Trying to escape

There's long been an association between creativity and mental illness.  Certainly there's plenty of anecdotal evidence -- people like Sylvia Plath, Robert Schumann, Virginia Woolf, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, and Vincent van Gogh are commonly-cited examples -- and a few controlled studies have suggested that there is at least some degree of correlation between the two.

The question, as always, is whether this correlation is indicative of causation, and if so, which direction the causation points.  Does the underlying physiological problem that causes mental illness create, as a side effect, a greater degree of creativity?  (A recent study supports this conjecture, at least in some cases.)  Or does mental illness cause a desire to cultivate creative outlets as a way to assuage the pain?

This latter possibility was the subject of a paper that came out this week from Ohio State University, authored by psychologist Joseph Maffly-Kipp.  The research had two parts.  The first was a cross-sectional study of people from ages 18 to 72, in all walks of life, that assessed their experience of depression and mood disorders, and also scored them for fantasy-proneness -- to what extent did they find themselves escaping into fantasy worlds, whether through reading, watching television or movies, creative endeavors, or daydreaming?  The other was a longitudinal study took a group of college students and tracked them for six weeks to see how both of those measures changed over time.

Both groups were also assessed for their perceptions of "meaning in life" -- to what extent did they find any kind of meaning behind their daily experiences?  This, like fantasy-proneness, might take many forms, from conventional religiosity, to spirituality, to connection with other human beings, to dedication to a higher purpose.

The results are fascinating.  The people with higher levels of depression and high fantasy-proneness scored higher on assessments for meaning in life than the ones who were high on measures of depression but low on measures of fantasy-proneness.  Apparently for depressed individuals, our ability to maintain a sense of meaningfulness in life is boosted by our capacity to escape now and again into fantasy worlds.  Interesting, too, is the piece of the sample that showed negative results; individuals low for depression-proneness had no significant correlation between fantasy-proneness and meaning in life.

It seems like if you're not depressed, your capacity for finding meaning doesn't depend on your finding that sense of meaning in the imaginary.

"We found across several studies that the tendency to engage in vivid mental fantasies was related to greater perceptions that life was meaningful, but this was only true for people with high levels of depression," Maffly-Kipp said.  "We speculated that, because depressed people are struggling to find meaning in more typical ways (e.g., religion, social relationships, careers, community, etc.), they might resort to finding it through the engagement with fantasies.  Fantasies are less constrained by reality, more controllable, and might be free from the negativity biases seen in depression.  They could help a person find a sense of belonging and purpose, even if it is imaginary."

Nøkken Som Hvit Hest by Theodor Kittelsen (1907) [Image is in the Public Domain]

Of course, it immediately made me think of my own case.  I have struggled with depression and anxiety for as long as I can remember, and ever since I was a child I've not only voraciously read escapist fiction (reading Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time when I was about ten was a transcendent experience), but I've written it, too.  Not that everything I read or write is cheerful, mind you -- if you pick up one of my novels, don't expect that every character is going to have a happy ending, or necessarily even survive to the end.  But what my writing does consistently embody is that there is hope, that there are still selfless, brave, good people in the world, that a powerful cause is worth fighting for, and that love, loyalty, and friendship are the most important things in life.

That some of what I write is spurred by my own attempts to escape the dark, chaotic whirlwind of my own brain, I have no doubt whatsoever.  Maffly-Kipp's study doesn't settle the question of whether we mentally ill people have a higher capacity for inventing fantasy worlds because of some underlying common cause, or if the mental illness came first and trying to escape from it into fantasy worlds evolved later as a coping mechanism; and of course, it could be both, or be different in different people.  Mental illness, like anything having to do with our cognitive apparatus, is a complicated matter, admitting of few easy explanations.

But it does highlight that even those of us who live with depression and anxiety on a daily basis can find ways to manage it -- even if it means leaving the real world at times.

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Music on the brain

A pair of new studies last week in The Journal of Neuroscience analyzed the connections between two phenomena related to music listening that I know all too well -- our ability to replay music in our imaginations, and our capacity for anticipating what the next notes will be when we hear the first part of a melody.

