Healthy Brain, Happy Life (35 page)

Adams received degrees in physics and chemistry before getting her doctorate in cell biology and worked for many years in academia. When she was forty-six, she took a leave of absence from her academic position to take care of her son, who had been in a serious car accident. During this time, she began to paint. Her early work was in the classical style, but relatively simple. Over the following six years, however, her painting evolved dramatically to a style that was bold, vibrant, and abstract, with great attention to detail.

When she was fifty-three, seven years before her first symptoms of PPA appeared, Adams painted what could probably be considered her masterpiece. She called it
Unraveling Bolero,
and she based it on the famous symphonic work
Bolero
by the composer Maurice Ravel. In this painting Adams meticulously translated Ravel’s musical score into a visual modality.

Bolero
is so powerful as a piece of music because it is unrelentingly repetitive, even perseverative in nature, building up to a surprising auditory climax at the end. Adams was incredibly systematic in her visual translation of the score. Each bar of the piece was represented by one upright rectangle, with the height of the rectangles representing the increasing volume of the music. The piece remains in the same key, represented by a unified color scheme in Adams’s painting, until bar 3,236. At this point, Adams represents the dramatic conclusion of the piece with a brilliant burst of visually salient orange and pink bars.

Adams continued to paint voraciously, moving on to pieces focusing on abstract concepts, like the number pi (π), but then shifted her focus again away from multisensory and abstract themes to paintings focused on photographic realism. Initially, it seemed as if Adams were simply a woman who discovered her creative gifts later in life. But when Adams turned sixty, six years after she painted
Unraveling Bolero,
she began developing language problems and difficulty initiating speech. These were the first clinical signs of PPA. Sadly, her symptoms continued to progress, rendering her mute and affecting her motor functions; but through much of her disease, she retained the drive to paint and continued to do so as long as she was able to hold a brush. Adams died at the age of sixty-seven.

Because brain scans were taken on Adams from the time of her diagnosis until her death, we now have a rare window into not only the progression of her neurological disease, but also her creative output. MRI scans identified two key sites of change in Adams’s brain. First, consistent with other patients with PPA, she showed severe damage in the left frontal lobe, which extended into the striatum, a subcortical region important for motor control. This left frontal damage included key language areas, which caused her initial language deficits. The striatum is the motor-related area damaged in Parkinson’s disease and was likely the cause of Adams’s difficulty in speech initiation. The damage on the left frontal lobe is consistent with studies, described earlier, suggesting that patients with damage to this region exhibit enhanced creativity. What else besides language do these left frontal regions do? It is thought that they supervise, or control, our attention and our ability to make particular responses. The idea is that if this part of the brain is damaged you lose your supervisory power over the attention and response areas, which could result in less supervised (less inhibited) and more creative thinking.

The second major change in Adams’s brain was even more surprising. Researchers found that parts of her brain on the right side were actually significantly enlarged (compared to the brains of people of her age and education background). These enlarged brain areas included more posterior areas (toward the back of the brain) in the parietal and occipital lobes, which are critical in perception and imagery. This may have allowed Adams to make the links she did between the auditory modality of
Bolero
and the visual/perceptual aspects of her painting. In other words, it was no accident that Adams’s art mixed two entirely different media—music and painting.

So what do we think was going on in Adams’s brain? The idea is that her blossoming creativity in her fifties was initiated by the left side frontal damage caused by the earliest signs of PPA. This weakening of that brain area could have released the supervisory control over more posterior areas, enabling her to let her creativity flow.

It will never be known if Adams was born with larger parietal and occipital brain areas, or if their enlargement was a result of her disease. But it seems likely that those enhanced posterior areas played a role in her attention to visual and auditory detail and were responsible for the creative growth spurt that came later in her life.

