The Disordered Mind

by Eric R. Kandel

  That translation goes like this. First, Close takes a photograph of a face. Then he covers the photograph with a sheet of transparent Plexiglas and pixelates it—that is, he applies a grid that separates the image into thousands of tiny cells. Finally, he paints each of the tiny pixels, row by row, which together coalesce into a portrait. The final image is clearly composed of its constituent parts.

  Figure 6.1. Chuck Close, Big Self-Portrait, 1967–68. Acrylic on canvas, 107.5 × 83.5 × 2 inches

  In his early work, Close used this method to achieve an unprecedented level of realism (fig. 6.1), consistent with his desire to make sense of the world. In time, however, he began using the grid more experimentally, revealing a progressive lifting of inhibitions. First, he filled each cell with a repeated mark, a dot, to create wonderfully complex portraits from very simple, incremental units. Eventually, the technique evolved into painting each cell as a tiny abstract painting made of concentric circles (fig. 6.2). Rather than coloring each square with the same uniform flesh tone, Close made several saturated rings; from a distance, they create the illusion of a single color and create a vibrant, believable portrait.

  Studies have shown that the right hemisphere of the brain is more concerned with putting ideas together, seeing new combinations—in short, with aspects of creativity. The left hemisphere is concerned with language and logic. As we saw in chapter 5, John Hughlings Jackson, the founder of modern neurology, argued a century ago that the left hemisphere of the brain inhibits the right hemisphere, and as a result, damage to the left hemisphere can enhance creativity. Close’s left hemisphere is compromised, as is evident in his dyslexia, and like many other artists, he is left-handed, which further indicates that the right hemisphere of his brain is dominant.

  Not only has Close taken full advantage of this possible pathway to creativity, he has worked, as a gifted athlete might, at doing better what he already does well. He has used his dyslexia to enhance his artistic strengths. He has pointed out that everything he does is driven by his learning disabilities. He didn’t take algebra, geometry, physics, or chemistry. He got through life by taking extra-credit art courses and projects to show his teacher that he was interested in his classwork, even though he couldn’t recall facts later on. He got reinforcement for demonstrating that he had skills, and this made him feel special. As a result, his artistic ability is extraordinary, and his depiction of faces is continually evolving.

  Close exemplifies two important aspects of creativity in addition to the lifting of inhibitions: the determination to work hard and overcome difficulty, and the enormous plasticity of our brain. As we saw in the chapters on autism and Alzheimer’s disease, damage to some regions of the brain can be compensated for by increased strength and effectiveness in other regions. The brain’s ability to compensate for damage can also enhance an artist’s ability to do new, more interesting and creative things.

  Figure 6.2. Chuck Close, Roy II, 1994. Oil on canvas, 102 × 84 inches (top), and a detail from the same painting (bottom)

  THE VIEWER

  While the ancient Greeks and the Romantics were fascinated by the creative artist, it wasn’t until the turn of the twentieth century that the viewer’s experience of art took center stage. The idea that both the beholder and the artist engage in creative mental processes was first introduced around 1900 by Alois Riegl, a founder of the Vienna School of Art History.

  Riegl and his two great disciples, Ernst Kris, who later became a psychoanalyst, and Ernst Gombrich, argued that when we look at a work of art, each of us sees it in slightly different terms. That is because there is ambiguity in almost every object we see, but particularly in great works of art. Each of us interprets that ambiguity differently, and as a result, each of us sees a given work of art differently. This implies that we each create our own view of the work—that is, we undergo a creative process that is similar in nature, although more modest in scope, to the creative process of the artist. This creative process is known as the beholder’s share.

  We know this is true because, as we have seen, the actual sensory information going from any image to our brain is rudimentary, fragmentary. Our eyes are not a camera that relays a complete image to our brain. Rather, our brain receives incomplete sensory information and interprets it in light of our emotions, experience, and memory. This interpretive process, carried out by our brain, is what enables us to reconstruct our own unique perception of the image we see, and it is the basis of the beholder’s share.

