We publish quality short stories, poetry, extracts from forthcoming novels, and articles and essays on topics of social, environmental and cultural significance.ISSUE NO. 111
SUMMER 2007
CONVERSATION
Sue Woolfe and Kevin Brophy
Talking about Creativity and Neuroscience
Editor’s note: In 2007 Australian novelist and creative writing teacher, Sue Woolfe, published a fascinating exploration of contemporary neuroscience and what it can tell us about the physiological processes involved in acts of creativity. Her book, The Mystery of the Cleaning Lady, is structured as a quest narrative in which the central character, a novelist who has become stuck in the middle of writing a novel, seeks the science she hopes will help her rekindle her project. After reading and enjoying this book, I decided to invite Sue Woolfe and fellow author and thinker, Kevin Brophy, to talk (via email) about this intriguing topic.
Dear Sue,
Congratulations on your marvellous book, full of insights and questions and experience.1 I have read it through now, and will be retracing my steps through it many more times.
Maybe I could start off our discussion with a few questions to you or, rather, to your book: did you discover how to write a novel through the course of this search, or did you discover ways of describing the process? Is the process still outside of your control?
Connected with this, are you convinced now that the novelist is an unusual case of unusual mental happenings?
I was very interested in Martindale’s idea of ‘defocusing’ – I’ll try it with students too. I think there is something useful there.2
As you might have gathered from my article, I am interested in how little can be accomplished consciously, especially in a creative task.3 Have you read Benjamin Libet’s reports, and do his results shift your ideas in any way?4
I look forward to hearing from you.
Kind regards,
Kevin
Dear Kevin,
Congratulations on your marvellous article, which I will also visit again and again. But from the start I must admit that what you address is something I couldn’t begin to think about in The Mystery of the Cleaning Lady: consciousness. My search was to discover the beginnings of an answer to the question: what do we know about how the mind works during the creative act and does that throw any light on the way novels seem, during the writing, to develop a life of their own, a coherence of their own, thematically, even stylistically? Metaphors, characters, incidents, often seem to the writer to come of their own accord – after an enormous amount of work, of course, though often in an astonishingly different direction. I was wondering if novels develop their coherence not just despite the author’s initial lack of understanding of a purpose, but perhaps because of it. This question seemed to me to go right to the heart of creative thought – that it might happen far removed from our normal modes of thought. Since I teach creative writing as well as write, I hoped to discover in neuroscience an unheralded mass of knowledge identifying exactly how proven creative people moved their mind to do their imaginings, which my students might usefully mimic.
But consciousness – no! I had taken to heart the 1993 warning of Thomas Metzinger, editor of Journal of Consciousness Studies, that the defining of consciousness was in a pre-paradigm state. Francis Crick (of the duo James Watson and Francis Crick) had expressed irritation at the broad public interest in consciousness, but Metzinger wanted it to be broader: ‘The adoption of the wrong paradigm could have disastrous consequences. It will be wrong, so our only defence is a pluralistic one.’5 The participants in the forum should not only include physicists, biologists and computationalists, but he added: ‘Can we not get some bakers to participate in this forum, who will advocate that the roots of consciousness reside in the ˇclair?’
After all, Descartes’s view of the mind as self-contained and separate from the world – a view that was rooted in the thought and the needs of his times – has not only illuminated our thinking for centuries – it was of course pivotal to the whole notion of the scientific method – but it has also constrained our thinking. Now, the idea of a mind-in-a-vat looking at a world from which it is cut off, and trying to extract certainty from the abyss, is implausible, as Bruno Latour suggests.6 In fact Antonio Damasio talks about a mind arising from or in ‘a brain situated within a body-proper with which it interacts’ – along with the idea of somatic markers that mark thought with emotional states.7 All this gave me courage to consider my felt experience as a novelist a legitimate way to consider what neuroscience can teach us.
