Money can't buy you Creativity, or can it?
Face To Face With The 2nd Step by Richard Stine
I’ve got what I think is a genius idea for a plot, some genuine, interesting characters and just over 12,000 words. Sometimes my writing voice still feels as though it’s coated with phlegm but I am making progress. I’m still way behind on the word count, however: I should be somewhere in the 25,000-30,000 range right about now. NaNoWriMo is designed in part to help writers (professionals and avocationals alike) develop the discipline and find the motivation to churn out a first draft. After all, the myth that creativity only happens during fleeting and involuntary moments of inspiration is among the first to be debunked by prolific creative writers.
I only write when inspiration strikes. Fortunately, it strikes every morning at nine o’clock sharp. ~ W. Somerset Maughum
If it’s such a struggle, you might ask, then why on earth are you doing it? Well, the paradoxical truth is that I want to. The exhilaration that I feel when I’ve written something that might be good is intoxicating. It’s similar to how I feel onstage, firing on all cylinders. My motivation is intrinsic: that is, it comes from within rather than for some external goal like the pursuit of a degree or an award or financial gain. Don’t get me wrong, I certainly wouldn’t turn down an advance from a publisher and of course there is a part of me that hopes the work will be published and bring accolades and royalties. But I don’t expect to regret the time and energy spent on the project even if it never generates any income. And so I’ve been wondering, in those moments when the temptation to tweet, or check email, or book a weekend in Mexico shatters my concentration, how strong or pure my intrinsic motivation will prove to be and how the NaNoWriMo artificial deadline affects creativity.
The goal of NaNoWriMo participants is to write 50,000 words in 30 days. Some writers simply see it as an opportunity to check off an item on their Bucket List, others feel that the community atmosphere will help them stay motivated and complete a project that has been on the back burner for too long. Some hope to publish the work as is, others will refuse to allow anyone else to read a single word. My (only) writing buddy Gord McLeod sees it as an opportunity to build the block of marble from which he will carve his David over the course of the following months. This smorgasbord of motivations and goals reminds me of the work of Teresa Amabile, who studies the effects of motivation on creative output and is on faculty at Harvard Business School. Having studied and thought about the interplay between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation and creativity for decades, she will be the first to admit that the relationships are complex.
In a recent review simply titled Creativity, published in the Annual Review of Psychology, Teresa, along with Beth Hennessey at Wellesley College, sums up the latest research findings by suggesting that when people feel controlled by their situation, as is the case in many workplace environments, rewards for creativity undermine intrinsic motivation and paradoxically, suppress creative output. For example, if employees are asked to create posters and are told that the person who comes up with the best one will get a monetary bonus, research suggests that the final products will be less creative than if the bonus comes as a surprise, rather than an expectation. When intrinsic motivation is already strong, however, rewards can further enhance it and lead to more creative output. Specifically, when rewards confirm competence or provide support in the form of a manager’s kind words or extra resources, creativity flourishes.
So the bottom line seems to be that intrinsic motivation is necessary, but not sufficient, for creative output. And extrinsic rewards can be helpful, so long as they don’t destroy the sense that we are being creative just because we want to. Those NaNoWriMo guys are on to something, but as Beverly Sills has said, there are no shortcuts to any place worth going. And that’s enough procrastination for Day 18.
Effortless Mastery
According to the Nielsen media rating company, the average American watches 4.5 hours of TV per day. If that American individual practiced, deliberately, as often as he/she watched TV, effortless mastery would be achieved by everyone in about seven to ten years. The idea that most Americans simply do not have time to master a domain must be false: what’s missing is effort, motivation and an understanding of how learning works.
Unlike watching television, deliberate practice is hard: it requires sustained attention and constant adaptability. Rote repetition of an activity simply ingrains habits, not all of whom are good. Mastery requires thoughtful practice, with feedback and change is incremental. Deliberate practice exhausts the muscles and the brain, and for most people, a four-hour practice session feels like a marathon. The way in which a person approaches training is inherently linked to personality and individual differences, making many generalizations uninformative. But are there some general principles that can cut across individual differences?
The first published evidence that called into question the popular notion that more practice of any kind inevitably leads to mastery came from studies of Morse Code operators at the turn of the 20th century (Bryan and Harter, 1897, 1899). The operators in these studies would show improvements in their skills with repeated practice but eventually, their progress would plateau and further practice would yield no more gains. By changing their practice techniques, however, the operators were able to jumpstart their learning and continue to improve. Are these plateaus an unavoidable consequence of learning? Using the same paradigm, that is, learning Morse Code, Keller (1958) showed that the training method itself can be designed to avoid plateaus and show steady learning.
