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Book review: Brain storm: Harnessing the power of productive obsessions

Being human, Books, General 1 Response »

Aug 252010

Brainstorm: Harnessing the Power of Productive Obsessions, by Eric Maisel and Ann Maisel.

Eric Maisel is a psychotherapist and a well-known creativity coach, with many books to his credit. His co-author is his wife Ann, who is, according to the jacket blurb, busy researching the productive obsessions of others. They’ve produced a book of advice and encouragement for how to engage your mind in a project that can help you find meaning and fulfillment.

This book follows up on Eric Maisel’s earlier The Van Gogh Blues: The Creative Person’s Path Through Depression, in which he encouraged depressed creative people to work through the depression by focusing on how they were creating meaning through their work. The basic idea was that depression is what fills your heart when the meaning has leaked out, so the key to keeping it at bay is to never take meaning for granted, but to cultivate it assiduously.

Brainstorm is more of a how-to manual for the care and feeding of projects that can give life meaning. The idea behind a productive obsession is that it gives your brain something to focus on, something that will help you channel your mental energies into something more productive than the hamster-wheel spinning of worries, fears, or regrets that can sap your energy. A productive obsession can be just about anything: writing a novel, creating a series of paintings, launching a business or a nonprofit, solving some scientific or technical problem, or resolving some vexing personal dilemma like how to balance your work and your family or how to care for an aging relative. The key thing is to find something to which you can commit yourself wholeheartedly and that will repay your sustained attention.

The introduction says this book could be read in an afternoon, and I think that’s a pretty accurate estimation. The chapters are short and the writing is engaging and approachable. However, the payoff really comes when you apply the ideas to your own productive obsession, whatever it might be. So in that sense, it’s a book for bookmarking and dipping into as your obsession unfolds.

The book is structured loosely around the progress of a typical productive obsession. It describes identifying the thing that will most happily occupy and focus your brain, clearing the decks for action, mustering the discipline to succeed, and dealing with rough patches. The successful completion of your project is then only the beginning of the next obsession. Each chapter closes with a few paragraphs of more specific counsel: suggestions for dealing with obstacles, bits of insight into the process, words of encouragement, success stories for inspiration. The book closes with an appendix about how to start your own productive obsession group online in which you can find and offer encouragement and swap stories.

My own productive obsession at the moment is a novel that I’m writing. The idea first came to me on New Year’s Day, 2007. I’ve written a lot of background and sketches, and this January 1, I resolved to finish a first draft by the end of the year. (I think I may make it.) I read the Maisels’ book with this project in mind. It struck me as containing advice of varying degrees of usefulness to me at the moment. As I read, sentences or paragraphs would leap out at me, telling me things that I either hadn’t known or had sensed only dimly. I suspect that in another reading at a different stage of my work, a different set of ideas would be highlighted. This time, I got a lot out of the parts about self-doubt, follow-through, and being patient with the process.

For example, one of the things that has bedeviled me the most about writing a novel is trying to get a handle on exactly how the process works. I figured most people don’t just sit down, like Snoopy, and type “It was a dark and stormy night,” and then move along, page after page, until “The end.” Foundations must be laid, preliminary sketches made—but how does this fit into the actual production of completed pages? I wanted someone to tell me what I was supposed to do every day. And being a mildly (or maybe moderately) obsessive type, I wanted to see results, to watch the number of words and the number of pages steadily increasing. However, that just didn’t seem to be how it worked, at least not in the beginning. I’m slowly figuring out my own process (at least for this book), but I still feel like I’m floundering sometimes. So I was brought up short by the following:

There is simply no paved road from here to there.

It was surprising how much this helped. My reaction seemed to exemplify something the book said a few pages earlier:

Yet people are convinced that there is some linear way to write a novel, build a business, or answer a scientific question. Holding to this false hope, when they enter into the turmoil of process and discover that it is messy, nonlinear, and not what they expected, they quit. If only they could accept that process is exactly this messy, they might grow calm—and enjoy themselves.