I agree with you that the problem in scientific inquiries is ‘the provisional nature of scientific knowledge’. I fell to wondering as I read your paper if our current model of consciousness may become something less grand, less inclusive, the way the concept of the soul has morphed into the concept of the mind, even the way that the concept and location of heaven have shrunk. I suppose because I have delved into ‘epiphenomenalism’, as you call it (become for a while quite enchanted with it), I am sympathetic to your suggestion that consciousness ‘might be a consequence of brain processes but in itself have no significant role. (It) simply comes along for the ride.’
Now, to your questions: you ask did I discover how to write a novel through the course of my search. I don’t know if there is such knowledge; I certainly haven’t found it. I fumble, meander, try this and that, go in a hundred directions, grab at this, at that, loosen my hold, tighten it, but eventually come to some fragile understanding of what’s on the page or the screen, an understanding that sometimes seems to me like a bulging skin that may rip apart at any moment. The felt experience again. I don’t know if writing a poem is like this. To answer you more directly, my sleuthing through neuroscience eased me into the next stage of writing The Secret Cure because I realised that I had become too knowing too early.8 I had experienced this not knowing (I want to hyphenate that) in two previous novels – but only two! Could I legitimately draw any conclusions from two? Or were these two merely idiosyncratic? The need, early in the writing, to wilfully invoke not-knowing. Not-knowing seemed critical to imagining, but the writing of a novel is such a strange process, I appear to have to learn it again and again, as if I can’t believe it.9 In your words, ‘a case of unusual mental happenings’. It may be not much different from the mental happenings we all do when we’re not thinking in a purposeful, logical, goal-oriented way. The paradox is that novelists, and, I imagine, painters, composers, mathematicians, scientists, inventors, will this purposeless goal-less thinking into being for the very definite purpose of making something up – in my case, a story.
What you and I do seem to share is a central curiosity: what does it say about the mind not only that we read works of the imagination, but that we can create them?
Would you please send as attachments the Libet papers you refer to in your email? Then I might be able to try to answer your last question.
Kind regards,
Sue.
Dear Sue,
Thanks for your thoughts. I can’t send the Libet papers because I don’t have electronic versions of them. They are described in my article, and the references are there at the end. I guess the implication of Libet’s work is that far more than we would like to allow, in fact probably everything, happens somewhere outside of or beyond our awareness as far as thinking is concerned.
Some slightly random thoughts in response to yours:
You are certainly drawn to Damasio’s proposition about the mind being an all-body phenomenon, and I find that an attractive idea too. I wonder, just as, you say, Descartes’ ideas reveal that his thinking was ‘rooted in the thought and needs of his time’, whether the attraction to Damasio’s version of the mind reflects our position as conduits of the thought and needs of our times? We have an aversion to, a suspicion of, a disrespect for the mind-in-the-head? We want to feel our ideas, not think them?
And feeling (as in touch) is a blind process, one that requires reaching out in the dark for the shapes of surfaces. But thinking is a speculative matter as well as a physical process. I guess the laboratory is the perfect image of this meeting of the physical and the abstract. What happens there makes no sense without both aspects of thought being acknowledged.
Write ‘as if we know what we are doing’: another reaching into the dark, but like those with what neuroscientists call blindsight, it is an accurate reaching towards the very things (ideas) we need. The real task is to trust that, just beyond our comprehension, we know enough to be going on with the project/question/search/problem.
I seem to be drawn to those instances where you express a lack of knowledge that turns out to be exactly what is needed in order to allow the knowledge to be expressed or the method to be uncovered.