  Ann Temkin, chief curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, uses Close’s portrait of Roy Lichtenstein (fig. 6.2) as an example of the viewer’s response. “There is obviously a back-and-forth in these pictures between the abstract marks, the painting act, and the representation of somebody,” she says. “Neither one is the whole experience. Part of the experience is the abstract circles and squares and funny shapes that you see close up, and part of it is stepping back and recognizing that Oh, it’s Lichtenstein. The process that you go through in recognizing Lichtenstein is so embedded in the painting that as the viewer you are almost made to re-create it.”1 That process of recognition is also embedded in the way our brain constructs Lichtenstein’s face from Close’s tiny geometric shapes.

  THE CREATIVE PROCESS

  Is there an explanation for why a burst of creativity occurs at certain times in history and in certain places? Whether we are talking about the cultural ferment of the Renaissance, the Impressionists in Paris, the Figurative Expressionists of Vienna 1900, or the Abstract Expressionists in New York, interaction among creative people is essential. Sometimes that interaction comes in the form of a rivalry among colleagues, or conversely the desire to support one another. Ideas commonly emerge when creative people talk with one another in a café or at a party. In other words, the myth of the isolated genius is just that: a myth.

  What, then, are the factors that contribute to individual creativity? For Close, as we have seen, the essential aspect of creativity is problem solving: technical competence and a willingness to work hard. Studies have found that certain additional features increase the likelihood of creativity. The first is personality: some personality types are more likely to be creative than others. Note the plural—creativity is not limited to a single personality type, as the developmental psychologist Howard Gardner emphasizes in his work on multiple intelligences. Rather, creativity comes in multiple forms: some of us are strong in arithmetic skills, others in language skills, others in visual skills.2

  The second feature is the period of preparation, when a person works on a problem both consciously and unconsciously. The third feature is the initial moment of creativity, the Aha! moment, when a sudden insight connects previously unassociated factors in a person’s brain. Last is the subsequent working through of the idea.

  After consciously working on a problem, we need an incubation period, when we refrain from conscious thought and let our unconscious roam. This incubation period, says the psychologist Jonathan Schooler, is for “letting the mind wander.”3 New ideas often come to us not when we are hard at work on a project but when we are going for a walk, taking a shower, thinking about something else. These are the Aha! moments, the epiphanies, of creativity, and we are now beginning to get some insight into the biology underlying them.

  Kris, a student of unconscious mental processes in creativity, observed that creative people experience moments in their work in which they undergo, in a controlled manner, a relatively free communication between the unconscious and conscious parts of their mind. He calls this controlled access to our unconscious “regression in the service of the ego.”4 It means that creative people go back to a more primitive form of psychological functioning, one that allows them access to their unconscious drives and desires—and to some of the creative potential associated with them. Because unconscious thinking is freer and more likely to be associative—it is characterized by images as opposed to abstract concepts—it facilitates the emergence o
f Aha! moments that promote new combinations and permutations of ideas.

  THE BIOLOGY OF CREATIVITY

  Although we know little about the biology of creativity, it is clear that creativity entails the lifting of inhibitions. Jackson’s idea that the left and right hemispheres of the brain inhibit each other and that damage to the left hemisphere frees up the creative capabilities of the right hemisphere has been validated by modern technology.

  PET scans of the brain, for example, have revealed a fascinating difference in the way the left and right hemispheres respond to a repeated stimulus. The left hemisphere always responds to the stimulus (a word or an object), regardless of how often it is presented. The right hemisphere, in contrast, is often bored with the routine stimulus but responds actively to novel stimuli. Thus, the right hemisphere, which is more concerned with novelty, has a greater capability for creativity. Similarly, the neurologist Bruce Miller, whom we encountered in chapter 5, made the remarkable discovery that people with frontotemporal dementia in the left hemisphere sometimes undergo a burst of creativity, presumably because the disorder in the left hemisphere is removing its inhibitory constraint over the right hemisphere.5

