Daniel J. Levitin had a piece in The Walrus this month where he goes on at length about how music is therapy.

In the middle of the article were a couple paragraphs that suggested the dividing line between artists and scientists isn’t as stark as described.

Beyond the usual example of Albert Einstein and other scientists have creative hobbies Levitin seems to suggest that the effort to establish a distinction between art and science may be based in a degree of discomfort with anything that might blur those lines. (my emphasis)

Good medicine relies on clinical judgment, refined through the same sort of trial and error and creative problem solving that artists and scientists use. Both the master physician and master baker must improvise. (Although the thought of a brain surgeon “improvising” may fill you with terror, it’s actually necessary, as neurosurgeon Theodore Schwartz explains. “Not only is the normal anatomy of every human variable, and unique, every tumour has its own configuration that distorts the landscape into which it has dug itself in a slightly different way. Inevitably, the reality we encounter differs from our expectations of what we thought we would find.”)

The most important distinction, then, isn’t in separating artists from scientists and doctors but in separating creative thinkers from formulaic ones, separating those who can tolerate uncertainty from those who cannot. Art, science, and medicine trade in doubt—and in its remedy, improvisation. Moreover, to be effective, the musician, the therapist, the scientist, and the physician must establish a rapport and a relationship of trust with people they may have never met.