How does the brain work? More importantly how does YOUR brain work? And more important still? Why DOESN’T IT WORK when you want it to? This is the very crux of Decoding Creativity – illuminating what is known about the creative brain, and how knowledge about your own brain can help you write, finish, publish, and promote your work more easily.
Maybe you’ve heard of Phineas Gage (1823 – 1860). When he was 25, he worked on the railroad. They were blasting away mountainous terrain to make a flat bed for train tracks. Phineas’ job was to drill holes into the mountainside, put gunpowder and sand in there, and then tamp it with his tamping rod. Later they’d light long fuses and break up the rock. One of those times, he forgot the sand, so he was tamping directly on the gunpowder and KABLAM. The tamping rod surged out of the hole, and straight through his head.
Phineas Gage Cased Daguerreotype Photograph by Jack and Beverly Wilgus of daguerreotype originally from their collection, and now in the Warren Anatomical Museum, Harvard Med School.CC-BY-SA 3.0
To everyone’s utter surprise, Gage lived, and was taken to a local doctor. He is said to have ridden upright in the cart and greeted him, saying: “Doctor, here is business enough for you.” Gage became famous as the “American Crowbar Case,” traveled with the Barnum & Bailey circus and was studied by neurologists all over the world. He was considered one of “the great medical curiosities of all time.”
After a while, though Gage recovered physically, he seemed changed. He was, according to those who knew him, “no longer Gage.” It was the first illumination of a brain’s parts and functions. And it was perhaps the earliest case to suggest the brain’s role in determining personality, and that damage to specific parts of the brain might induce specific mental changes.
Neurologists of the time were forced to rely on odd injuries and observation to draw up theories of how the brain worked, so our knowledge was rudimentary.
It wasn’t for another 120 years that the MRI and fMRI made it possible to scan and see brains, and see brains functioning in real time.
How brains work, and how we came to understand them is always a source of amazement to me. I know in my life, understanding more about how my own brain worked (and stalled) has been nothing short of amazing. It’s not like I’m suddenly as famous as Phineas Gage – touring with the circus and being studied by doctors at Harvard – but in my own little eco-system, finding out how my brain’s idiosyncratic piece-parts interact has been a minor miracle.
We’re about to embark on the Write Without the Fight 5-Day Challenge – just a week away! Come join over 100 writers and figure out how exactly your brain works, and why it sometimes doesn’t. And Voila. You have a minor miracle and big shift in your working knowledge of your brain. Ready? Join us in the FB group!