Kevin
Dear Kevin,
Since I wrote to you I’ve been haunted by the worry that I too summarily dismissed further discussion about consciousness. I’m very wary of straying out of the area of my questioning, which was: what can neuroscience tell us about what we do to our minds when we’re trying to make up stories? However, the worry sent me to books, as most worries do. I came upon a discussion between the biochemist Kary Mullis (who invented PCR and revolutionised the study of genetics) and Kevin Jay Brown in which they were discussing a pinprick experiment by parapsychologist Dean Radin, in which the subjects reacted not after the pinpricks but up to five seconds before the pinpricks. Mullis mused about what this could mean about our consciousness of time: Radin is demonstrating an empirical fact, a strange and unexpected property of things, in a scale of seconds, with which we are personally familiar, and he is doing it in a totally convincing way... In my book I was talking about whether a computer could be ahead of you by looking at your brain activity... What Radin is getting at is something more curious. If you think about yourself as something going through time, how thick are you? You’ve got to have a certain finite thickness in time or you wouldn’t exist. So you might be a fraction of a second, or a second wide, or five, sliding through time.... Perhaps our conscious experience of ‘now’ has a thinner ‘thickness’ than other unconscious aspects of our brains? I’ve wondered if this possibility might be an explanation for what people have described as precognition.... It might be that certain parts of you are weeks, months, or years wide. Or maybe some part of you is ‘now’ all the time – from your birth (or maybe even before your birth) to your death. Some part of you is in the future at any moment, and some part of you is in the past, because you couldn’t possibly be just in this infinitesimally thin thing we call ‘now’ – because there wouldn’t be room for you in there... I’ve always thought that a little bit of me has got to be in the future.... There’s no need for this place to be just three-dimensional space and time. We have a subjective sense of physics that is consistent with three-dimensional Euclidean geometry. Euclid probably did too. But a lot of modern physics says that this place has more dimensions than that. String theory says that it is all made of strings, vibrating in eleven dimensions. We are made out of things that are eleven dimensional.... This physics claims that eight of those dimensions have shrunk to such proportions that we can’t perceive them in our normal life. But we can infer them from the properties of tiny particles that we can see with enormous machines that we can build at great expense.10Sorry I’ve quoted at length but I was enjoying typing his thoughts! Metzinger might quip: ‘Bring in the bakers, let’s ask them whether they see a connection between the delayed reaction and the ˇclair.’
By the way – when I said that Descartes was rooted in the needs and thoughts of his time, I was thinking of his political landscape, and the possible condemnation by his masters, who’d recently put Galileo under house arrest and condemned others. It was wise – calculating? – of him to separate his physics and his metaphysics. You suggest that we might respond to Damasio’s ideas that ‘the display of images necessary for thought is not for a Cartesian self isolated in the equivalent of a mind-in-a-vat but distributed through the body’ partly because ours is an age in which we want to feel our ideas, not think them. I’m not sure we do live in such an age, and if we do, I’m not sure we’re more like that than any other age – although you’re perhaps not implying that Descartes’ mind-in-a-vat suggested a more cerebral age. However, the poetry of the idea delights me.
I’m also worried that ‘the real task is to trust that just beyond our comprehension we know enough to be going on with the project’. I’m wondering if that’s the assumption that we know, on some other-thanconscious level, what we’re doing when we create, or at least what the end purpose of all the scribbling might be. I used to assume this and in fact often suggested to students the image of a sunken cathedral that we bring to consciousness. Some days it seems less like a cathedral and more like a sunken chook shed. That suggests almost a pre-existing construction, or near construction, that we discover, and that gradually emerges.
But I’ve come to consider a different model of what’s happening. I’ve heard many writers talking about writing from a centre of pain – that’s often how it’s been expressed to me. I used to consider that a call to work with passion, if that’s an admirable end in itself, or at least a motivation to amass material. But might the passion, the pain, be a vital part of creating – might it be, in fact, an agent?
Now with neurophysical evidence that thoughts and memories might be coded in the brain according to their emotional nuances or feeling tones, I’ve come to wonder if the creative process is more dynamic than the uncovering of something pre-existent. I’m wondering if, as I said in The Mystery of the Cleaning Lady, ‘some trigger late in the writing process causes the tagged themata to connect’.11 Till that point, ideas are often experienced as frustratingly disparate – and may in fact be so. But when the trigger comes, the emotions might sequester and connect the disparate ideas. Often it seems that after not-knowing for an eternity, you move with astonishing rapidity to knowing.