Oh. OK. Yeah, that does make sense.

Maisel talks about neuronal gestalts and uses other brain-centered language in what seems to be a largely metaphorical way. He has the experience to back him up in his observations on how brains work and what makes them happy and productive (or unhappy and stuck), but it might have been nice to have some footnotes or suggestions for further reading that address what brain science can tell us about focus, mindfulness, self-confidence, and self-doubt. With that minor caveat, though, I’d say that this book has some helpful advice and inspiration that can help you get from a vague feeling of wanting to do something big with your time and energy to actually doing something about it.

Baby minds and unconscious minds

Brain and mind, Thought and consciousness 5 Responses »

May 032009

I’ve been thinking a lot about creativity lately, in particular about how it works and what it feels like to create something. A couple of recent news articles, while not directly about creativity, do seem to shed some light.

This article from the Boston Globe discusses some of the capabilities of the infant mind and how they differ from those of the adult mind. The skills our brains are born with are useful in gaining mastery over the world; as we grow and use this initial tool kit, the result is a greater capacity for focused consciousness and time-saving familiarity with the world we live in. As in so many things, though, it’s not all gain. Some of those early-life attributes, such as greater flexibility and the capacity for noticing many more details of a situation or scene, would be kind of handy to regain from time to time. The article gives some interesting tidbits about how the brain develops from its early state into something more sophisticated but in some ways narrower and less rich.

Creativity comes into the story, it seems to me, because part of what it means to be creative is to be able to see things freshly, not only appreciating the familiar as if it were new but being able to present stories, colors, shapes, or sounds in new ways, as if seeing them from a new angle. I wonder if creativity is enhanced in any way by spending time with very young people and borrowing their sense of wonder and their capacity for absorbing situations (not knowing what they should pay attention to, the idea is that they try to pay attention to it all). One thing I’ve run across several times in advice about how to keep your brain fit and healthy as you age is to try new things: learn a new language or a new physical skill, read up on some subject or place that’s foreign to you. Maybe what’s going on there is that by immersing yourself in a world that you don’t know, you have to re-acquire some of that ability to notice everything and put it all together. It certainly seems like that might also be a boon to those who want to create; I’ve always had the feeling that doing new things, even if they weren’t related to the writing I wanted to do, was helpful somehow.

This article from The Economist, on the other hand, covers some new research into unconscious thought. A new study has used EEGs to examine brain activity while people were solving a particular type of problem; it turns out that brain activity can be used to predict, by up to 8 seconds, whether someone is going to get the answer to a puzzle. In other words, brain unconscious activity (specifically, an increase in high-frequency gamma waves in the right frontal cortex) reliably signals a forthcoming conscious moment of insight.

It’s always been fascinating to read about the many ways our subconscious minds seem to go on about their business without letting our conscious minds in on what’s going on until necessary. It’s like there’s some committee in the back room discussing the options unbeknownst to me (although “me” is a slippery pronoun in this context) until suddenly my conscious mind is announcing some decision to myself and to the world, just as confidently as if it had thought of it by itself. I’m sure this behind-the-scenes activity makes my cognitive processing much more efficient, but sometimes I’d really like to know what’s going on in there. The whole thing is even more peculiar when you’re coming up with ideas for some creative project or another, and you suddenly see a way to put together the pieces you’ve been mentally pushing around but you’re not sure where the insight came from, or you think you know what road you’re going to take in your writing that day but wind up finding yourself far from home with not much of an idea how you got there. Funny old things, brains.