What are the characteristics of the training method and are these characteristics applicable to domains other than learning Morse Code? Perhaps the most important, and certainly the most commonly discussed attribute of deliberate practice is captured by the name itself: deliberate. The subject must want to improve and must be focused upon doing so; attention must be paid and effort exerted. The other two factors outlined in the seminal paper on deliberate practice by Ericsson and colleagues are that the instructions for how to perform the task at hand be understandable and take into account the subject’s previous knowledge and that the subject receives feedback during practice that helps him/her adjust performance in the right direction. Then, the subject should repeated perform the task, adjusting when necessary and always focusing on the process.
Since mastery of a skill in a field requires on average 10,000 hours of deliberate practice, those individuals who take pleasure in practicing or who can enjoy the process are much more likely to put in the requisite hours, and pay more attention to what they are doing. Why do some people like practicing while others loathe it? The exercises that one chooses when practicing can vary in terms of the enjoyment they provide, but even rote repetition can be more or less interesting to different individuals. Ticking off repetitions can be experienced as serial micro-triumphs, or as the epitome of monotony. The mind can be engaged to different extents: the practicer can concentrate on each repetition, comparing it to previous instances, monitoring performance and observing the evoked sensations, or he/she can simply daydream and ‘check out’. Despite our innate tendency to resort to daydreaming in response to boredom, scientists have recently discovered that daydreaming or zoning out can actually lower your mood, rather than lift it. If you allow yourself to daydream during a practice session, it might, paradoxically, be less enjoyable than if you make the effort to concentrate, and battle the temptation of zoning out.
I’ve been thinking about motivation and concentration this past week because I’m participating in National Novel Writing Month - with the goal of cranking out a 50,000 word novel in 30 days. For the first time in my life, I’m focusing on quantity rather than quality in an artistic pursuit. So far, I’ve written about 8,700 words, and I have no idea what use this exercise will prove to be. But the first step towards mastery is deliberate practice, and if nothing else, I’ll have resisted the temptation to procrastinate for at least several hours every day for 30 days in a row. Now that’s one habit worth developing.
When Conviction Becomes Confabulation
But when does conviction turn into confabulation?
Confabulation is a term that
neurologists coined to describe a disorder of
memory in which a patient gives a false or
contrived answer to questions about the past but
who believes that these answers reflect the truth.
It was first described in patients with
Korsakoff’s syndrome, whose memories have been
obliterated by thiamine (vitamin B1) deficiency
usually following years of alcohol abuse and/or
severe malnutrition. Oliver Sacks poignantly
described a case study in The Lost Mariner and
A Matter of Identity in
his book The Man who Mistook his Wife for a
Hat.*
But while the Korsakoff’s patient represents one
extreme, we have all confabulated at one time or
another. Young children reporting their own memories
often confabulate, as they learn how to distinguish
remembering from fantasizing. We often indulge in
impulse buying, justifying our purchases after the
fact with false memories and constructing a narrative
that makes sense and leaves our ego intact. We deny
our shortcomings; the vast majority of us consider
ourselves to be ‘above average’ in most instances.
In the extreme cases of anosognosia, or denial of
illness often following stroke, some patients will
deny that part of their anatomy has been
paralyzed, insisting that if they really wanted
to, they could move the affected region.
Doubt, particularly in Western society, is
interpreted as a sign of weakness. For many people,
the term ‘skeptic’ is synonymous with Doubting Thomas, someone who
refuses to believe unless shown direct evidence,
and being called a skeptic is seen as pejorative
amongst many social groups. Confabulation involves
a lack of doubt, about something that is
inherently doubtful: one’s memory for the past.
But confabulation also involves a skill that
humans have perfected: story-telling.
Some evolutionary psychologists
argue that our propensity for creating, telling
and remembering stories emerged about the same
time that the proliferation of our neocortex began
to differentiate us from other primates, and that
this metabolically-expensive leap in brain size
was driven by the need to communicate with each
other and navigate social relationships. As our
ancestors found strength in numbers, understanding
and predicting the behavior of fellow co-habitants
afforded a certain advantage,
genetically-speaking. Stories might have served as
tools for accomplishing this delicate task. But
when that storyteller is let loose, and the
Doubting Thomas in the brain is silenced, either
unintentionally by brain damage or deliberately by
conviction, confabulation is the result. Perhaps
what fascinates me, then, is the interplay between
the interpreter and the doubter in different
people: how the relationship between these two
components of the mind can result in belief or
doubt.
*This book has also been made into an opera with music by Michael
Nyman, which I’ve been dying to perform.
