In this month's Atlantic, Nancy Andreasen, a noted neuroscientist AND former professor of Literature, writes about her recent research on the creative brain. Andreasen's early work on the subject, beginning in the sixties, focused on writers with whom she was in contact while teaching at the University of Iowa, home of the famous Iowa Writers Workshop. (One of her subjects was Vonnegut.) For her current research, she's covering not only writing, but other arts (George Lucas is a subject this time around) and several geniuses in the sciences.
The main point of this article concerns the thin border that barely separates many creative thinkers from mental illnesses, especially schizophrenia. The idea that such visionaries are also mad goes back centuries, but the hardcore neurological study of this correlation is very much a recent phenomenon. Andreasen's studies have looked not only at brain patterns but also family history, seeking to find issues of genetic "genius" and also the role of nurture in encouraging creativity and/or madness. (I wonder if she thought of trying to study the brain of Allen Ginsberg, whose visionary poetry is often mad and about madness; recall the first line of Howl.) The studies are fascinating for what they show about the brain, and also what they tell us about family dynamics. And indeed, one of the crucial aspects of the creative brain is that the same vision that can lead to scientific, mathematical, or artistic breakthroughs that can save and inspire millions can also lead to totally irrational behaviors, depression, breakdowns, and suicide. (Andreasen closes her article with a reference to the noted John Nash biography A Beautiful Mind, where Nash makes this exact point.)
But for me, one of the most intriguing points made in the article is almost an aside: that creative thinkers don't see their ideas as extraordinary. "I've been struck," she writes, "by how many of these people refer to their most creative ideas as 'obvious.'" A creative thinker sees the world in such a unique way, but that way is unique to others, not to the thinker; as one artist being studied puts it, you are kind of blinded to your talent, because it stuns you that no one else sees it as you do. Such a capacity can lead to all kinds of frustration. (I'm thinking of Benedict Cumberbatch's Sherlock Holmes, who can't comprehend what it's like to be of an ordinary thought process.) One of those frustrations is a lack of confidence because you can't seem to get people to see things the way you do. (As William Goldman's Butch Cassidy put it in George Roy Hill's classic film starring Newman and Redford: I got vision and the rest of the world wears bifocals.)
The notion of things being "obvious" took me back to the writing of my dissertation I remember that as I read late drafts of my project it seemed like on every page I used the phrase "of course." It was embarrassing! I was assuming that my readers -- and when you write your dissertation, you're only thinking of your committee members, not whatever audience you might have if a publisher accepts your diss -- knew the points I was making, since they were self evident to anyone who had taken enough graduate coursework in the field, but that "of course" was also a reflection of my humility, my inability to accept that I was becoming an expert in this area, and that my argument was original and worth sharing. The diss still sits on my shelf, having been successfully defended, with a few articles from that research scattered about academic journals and one textbook. What I was saying seemed so obvious to me that it couldn't be all that worth paying attention to! I had to cut out pretty much every "of course" phrase; it probably trimmed the final draft by about a tenth!
The same thing happened when a saw a call for proposals for a submission on a collection of essays on Sex and the City back in the early 2000s. Dirty little secret: I had not watched the series when I first saw the CFP, but in my Media Criticism class, several students had attempted a formal analysis of the show, and I was curious enough that I decided to watch some of the episodes on DVDs I rented from Blockbuster. (Yes, I'm old. Obviously.) I submitted two proposals, and it was the one I thought was ridiculously obvious -- that the series owed some formal and thematic debt to Woody Allen's seventies films -- that the editors of the anthology liked, and so I went on to finish the chapter, after several tortured revisions. Even here, recently, when I wrote about Harold and Maude, I had to make the point that I was certainly not the first one to note the film's influence on Wes Anderson. I mean, it's not like I'm suddenly discovering that Apocalypse Now is a remake of Heart of Darkness in a Captain Obvious sort of way; my ideas are a bit past that point, but still, it's one of the things that I have to make drive me forward as a thinker, a writer, etc. I have not to shut down ideas just because I think they are too obvious as to need no comment.
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