The Hidden Hands And Slow Brains of Creativity

Rod Dreher had a couple interesting entries about creativity and the unseen entities at performances on his Beliefnet blog last week. The entries aren’t about religion except in the broadest sense in which any communal endeavor in which the final result is due to the efforts of the many in support of a goal.

Although the article about backstage workers Dreher links to does appear in In Character which is subtitled, “A Journal of Everyday Virtues,” so perhaps I shouldn’t discount the efforts of backstage workers as not having an element of religious like devotion. It isn’t new to those of us in the business, but it is gratifying to have it acknowledged by someone from without. I especially appreciated that the writer included the observation by the technical director that he isn’t a frustrated actor just awaiting the opportunity to make a star turn. I guess from the outside, performance is such a defining quality of the arts that many people have no conception that anyone would far prefer to be involved in other capacities.

And there can be ample psychic income in the commitment to the craft of play-making, from sewing the costumes to hanging the lights, as well as in contributing to an artistic endeavor that may have a lasting impact on the culture.

Still, much of the activity in the beehive of theatrical life goes on without even a minimal sort of public acknowledgment. It’s a strange dichotomy. For an art form so reliant on applause, most of those who work in the theater only hear it as muffled noise from another room. Propping up a star’s halo, the behind-the-scenes folks hardly bask in a sliver of reflected light.

It takes a special kind of humility to devote yourself to being backstage for the creation of a play, to knowing from the outset that you will receive little of the credit. There is, of course, a certain safety, too, in being out of the line of fire. But we are a culture that more and more seems to define success as the aggregation of renown, as the cachet of a boldface name, as the catalyst for a gazillion clicks of a mouse and qualifying for a sizable personal entry on Wikipedia.

So toiling anonymously in a public profession such as the theater translates for me into something rather noble. You know from the outset that there will be no fanfare for you, that the satisfactions will on some level always be vicarious. The good of the whole is what matters. Absorbing this reality requires an acceptance of modest status — a true spirit of deference.

The second article Dreher linked to was immensely interesting to me–the hypothesis that creativity might be a slow neurological process. We also think of high achievement being related to speed of thought. Solve a complex problem quickly, ring your buzzer and beat the other guy. However, as one of the scientists quotes in the piece points out, speed is not generally seen as a component of creative work.

The results are surprising, given that high white-matter integrity is normally considered a good thing, says Paul Thompson at the University of California in Los Angeles. He acknowledges that speedy information transfer may not be vital for creative thought. “Sheer mental speed might be good for playing chess or doing a Rubik’s cube, but you don’t necessarily think of writing novels or creating art as being something that requires sheer mental speed,” he says.

After performing MRI scans on people whose creativity had already been tested, Dr. Rex Jung at the University of New Mexico found:

Jung found that the most creative people had lower white-matter integrity in a region connecting the prefrontal cortex to a deeper structure called the thalamus, compared with their less creative peers.

Jung suggests that slower communication between some areas may actually make people more creative. “This might allow for the linkage of more disparate ideas, more novelty, and more creativity,” he says.

Unfortunately, lower white-matter integrity is also associated with mental illness. “So the result also strengthens the link between creativity and mental illness. One of the triggers for Jung’s study was the finding that when white matter begins to break down in people with dementia, they often become more creative.”

I remember about a year ago I blogger was complaining that the depressive/mentally ill artist was a stereotype that needed to be broken. But if what Jung gains more evidence for what he has found thus far, it may be more of a physical reality than we would like.

Intelligence and creativity aren’t mutually exclusive though-

“Each appears to be controlled by white matter in a different region. So theoretically, there’s no reason why someone might not have high integrity in the cortex, producing intelligence, but low integrity between the cortex and deeper brain regions, leading to creative thinking. “They appear to function relatively independently,” he says.”

Which makes me realize I know less about the brain than I thought because I initially assumed the integrity would be generally uniform throughout. Though if I thought about it a bit longer, it does make sense. Overall, some things to ponder.