a self-made worldview arose first with development of the capacity for one thought to trigger another thought. This chaining allows free-association, critical reflection, or complex behavioural thought sequences to be created and recalled for material with high psychological entropy to be restructured to form a new idea or perspective. However, a second capacity important for creative thought also is needed: contextual focus, the ability to adaptively shift between convergent and divergent modes of thought. Whereas chaining allows the connecting of closely related items in memory, contextual focus enables the forging of distant connections for sophisticated creative expression. Chaining is sufficient for “little-c”, everyday creative ideas, but contextual focus is need for the generation of those “big-C” creative ideas that define major conceptual shifts. These phenomena of mind arise at the level of the brain with coordinated activity of groups of collectively co-spiking neurons (neural cliques). Those that respond to more general or abstract aspects of a situation offer a straightforward mechanism for contextual focus, for example; with associative thought, as more aspects of a situation are taken into account, more neural cliques are recruited. Gabora’s global mind perspective highlights the evolutionary significance of creativity: cultural evolution became possible with the emergence of a creative worldviews that are self-organizing, self-mending, communally interacting, and self-propagating.

Memory Linking and Creativity

Human creativity intuitively seems beyond the reach of molecular, cellular, and circuit neuroscience. However, in this chapter, the authors propose that mechanisms that link memories across time have a critical role in a key aspect of human creativity, namely, the many ways in which distinct memories acquired on separate occasions can be related and connected in novel and generative ways. Recent work in mice suggests a detailed molecular, cellular, and systems neuroscience mechanism of memory linking that provides a framework for this key component of creativity in humans. This proposal shares some interesting features with psychological and systems-neurobiological accounts of human creativity but differs from such accounts since data in support of it are drawn from controlled interventional experiments in mice. Yet this purely mechanistic account raises a philosophical dilemma based on the intuitive differences between “mechanism” and “creativity.” The authors conclude the chapter with a brief exploration of this dilemma and its potential implications for a scientific explanation of the human creative process.

Using Neuroscience to Image the Creative Brain

The nature and sources of creativity have intrigued people for many years. During the early phases of this effort, people relied on anecdotal or historical accounts, but in the twentieth century the emphasis shifted to empirical studies. Assuming that high intelligence (“genius”) was associated with creativity, investigators relied on IQ tests to select subjects for study. In the mid-twentieth century the emphasis shifted to custom-designed tests that assessed more specific components of creative thinking. With the development of neuroscientific methods and neuroimaging, the emphasis has shifted to include methods that directly measure brain activity, based on the assumption that creative ideas are the product of brain activity.

Clues to Human Creativity

Creativity is one of the defining features of humanity. However, the mechanisms involved in the generation of novel and interesting ideas are not, at least from this perspective, extensively studied. Creativity as a property is easily (if subjectively) identified but notoriously hard to do define. One aspect on which most definitions agree is the necessity for domain knowledge: to be significantly creative in an area of endeavor, one needs knowledge of that area. Such a need entails the involvement of human memory and learning as a precursor to creative activity. In this chapter, the authors discuss the relationship between memory and creativity, looking at the potential for mathematical models and empirical study to elucidate the connections between them.

The Psychology of Creativity

With respect to the psychology of creativity, different approaches are presented that this author has developed over the years. In particular, they are a three-facet approach, an investment approach, and a propulsion approach to creative work. According to the three-facet model, the aspect of intelligence that is most important is creative intelligence. According to the investment theory, creative people defy the crowd as they question familiar beliefs and assumptions. According to the propulsion theory, creativity propels a field in a new direction. Divergent thinking is discussed, but only as a small part of the wider scope of creativity that occurs in real-world domains. Alternative theories are reviewed. Emerging from these theories are common “creative” dispositions that are described, such as an openness to new experience, a willingness to take risks, and intrinsic motivation. Conclusions are drawn regarding how education—often early education—can nurture the development of creative thinking in our society.

The Twists and Turns of Creativity

Suzanne Nalbantian provides an overarching synthesis of the conclusions about creativity arrived at by the neuroscientific and humanist contributors to this volume. She shows that the neuroscience chapters present a span of approaches, including a “workspace model” of the creative brain (Jean-Pierre Changeux), the role of the default mode network (Marcus Raichle), cognitive processing during dreaming (Robert Stickgold), the fundamental systems and cellular foundations of creativity (Jaak Panksepp, Alcino Silva, and John Bickle), and the importance of brain circuit plasticity in quantitative creative cognition (Geraint Wiggins and Charlotte Stagg). The psychologists Robert Sternberg, Oshin Vartanian, and Liane Gabora offer cognitive approaches based on phenomena of mind. Nancy Andreasen and Paul Matthews show how studies of exceptional brains—those marked by genius or those altered by disease or drugs—illuminate the mechanisms of creativity. The humanist contributors to this book provide a range of perspectives from those who analyze creativity as a trait of the individual (Suzanne Nalbantian, Suzette Henke, Mark Hussey, and John Onians) and those who view it as shaped by social context (Peter Schneck, Donald Wehrs, and John Foster). Personal narratives of the creative process are provided by the musician Bruce Adolphe and the contemporary novelist Richard Powers. All the contributors explore aspects of the conscious processing and spontaneous, nonconsious processing that define creativity, which this volume investigates through a unique, interdisciplinary optic.

The Distinctive Creativity of Leonardo and Michelangelo

The artistic creativity of Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo can be studied from a neuroscientific perspective. We can appreciate their innovativeness if we recognize that creativity is rare, for good evolutionary reasons. Our genetic material predisposes us to imitate our elders and betters because it is safer that way. This is why norms are so prevalent. This is also why innovation is rare, and why it is often found in the work of individuals who, for some reason, are outside the norm. Such people will possess neural resources that are exceptional, and none will be more important for artists than their default mode networks (DMN), which are vital because of their integration of past memories, present experience, and future planning. The more independent and non-normative the artist, the more crucial are such resources, especially for artists such as Leonardo and Michelangelo. Their family backgrounds, family relationships, and experiences were all unlike those of other people, equipping them with highly differentiated networks, which they were in a good position to exploit because of their brains’ neuroplasticity and their training in attention which gave them their mental discipline. These two artists were also skilled in several fields which contributed to their creativity. Their conscious interdisciplinarity included insights from visual arts and music (for Leonardo), from architecture (for Michelangelo), and from the study of human anatomy for both artists.

Creativity

Creativity is not a phenomenon that arises from the brain in isolation; it has an experiential, sociopolitical, and cultural context. Nonetheless, studies of the brain illuminate mechanistic aspects of human creativity with a clarity sufficient clearly to allow some predictions of the potential for creativity and have suggested ways in which it can be enhanced. This chapter briefly reviews associations between creativity and disease, focusing on rare case studies of people with neurodegenerative disease affecting the frontal lobe and executive processing. These suggest that impaired frontal activity can enhance more creative behaviors under some conditions, a hypothesis confirmed by direct testing with transient, noninvasive electrical interference with frontal lobe functions in healthy volunteers. The use of some drugs also has been associated with increased creativity. Improved performance on tests of creative cognition by people with Parkinson’s disease after treatment with L-dopa has highlighted roles for dopamine and norepinephrine in modulating cognitive flexibility. However, most of the recent advances in understanding brain mechanisms of creativity from functional brain imaging studies have highlighted that creativity is not localizable to one or a few brain regions, but instead engages coordinated activities across major systems in the brain, including the default mode network and executive control, salience, or attentional networks. With information on genotype and patterns of brain activity, neuroscientists may be able to classify people for their potential creativity.