Imagine: How Creativity Works (9 page)

But Capote was wrong. The reality of the creative process is that it often requires persistence, the ability to stare at a problem until it makes sense. It’s forcing oneself to pay attention, to write all night and then fix those words in the morning. It’s sticking with a poem until it’s perfect; refusing to quit on a math question; working until the cut of a dress is just right. The answer won’t arrive suddenly, in a flash of insight. Instead, it will be revealed slowly, like a coastline emerging from the clouds.

The larger point is that creativity isn’t just about relaxing showers and remote associations. That’s how Dylan wrote “Like a Rolling Stone,” but that’s not the only way to make something new. The imagination, it turns out, is multifaceted. And so, when the right hemisphere has nothing to say, when distractions are just distractions, we need to rely on a very different circuit of cells. We can’t always wait for the insights to find us; sometimes, we have to search for them.

Furthermore, even if a person is lucky enough to experience a useful epiphany, that new idea is rarely the end of the creative process. The sobering reality is that the grandest revelations often still need work. The new idea — that thirty-millisecond burst of gamma waves — has to be refined, the rough drafts of the right hemisphere transformed into a finished piece of work. Such labor is rarely fun, but it’s essential. A good poem is never easy. It must be pulled out of us, like a splinter.

What does this have to do with Benzedrine? The answer returns us to the brain and to the specific ways in which amphetamines alter the activity of neurons. After Auden popped his morning pill, the drug quickly diffused into his bloodstream. Most chemicals can’t pass through the blood-brain barrier — a mostly impermeable wall that protects the mind from mind-altering substances — but the small molecules of speed slip right through it. As a result, Auden began feeling the effects of Benzedrine within five minutes of swallowing the white tablet.

While the drug might have turned the poet into a poetry machine, it came with many dangerous side effects. For one thing, Benzedrine is extremely addictive. It’s also been known to cause insomnia, psychotic episodes, tremors, constipation, and cardiac arrest. Furthermore, such stimulants can block moments of insight. Because the drugs sharpen the spotlight of attention, they make it much harder for anyone to hear those remote associations emanating from the right hemisphere. The distracting murmurs of the mind are silenced; the alpha waves disappear.

However, even though these stimulants inhibit our epiphanies (and sicken us with addiction), they seem to dramatically increase other kinds of creativity. Just look at Auden: it’s astonishing how many of his most celebrated poems, from “Musée des Beaux Arts” to “In Memory of W. B. Yeats,” were composed in those first in-somniac months after he started experimenting with Benzedrine. In fact, Auden’s poetic production during this time is widely considered to be one of the great outpourings of literature in the twentieth century. It’s as if the pills awakened his latent talent, transforming a gifted lyricist into the premier poet of his generation.

But the amphetamines didn’t just make Auden insanely productive — they also transformed his writing style. His flood of Benzedrine poetry is defined by its clarity, the lines stripped down to their rhetorical essence. There are no wild rhymes here — every word is deliberate. Take this stanza from “September 1, 1939,” written in the dark days right before World War II:

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

The writing feels candid, as if it were composed on the back of a cocktail napkin. (The poem opens, after all, with a bar scene: “I sit in one of the dives / On Fifty-Second Street.”) But that ease is an illusion: Auden lavished months of attention on these lyrics, patiently fixing the flaws and cutting the excess. For the most part, his drafts document a move toward simplicity, so that the more opaque lines — “Each pert philosopher’s / Concupiscence or, worse / Practical wisdom, all” — were removed. The power of the finished poem is inseparable from this amphetamine-fueled editing process in which Auden was able to focus on the writing until it was lean and spare and ready for publication. He no longer got bored with bad metaphors or stopped working on substandard stanzas. Instead, the drugs allowed him to relentlessly refine his words. He thought about the lines, and then he thought some more.