The first, which I seem to excel at, is a bit of a mixed blessing.  It's my one and only superpower -- I can essentially remember tunes forever.  In my ten years as flutist in a Celtic dance band, I had just about every tune in our repertoire memorized.  I'm lousy at connecting the names to the tunes, though; so when my bandmate would say, "Next, let's play 'Drummond Castle,'" and I responded, sotto voce, "How the hell does 'Drummond Castle' go?" she'd say, "It's the one that goes, 'deedly-dum, da-deedly-dum, dum-da-deedly-deedly-deedly,'" then I'd say, "Oh, of course," and proceed to play it -- in the correct key.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons © Nevit Dilmen, Music 01754, CC BY-SA 3.0]

The most striking example of this was a tune that I remembered literally for decades without hearing it once during that time.  When I was about 25 I took a Balkan dance class, and there was one tune I especially liked.  I intended to ask the instructor what the name of it was, but forgot (indicating that my memory in other respects isn't so great).  In those pre-internet days, searching for it was damn near impossible, so I forgot about it... sort of.  Twenty years went by, and my wife and I went to a nine-day music camp in the California redwoods, and I made friends with an awesome accordionist and all-around nice guy named Simo Tesla.  One day, Simo was noodling around on his instrument, and instantaneously, I said, "That's my tune!"  There was no doubt in my mind; this was the same tune I'd heard, a couple of times, two decades earlier.

If you're curious, this is the tune, which is called "Bojerka":

The downside, of course, is that because I never forget a tune, I can't forget one even if I want to.  I'm plagued by what are called earworms -- songs that get stuck in your head, sometimes for days at a time.  There are a few songs that are such bad earworms that if they come on the radio, I'll immediately change the channel, because even a few notes are enough to imbed the tune into my brain.  (Unfortunately, sometimes just hearing the name is enough.)

And no, I'm not going to give examples, because then I'll spend the rest of the day humming "Benny and the Jets," and heaven knows I don't want to... um...

Dammit.

The second bit -- imagining what comes next in a piece of music -- also has a positive and a negative side.  The negative bit is that it is intensely frustrating when I'm listening to a song and it gets cut off, so that I don't get to hear the resolution.  The importance of resolving a musical phrase was demonstrated by my college choral director, Dr. Tiboris, who to illustrate the concept of harmonic resolution played on the piano, "Hark, the herald angels sing, glory to the newborn..."  And stopped.

Three or four of us -- myself included -- sang out "KING!" because we couldn't stand to leave the phrase unresolved.

The positive side, though, happens when I listen to a piece of music for the first time, and it resolves -- but not in the way I expected.  That thwarting of expectations is part of the excitement of music, and when done right, can send a shiver up my spine.  One of my favorite moments in classical music is a point where you think you know what's going to happen, and... the music explodes in a completely different direction.  It occurs in the pair of pieces "Quoniam Tu Solus Sanctus" and "Cum Sancto Spiritu" from J. S. Bach's Mass in B Minor.  (If you don't have time to listen to the whole thing, go to about 5:45 and listen for the moment you get lifted bodily off the ground.)

All of which is a long-winded way to get around to last week's papers, which look at both the phenomena of imagining music and of anticipating what will happen next, through the use of an EEG to determine what the brain is actually doing.  What the researchers found is that when you are imagining a piece of music, your brain is responding in exactly the same way as it does when you're actually listening to the piece.  When there's a silent bit in the music, your brain is functionally imaging what's coming next -- whether it's real or imagined.

What was more interesting is the brain's response to the notes themselves.  Imagined notes generate a negative change in voltage in the relevant neurons; real notes generate a positive voltage change.  This may be why when our expectations and the reality of what phrase comes next match up, we can often tune it out completely -- the two voltage changes, in essence, cancel each other out.  But when there's a mismatch, it jolts our brains into awareness -- just like what happens at the end of "Quoniam Tu Solus Sanctus."

I find the whole thing fascinating, as it ties together music and neuroscience, two subjects I love.  I've often wondered about why some pieces resonate with me and others don't; why, for example, I love Stravinsky's music and dislike Brahms.  These studies don't answer that question, of course, but they do get at our ability both to remember (and replay) music in our minds, and also why we have such a strong response when music does something contrary to our expectations. 

