Challenging Depression & Despair: A Medication-Free, Self-Help Programme That Will Change Your Life (27 page)

YOU
ARE
CREATIVE!

Let’s start with a Brain Quiz.

Question 1

This one is about your brain’s storage capacity. How many brain cells do you have?

(a) 30 million

(b) 10 billion

(c) 12

The answer is none of them. You have 100 billion or 10 to the power of 11. And each connects up with 10,000 others, which means multiple quadrillions of connections.

Scientist Dr Mark Rosenweig:
Even if your brain were fed ten items of data every second for 100 years, it would still have used less than one tenth of its storage capacity.

Question 2

What does your brain look like inside?

Golgi’s silver nitrate

The first person to see individual neurons was the Italian scientist Camillo Golgi. He won the Nobel Prize but it was all an accident. In 1972 he knocked a piece of brain tissue into a solution of silver nitrate and didn’t notice his mistake for several weeks.

When he looked at it again and examined slices under a microscope, he saw that some cells had filled up with the nitrate and therefore showed up against the brightly lit background.

A neuron, he was amazed to discover, was a rounded cell body, between one two hundredth and one tenth of a millimetre across, with a number of fine fibres growing out into the surrounding tissue. The longest, and it can grow up to a metre in some types of cell, winding and twining its way through the brain’s circuits, is the axon or transmission cable. The others are dendrites or receivers.

Question 3

This one is about the brain’s blood supply. Your brain is just over 2% of your body weight. What proportion of your glucose and oxygen does it consume?

(a) 20%

(b) 10%

(c) 1%

The answer is (a), 20% of the glucose and oxygen
needed by your whole body
. You see now why the fight-or-flight response must reorganise your blood supply when you face a challenge or threat, so that your brain can ‘charge up’ ready for action.

HEMISPHERES

Your brain resembles a very large walnut, with two halves joined together. Scientists have found that the right and left hemispheres broadly specialise in different styles of thinking, like this:

Hemispheres task

You have a reproduction Roman centurion’s helmet that you wish to sell. Using only
left brain
specialities design an advertisement to be posted on eBay highlighting its selling points.

Repeat the exercise, this time using only
right brain
specialities.

Which was harder?
 

IMAGINATION

The ‘imagination’ refers literally to the right
imaging
hemisphere. Your brain’s ability to recall and store images is prodigious and much more accurate than recall of names. If you want to remember a list of items, you can do this by using image mnemonics – by converting each into a picture so that your brain can store it more readily. It is much easier to teach a child to ride a bike or a man to swing a golf club if you
show
them how to do it rather than trying to tell them. To the brain, a picture really is worth a thousand words.

Everyone has an imaging right brain. A lot of people are afraid to use it. If you think you can’t draw, for example, take a look at
Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain
by Dr Betty Edwards.
¹
This astonishing book is about people who thought they were incapable of sketching – and if you examine their original efforts you would have to concur: no artistic gifts here. Matchstick figures and lollipop trees – just amateur symbols of the real things. But Dr Edwards took these same people and trained them to look at, and into, objects in a calm, focused, meditative state. They were now using not the left brain, with its judgemental and analytical powers, but the imaginative right brain.
Now
they could see their subjects! This different way of
seeing
enabled each ‘cannot draw’ artist to produce sketches that were graphically so much more accurate and real that they appeared to be by somebody else.

You can use your creative right brain in all sorts of ways. If you like sudokus, for example, the way that you probably work them out now is by using logic and numerical skills. But next time you get stuck, try allowing your eyes to relax and ‘take in’ the patterns. Pretty soon you will find your gaze drawn to a match for the surrounding numbers or a significant blank square that will provide the missing clue.

You can practise relaxing your gaze with those popular ‘3D pictures’ that you can find in many bookshops. These are collections of coloured patterns that, when gazed at in a certain relaxed way, reveal hidden figures and shapes that seem to stand proud of the page. Some people claim they can never see anything. This is because they are obstinately using their left brains and trying to force their logical intelligence to ‘solve’ the patterns whereas what they need to do is to relax their eyes and gently
allow
the figures to emerge. A little patience may be needed. If the imaginative right brain has been cowed down by a lot of left brain discipline and activity, it may take a while to venture out and do its stuff.

However left-brain we may have become in this increasingly mechanical society, we all experience imaginative thinking, whether we like it or not – as we are about to drop off to sleep. Between waking and sleeping our brains present us with what are known as
hypnagogic
images – pictures, illogical sequences and memories,
sometimes with narrative links but often not, that simply ‘pop’ unbidden into our minds. If we try to seize them they are gone, like the colours in a dragonfly’s wings.