But the question remains: How does a little white pill make this kind of focused creativity easier? Why does Benzedrine make someone more likely to persevere? At first glance, the effects of the drug on the brain seem relatively minor. Amphetamines act primarily on a network of neurons that use dopamine, a neurotransmitter, to communicate with one another. (Our cells speak in squirts of chemical.) Within minutes, the drug dramatically increases the amount of dopamine in the synapses, which are the spaces between cells. (The drugs do this by both increasing the amount of dopamine released into the synapse and inhibiting the removal, or uptake, of dopamine from the synapse, making the chemical linger longer.) This excess of neurotransmitter means that neurons are stuck in the active state, like a light that can’t be turned off.

While dopamine neurons are relatively rare, they are clustered in specific areas in the center of the brain, such as the nucleus accumbens and the ventral striatum. These cortical parts make up the dopamine reward pathway, the neural highway that’s responsible for generating the pleasurable emotions triggered by pleasurable things. It doesn’t matter if it’s having sex or eating ice cream or snorting cocaine: these things fill us with bliss because they tickle these cells. Happiness begins here.

What’s the purpose of all this pleasure? It turns out that the real benefit of delight — and the reason amphetamines increase creative production — is its powerful effect on attention. The same neurons that generate happiness (and get titillated by Benzedrine) also play a crucial role in determining which thoughts enter conscious awareness. A sense of pleasure is the brain’s way of telling itself to look over there, or there, or there. The result is that dopamine acts like a neural currency — a price tag for information — allowing us to quickly appraise the outside world. The chemical tells us what we should notice, which things and thoughts are worth the cost of awareness.

The wiring of the brain reflects this evolutionary innovation: there’s a highway of nerves connecting the pleasure center — the dopamine reward pathway — to the prefrontal cortex, a mass of tissue behind the forehead that controls attention. This is the area that allows someone to zoom in on reality, so that all he is thinking about is a single line in a single poem. Instead of getting distracted by the wandering mind, he can concentrate on the work.

This essential mental talent depends on the prefrontal cortex and the squirts of dopamine that help guide one’s gaze.
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This also explains why Ritalin and other amphetamines are used to treat attention de
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cit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Because they make classroom tasks more rewarding, they make it easier for children to pay attention.)

And this is why amphetamines can be so helpful, at least for distractible writers. The drugs are a chemical shortcut. Because those dopamine neurons in the midbrain are so excited — they are suffused with the neurotransmitter — the world is suddenly saturated with intensely interesting ideas.
(Daniel Kahneman and Jackson Beatty have demonstrated that any task requiring extended bouts of focused attention, such as editing a poem or solving an algebra problem, causes the pupils to dilate. “Much like the electricity meter outside your house or apartment, the pupils offer an index of the current rate which mental energy is used in the brain,” Kahneman writes. It shouldn’t be too surprising, then, that amphetamines also cause pupils to dilate, as the drug dramatically increases the amount of attention we can devote to the world.
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While attention is normally impatient and twitchy, flitting about from sensation to sensation, the drug-induced flood of dopamine makes even the most tedious details too interesting to ignore. (Some people get a similar boost naturally; studies have linked small coding differences in the genes that underlie dopamine production, such as the COMT Val/Met polymorphism, to variations in attentional abilities, with more neurotransmitter equaling more attention.) For Auden, the drug was a crucial tool, since all of his writing required endless revision. A single line was changed, and then changed again. Syllables were trimmed, rhymes altered, words cut.

But amphetamines do more than focus the attention. They also make it easier to connect ideas, to translate concentration into better poetry. That’s because the prefrontal cortex — that area in charge of attention — is also a theater of ideas, a mental space to store all of our pleasurable and interesting thoughts. As the human brain evolved, its design slowly morphing over millions of years, this area underwent a vast expansion. The benefit of this new anatomy was an unprecedented cognitive talent called working memory. The name is accurate: by keeping information in short-term storage, where it can be consciously contemplated, the prefrontal cortex allows us to work with all the fleeting thoughts flowing in from the various parts of the brain.

