The Wandering Mind

by Michael C Corballis

  Kipling’s verse, published in 1901, reflects a fascination with the two sides of the brain that followed the discoveries in the 1860s and 1870s that the left brain was dominant for both producing and understanding speech. This led to speculation as to what the right brain might do, and some began to see the differences between the two sides of the brain as complementary, rather than the right being subservient to the left. The left brain came to be seen as the repository of humanity and civilisation, the right as carrying the primitive, animalistic side of our natures. Much interest centred on dual personalities, captured in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, published in 1886; Dr Jekyll epitomised the educated, civilised left brain, Mr Hyde the crude, passionate right brain. The two needed to be balanced, because imbalance could cause madness, especially if the right side gained the upper hand, as it were. Associated with madness, and by implication the right brain, was creativity.

  This early obsession with the two sides of the brain was largely forgotten from around 1920, but revived in the 1960s and 1970s,1 following work by Roger Sperry and collaborators in California on the split brain. A number of patients suffering from intractable epilepsy had their brains surgically separated down the middle by cutting the corpus callosum, the main tract of fibres that connect the cerebral cortices. With respect to higher-order mental functions such as language, memory, perception, even imagination, then, the two sides of the brain were effectively disconnected, as though two separate minds huddled in the same cranium. The aim of the surgery was to prevent the spread of epileptic discharge from one side of the brain to the other, but it turned out that the outcome was more successful than expected, in many cases leaving the patient largely free of seizures, or with seizures much more easily controlled. Nevertheless, the split brain raised philosophical and psychological questions. Would splitting the brain split the mind? How might the two half-brains differ in their mental faculties?

  Roger Sperry and Michael Gazzaniga took the opportunity to find answers. They devised ways to study the mental capabilities of each half-brain independently of the other. Sperry belatedly won the 1981 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine—incidentally echoing the Nobel Prize in Literature won by Kipling in 1907. Sperry and Gazzaniga documented the left-brain specialisation for language, although this had been largely known since the 1860s. Their work also demonstrated spatial and emotional processes for which the right brain seemed dominant. This revived the idea that the two sides were complementary, with the left representing logic and rationality, and the right intuition, emotion and creativity.

  As I suggested in the previous chapter, the duality of the brain has been exaggerated, and too often serves to accommodate the polarities that frame our lives. These polarities were driven to some extent by the divisions that fractured social and political life in the 1960s. The left brain stood for the military-industrial establishment of the dominant West, the right for the supposedly peace-loving nations of the East. The women’s liberation movement of the 1960s and 1970s also claimed rights to the right brain, the seat of protest against male subjugation—a duality that also goes back to the late nineteenth century when the left brain was also seen as the male side and the right the female side. The dual brain was catapulted into public awareness with the publication in 1972 of Robert Ornstein’s best-selling book The Psychology of Consciousness.

  Emerging from this duality was the idea that the right brain is somehow the engine for creativity—an idea that itself was partly responsible for Julian Jaynes’ notion that the gods spoke through the right brain, or Iain McGilchrist’s view that the right brain is the master and the left brain the emissary. In 1979, an art teacher called Betty Edwards wrote Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, purporting to teach people how to draw by exploiting the spatial and creative powers of the right brain.2 This book outsold even Ornstein’s book and remains a best-seller. In his 1977 book The Dragons of Eden, the noted cosmologist and populariser of science Carl Sagan portrayed the right hemisphere as the creative but paranoid instigator of scientific ideas, often seeing patterns and conspiracies where they do not exist. The role of the rational left hemisphere is to submit these ideas to critical scrutiny.

  The right brain insinuated its way into the business world. In 1976, a professor in the Faculty of Management at McGill University was moved to write in the Harvard Business Review as follows:

  The important policy processes of managing an organization rely to a considerable extent on the faculties identified with the brain’s right hemisphere. Effective managers seem to revel in ambiguity; in complex, mysterious systems with no order.