Five Lessons Opera Singers can learn from Moneyball
It’s hard not to be romantic about baseball. ~ Billy Beane, GM of the Oakland A’s
One of the aspects of baseball that I’ve come to love is the conversation. I love listening to broadcast legends Jon Miller and John Sterling call the games of our two favorites teams. Often, when Adam and I are cooking dinner together, he reads me the latest post from Joe Posnanski’s blog. I love the soap opera, the human drama, the boyish charm and the respect for the past that infuses the game. All of these qualities baseball has in common with opera.
But I was surprised by how much opera singers can learn from the movie Moneyball.
Five Lessons for Opera Singers from the movie Moneyball
1. No scout has a crystal ball. In industries as competitive as baseball and opera, no one can predict who will be a major player and who will spend a career languishing on the sidelines. Anyone who claims to have that knowledge should be avoided. The truth is that what worked in the past might not work in the future and the best thing an aspiring athlete, musician, actor or entrepreneur can do is work hard to hone the necessary skills and be ready when opportunity knocks. But there is also room for analysis: not everyone can be a home-run hitting machine, and a team needs guys who consistently get on base. There are other roles in opera besides the leads and consistently nailing them with grace and precision will lead to more work.
2. Take time to react. The performances by the actors in the movie were spectacular. There were many scenes in which their faces took up the entire shot and their thoughts and feelings were projected onto the screen without the usual help from the musical score. Onstage, it’s often hard to resist the temptation to react to what your fellow actors or singers are going to do, rather than what they have just done, especially in opera, where much of the timing is dictated by the composer. And 5 seconds onstage can feel like an eternity. But the performances in the movie underscore the power of the well-timed reaction. Give the audience time to digest and we’ll be with you the whole way through. There is power in doing nothing but listening.
3. Make every pitch count. If you make the starting pitcher work hard and never swing on the first pitch, chances are your team will be up against relievers sooner rather than later. The same advice applies to how singers should rehearse and perform. Mindlessly breezing through blocking or vocal exercises accomplishes very little but focussed practice leads to exceptional performance. Make every rehearsal count.
4. Don’t bunt. If you’re going to swing, make it a homerun. Don’t cheat the audience of your best performance. If you’re sick, underprepared or in any way unable to do your best, send in your backup. By the same token, don’t just throw together a performance, no matter how little the pay or how small the audience. Swing to send it over the fence. Every time.
5. It’s easy. It’s incredibly hard. The audience wants to think that you’re so talented and skilled that it’s easy for you to do this very difficult thing. No one wants to see your effort. But it’s incredibly hard. Work at it until you can make it look easy, even if it doesn’t feel that way. Always underestimate the effort when speaking to your audience - they don’t need to know about your trials and tribulations - that just ruins the romance.
And there’s no point in playing baseball or singing opera if the romance is missing.
When Time Stands Still
As you can probably tell, I feel a certain pride in my fledgling understanding of San Francisco’s seasons. Dressing for the weather is an art in this city, and I’m convinced that the eclectic fashion of our native hipsters is influenced in large part by the extreme fluctuations in temperature in the different neighborhoods of the city and at different times of the day.
Just as my brain has finally sorted out the regularities in our highly irregular climate, I must admit that I have become a bit of a San Francisco cliche. I no longer fear simultaneously donning two different patterns. I prefer to walk or ride a bike than to drive. I’m really picky when it comes to coffee. I get a box of vegetables delivered from a local farm every week. I do what I love, relying on the kindness of strangers to pay me for doing it. I have an entire trunk dedicated to my scarf collection. When I drive, I drive a smart car so that I can park in between meters. I run a lot. I blog. I tweet. And I listen to NPR.
And so it was that I found myself moved to tears (while driving my smart car to a random gig) by Maurice Sendak on Fresh Air. He has just lost two dear friends, one a few months ago, and another just the other day, and he talked about how he doesn’t fear death itself, but he does fear isolation. He misses his friends and all the other loved ones that he’s lost. So he wrote another book, to help him negotiate these feelings and to explore them further.
Bumble-ardy, the latest from author and illustrator Maurice Sendak, is dark and deeply imaginative, much like his classic works Where the Wild Things Are and In The Night Kitchen. Bumble-ardy is an orphaned pig, who has reached the age of 9 without ever having a birthday party. He tells his Aunt Adeline that he would like to have a party for his ninth birthday, so Aunt Adeline plans a quiet birthday dinner for two. But Bumble-ardy instead decides to throw a large costume party for himself after his aunt leaves for work — and mayhem ensues. When his aunt returns she says, "Okay smarty, you've had your party but never again." Bumble-ardy replies, "I promise, I swear, I won't ever turn 10."