Frontotemporal dementia

Being human, Brain and mind Comments Off

Apr 152008

The New York Times has a good article on frontotemporal dementia (FTD) and creativity. FTD is a rare disorder, or perhaps more accurately a cluster of related disorders, that affects the frontal and temporal lobes of the brain. As the frontal lobes begin to lose function, other areas of the brain, particularly those related to creative activity, can become stronger. There’s no treatment and no cure, but the odd thing about the disease is that it can result in a wonderful outpouring of creative work. The article talks about Anne Adams, a woman with FTD who was strongly driven to begin painting in the early stages of the illness, after leaving a career in science due to a family emergency. The article describes her work (including a painting she did that renders the structure of Ravel’s Bolero visually; Ravel also suffered from FTD) and talks about what can be learned about brain function from studying patients with FTD. Check out the links at the end to look at samples of Adams’s work. Thanks to Patrick for telling me about this one.

Book review: The creative brain

Books, Brain and mind Comments Off

Apr 112007

The Creative Brain: The Science of Genius, by Nancy Andreasen. Penguin, 2006.

Creativity is something of a mystery. Where do brilliant innovative ideas come from, and why? Nancy Andreasen’s book about creativity does a good job of nailing down some of the basic characteristics of creative people and the creative process, and making a first pass at describing some of the neuroscience behind this mysterious human capacity. Andreasen, a neuroscientist and MD with a PhD in English literature, is well-qualified to write about creativity and to try to integrate the worlds of neuroscience and the arts (i.e., to further the consilience of which E.O. Wilson wrote).

The first couple of chapters describe some of the early research into creativity (of which there isn’t a whole lot) and discuss the nature of creativity, the relationship between creativity and intelligence, and the difficulties of defining and measuring creativity. Ordinary creativity is the kind we all employ all the time, coming up with never-before-spoken sentences, for example, or designing and building things. People likely fall along a spectrum for that kind of creativity, as they do for intelligence, with a bell-curve distribution. Extraordinary creativity is a spike at the high end of the scale, the possession of relatively few geniuses like Shakespeare, Mozart, Michelangelo, and Einstein. The book is mainly about extraordinary creatvity, although the exercises at the end are aimed at developing the ordinary kind. Andreasen explores the nature of creativity by analyzing accounts that creative people (including Coleridge, Mozart, Tchaikovsky, Stephen Spender, and Poincaré) have given describing how they work. I found these glimpses into creative minds fascinating. The personality profile of creative people was interesting too; it includes the following traits:

openness to experience, adventursomeness, rebelliousness, individualism, sensitivity, playfulenss, persistence, curiosity, and simplicity

Having examined what creativity feels like from the inside and looks like from the outside, Andreasen proceeds to discuss the brain areas involved in creative activity. Brain studies of creativity are a relatively new thing, so this is an exciting but little-explored area so far. She describes a a PET scan study she did that looked at the brains of experimental subjects who were “free associating”: not thinking of anything in particular but letting their minds wander (a crucial process that gives diverse thoughts and memories the chance to connect in possibly new and interesting ways). The association cortex, which integrates sensory input and links various brain areas, was most active during this state of free association, which indicates that it may play an important role in creative activity.

Folk wisdom holds that there’s a link between creative genius and mental instability (mood disorders and problems like alcoholism and drug abuse). I’m sure you can come up with a list just off the top of your head of tortured artists who drank themselves to death or committed suicide, but of course there have also been plenty of artists who didn’t suffer such dramatic problems. The scientific evidence for whether or not there really is a correlation is somewhat scanty, but what there is shows some consistent results. Andreasen has done a study of writers involved with the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, and she cites her own results and those of two other studies, both relatively small but all showing a higher incidence of mood disorders in writers and artists. (The evidence for an association between schizophrenia and creativity, by contrast, is not as solid so far.)

It seems likely that more creative geniuses are born than have the chance to develop their talents. (The book is dedicated to “the lost geniuses of the past”.) What conditions are required for genius to flourish? Andreasen mentions a number of periods in history that are noted for being rich in innovative ideas in science, the arts, and technology, in particular Renaissance Florence. She uses the lives of Michelangelo Buonarroti and Leonardo da Vinci to illustrate the factors that she believes are necessary for genius to flower (e.g., a critical mass of creative people and the presence of mentors and patrons). These conditions are seen as allowing an innate talent to blossom; like so many things about humans, creativity is a result of nature as well as nurture. Whether creativity has a heritable component is not clear. It does seem to run in families, but creative families provide, in addition to shared genes, a favorable environment for nurturing creativity, so it’s hard to say what the mechanism is by which creativity is transmitted.