  This must have had an impact. Google ‘right-brain business’ today and you’ll find around 350 million entries.

  More critical analysis suggests that all may not be right. In one recent study, students of art and design were asked to create book cover illustrations while their brain activity was monitored in an MRI scanner. Although these students were artistically inclined and were engaged in an art project, there was no evidence that they were drawing on the right sides of their brains. Instead, the areas activated included regions in the frontal lobes associated with executive functions, along with the default-mode network underlying mind-wandering. Neither side of the brain was favoured.

  In a more extensive review of evidence from brain-imaging associated with measures of creative cognition, Rex Jung and his colleagues conclude that, as a ‘first approximation’, creativity depends on the very mechanisms of mind-wandering itself—the default-mode network. It is surely more likely that the source of creativity is to be found in widespread networks in the brain, rather than cramped up on the right side—even in the brain, the further we wander, the more likely we are to find something new: a new connection, as Steve Jobs put it. Edward de Bono, sometimes called the father of creativity, encourages his audiences to ‘think outside the box’. He does not endorse the right-brain theory, although he does add an interesting twist: ‘We believe the right side of the brain represents creativity, but it does not. It represents innocence, which may play a role in creativity—particularly in artistic expression.’ There may well be a morsel of truth in the idea that the right brain is the more involved in artistic creativity, the left in verbal creativity, but we should relinquish our obsession with brain duality, and let the whole brain get on with it.

  If creativity depends on widespread networks, you might expect more long-range connections in creative individuals than in the non-creative. Such connections make up the white matter of the brain, and one study showed divergent thinking to be unrelated to white-matter volume in either the left or the right brain. Rather surprisingly, though, more creative individuals tended to have smaller corpora callosa. The authors of this study suggested that a smaller corpus callosum provides greater independence in each side of the brain. Perhaps creativity depends not so much on thinking outside the box as on having two boxes to think with. Kipling may have been right.

  On randomness

  The distinguished psychologist and epistemologist Donald T. Campbell (1916–1996) once described the essence of creativity as ‘blind variation and selective retention’. Blind variation is captured in the very notion of wandering, whether ambulatory or mental—straying from a set path into unknown territory. What we find there then depends on chance. It is the randomness of our wanderings, then, that supplies the spark of creativity, although when we do stumble across something new and important we need to recognise it as such—what Campbell called ‘selective retention’.

  Indeed, randomness seems to permeate the very universe, and not just our fickle minds. According to the uncertainty principle in physics, even subatomic particles don’t seem to know exactly where they are. Or more accurately, you can’t specify precisely both the location and momentum of a particle—the more you know of one, the less you know of the other. They can therefore only be located according to a probability distribution, as though wandering in their rather confined niches
, fighting for their own space. Albert Einstein famously remarked to Max Born that ‘God does not play dice with the universe’, but perhaps that’s precisely what God, if he or she exists outside of a probability distribution, actually does.

  We will also never know exactly what the weather will do next, where each raindrop will fall, or where and when the next earthquake will occur—in New Zealand, the devastating earthquakes in Christchurch in 2010 and 2011 came as almost complete surprises, despite the diligent research of seismologists. The emergence of life itself on this lucky planet was also a matter of happenstance—the right mix of primordial soup and maybe a lightning strike to set the thing going. Once it started, randomness played the major role in building the pulsating planet we inhabit today. Evolution capitalises on random changes to the genome that add to survival value, and we are ourselves the product of a vast number of random events, selected and ratcheted over time. Learning, too, seems to depend on random activity. Even the behaviourists understood that behaviour must be ‘emitted’ before it can be reinforced, and stamped into an animal’s repertoire. The pigeon that insistently pecks a key to receive a food reward must first peck it by chance, and only then discover the benefits of doing so.