That last line has rattled around my mind all week: a
simple rhyme that can be interpreted in so many ways,
including as a strong desire to elongate the present
moment into eternity and stop the unrelenting march
of Time. I have long been fascinated by (and fearful
of) the passage of time and the way that our minds
track it. Our internal chronometer works in a myriad
of ways, each tuned to a different time scale, from
milliseconds to years. And just as memory is not an
accurate record of the past, our sense of time is
distorted by our goals, emotions, past experiences
and current environment.
Even if we understand objectively that our memories
are reconstructed versions of our experiences, it’s
still difficult to reconcile the fact that our
experiencing selves are very different from our
remembering selves (see Kahneman’s brilliant TED talk
here). That separation,
however, is obvious to
David Eagleman, a 39-year old
neuroscientist in Texas, who launched his human subjects off
of a 50-meter high platform to test the notion
that time slows down when we fear for our lives (a
great New Yorker profile of him can be found
here).
As expected, the disheveled subjects reported that
their fall seemed to last a long time, and estimated
that their own fall was 36% longer than the falls of
the other subjects. A portable ‘perceptual
chronometer’ was strapped onto the wrists of the
subjects, to test whether subjects’ experiencing
selves have better temporal resolution during the
fall, when they report having experienced the slowing
of time. A supersense should have its usefulness,
after all, and the military, who funded part of this
work, would benefit from harnessing such a skill.
Alas, Eagleman and his colleagues found no evidence
that our experiencing selves actually perceive time
differently during frightening events. It all comes
down to how and what we remember.
Happily, however, this finding points Bumble-ardy
towards a way to accomplish his desire to stop Time.
While we can’t manipulate the passage of time outside
of our minds, our memory and imagination are the
tools we need to leap forward, jump back and, most
importantly, do-over what Time has taken away from
us. Crafting rich, varied, and meaningful experiences
fills our memory repositories with branches and
footholds that trigger and support our reconstruction
of Time gone by.
Remembering in Manhattan
When we were shooting the episode of Miracle Detectives that deals with the story of 9/11, I came across this statement by Minoru Yamasaki, the architect of the World Trade Center:
'The World Trade Center should,' Yamasaki said, 'because of its importance, become a living representation of man's belief in humanity, his need for individual dignity, his belief in the cooperation of men, and through this cooperation his ability to find greatness.'
I’m not the first to point out how eerie it is that his vision has become reality as a result of unimaginable horror. My scientific career has been built on the study of autobiographical memory: how we remember our past and how our memories of our experiences shape our identity, our imagination, our decisions and ultimately, our future. But even if I had chosen a different topic, I suspect that I would still have been struck by the central place that remembering occupies in the landscape of the aftermath of the terror attacks.
We interviewed many people while we were preparing for and shooting the episode; survivors, first-responders, grieving family members, health-care practitioners treating victims and their families, writers and artists. Time and time again, I was struck by how important it was to the first responders and survivors in particular, to tell their stories. Even now, on Twitter, the vast majority of the conversation is dominated by reminiscences. Faced with random acts of violence, our notion that life is fair and just was turned on its head. As we try to make sense of what happened, we rearrange our worldview to accommodate this new information.
Faced with evidence that humans can cause such destruction, we swing the pendulum in the opposite direction: we become selfless, generous, kind and creative. In a city notorious for its ruthlessness, the citizens of New York, in particular, outdid one another with random acts of kindness and sacrifice. All over the city, the stories are being told, in pictures, in words and in acts. We are reshaping our memories and creating new ones with the same objective: to connect with those who were lost and with those who remain. Our experiencing selves panicked, despaired, fought but our remembering selves have the power to console, create and rebuild.
There are countless events today to choose from, but I chose to participate in Music After because my dear friend Danny Felsenfeld, a Brooklyn-based composer, along with his friend Eleonor Sandresky, are emphasizing the creative output triggered by 9/11. Losing so many different people in one day is a blow to the community. And yet, the legacy of 9/11 includes a refocusing on the importance and power of communities and connections between people. This concert, free to anyone who wants to come and listen, is one example. Meetup, a site that was created by New Yorkers in response to 9/11, and now has 9 million monthly visitors in 45,000 cities, is another. My heart goes out to all those who experienced loss first-hand a decade ago, and my performance today is my humble gift to this great city. May it never sleep.