OFF WITH THE FAIRIES

When we are entranced by an activity – whether it be embroidering, making a chair leg or shaping a garden pond – we are ‘off with the fairies’. Time and space do not matter. Our problems, our concerns, even ourselves, do not matter. We have entered another dimension – the creative, right-brain, imaginative dimension where anything is possible. This is the dream time of the Australian aboriginal and the cave painter, the artist and the child. These are the lost faculties that Western society has proscribed as time-wasting, illogical, mad and inappropriate. But this is the dimension you can inhabit if you allow yourself to look more gently at the world – and create. People usually start off as creative children and become inhibited adults. They shrink from rejection. Then they get married, mortgaged, bored and buried. Let’s wake up now and enjoy being brilliant, as anyone can, while we are alive and still able to do it.

What we produce in our ego-less imaginative state is in a way
separate from us
. It may be inspired. Poet and novelist William Makepiece Thackeray spoke for all writers and artists when he said: ‘I have been surprised at the observations made by some of my characters. It seems as if an occult power were moving my pen.’

ORIGINALITY

Consider the following valuation puzzle:

•
A great painting may be worth millions.
 

•
A print, though it may look almost exactly the same, might be worth just a few pounds.
 

•
A forgery is worth nothing.

Why? Because as a society we value originality
per se
. Indeed we revere it. We celebrate original writers, poets, painters, actors, sportsmen, fashion designers, dancers, composers, television performers – virtually as demigods. Not all of us can be original –
or can we
? Here is a little test for you. Please answer the questions as honestly as you can.

The shape of things to come

1
What do other people think you are good at?

2
What do you think you are good at?

3
What do you do that is different or unique?

4
What have you yourself created, made or manufactured?

5
What might be considered your hidden talent?

6
What inspires you?

7
If you were to produce something now that was new and original, what would it be?

8
WHY ARE YOU NOT DOING IT?

THE SCREEN-STARING SOCIETY

We live in a screen-staring society (teenagers are even referred to now as
screen
agers). People stare into screens, shovelling food and drinks in their faces, and then go to bed and dream of what might have been.

Being constantly exposed to other people’s creations, we may think all the original things in the world have already been done. You may say: ‘I could never produce anything like
that
person.’ No, you will only produce anything like
that
person if you set out to imitate him or her. In fact one of the biggest inhibitors to originality is the desire to
be
original.

Just be yourself. Follow your own trail of salt.
Don’t try to be original
. In improvisation work it kills the imagination stone dead. You already ARE original. In fact you are unique. You are the only person in the universe who knows everything you know and has felt everything you have felt. All you have to do is step aside
and allow your right brain some freedom. Your imagination already
has
all the connections. Edit what it produces once you’ve got it. Not before.

HOW TO ‘STEP ASIDE’?

There are various techniques one can use. Improvisation games work wonderfully – you can use those we tried earlier or make up new ones. Meditation is another: if you simply focus on a candle flame and clear your mind, imaginative ideas will often present themselves. Tennis players who use Tim Gallwey’s ‘Inner Game’ technique focus on the seams of the ball as it turns over in the air, and golfers visualise the ball’s trajectory to free up
their
inner game. Some people prefer hypnosis. Sergei Rachmaninov composed his world-famous Second Piano Concerto after sessions with a hypnotist telling him: ‘You will compose with great facility’. Self-hypnosis, in which you play back tapes you have recorded yourself, can be useful too. Or you might try this:

Distracting the editor

You are a journalist in a busy newspaper office. You are really very creative, but your editor is the sort of mechanical, judgemental bully that constantly interferes with your writing and puts you off. Have a pen and paper in front of you, or sit at your PC ready to type.

Now distract your inner ‘editor’ by giving him a task: ‘counting down from 100’ or
‘reciting the alphabet backwards’ are the sort of ‘clever clever’ assignments that will appeal to him and keep him busy for a few minutes. Meanwhile, allow your imagination, during this window of opportunity, to just type or scribble away!

See what you get – and by the way, there is absolutely no point in cheating.

Having used whatever ‘freeing-up’ method you prefer, take the Creative Challenge!

Make something, write something, compose something, ornament or embellish something (for example by carving or embroidery), paint something, draw something, manufacture something, sculpt something, mould something, build something, model something, choreograph something, paper-fold something, paste something, formulate something, decorate something, sew something, knit something, crochet something, design something, computer generate something, glass-blow something, stone-craft something, script something. Whatever …

But bring something into being that has never existed before.

Learning to exercise the creative imagination can enable depressed people to reenter the world of wonder and hope. It is both rewarding and life-affirming.
Go
create
.

WHAT PANEL MEMBERS THOUGHT

Charlotte

‘I’ve started a semi-fictional sort of journal. When I was a patient at the big London clinic where I was being treated for body dysmorphia, someone there suggested I keep a diary, but this is different. It’s partly about me but partly not. I’m finding it’s a useful way of getting my feelings out there without necessarily losing my privacy. Actually there’s a lot in it that is pure fantasy and enjoyable to do.’