  Moving animals are disposed to wander through space. Sometimes they do so in goal-directed fashion, taking the well-trodden route to the watering hole, or the traffic-snarled road to work. But sometimes they just roam, exploring new territories, or perhaps wondering as they wander what’s around the next bend. This too can lead to evolutionary change. Migration patterns in birds may have begun because birds that wandered found better conditions, and produced more offspring, than the stay-at-homes. For instance, birds originating in the tropics may have discovered that by wandering north they could enjoy longer daylight hours, allowing them to raise more young. They would then return before the northern winter, as the days shortened. Such patterns were eventually incorporated into the genetic make-up. We humans are prolific wanderers, having dispersed from Africa around 70,000 or so years ago to populate the globe. Except for the Canadians who migrate to Florida and New Zealanders to the Australian Gold Coast in winter, human wandering is for the most part exploratory, leading to the discovery of new lands, new climates, new ways of coping, greener grass.

  It is through wandering, whether physical or mental, that we invite randomness to intervene, and so discover novelty. William Wordsworth found much of his poetic inspiration by wandering in the Lake District in the north-east of England:

  I wandered lonely as a cloud

  That floats on high o’er vales and hills,

  When all at once I saw a crowd,

  A host, of golden daffodils;

  Beside the lake, beneath the trees,

  Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

  His wandering was no doubt as much mental as physical, lending poetic voice to an experience that was itself a matter of chance.

  The previous chapters in this book have covered some of the ways in which we wander in mind only, whether in mental time travel, imagining ourselves inhabiting the minds of others, dreaming, or hallucinating. All have a random element, taking us into mental territory that can prove unexpected and even illuminating. Much of our mental wandering, like spatial wandering, takes us into territories that are of no consequence for our futures—or those of our fellow humans. Occasionally, though, we strike gold.

  Dreams are a form of uncontrolled mind-wandering that may lead to creative ideas, so long as we remember them. Otto Loewi won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1936 for his work on the chemical transmission of nerve impulses, and is said to have discovered how to prove his theory in a dream. Robert Louis Stevenson developed the plot of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde in a dream. August Kekulé hit upon the ring shape of the benzene molecule after a daydream of a snake seizing its own tail—although some have doubted Kekulé’s story. And Jack Nicklaus corrected his golf swing as a result of a dream.

  But you shouldn’t rely too much on dreams. William James told the story of a Mrs Amos Pinchot, who had a dream in which she believed she had discovered the secret of life. Half asleep, she quickly wrote it down. When fully awake, she saw what she had written:

  Hogamus, Higamus

  Man is polygamous

  Higamus, Hogamus

  Woman is monogamous.

  Dreams aren’t always as revelatory as they may have seemed at the time. And in any case, we forget nearly all of them.

  The effects of mind-altering drugs may be a more potent source of inspiration, because they are manifest while we are awake and leave a more lasting impression. Like dreams, they are outside of our control, providing a strong dose of randomness, but they often make too little sense to lead to productive creativity. Nevertheless, many artists and writers have turned to drugs, sometimes with the explicit aim of finding inspiration and enlightenment. The English Romantic poets around the turn of the nineteenth century found much of their muse in opium, which began to be imported into England during the eighteenth century. Wordsworth had experimented with it, and it may well have added to the golden lustre of the daffodils. His friend Coleridge was much more reliant on opium for poetic inspiration. He started using opium to relieve his rheumatism, but then came to believe it harmonised his body with his soul, if not with Wordsworth’s—the two friends fell out with one another as Coleridge’s addiction grew. Two of his most famous epic poems, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan, are said to have resulted from opium-induced visions.

  Thomas De Quincey started taking opium for an equally mun dane reason, to alleviate toothache, but he too soon came to appreciate its power to transcend. In his 1821 work Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, he observed that ‘happiness can now be bought for a penny’, referring to the happy age when laudanum (a mixture of opium and alcohol) could easily be obtained cheaply from street vendors. Inflation and the illicit nature of the drug industry have since added to the price. De Quincey’s descriptions of opium-induced dreams and altered consciousness influenced later writers, including Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Baudelaire and Nikolai Gogol, but he also told of the excruciating torment he suffered through his addiction.