Interpretation: the Performer's Art
Playing the role of a model in Vegas certainly has
its perks: I was always greeted with smiles and
courtesy, I never had to wait for a table at the
fancy restaurants or stand in line to get into the
clubs, and the trade show was within stumbling
distance of my hotel room, which was equipped with
every imaginable amenity. But already on the first
day, I became keenly aware that despite the sheen of
fool’s gold, Vegas can quickly
turn dreams into acid. I was simply a vehicle for
the jeans that I was demonstrating, easily
replaced by any number of other women. Certainly,
there are ways in which models can improve the
look of a garment, but in the end, the garment is
the focus and the designer is the star.
This shift away from the interpreter and towards the
creative team behind the scenes is also occurring in
opera and ballet, and many other performance arts.
Composers are popping up like mushrooms after a
rainstorm, as the proliferation of self-publishing
and recording tools has changed the game. Much as blogging and citizen
reporting are enabling individuals with no
training in journalism to reach the masses,
youtube, itunes and composition software are
equipping creatives with the ability to create
complex music without ever learning to play a
single instrument.
Like the blogosphere, I suspect that in time, quality
will cut through quantity in music as well as writing
and the true test of a work will be its longevity.
But in the meantime, why should a person devote years
of his/her life mastering the art of interpretation
rather than focusing on composing, or designing? Why
work on skills when the sheer amount and frequency of
output is what seems to dictate success?
Sometime during my third day in Vegas, I began to
notice the acidity in the air: the meanness created
by an empire built on losses. In Vegas, you can see,
do, taste anything that you can imagine but
everything has a cost: the better the quality, the
higher the price tag. And the proximity to
unaffordable luxury leads to bitterness. I have seen
the same cruel disappointment envelop young creatives
when the seemingly straight and narrow road to
success proves to be deceptively curvy and bumpy.
Upon my return from Vegas, I was desperate for a long
and focused singing practice session and a workout.
I also re-read Uta Hagen’s Respect for Acting to
remind myself of how complex and elegant the craft
can be and how conscientious training can help the
actor generate a more powerful experience for the
audience. The same is undoubtedly true for my
chosen craft: classically-trained singing. A great
performance of a play or opera or other
composition gives the audience a therapeutic
emotional cleanse in addition to intellectual and
sensory stimulation. Aristotle observed that a
well-executed play allows the audience to expend
pent-up emotions and that catharsis is a rewarding
experience.
Several studies of the effect of music on the mind have shown
that the brain regions involved in rewarding
experiences such as eating, sex and taking
pleasure-enhancing drugs are active when we are
moved by a piece of music. And recently, in a
PLosOne paper, Heather Chapin
and co-authors from a university in Florida
demonstrated that when a Chopin’s Etude in E Major was performed
by an undergraduate piano major on a digital
piano, the emotion and reward centers in
listeners’ brains responded. When the same piece
was played on the digital piano but using a
computerized version that was technically accurate
but lacked the expressive quality of the human
performance, these areas were much less involved.
One might argue that this is the first scientific
study to demonstrate what audiences have known
since the first cave man beat on a drum: the way
in which a piece is performed matters just as
much, if not more, than the piece itself. The
performance matters, and the only way to give a
great performance is to rehearse and train. The
performance itself might not last forever, but as
long as composers compose and designers design,
the interpreter will have an important role to
play.
The Creativity Instinct
I have come to believe
that defining creativity in one comprehensive sound
byte is at best unnecessary and at worst potentially
harmful, if we ever want to truly understand it. What
if we applied that same strict criteria to an equally
complicated cognitive construct, such as memory? I
often use the following definition of memory when
asked to provide one, which is both unsatisfactory
and strictly true: the change in behavior that comes
with experience. I have developed muscle memories for
singing after 15+ years of training and my behavior
has changed as a result of that experience. I have a
long autobiography of vivid events that I can summon
at will to affect my current actions. My experience
of the visual realm affects the way that I interpret
what I see today. Although accurate, the definition
glosses over the very aspect of memory that piques
the curiosity of most people who want to discuss the
topic: the fact that we can search through a vast
repository of information that we gathered over a
lifetime and use it to our advantage. How it works is
much more interesting than what it is.
The very same is true for creativity. Creativity,
like memory, is a collection of many processes and
behaviors, with many different motivators and
mechanisms. Like the study of memory, the study of
creativity would also benefit greatly by a shift away
from definition and towards understanding how it
works under different circumstances. We talk about
the differences between memory for events and motor
skills or habits. In the same way, we should talk
about the differences between creativity in writing and creativity in
dance.
