The Disordered Mind: What Unusual Brains Tell Us About Ourselves

by Eric R. Kandel

We are by nature intensely social beings. Our success in adapting to the natural world over the course of evolution has resulted in large part from our ability to form social networks. More than any other species, we depend on one another for companionship and survival. As a result, we cannot develop normally in isolation.

Our performance of a task improves as a result of experience, but we are not aware of it, nor do we have the sense of using memory when we perform the task. In fact, studies show that performance on implicit tasks can actually be impaired when we consciously contemplate the action.

the Roman ideal of a sound mind in a sound body now appears to have a scientific basis.

Scientists have yet to uncover the biological mechanisms of creativity, but they have discovered some of its precursors, one of which seems to be divesting ourselves of inhibitions, allowing our minds to wander more freely and to seek new connections between ideas.

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.

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 characterised by images as opposed to abstract concepts – it facilitates the emergence of Aha! moments that promote new combinations and permutations of ideas.

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 memorised 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 practising their art form, filling their brains with musical ideas that they could spontaneously recombine on stage.

The war called into question the belief in the inevitability of social progress; even more important, it struck at the heart of Western rational self-understanding. From the failure of reason there emerged the possibility that irrationality might be a life-affirming alternative.

The Surrealists aimed to create a pictorial art that already existed in the art of psychotic patients by devising ways of tapping into their own unconscious mind. Whereas the psychotic artists did this naturally and unselfconsciously, the Surrealists’ deliberate efforts also succeeded, as Roeske’s exhibition demonstrates. Both groups of artists evoke in us the ‘disquieting feeling of strangeness’ that Prinzhorn described. Moreover, whereas the psychotic artists were untrained, the Surrealists went to great lengths to unlearn their training. Picasso claimed that he used to draw like Raphael and it took him a full lifetime to learn to draw like a child.22

The idea that creativity is correlated with mental illness is a Romantic fallacy. Creativity does not stem from mental illness; it is an inherent part of human nature. As Rudolf Arnheim points out, ‘Present psychiatric opinion holds that psychosis does not generate artistic genius but at best liberates powers of the imagination that under normal conditions might remain locked up by the inhibitions of social and educational convention.’

About one hundred years ago the English physiologist Charles Sherrington realised that while our senses provide many ways for information to enter the brain, there is only one way out – movement.

James proposed that our conscious experience of emotion takes place only after the body’s physiological response, that the brain responds to the body.

It goes without saying that our emotions need to be regulated. Aristotle argued that the proper regulation of the emotions was a defining feature of wisdom. ‘Anyone can become angry – that is easy,’ he wrote in The Nicomachean Ethics. ‘But to be angry with the right person and to the right degree and at the right time and for the right purpose, and in the right way – that is not within everybody’s power and is not easy.’

Until the end of the nineteenth century, the only approaches to the mysteries of the human mind were introspection, philosophical enquiries and the insights of writers. Darwin changed all that when he argued that human behaviour evolved from our animal ancestors. This argument gave rise to the idea that experimental animals could be used as models to study human behaviour.

If psychopathic behaviour is based in biology, what does this mean for free will, for individual responsibility? Do these built-in neural processes lead inexorably to certain decisions, or does our conscious sense of morality, our cognitive mental function, have the last word?

A particularly interesting study of addiction by Lee Robins, a sociologist at Washington University in St.Louis, involves Vietnam veterans who had become hooked on very high-quality heroin while overseas. Amazingly, most of them were able to conquer their addiction when they returned to the United States because none of the cues that had encouraged them to use heroin in Vietnam were present at home.

One of the most surprising insights to emerge from the modern study of states of consciousness is that Sigmund Freud was right: we cannot understand consciousness without understanding that complex, unconscious mental processes pervade conscious thought. All conscious perception depends on unconscious processes.

Along the way, we learn what the unlikely collaboration of economics and cell biology has revealed about the rules that govern decision making.

we don’t consciously pick the words we’re going to use. We don’t consciously form grammatical structure. It’s all done unconsciously – we just speak. In fact, when we speak, we know the gist of what we’re going to say, even though we don’t know precisely what we’re going to say until we say it.

Yes, we have a feeling of the shape of the thought, that we feel in one complete piece before the sequence of words used to express it

After designing and conducting a series of experiments that used brain imaging to study visual perception, Baars introduced the theory of the global workspace in 1988.2 According to this theory, consciousness involves the widespread dissemination, or broadcasting, of previously unconscious (preconscious) information throughout the cortex.

So our consciousness is like an event listener on an ESB? Could another, artifical listener be added to give us an extra perception?

Put simply, when you are conscious of a particular word, that word becomes available in the global workspace, a process that takes place separately from your visual recognition of the word.

Wow

Conscious activity is restricted in what it can focus on: it selects only a single item at a time and broadcasts it widely across the brain. Unconscious processing of information, in contrast, can take place in many different areas of the cortex simultaneously, but that information is not broadcast to other areas. As you read these words, for example, you are aware of your surroundings – ambient sounds, temperature and so on. That sensory information about your surroundings is processed unconsciously in the brain, but because the information is not broadcast widely, you are not consciously aware of it as you are reading.

While the mere recognition of a word is occurring unconsciously, the meaning of that word is being accessed at much higher levels in the brain without our being aware of it. Other aspects of the word can also be computed unconsciously, such as its sound, or its emotional content, or whether we spoke it in error and want to catch the error. Similarly, when we see a number, we effortlessly tap into the mathematical systems of our brain. Scientists are still struggling to understand how unconscious processing works and how deep it can go.

Wow

Many of us, when faced with an important choice, take out the proverbial piece of paper and make a list of plusses and minuses to help us decide what to do. But experiments have shown that this may not be the best way to make a decision. If you are overly conscious, you may talk yourself into thinking you prefer something that you really don’t like. Instead, you are best off when you allow yourself to gather as much information as possible about the decision and then let it percolate unconsciously. A preference will bubble up. Sleeping helps equilibrate emotions, so when it comes to an important decision, you should literally sleep on it.

James realised not only that the brain communicates with the body but, equally important, that the body communicates with the brain. He proposed that our conscious experience of emotion takes place after the body’s physiological response. Thus, when we encounter a bear sitting in the middle of our path, we do not consciously evaluate the bear’s ferocity and then feel afraid; we instinctively run away from it and only later experience conscious fear. Recently, three independent research groups have confirmed James’s theory.

with some notable exceptions, psychoanalysts have not embraced the last fifty years’ worth of knowledge about the biology of the brain and its control of behaviour. If psychoanalysis is to regain its intellectual power and influence, as it should, it will need to engage constructively with the new biology of mind. Conceptually, the new biology could provide psychoanalysis with a scientific foundation for future growth. Experimentally, biological insights could serve as a stimulus for research, for testing specific ideas about how brain processes mediate mental processes and behaviour. Imaging studies have provided evidence that psychoanalysis, as well as other forms of psychotherapy, is a biological treatment – it actually produces detectable, lasting physical changes in the brain and in behaviour. Now we need to find out how.

Twenty-first-century biology is already in a good position to answer some of our questions about the nature of conscious and unconscious mental processes, but those answers will be richer and more meaningful if they are reached through a synthesis of the new biology of mind and psychoanalysis.

Our innate creativity – in any field – hinges on loosening the bonds of consciousness and gaining access to our unconscious.

neurology and psychiatry will merge into a common clinical discipline