  A great many writers in the nineteenth century took opium in the search for inspiration, including Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle, John Keats, Edgar Allan Poe, Sir Walter Scott, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Robert Louis Stevenson; one wonders where nineteenth-century literature would have been without it. It was not just writers. The American polymath, inventor and scientist Benjamin Franklin experimented with both hashish and opium. Twentieth-century users of opium include Billie Holiday, Jean Cocteau and Senator Joe McCarthy. Pablo Picasso said: ‘The smell of opium is the least stupid smell in the world.’

  Cannabis and its various products seem to have had a more lasting legacy, though perhaps as much for its recreational delights as for its revelatory powers. In the form of hashish, it is said to have been introduced into Europe by Napoleon’s army, who discovered it in Egypt after a victory there. George Washington farmed cannabis plants, as did Thomas Jefferson. Also known as marijuana, it seems to have been a source of recreation for American politicians, including Thomas Jefferson, Al Gore, Bill Clinton, Newt Gingrich and US Supreme Court judge Clarence Thomas. Salvador Dalísaid: ‘Everyone should eat hashish, but only once.’ He also said: ‘I don’t use drugs. I am drugs.’

  A latecomer was LSD, first synthesised in 1938, and found to induce powerful hallucinations and distortions of thinking. Largely through the efforts of Timothy Leary at Harvard University, LSD became the drug of choice in the psychedelic 1960s. In his autobiography Flashbacks, Leary claimed that 75 per cent of the professors, students, graduate students, writers and professionals who took LSD trips found the experience to be the most educational and revealing of their lives. The English novelist and essayist Aldous Huxley also wrote in praise of drug-induced enlightenment, having experimented first with mescaline and then with L
SD, and famously took 100 grams of LSD as he lay dying. His drug-induced experiences are described in his 1954 book of essays whose title The Doors of Perception was taken from a line in William Blake’s book The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, written between 1790 and 1793. Blake’s own writing and art had many of the features of drug-induced revelations, but there seems to be no evidence that he actually, in the 1960s vernacular, ‘did drugs’. LSD also inspired musicians such as The Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, The Mothers of Invention and The Rolling Stones, as well as the actors Peter Fonda, Cary Grant and Jack Nicholson. Steve Jobs, co-founder of the Apple company, used both marijuana and LSD. Indeed, LSD might have helped create the computer industry as a whole, since Silicon Valley emerged in California at the same time as LSD exploded into the cultural scene.

  And there’s always been alcohol—perhaps the most widely sanctioned of mind-altering drugs, but in many respects the most dangerous. It was the drug of choice for Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt, and lit the fires of creativity in many talented writers, including Truman Capote, John Cheever, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, James Joyce, Jack Kerouac, Dorothy Parker and Dylan Thomas. In her novel The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath wrote:3 ‘I began to think vodka was my drink at last. It didn’t taste like anything, but it went straight down into my stomach like a sword swallower’s sword and made me feel powerful and godlike.’ Ogden Nash was more succinct: ‘Candy is dandy but liquor is quicker.’

  I am sure that people will continue to use drugs not only to find inspiration, but also simply for the transcendental experience. Drugs certainly add randomness to our thoughts, and in that sense can lead to creativity—more so, perhaps, in art and writing than in science. But there are, of course, serious downsides. One is that the induced randomness may be devoid of meaning—simply too much of a jumble to provide meaningful insight or aesthetic value. Another is that the sense of revelation itself turns out to be illusory in the cold light of sobriety. More serious, perhaps, is that many of the most potent drugs are addictive, and the pain of escaping their grip is simply too great to compensate for whatever pleasure of inspiration they brought in the first place. And besides, I feel bound to mention, most mind-altering drugs are illegal.