  This idea has been carried further in a very interesting collaboration between Mark Jung-Beeman at Northwestern University and John Kounios at Drexel University. They presented study participants with problems that could be solved either systematically or by means of a sudden Aha! insight. When participants call on an Aha! insight, a region of their right hemisphere lights up. These experiments, although in the early stages, support the idea that sudden flashes of insight, moments of creativity, occur when our brain engages distinct neural and cognitive processes, some of which are located in the right hemisphere.6

  A similar lesson emerges from brain-imaging experiments carried out by Charles Limb and Allen Braun at the National Institutes of Health. They wanted to understand the differences in the mental processes underlying jazz improvisation, on the one hand, and the performance of a memorized musical sequence, on the other. They put experienced jazz pianists into a scanner and asked them to play a musical sequence they had created on the spot or a tune they had memorized. Limb and Braun found that improvisation relies on a characteristic set of changes in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, an area concerned with impulse control.7

  How does impulse relate to creativity? Limb and Braun found that before the pianists began to improvise, their brain showed a “deactivation” of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. However, when they were playing the memorized tune, this region remained active. In other words, while they were improvising, their brain was damping down their inhibitions normally mediated by the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. They were able to create new music in part because they were uninhibited and not self-conscious about being creative.

  Simply turning off the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex won’t turn any of us into a great pianist, however. These pianists benefited from the lifting of inhibitions only because they, like most other successful creative people, had spent years practicing their art form, filling their brains with musical ideas that they could spontaneously recombine onstage.

  THE ART OF PEOPLE WITH SCHIZOPHRENIA

  The Romantic movement, which blossomed in the first half of the nineteenth century, emphasized intuition and emotion over rationalism as a source of aesthetic experience and awakened a keen interest in the creativity of people with mental illness. Romanticism characterized psychoses as exalted states that free a person from conventional reason and social mores and provide access to hidden realms of the mind that are normally unconscious and thus inaccessible.

  The first person to take an interest in the art of psychotic patients was actually Philippe Pinel, the physician who developed a humane, psychological approach to mental patients. In 1801 he wrote about the art of two of his psychiatric patients and concluded that insanity can sometimes unearth hidden artistic talents.8 In 1812 Benjamin Rush, a Founding Father of the United States and the founder of psychiatry as a distinct discipline in the United States, echoed Pinel’s view. Insanity, Rush wrote, is like an earthquake that “by convulsing the upper strata of our globe, throws upon its surface precious and splendid fossils, the existence of which was unknown to the proprietors of the soil in which they were buried.”9

  In 1864 the Italian physician and criminologist Cesare Lombroso collected works of art from 108 patients and published Genio e Follia, or “Genius and Madness,” later translated into English as The Man of Genius. Like Rush, Lombroso found that insanity transformed some people who had never painted before into painters, but Lombroso saw this art as part of the patient’s illness and was insensitive to its aesthetic merits.10

  Emil Kraepelin, the father of modern scientific psychiatry, took a less Romantic, though no less appreciative, approach to the relationship between psychosis and creativity. Soon after becoming director of the psychiatric clinic of the University of Heidelberg, in 1891, Kraepelin noted that some of his schizophrenic patients painted. He started to collect the art of these patients as a Lehrsammlung, a teaching collection, to see whether studying the paintings might aid physicians in diagnosing the disorder. Kraepelin also thought that painting might be therapeutic for patients, a view that now has considerable support.

  Karl Wilmanns, a subsequent director of the Heidelberg clinic, continued Kraepelin’s tradition of collecting the paintings of his psychotic patients and in 1919 recruited Hans Prinzhorn to work on the collection. Prinzhorn was a psychiatrist and art historian who had trained in art history under Alois Riegl.

  Prinzhorn proceeded to expand the collection. Since only about 2 percent of the inmates at the Heidelberg clinic were creating art, he asked directors of other psychiatric institutions—in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Italy, and the Netherlands—to send him the artwork of their psychotic patients. As a result of this appeal, Prinzhorn received more than five thousand paintings, drawings, sculptures, and collages representing the work of about five hundred patients.