Often, when I’m not doing a particularly good job of
sharing my enthusiasm for science and instead am
caught up in academic jargon or the minutiae of some
esoteric argument, I see the eyes of my conversation
partner glaze over with boredom. It always surprises
me because I’m clearly interested in what I’m talking
about. But then I remember that what fascinates me is
not what I know, but, rather, what I don’t know.
Delving more deeply into a topic as wide-reaching and
humanistic as creativity only raises more questions.
And that is what drives interest. We flock towards
the mysterious, towards things that we can’t seem to
explain because curiosity leads to knowledge which
leads to better decisions and, dare I say, the
reproduction of those genes that underlie curiosity
(for a paper on a potential curiosity gene, you can
read about great tits, though not the kind
you’re thinking of, unfortunately).
We hate boredom: it’s a highly
uncomfortable state, as evidenced by our knee-jerk
reaction to pick up a smartphone or even look out
the window. And we love information: twitter thrives because it
promises a never-ending stream of information
about our world and its co-inhabitants. The bigger
the mystery, the more surprising the cliff-hanger,
the more complex the visual scene, the more
interested we remain. Provided, of course, that
there is some pattern or some hint of a pattern
that suggests it’s not completely random. Because
randomness is unpredictable and therefore useless
information. Creativity, that new interpretation
of ourselves and our world, is arguably our most
powerful instinct. Only by understanding how it
works can we ever hope to understand what it is.
Opera and the Meaning of Life
But there is one thing that is indisputable: you won’t find out whether you love opera if you are unable to access it. And going to the opera is in some ways much more similar to going to the movies than any other form of entertainment. Both genres are all-encompassing: the lights are low, the drama looms large, the music shuttles your emotions from one extreme to the next, and the goal is to sweep you away into a different world. it just so happens that period and foreign pieces are much more common in opera than in Hollywood.
Like many North Americans, I often crave going to the movies precisely because I will be thoroughly entertained. It’s easy to forget work or personal troubles when your senses are bombarded with the powerful images and sounds of a movie. Sure, some movies are more engrossing than others: some are better acted, others better directed, some stories resonate with me more closely, others are too predictable for my taste. But if I go to the movies and a particular film is a dud, I don’t simply conclude that movies aren’t for me. Not so with opera. Many people only give it one shot. Or, worse, decide they don’t like the genre having never been to a single performance.
The most devoted opera fans are a different breed altogether. They will go to every production, multiple times, even if they hate it. They will relish their distaste for a particular singer, or director or concept. And they will elevate to the status of legendary hero the singer/director/composer/conductor of their choice. We see a similar passion in devotees of many other things: cars, movies, comic books, TV shows, indie rock bands, wine, baseball or pickled foods. Of course, like with so many other objects of affection, there is a rampant nostalgia for the past: a lost golden-age that makes the present seem thin and lifeless.
I believe that the vast majority of people want the same thing: to live a long, meaningful life surrounded by the people they love. But I’ve often wondered how ‘meaningful’ translates to different people. Recently, I came across an interesting notion: some psychologists believe that our search for meaning stems from our uniquely human awareness of our own mortality (though the jury is still out as to how unique this knowledge is to our fair species). A paper that just came out in the highly-regarded Journal of Personality and Social Psychology this week suggests that nostalgia helps give our lives a sense of meaning. The authors themselves say it best:
Believing, then, that one is part of something larger and more meaningful than one’s own physical self provides a psychological defense against the threat of inevitable, and absolute, physical annihilation (Becker, 1973).
It makes me tired just to think about that absolute, physical annihilation but I do think they have a point. In a clever series of studies and surveys, the psychologists found that nostalgia adds a sense of meaning to life by making one feel connected to others. Perhaps a feeling of leaving a legacy aids in dampening our fear of death by the same token. They also found that music evoked a sense of nostalgia, that led to the feeling of being loved and to the idea that life is worth living. When the meaning of life was threatened by reading an essay that contained the following comments, the participants engaged in nostalgic thinking as a defense mechanism:
When participants who reported a low sense of meaning in life were encouraged to engage in nostalgic reflection, they showed an increase in vitality and an attenuated response to stress.There are approximately 7 billion people living on this planet. So take a moment to ponder the following question: In the grand scheme of things, how significant are you? The Earth is 5 billion years old and the average human life span across the globe is 68 years. These statistics serve to emphasize how our contribution to the world is paltry, pathetic and pointless. What is 68 years of one person’s rat-race compared to 5 billion years of history? We are no more significant than any other form of life in the universe.