Adams’s case is striking in one other interesting way. While she was not aware of this when she painted
Unraveling Bolero,
Maurice Ravel composed his masterpiece when he was at about the same stage of PPA as Adams was. In fact, Ravel was probably the most famous patient with PPA to have been described in the medical literature. Ravel, like Adams, was attracted to repetition, which is a major theme in
Bolero
. But rather than being monotonous, Ravel created a growing tension in the piece with a beautiful and haunting melody that kind of carries us along, mesmerizing us until the very end. From her notes, it was clear that Adams was fascinated with Ravel’s work. Her case, together with other examples of patients with PPA, suggests that one key to creativity is a release from control that may come naturally in some and from a neurological condition in others.

THE NEUROBIOLOGY OF IMPROVISATION

Adams’s story provides another example of how information about patients with brain damage can help us understand brain function. But another approach to understanding the brain basis of creativity is to examine the brain activity in highly creative people. The tricky part is to pick the right category of artist to study. It becomes kind of like a riddle: Name an art form that can be quickly generated and evaluated, and can be performed while lying in an MRI scanning machine. Does such an art form exist?

My favorite answer to this riddle has been the study of musical improvisation, or the ability to quickly and extemporaneously create a melody. Two main forms of improvisation have been studied by neuroscientists: jazz improvisation on a piano and lyrical improvisation by rappers.

I have become particularly interested in the brain basis of rap. Several years ago I was doing a program for the World Science Festival in New York called Cool Jobs. The emcee of that event was a science rapper named Baba Brinkman. What, you may ask, is a science rapper? A science rapper is like any other rapper, but Brinkman raps about science. He’s written rap based on the science of mating, evolution, and human nature. The two of us started talking about the neurobiology of improvisational rap, and I invited him to lecture at NYU on the history of the rhyme and rhythm of rap. His lecture naturally led to a fascinating discussion of the neurobiological study of the brain areas involved in improvisation and in rap.

While there is only one fMRI study that has examined the brain areas involved in improvisational rapping, there are more studies that have looked at the brain areas activated during jazz improvisation. In both the rap and jazz studies, scientists compared the patterns of brain activation during freeform improvisation with brain activity when the artists performed memorized pieces. The question was, What additional brain areas were activated in the improvisational condition compared to the memorized condition? In both cases, the results showed the same major patterns of activation within the frontal lobes. First, researchers found that in the improvisational condition there was activation of the part of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex on the left side. This region has also been associated with organizing internally motivated behaviors. In addition to the increased activation of this region, there was a deactivation of the dorsolateral portion of the prefrontal cortex in both the jazz and the rap study. The deactivated region is thought to be involved in self-monitoring and may be the origin of that inner critic that tells us, “Don’t say that—that’s stupid!” Or “If you do that, everyone will look at you funny.” These self-monitoring areas appear to be inactive in situations of free improvisation.

Self-monitoring or, rather, the inhibition of self-monitoring is a critical aspect of all artistic performance and the creative process. It’s fascinating that studies of improvisational jazz and rap have pinpointed the area that may be the key to letting go and going with the flow.

But the studies of improvisation are only in their baby stages. There are so many more fascinating questions to address, including what happens when rappers or jazz musicians start interacting with other musicians or with the audience and begin to respond to feedback. Are there structural differences in the brains of improvisational artists compared to the brains of other artists that might explain their talent in these areas? In the meantime, we have a small window on what might be happening in Jay-Z’s brain as he performs live and off the cuff, as he is famous for doing.

FROM JAY-Z TO PHILIP SEYMOUR HOFFMAN: THE NEUROBIOLOGY OF ACTING

As I have told you, I grew up loving the theater and the movies. My childhood favorites included not just musicals but great dramas like
Gone with the Wind,
Sophie’s Choice,
and
The Godfather.
I very much admire actors who can make us feel as if real life is unfolding on the screen. I had an opportunity to get a deeper insight into the craft of acting at an event hosted by NYU’s Emotional Brain Institute a few years ago called “Once More with Feeling.” This was a panel discussion between the actors Tim Blake Nelson and the late, great Philip Seymour Hoffman and the neuroscientist Ray Dolan. The panel was moderated by actor-director and professor at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts Mark Wing-Davey. It was a fantastic event that started with some general questions for Hoffman and Nelson about their approaches to acting. Their answers were interesting, but the most memorable exchange of the night came when Wing-Davey asked the neuroscientist, “Is acting akin to inducing a false memory? In other words, is it a true emotion up on stage or is it [something] different?”