  The patients whose art Prinzhorn collected had two salient characteristics: they were psychotic, and they were artistically naïve, that is, untrained in art. Prinzhorn recognized that the art of psychotic patients is not simply pathology translated into a visual language. The lack of artistic training evidenced in most of their drawings is no different from what we would see in the work of any inexperienced adult who took up drawing; it reflects nothing pathological in and of itself. Prinzhorn realized that the patients’ images were creative works in their own right and that they were remarkable examples of naïve art.

  As Prinzhorn was careful to point out, however, artistic naïveté is not confined to artists who suffer from psychosis. One of the most notable examples of an untrained artist who was not psychotic is Henri Rousseau (1844–1910). Rousseau, a French toll collector, was often ridiculed by critics during his lifetime, but his work is of extraordinary artistic quality. He eventually came to be recognized as a self-taught genius and major Post-Impressionist painter (figs. 6.3 and 6.4), and his work influenced several generations of artists, including the Surrealists and Picasso. Although Rousseau never actually left France, his best-known paintings depict jungle scenes (fig. 6.4). He drew inspiration for these scenes from his unconscious fantasy life.

  In the early twentieth century, psychiatric patients who were hospitalized commonly spent the rest of their lives—twenty to forty years—in an institution. Some of them began to paint after they were hospitalized. Rudolf Arnheim, a distinguished student of the psychology of art, notes:

  [T]housands of institutionalized patients seized on pieces of stationery or toilet paper, wrappers, bread, or wood to give visible expression to the powerful feelings of mental upheaval generated by their anguish, their frustration, their protests against confinement, and their megalomaniac visions. Yet among psychiatrists only an occasional prophetic forerunner sensed the diagnostic possibilities of those uncanny images and perhaps speculated on their oblique significance for the natu
re of human creativity.11

  Figure 6.3. Henri Rousseau, The Sleeping Gypsy, 1897

  Figure 6.4. Henri Rousseau, The Flamingoes, 1907

  Prinzhorn’s appreciation of the creativity and aesthetic value of his patients’ art established that many aspects of what was then termed “psychotic art” are not mere curiosities but worthy of serious study. As Thomas Roeske, the current director of the Prinzhorn Collection, points out, the paintings gave a voice to people who otherwise would not have been heard from—and their voice was often quite distinctive.12

  PRINZHORN’S SCHIZOPHRENIC MASTERS

  In 1922 Prinzhorn published his highly influential book Artistry of the Mentally Ill: A Contribution to the Psychology and Psychopathology of Configuration, which he illustrated with examples from the Heidelberg collection.13 Of the five hundred artists represented in the collection, 70 percent had schizophrenia; the remaining 30 percent had bipolar disorder. These proportions reflect, in part, the hospitalization rates of people with those psychiatric illnesses. Prinzhorn focused in particular on the work of ten patients whom he referred to as “schizophrenic masters.” He presented the clinical history of each artist, protected by a pseudonym, followed by an analysis of the artist’s work and of its clinical implications for diagnosis and for the course of the artist’s disease.

  Prinzhorn describes these patients as suffering from “complete autistic isolation … the essence of schizophrenic configuration,”14 and he found their work to be characterized by a “disquieting feeling of strangeness.”15 For Prinzhorn, their art reflected the “eruptions of a universal human creative urge”16 that counteracted the sense of isolation they were experiencing. Because most of his artists were untrained, Prinzhorn also used their art to demonstrate surprising parallels with the work of children and with the work of artists from primitive societies. In every case, the artworks reflect the unschooled artistic creativity present in all of us. For these artists, a blank piece of paper often represented a passive emptiness that cried out to be filled. As a result, they tended to cover every inch of the surface. We see this in paintings by three of Prinzhorn’s schizophrenic masters, Peter Moog (fig. 6.5), Viktor Orth (fig. 6.6), and August Natterer (fig. 6.7).