I’ve just watched the most silent and disbelieving class of twenty-three beginners reluctantly, only by insistence from me, scribble thousands of words of disparate fragments from their painful selves without having a clue how the bits would connect. I just kept insisting that they would, the more disparate and edgy they were. For weeks. Last night everyone’s fragments connected into a story that they found ‘eerie’. They’re over the moon. Such a relief to have their intransigent disbelief gone!
Regards,
Sue.
Dear Sue,
This is I think the last contribution I can make. Thanks for your thoughts, again, and as in the past, I am thrown in all sorts of directions by what you have found and by your suggestions. I have returned to Margaret Boden’s book, The Creative Mind, this week, where she argues, not very convincingly, that computers do show a form of ‘understanding’; but mostly her book is asking what does happen in the mind during that ‘incubation’ period identified by Poincarˇ and later refined by Hadamard in their descriptions of creative processes.12 Whatever it is that happens beyond our witnessing, the process seems to need a conscious effort beforehand (the brainstorming, the stumbling after something), and conscious reception of insights afterwards. She can only suggest that the kind of thinking that happens during ‘incubation’ (I think of those chook sheds with their hens on the eggs) must be the same as conscious thinking but somehow more free, somehow uninhibited enough to make connections that would otherwise have been impossible. Perhaps these inaccessible aspects of thinking can make use of all eleven dimensions of the subatomic quantum world! – though why stop at eleven?
I like your images of the sunken cathedral and the sunken chook shed. Who’s building them down there? That is my question. They didn’t just fall into place. And pain, as you suggest, or, more broadly, feelings as the source of whatever it is art needs to express, is another possible model for understanding what writers, artists (and scientists?) do. Perhaps you are right, that anything we do, as human beings, that looks excessive and unnecessary (climbing Everest, all extreme sports, novel writing...) comes out of pain, or at least an uncontainable, unrestrainable emotion. That can’t be all, though, or even the main point of it. We work so hard to get better at what we do – surely not trying to achieve an excellence in feeling? We seem to need to face ourselves with insoluble problems, over and over again. In praise of pain, though, I think it brings humility and vulnerability upon us, always good starting points for producing writing that will matter.
You are right, it is the rapidity of those final connections and structures that is astonishing when we do achieve some sort of creative outcome for a project. I can see it happen with some students too, and more often with postgraduate research students who bring me a draft that has been suddenly transformed by a remix and reconstruction of all the previous stumbling efforts. To be there to see these achievements makes being a teacher worthwhile, though my role is that of a witness, a necessary bystander. And maybe that’s an image of how consciousness itself works.
With thanks,
Kevin.
Dear Kevin,
So much to think about and debate in your letter, even if it is too late (because of my delays, I’m sure, so please forgive me). So relieved to see, by your reference to ‘chook shed’, that my email defeated the complications and messes of the universal email ‘migration’ that’s been imposed on us, I’m sure for very good reason – what a word, ‘migration’, so aptly summing up the uncertainty, bewilderment, harassment and sense of loss of not knowing whether our many letters have been sent or will ever arrive, not to mention people shouting at us from all sides because we haven’t done what we thought we’d done.
You wondered if there could be more than eleven dimensions: for the number of dimensions, remember Hawking’s A Brief History of Time?13 It’s a number that’s furrowed the brows of many mathematicians. It’s a hard concept to get one’s head around; I’m having trouble today with three.
My argument in The Mystery is that the incubation-type thinking is in fact very different from conscious thinking. There’s no sense of self, that seems to me one of the key differences. Correspondingly there’s no sense of place and time, and definitely no sense of reward or even purpose. I’m sure you’d go into such a state when you’re writing – although, paradoxically, if we watch ourselves go into such a state, we seem to suffer its loss. I share your wondering if we might, while thinking in this state, go into some of the other dimensions – but that’s way out of my field. However, the ‘felt’ experience of such thinking is quite otherworldly, silent and blissful.