But I think I'll wind this up, and just add one more musical track that is pure fun -- the "Polka" from Shostakovich's The Age of Gold.  This is Shostakovich letting loose with some loony light-heartedness, and I defy anyone to anticipate what this piece is gonna do next.  Enjoy!

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Author and biochemist Camilla Pang was diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder at age eight, and spent most of her childhood baffled by the complexities and subtleties of human interactions.  She once asked her mother if there was an instruction manual on being human that she could read to make it easier.

Her mom said no, there was no instruction manual.

So years later, Pang recalled the incident and decided to write one.

The result, Explaining Humans: What Science Can Teach Us About Life, Love, and Relationships, is the best analysis of human behavior from a biological perspective since Desmond Morris's classic The Naked Ape.  If you're like me, you'll read Pang's book with a stunned smile on your face -- as she navigates through common, everyday behaviors we all engage in, but few of us stop to think about.

If you're interested in behavior or biology or simply agree with the Greek maxim "gnothi seauton" ("know yourself"), you need to put this book on your reading list.  It's absolutely outstanding.

[Note:  if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Choosing the right path

We're all so familiar with our own mental internal state that it's interesting to consider (1) that not everyone has the same sort of thing going on in their brains, and (2) what's really going on in there is not at all obvious.

I was just discussing the first bit last night with a friend.  She told me that she has entire, back-and-forth conversations in her mind, pretty much constantly.  Asking herself things, musing over answers, as if she was on both sides of a discussion over what to do and how to do it.  Me?  I have a crazy, trippy, disjointed monologue, jumping from topic to topic, as if my skull was occupied by Daffy Duck on speed.  And generally there's a soundtrack, too, usually of whichever song I heard on the radio over the past 48 hours was the most annoying.

It's no wonder I have such difficulty focusing.

Some people are highly visual, and rather than words, they think in pictures.  No internal chatter at all, which is hard for me to imagine.  And I guess it's no surprise I don't think in images much, especially not images of people; being face-blind, I can't picture anyone's face, including my own.  Nada.  I know I have blond-ish hair and blue eyes and short facial hair and a big nose, but I can't put it all together into a composite image the way some people (apparently) do with ease.

Of course, in most ways I get by just fine.  I was asked one time, "If you can't picture your own face at all, how do you know it's you when you look into the bathroom mirror in the morning?"  I stared at the person for a moment, and said, "Because I know there's no one else in the bathroom but me."

I mean, I may be face-blind, but fer cryin' in the sink, I'm not stupid.

But I digress.

Anyway, there seems to be a huge variety of internal experience, which I suppose is what we should expect given the huge variety of outward expressions of that experience.  But that brings us to the second question: what's happening inside our skulls that creates that internal experience in the first place?

Neuroscientists are just beginning to piece together an answer to that question.  We have a pretty good idea of where in the brain certain activity occurs; higher-order processing in the prefrontal cortex, motor coordination in the motor cortex and cerebellum, spatial navigation in the hippocampus, speech production in the Wernicke's and Broca's areas of the cerebrum, and so on.  Even my own particular difficulty, which goes by the medical name prosopagnosia, has been localized to a place called the fusiform gyrus, which in the face-blind simply doesn't respond when confronted with an image of a face.  So we can see it just fine, but we don't recognize who it is.  (It manifests in me as everyone looking vaguely familiar -- so when someone starts talking to me, I can usually slip right into acting like I know who I'm talking to, when in fact I very rarely do until I recognize the voice or pick up context clues.  But I'm good at faking recognition, at least until I get fed up fishing around and say, "I'm sorry, but I have no idea who you are.")

But other than the general locations in the brain where certain functions occur, we're still largely in the dark.  Think about something really simple that isn't in your mind before the question was asked -- for example, what did you have for dinner last night?