So perhaps this focus on
a golden-era is simply the opera aficionado’s attempt
to cope with his/her mortality. Certainly old
recordings of operas trigger a strong sense of
nostalgia. And attending a live opera performance in
general can foster a sense of connectedness not only
with the other members of the audience and the
musicians, but also with the great works of
literature upon which the stories are based, and the
historical eras represented onstage. Perhaps this is
one more reason why the great operas, like Le Nozze
di Figaro, and La Traviata endure for centuries.
Dreams: Setting the Stage for Creativity
Creativity is a slippery process: first, you have to
gather all the necessary information and skills,
second, you try to combine what you know or can do in
a new way, then you generally need to step away from
the problem or task and let it simmer for a bit, and
finally, the new idea or way of expressing yourself
seems to ‘pop’ into your mind. That third stage is
called the incubation period.
Understanding exactly what’s going on during that
incubation period is arguably he Holy Grail in the
study of creativity.
This week I came across two interesting studies of
incubation that were published within a few months of
each other in 2009. Sio and Ormerod reviewed a
number of empirical studies of incubation in the
journal Psychological Bulletin and found
that when someone needs to consider a large amount
of information to come up with a creative
solution, the incubation period is particularly
important. When the problem is visual rather than
language-based, incubation is only effective if
the person has undergone a long preparation period
and has hit a creative block.
Denise Cai in Sarah Mednick’s
lab at UCSD wondered whether dreaming, or
rapid-eye-movement (REM) sleep, when our brain is
busy consolidating what we’ve learned while we
were awake, might be the critical component in
incubation. She had her subjects take Mednick’s
Remote Associates Test (RAT), a commonly used test
of creativity, in which the goal is to figure out
how three items are related (e.g. cookies,
sixteen, heart - once you’ve had a chance to think
about it, scroll down to see the answer below) and
then she randomly assigned them to one of two
conditions: full-on napping (measured by a
polysomograph) or resting quietly while listening
to instrumental music. Turns out that napping did,
in fact, improve performance significantly more
than rest when they were tested again on the RAT
in the afternoon.
How important REM sleep is for memory consolidation
remains fairly controversial, but there’s no
question that sleep affects memory,
especially the deepest sleep, called slow-wave
sleep. Many professional classical musicians take
a nap in the afternoon: napping helps their bodies
recover from a long morning practice session and
prepare for an evening concert but it’s also
likely that their brains are consolidating the
motor sequences that they have been learning while
their conscious minds are at rest.
Whatever the relationship might be between sleep,
memory consolidation and creativity, one thing is
clear: there is something still magical about
incubation. This weekend, my dreams were filled with
waterfalls and butterflies, and new ideas are
bubbling in my brain. It will be a while before I
underestimate the importance of taking time off
again. Oh and the answer to the RAT item above is
sweet. Literally.
The Tao of Cat: the Future as a Function of the Past
Chicago Street Art
His is a pretty sweet
life. Recently, I’ve found myself envying his
advanced Buddhist practice of living purely in the
moment. He does not plan for the future or regret
past decisions. He is focussed entirely on the
present and his behavior reflects only his most
immediate needs. But he does have one major character
flaw: when a choice is forced upon him, even if it is
a desirable alternative or would have been his
preferred action in any case, he cannot tolerate it.
For example, it has become his habit, after dinner,
to enjoy stretching out on a warm blanket near his
chef. But if his exit from the room is blocked by a
closed door, he will not settle down for a snooze,
but will do everything he can to get out of the room.
Once the door is opened, he ignores it and proceeds
to sidle up to the chef with his motor in full purr
mode.
On one level, I understand his angst: when I am told
that I must do something, that action loses
a part of its attraction. And I don’t like to feel
boxed in or powerless to escape if circumstances
change. But, after five years of having my needs met,
and never once being hurt or trapped, I have learned
to trust the person (and cat) with whom I share my
living space. Part of this trust comes from my
ability to predict the actions of my co-tenants based
on thousands of observations over the years. These
observations have been stored, some as vivid
episodes, others as extractions of the regularities
in my co-tenants’ behaviors, in my malleable brain.
Memory for episodes, in particular, fascinates me for
two reasons: the first being that our autobiography,
and to a large extent our identity, is made up of our
memories of the past, and feels to us like a
searchable database of our experience (more here) and the second being the
extraordinary observation that patients who lose
the ability to retain event memories are also
unable to imagine the future (the case of
K.C.described here). I’ve studied
autobiographical memory for over a decade, from my
very first published paper (found here) to the one that’s
currently in the STUFF TO DO NOW folder on my
desktop.
