The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer's Block, and the Creative Brain: The Drive to Write, Writer's Block, and the Creative Brain – ... Compulsion Through Medical Case Studies - Softcover

Flaherty, Alice Weaver

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0618485414 ISBN 13: 9780618485413

Verlag: Mariner Books, 2005

Inhaltsangabe

Why is it that some writers struggle for months to come up with the perfect sentence or phrase while others, hunched over a keyboard deep into the night, seem unable to stop writing? In The Midnight Disease, neurologist Alice W. Flaherty explores the mysteries of literary creativity: the drive to write, what sparks it, and what extinguishes it. She draws on intriguing examples from medical case studies and from the lives of writers, from Franz Kafka to Anne Lamott, from Sylvia Plath to Stephen King. Flaherty, who herself has grappled with episodes of compulsive writing and block, also offers a compelling personal account of her own experiences with these conditions.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

A. W. Flaherty is a neurologist at Massachusetts General Hospital who also teaches at Harvard Medical School. She is the author of The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer’s Block, and the Creative Brain. A. W. lives with her husband and twin daughters near Boston.

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The Midnight Disease

The Drive to Write, Writer's Block, and the Creative BrainBy Alice Weaver Flaherty

Mariner Books

Copyright © 2005 Alice Weaver Flaherty
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0618485414
Introduction

Writing is one of the supreme human achievements. No, why should I be
reasonable? Writing is the supreme achievement. It is by turns exhilarating
and arduous, and trying to write obsesses and distresses students,
professional writers, and diarists alike. Writers explain why they write (and
have trouble writing) one way; freshman composition teachers, another;
literary critics and psychiatrists and neurologists have increasingly foreign
explanations. These modes of thinking about the emotions that surround
writing do not easily translate into one another. But one fact is always true:
the mind that writes is also the brain that writes. And the existence of brain
states that affect our creativity raises questions that make us uneasy. What
is the relation between mind and body? What are the sources of imagination?
How can both neuroscience and literature bear on the question of
what makes writers not only able to, but want to, even need to, write? How
can we understand the outpouring of authors such as Joyce Carol Oates or
Stephen King? Why does John Updike see a blank sheet of paper as radiant,
the sun rising in the morning? (As William Pritchard said of him, "He must
have had an unpublished thought, but you couldn"t tell it.") This compulsion
seems—and is—an unbelievably complex psychological trait.
Yet it is not so complex that it cannot be studied. Neurologists
have found that changes in a specific area of the brain can produce
hypergraphia—the medical term for an overpowering desire to write. Thinking
in a counterintuitive, neurological way about what drives and frustrates literary
creation can suggest new treatments for hypergraphia"s more common and
tormenting opposite, writer"s block. Both conditions arise from complicated
abnormalities of the basic biological drive to communicate. Whereas linguists
and most scientists have focused primarily on writing"s cognitive aspects,
this book spends more time exploring the complex relationship between
writing and emotion. It draws examples from literature, from my patients, and
from some of my own experiences.
Evidence that ranges from Nabokov to neurochemistry, Faulkner
to functional brain imaging, shows that thinking about excesses and dearths
of writing can also clarify normal literary output and the mechanisms of
creativity. The few current books on creativity that include a neuroscientific
perspective have neglected crucial brain regions such as the temporal lobe
and limbic system in favor of a still popular —but arguably oversimplified—
emphasis on the role of the right side of the brain.
Focusing on the importance of the brain in the drive to write helps
suggest treatments for disorders of creativity that are sometimes medical. It
should do so, though, without ignoring the fact that most innovative people,
and most people struggling with blocks, are not mentally ill. Concentrating on
the brain structures underlying creativity provides surprising answers to such
diverse questions as how we learn to write, the nature of metaphor, and even
what causes the strange sensation of being visited by the muse.
Although The Midnight Disease attempts to be a scientifically
accurate book, it is far from a dispassionate one. How could I speak dryly on
a subject as charged as the origin of literature? I am infatuated with writing,
and this emotional engagement shapes the book. Writing can do
extraordinary things. One night when I was a child, I read a passage in C. S.
Lewis"s autobiography, Surprised by Joy, which described one of his own
reading experiences as a child. He had been reading Longfellow"s
poem "Tegner"s Drapa," when a line jumped out at him: "I heard a voice that
cried / Balder the beautiful / Is dead, is dead. . . ."The beauty of that line, the
way it tore at him, drove him to become permanently addicted to reading and
writing. Strangely, even out of context, the line stirred me as well. Something
swept me out of his book high into the cold air above the northern wastes.
What was it that was transmitted from the writer of "Tegner"s Drapa" to the
writer of The Allegory of Love to me, possibly even to you?
In her book On Beauty and Being Just, Elaine Scarry imagines
Leonardo da Vinci seeing a woman with a face so beautiful that he tries over
and over to capture it in different drawings. Later artists are moved by his
copies, which they then try to copy themselves. Eventually the critic Walter
Pater writes his famous essay on Leonardo, and the copies of the woman"s
face spread from one art form into another. Beauty drives copies of itself,
whether in art, or when we want to make children with someone we love.
Great scientific ideas drive their own transmission in the same way—it is not
a metaphor when researchers refer to an elegant theorem as beautiful.
In another sense, though, it is the brain, not beauty, that drives
those copies. Many parts of the brain play a role: Leonardo"s exquisite motor
cortical control of his pen, the way his visual cortex perceived shape from
shadow, his face recognition area. Yet some parts of the brain may be more
crucial than others for the emotional aspect of the drive toward beauty or
meaning.
One of these regions is the pair of temporal lobes, located in the
cerebral cortex roughly behind the ears. The temporal lobes have been
somewhat neglected by neurologists, in part because damage to them does
not produce glaring motor or cognitive problems. Still, the temporal lobes are
important for producing literature, in part because they are necessary for
understanding word meaning—and also Meaning in its philosophical senses.
In addition, changes in the temporal lobes can produce hypergraphia.
A second region of the brain that is surprisingly relevant to
creative writing is the limbic system, the seat of emotion and drive and, I"ll
argue, some aspects of the feeling of being inspired (a feeling, alas, that
does not always coincide with producing great work). It gets its name from
the fact that it forms a limbus, or ring, deep under the cortex. The limbic
system connects more strongly to the temporal lobes than to any other
region of the cortex. This strong link underlies the importance of emotion and
drive to creativity—factors that are anatomically as well as conceptually
distinct from the cognitive contributions of the rest of the cerebral cortex. The
limbic system also reflects the way mood swings can drive creativity.
The temporal lobes and the limbic system appear to underlie the
drive to seek beauty and meaning in nonliterary forms of artistic achievement
as well. The temporal lobes" role in hypergraphia, for instance, may parallel
their role in intense drives to paint and to compose music. The same brain
changes that drove Vincent van Gogh"s frenzied painting (at his peak he
produced a new canvas every thirty-six hours) seem to have driven his
hypergraphic letters to his brother, Theo. Further, to the extent that
hypergraphia and frenetic artistic...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Mariner Books
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2005
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0618485414
• ISBN 13: 9780618485413
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 320
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Product Safety Manager; enquiries@harpercollins.ie; ; HarperCollins, Macken House, 39/40 Mayor Street Upper; Dublin 1; D01 C9W8; Irland