Of course, no one really knows the actual answer to that question, but Dolan gamely offered an explanation. He said that acting was not the same as real emotion because, of course, when you are on stage, you are aware of the audience and you are monitoring your emotions in a different way from when you are feeling them for real. He suggested that there are some key elements of real emotion, but when acting, the emotions are just not the same.

No sooner had those words left Dolan’s mouth than Hoffman immediately said, “I disagree!” He said that when he is acting, he feels every emotion he portrays.

When he said that, I think everyone else in the audience simultaneously thought, “And
that’s
why you are such a brilliant Oscar-winning actor!”

Hoffman countered the argument that acting is different from real life because there is more monitoring happening. He said that we are always monitoring ourselves. We monitor ourselves when we go the grocery store to pick up some milk, when we are giving an important presentation in front of others, and when we are on stage.

He said, “The emotions that I have up there are real—even if the scene I’m playing is not. You are still living and experiencing life.”

Nelson offered a different perspective, saying that when he has a fight with his pretend wife on stage it is different from when he has a fight with his real wife at home because the actor knows he is being watched when on stage.

But Hoffman stuck to his guns that people monitor themselves all the time, blurring the lines between real life and acting. He went so far to say, “I think people wake up and think, I should be paid to do this!”
He
certainly deserved to be paid to do it.

What became clear is that there are many different yet effective ways to approach the art of acting. Differences in philosophies of how to best play a scene abound, but all seemed to agree that when a scene is played well, everyone can appreciate it in the same way. That night I realized how difficult it would be to study the neurobiology of acting given all the different ways people think about the craft. My peers seem to agree, as I couldn’t find any studies on this. The closest I came was an article in the UK paper
The Guardian
about an fMRI lab in London that studied the brain of actress Fiona Shaw. The study compared her reading lines from a poem to her simply counting a series of numbers. The story reported more activation in a region of the parietal lobe important for visualization when she was reading the poem. Unfortunately, this is where the findings end, and clearly this is a field left open for study.

BRINGING CREATIVITY HOME

While we may not be world-famous rappers or actors or have brain lesions that enhance our creativity, many of us (myself included) strive to maximize our creativity in everyday life. And luckily for us, neuroscientists and experts have useful information to help us spike our creativity.

Creativity gurus suggest that the concept of moderation is key to improving creativity. That is, while divergent thinking is useful for creativity, too much may lead to irrelevant ideas. Other studies have emphasized the importance of focused attention to enhance certain forms of creativity, but too much focused attention and you can lose the forest for the trees. Yet others suggest a shift in perspective or trying something counterintuitive can contribute to new insights, but a shift too large can take you too far away from the problem at hand.

So where does that leave us? Keep moderation in mind as you test your divergent thinking, shift your perspective, and focus your attention.

One of my favorite studies related to improving creativity was done by psychologists at Stanford University in 2014. This team studied the effectiveness of walking on creative thinking. I guess I am not the only one who had noticed that creative ideas suddenly come to me while walking the streets of New York. Stanford researchers tested this idea directly by comparing performance on a divergent thinking test (the Alternative Uses Test) during indoor walking on a treadmill and outdoor walking versus a control group. In one experiment, 81 percent of the participants increased their divergent thinking task score while walking relative to sitting. In another experiment, which focused on the generation of analogies, scientists found that relative to sitting, 100 percent of the subjects who walked outside generated at least one new high-quality analogy while only 50 percent of those seated inside did.