I didn’t mean to praise pain, or anguish, and I’m not sure they’re necessary for creativity. It’s just that in my experience, writing deeply felt fragments, ones that seem to have their own life and subvert my beliefs and prejudices – almost to my horror – the very subversion seems to help the fragments to connect into an eventual whole that astounds me by affirming what I most deeply believe. Antonio Damasio’s writings gave me the first ray of hope that this experience could be discussed, perhaps described, in terms other than the somewhat embarrassed shining-faced semi-mysticism we artists have to use when teaching creative writing to people very able to think consciously. (I only teach postgraduates.) It would be helpful to utilise the terms of conscious thinking that Damasio utilises. Nevertheless, I rejoice that at a university I’m employed to teach people to twist their minds in what seems to be another way, a way they often haven’t tried before in order to create. Even if these students don’t ever end up writing a novel, they’ve found out that their minds are richer and fuller and smarter than they think. They learn to honour what their own minds create. If they can learn to write down the experience Proust describes, that seems valuable: ‘the remembrance of things past, conjured up like dreams in quiet and darkness and trance and reverie’.14
Consciousness as a witness, you say. This puts me in mind of your earlier lines, that consciousness might just come along for the ride.
Thanks for this conversation,
Sue
NOTES
1 Woolfe, Sue, The Mystery of the Cleaning Lady, UWA Press, 2007.2 Ibid, pp 88-91.3 Brophy, Kevin, ‘Peculiarities and Monstrosities: Consciousness, Neuro-Science and
Poetry’ in Creative Writing: Theory Beyond Practice in Krauth, N and Brady, T (eds), PostPressed, 2006.
4 Libet B, Wright E, Feinstein B and Pearl D, ‘Subjective Referral of the Timing for a Conscious Experience: A Functional Role for the Somatosensory Specific Projection System in Man’, Brain, 102, 1979, pp 193-224. Libet, Benjamin, ‘Unconscious Cerebral Initiative and the Role of Conscious Will in Voluntary Action’, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 8, 1985, pp 529-66.
5 Metzinger, Thomas, ‘The Future of Consciousness Studies’, Journal of Consciousness Studies, 4 (5-6) 1997, pp 385-388. 6 Latour, Bruno, Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies, Harvard University
Press, 1999, p 4. 7 Damasio, Antonio, Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow and the Feeling Brain, Harcourt, 2003, p 206. 8 Woolfe, Sue, The Secret Cure, Picador, 2003 9 Woolfe, The Mystery of the Cleaning Lady, p 1-18, 32-39, 48.
10 Mullis, Kary & Brown, Kevin Jay, Conversations on the Edge of the Apocalypse, Macmillan, p 24-25.
11 Woolfe, The Mystery of the Cleaning Lady, p 126.
12 Boden, Margaret, The Creative Mind, Basic Books, 1990.
13 Hawking, Stephen, A Brief History of Time, Bantam, 1988.
14 Proust, Marcel as quoted in Sacks, O, An Anthropologist on Mars, Picador, 1995.
SUE WOOLFE is the author of three novels: Painted Woman (1989); Leaning Towards Infinity (1996) and The Secret Cure (2003) as well as many short stories and several works of nonfiction. She teaches creative writing at the University of Sydney.
KEVIN BROPHY is a poet and novelist who teaches at the University of Melbourne. He has published ten books. His most recent is a book of poetry: Mr Wittgenstein’s Lion (Five Islands Press, 2007). He has also published: Explorations in Creative Writing (Melbourne University Press, 2003) and Creativity: Psychoanalysis, Surrealism and Creative Writing (Melbourne University Press, 1998).
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