Creative human beings are the torch-bearers of civilization. How does their creativity
arise? What causes some minds/brains to achieve awe-inspiring artistic or scientific
achievements? We cannot help but be fascinated by the fact that Shakespeare—a merchant's
son with “small Latin and less Greek”—could emerge from the “nowhere” of rural Stratford to
create the richest literary treasure in the English language. We wonder how Michelangelo—a
stonecutter's son who also came from a rural nowhere—found within himself the vision to see
the shape of David in a block of discarded marble or the apolcalyptic fresco of
The Last Judgment on the wall of the Sistine Chapel. What genetic
influences shaped their brains to create—and to create these very specific wondrous things?
How did their environments promote or impede them? Would Michelangelo have been great
without the patronage of the Medicis or the competitive edge induced by Leonardo? Great art
and great science are indeed often forged in the smithy of pain—with the fire fueled by
self-doubt, obsessive preoccupation, sorrow, depression, competition, or economic
needs.
The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer's Block, and the Creative
Brain by Alice Weaver Flaherty unites two intrinsically fascinating domains of
knowledge—the workings of the brain and the nature of creativity. Its author, a neurologist
who has also become a writer by virtue of having published her first nonacademic book,
draws on her knowledge of neuroscience, her medical career as a clinician, and her
experiences as a patient. Early in the book, she describes her own hospitalization for
manic-depressive illness, a disclosure that implicitly places her in the pantheon of other
artists who have suffered from serious mental illness and provides her with
lustre-by-association. The result of all these juxtapositions is, however, a somewhat
disconcerting blend of pop-science and pop-confessional genres. The author frequently talks
to us in the first person, but one is not quite sure which person (the neuroscientist, the
doctor, or the patient) is actually speaking. In other words, this book has a jarring lack
of a strong single voice, despite a knack for often finding a fine turn-of-phrase or a
clever word choice.
Given that the book topic is promising and that the author can often write very well, it
is dismaying that this book is not better than it is. It is written for the intelligent lay
public, many of whom avidly collect and read “brain books” to expand their minds. Most
painful is the fact that this book is filled with factual errors, glib and misleading
generalizations, and careless misstatements. Perhaps most shocking and most erroneous, we
are told (by a neurologist!) that “The tips of the temporal lobe can be lopped off without
much changing a person's behavior.” HM, the most famous patient to receive bilateral
temporal lobectomy, remains frozen in a past linked to a never-changing present because he
lost the capacity to retain new memories. Temporal lobe syndromes are discussed more
accurately later in the book, but that is a weak excuse for this early error.
We are also told that “manic depression is a genetically transmitted syndrome” (when, in
fact, no replicable genetic loci have yet been identified), that “a very high proportion of
manic depressives become writers” (the lifetime prevalence rate of bipolar disorder is
approximately 1%, and only a tiny proportion of that 1% are writers), and that
“electrophysiology, because it is dangerous, is rarely performed” (electrophysiology
tools—e.g., the study of evoked potentials or electroencephalograms—are noninvasive and
frequently used; recordings of the activity of individual neurons with electrodes placed in
the gray matter are indeed rare, but nothing from the context suggests that this particular
type of electrophysiology is being discussed). There are many more such careless
misstatements. The intelligent lay reader deserves better than this.
The book raises and addresses a variety of interesting questions that have intrigued
many thoughtful people for more than two millennia. What is the nature of creativity? What
is the difference between skill and creativity? What is the relation between mental illness
and creativity? Is creativity inhibited when mental illnesses are treated? What is the
relation between mind and brain? The book also addresses some unique and interesting twists
on these questions. Its focus is the domain of writing, drawing from the author's own
experience of a compulsion to write, or hypergraphia, following a pyschic break. What is
the relationship between hypergraphia and the brain? Between writer's block and the brain?
Are these problems always pathological, or do they sometimes enhance creativity? Does that
college student who can't finish a term paper have a “disease”? Can “mind-expanding” drugs
that affect the brain enhance creativity?
In short,
The Midnight Disease raises many important questions, but fails to
address them completely and accurately. There is much more to learn, and much more to say,
about the nature of creativity, its origins in the mind/brain and in the human genome, and
its boundaries with health and disease.