The book wraps up by discussing ways we can nurture our own ordinary creative abilities and make the most of them. The edition of the book I have says “Includes life-changing exercises for your brain” across the top of the front cover, which is a bit hyperbolic in my opinion. Marketing spin aside, the exercises (for adults and for children) all make sense to me as good mental hygiene. All in all, this was an engaging and informative book.

Happiness and creativity

Being human, Psychology Comments Off

Dec 262006

Happiness may spur creativity by widening the circle of attention, so that it’s easier to make connections between seemingly unrelated things. The down side of this broadened scope of awareness is that happy people have a harder time concentrating their attention on a single thing without being distracted. This news article from Scientific American explains the recent study that led to these conclusions. (You can also read the abstract of the paper that was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA.) In the study, people were exposed to music that evoked either happiness, sadness, or a neutral affect, and then tested for their ability to solve word-association puzzles and to focus on a single piece of information. The happy people performed better on the former and worse on the latter. Based on my experience with any kind of creative work, the trick is to find a balance between generating enough ideas and being able to focus enough to follow through on them.

Creativity and emotional ambivalence

Being human, Psychology 2 Responses »

Oct 092006

Emotional ambivalence can be painful, or it can be beautiful in a bittersweet kind of way. Either way, it appears to be linked in some way to creativity. In a recent study at the University of Washington Business School, a researcher induced emotional states (positive, negative, neutral, or ambivalent) in volunteers and then measured their creativity using the Remote Associates Test (RAT). The RAT presents sets of three words each, and for each set the person taking the test has to come up with a single word related to all three. (E.g., when presented with the seemingly unrelated words “coin”, “quick”, and “spoon”, you’d have to come up with “silver”.) People who had been exposed to a stimulus that was meant to produce an emotionally ambivalent state scored higher on the test. Actually two different tests were done; in one, people in an ambivalent state scored better than those in the other three states, and in the other, people in an ambivalent state scored better when they thought their ambivalence was unusual.

This press release describes the work more fully. Since it was a business school faculty member who did the research, the press release includes some thoughts on what this might mean to managers who want to promote creativity in their employees. I’m intrigued by the connection between ambivalence and creativity, because the idea of paradox and the acceptance of co-existing opposites is important to me. I think, for example, that most blessings are of the mixed variety, and one of life’s bigger challenges is dealing gracefully with that fact.

Schizotypes

Brain and mind Comments Off

Sep 072005

The mad artistic genius is something of a stereotype. Here’s a story about some recent research that looked into whether there was any difference in creative behavior between normal subjects, schizophrenic subjects, and people called schizotypes, who fall somewhere in between the schizophrenics and the normal subjects, leading normal lives but often eccentric in behavior or thought. The schizotypes came up with more creative uses for everyday objects and, when their brains were scanned during the experiment, they showed more activity in the right hemisphere of the brain than did either of the other groups. It’s not clear whether the researchers identified the schizotypes based on the results of the study or whether they had already identified them, and if so, how they did that.

http://www.livescience.com/humanbiology/050907_schizotype_creative.html

Self-reflection linked to creativity and depression

Psychology Comments Off

Jun 252005

There’s a stereotype that suggests that artists are often tormented souls, suffering emotionally for their art, and in fact the incidence of depression is considerably higher among writers and artists. A recent study suggests that maybe it’s not that creativity is linked directly with depression, but rather that both are common products of a different trait, a tendency toward self-reflection. A study of college students showed that those who spend more time focusing on their feelings and themselves tend to have both a higher risk for depression and more of a bent for creative activities. The next step will be to study a bigger population and see if the correlation still holds.

http://www.apa.org/monitor/jun05/selfreflection.html