Now, where was that information before I asked the question?  How was it encoded?  How did you retrieve it?  Even weirder are those moments when you know you know a piece of information, and it's in there, but you can't get at it -- the "tip of the tongue" phenomenon.  And why, when you stop worrying at it and start thinking about other things, does the answer spontaneously pop out?  (In the days before Google, when finding out factual information usually required a trip to the library, I was driving myself nuts trying to remember the names of the Three Musketeers.  Athos, Porthos, and...?  It was a full two days later, while I was out for a run and completely thinking about other things, that suddenly my brain went "... Aramis!")

What about when we're trying to make a decision between two alternatives?  For me, I'll bat back and forth between them, then -- quite suddenly -- I settle down into one or the other.  And just last month a paper in Cell has suggested that what's going on in the brain might be exactly what it feels like, only much, much faster.

In "Constant Sub-second Cycling between Representations of Possible Futures in the Hippocampus," a team led by neuroscientist Kenneth Kay of Columbia University found that rats confronted with a choice in maze-running shuttle back and forth quickly (about eight times per second) between patterns of neural firing representing the two choices -- as if they were thinking, "Let's see, I wonder what's down the right-hand path?  Hmm, how about the left-hand path?"

The authors write:

Cognitive faculties such as imagination, planning, and decision-making entail the ability to represent hypothetical experience.  Crucially, animal behavior in natural settings implies that the brain can represent hypothetical future experience not only quickly but also constantly over time, as external events continually unfold.  To determine how this is possible, we recorded neural activity in the hippocampus of rats navigating a maze with multiple spatial paths.  We found neural activity encoding two possible future scenarios (two upcoming maze paths) in constant alternation at 8 Hz: one scenario per ∼125-ms cycle...  Notably, cycling occurred across moving behaviors, including during running.  These findings identify a general dynamic process capable of quickly and continually representing hypothetical experience, including that of multiple possible futures.

There are a couple of interesting things about this.  First, there's the role of the hippocampus; higher-order decision-making is traditionally thought to be the provenance of the prefrontal cortex, although the fact that this decision has to do with spatial navigation is probably why it occurs where it does.  Second, why is the cycling so fast -- each flip lasting, on average, an eighth of a second -- when it feels very much like we're considering each possibility slowly and deliberately?  (Of course, that's assuming that our neurology and experience are both comparable to what's happening in rats, which may be a poor assumption.)

I also wonder what's happening with the consideration of imaginary scenarios.  Being a fiction author, I do that a lot, and I know I spend a great deal of time testing out various ideas and plot twists before settling on the one that I want.  It's quite remarkable when you think about it; we're capable of dreaming up highly detailed and completely counterfactual scenes, and interact with them as if they were real -- deciding which path to take, which of the two magical doors to open.

As author and journalist Kathryn Schulz put it, in her phenomenal TED talk "On Being Wrong," "The most wonderful thing about the human mind is not that we can see the world as it is, but that we can see the world as it isn't."

But this is just the first step of solving that most fundamental of questions in neuroscience, which is how we emulate our experience in our brains.  This is one small piece of the puzzle of human consciousness, the origins of creativity, imagination, and memory, the last-mentioned of which hopefully will solve how I can set a tool down and literally thirty seconds later can't remember where I put it.

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One of my favorite people is the indefatigable British science historian James Burke.  First gaining fame from his immensely entertaining book and television series Connections, in which he showed the links between various historical events that (seen as a whole) play out like a centuries-long game of telephone, he went on to wow his fans with The Day the Universe Changed and a terrifyingly prescient analysis of where global climate change was headed, filmed in 1989, called After the Warming.

One of my favorites of his is the brilliant book The Pinball Effect.  It's dedicated to the role of chaos in scientific discovery, and shows the interconnections between twenty different threads of inquiry.  He's posted page-number links at various points in his book that you can jump to, where the different threads cross -- so if you like, you can read this as a scientific Choose Your Own Adventure, leaping from one point in the web to another, in the process truly gaining a sense of how interconnected and complex the history of science has been.

However you choose to approach it -- in a straight line, or following a pinball course through the book -- it's a fantastic read.  So pick up a copy of this week's Skeptophilia book of the week.  You won't be able to put it down.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]