It’s impossible to overstate the importance of working memory. For one thing, there is a strong correlation between working memory and general intelligence, with variations in the size of working memory accounting for approximately 60 percent of the variation in IQ scores. (Being able to cram more ideas into the prefrontal cortex makes a person smarter.) Thanks to working memory, we can play with abstractions and analyze poems; we can obsess over math problems and treat ideas like tangible things. Instead of just experiencing those rewarding sensations, we can think about them. The pleasure can be contemplated.

The power of working memory also explains why amphetamines are abused by poets and mathematicians seeking a creative edge. When we’re intensely focused on something, more information is sent to the prefrontal cortex; the stage of consciousness gets even more crowded. (If working memory is normally like a string quartet, these drugs turn it into a loud orchestra.) This excess of ideas allows the neurons to form connections that have never existed before, wiring themselves into novel networks. From the perspective of the brain, these new connections are merely old thoughts that occur at the exact same time.

But these new ideas are not epiphanies. The connections made in working memory don’t feel mysterious, like an insight, or shock us with their sudden arrival. Instead, these creative thoughts tend to be minor and incremental — one can efficiently edit a poem but probably won’t invent a new poetic form. These differences are a function of human wiring: while the right hemisphere excels at remote associations, the prefrontal cortex is tuned to detect the local connections between related ideas. We might miss the forest, but we can clearly see each tree.

This focused thought process, fueled by the ecstatic firing of prefrontal neurons, is necessary for solving certain kinds of creative problems. Just look at Auden’s Benzedrine poetry. Each line is taut and concise; there are no wasted words. He has distilled his grand ideas down to their poetic minimum, their expressive essence. And so we get the final section of “In Memory of W. B. Yeats,” which ends with a series of short rhyming verses, modeled on the clipped quatrains of Blake:

In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.

The poem is about the importance of poetry. Auden is argu-ing that the writer, by harnessing the power of language, gives us the power to “praise,” to illuminate a world shrouded in indifference. For Auden, Benzedrine was merely a means of perfecting the praise, a chemical tool that helped ensure he got the words exactly right.

To understand how such focused creativity differs from moments of insight, compare this spare stanza to the loose lyricism of Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone.” While Auden’s rhymes are tight and direct — his elegy to Yeats includes heart / start and dark /bark — Dylan’s syllabic associations are much more unexpected. (In one fevered stretch, he rhymes compromise, alibis, realize, and eyes.) And then there is the poetic content: Auden’s lyrics unfold like a linear argument. Dylan, however, is channeling the expansive flow of his right hemisphere, “vomiting” forth lyrics that make little literal sense.

Friedrich Nietzsche, in The Birth of Tragedy, distinguished between two archetypes of creativity, both borrowed from Greek mythology. There was the Dionysian drive — Dionysus was the god of wine and intoxication — which led people to embrace their unconscious and create radically new forms of art. (As Dylan once said, “I accept the chaos. I hope it accepts me.”) The Apollonian artist, by contrast, attempted to resolve the messiness and impose a sober order onto the disorder of reality. Like Auden, creators in the spirit of Apollo distrust the rumors of the right hemisphere. Instead, they insist on paying careful attention, scrutinizing their thoughts until they make sense. Auden put it best: “All genuine poetry is in a sense the formation of private spheres out of public chaos.”

Modern science has given Nietzsche’s categories a new set of names. The Dionysian innovator, trusting all those spontaneous epiphanies, is a perfect example of divergent thinking. He needs these unexpected thoughts when logic won’t help, when working memory has hit the wall. In such instances, the right hemisphere helps expand the internal search. This is the kind of thinking that’s essential when struggling with a remote associate problem, or trying to invent a new kind of pop song, or figuring out what to do with a weak glue. It’s the thought process of warm showers and blue rooms, paradigm shifts and radical restructurings.