As neuroscientists have come to navigate the
ever-shifting landscape of our personal memories, it
has become increasingly clear that our
representations of the past and the future overlap to
a very large extent. A former lab-mate of mine, who
finished her PhD with the supervisors of my very
first project (Dr. Morris Moscovitch and Dr. MaryPat
McAndrews, at the University of Toronto, co-authors
on my first published paper), went on to complete a
highly-successful post-doctoral fellowship at Harvard
with (another U of T alum) Dr. Daniel Schacter. Donna
Addis is a sweet, intelligent and dynamic woman (now
a professor in her own right at
the University of Auckland) who conducted a
seminal neuroimaging study demonstrating that the
brain regions that support episodic memory (the
medial temporal lobe, the core of which is the
hippocampus, as well as areas of dorsolateral
prefrontal and parietal cortices) are also
involved in imagining the future (paper available
here).
Most married couples, among other people, know that
memory is a constructive process, rather than an
accurate recording of what actually happened. For a
long time, this constructive aspect of event memory
was seen as a short-coming, rather than a desirable
feature. But Dan Schacter and Donna Addis suggested
that we should rethink this negative connotation and
think about the benefits of a constructive memory
system. Specifically, they suggested that this
feature enables us to pull together bits of our past,
recombine them and imagine the consequences of our
actions in the future. Our constructive memory system
gives us the tools we need to become effective
soothsayers.
This ability gives me an edge over Mr. Cat in many
different ways. I can dream big, and imagine every
step that I need to take in order to make that dream
come true. I can delay immediate gratification for a
bigger reward down the line. I can adapt to changing
circumstances because I can alter my imagined future
to account for new information. But this ability can
also draw me out of the present and prevent me from
enjoying the moment because I’m too busy planning for
the future. I’ve got a lot of decisions to make in
the coming weeks and I need Mr. Cat to remind me that
when the door is open, my belly is full and it’s
raining outside, it’s perfectly ok to snooze with the
chef.
There's still hope for sopranos: thanks to evolution
I’ve also been dusting off the Chansons Madecasses or Madagascar Songs by Maurice Ravel, in preparation for a concert that I’m giving on July 15th (details and a sample of one of the songs can be found here). These are fabulous, sensual and politically-charged pieces for voice, piano, cello and flute and I love them dearly. These chansons couldn’t be more different from Der Holle Rache in terms of the words, dramatic context, feel, style, tonality and texture and yet, when I’m singing them right, I get goosebumps. And not just when I’m singing them, but also when I hear someone else performing them.
Having that experience made me wonder, as I often do, why we get the ‘chills’ from specific musical passages. Jaak Panksepp, an Estonian-born (we’re practically neighbors! as my mother would say) neuroscientist in Washington state has studied and written about this phenomenon for decades, with an influential paper published in 1995 showing that, contrary to our intuition, we get the chills when we listen to ‘sad’ music, rather than music that makes us feel happy. A solo line, often in the soprano register (lucky for me), emerging from a denser musical texture most often caused his subjects to experience chills. He also found that women are more likely than men to get goosebumps when listening to music.
He has since gone on to suggest that the experience of chills evoked by music is related to the distress that we feel when we are separated from someone we love and that this response has perhaps evolved to encourage mothers to respond to their crying babies. It’s easy to imagine many of the most memorable musical passages as separation calls: Whitney Houston’s version of Dolly Parton’s I will always love you, the guitar solo in The Eagles’ Hotel California, the vocalise by Rachmaninoff, to name just a few. The solo instrument, on a simple melodic line, emerging from a thicket of other sounds.
Blood and Zatorre, neuroscientists at McGill University used neuroimaging to explore the parts of the brain that are activated during the experience of the chills evoked by music (you can find a copy here). They report that the same brain regions involved in other pleasurable activities such as eating or having sex such as the orbitofrontal and ventromedial prefrontal cortex, the striatum and the midbrain, are also involved in this experience. But what’s most interesting to me about their studies is the fact that exactly which musical passage evokes the experience is very much tied to the individual: just because I like it, or find it moving, doesn’t mean that you will. Of course, that observation is self-evident to most of us, and the staggering diversity of music available to us demonstrates that musical taste is deeply personal. By the same token, I’ve watched mothers pick out their own baby’s cry from a cacophony of sounds with remarkable ease.
As I return to my vocal practice this week, I’m going to keep both Panksepp’s and Blood and Zatorre’s findings in mind. And at my next audition, I’m not going to worry about the fact that at least a hundred other sopranos are vying for the part. I’ll remember that, just like a baby’s cry, each of our voices is unique and there’s no telling which of our voices will wake the latent maternal instinct deep in the heart of the men and women on the audition panel. There might be a lot of sopranos out there, but we also might be favored by evolution to give our audiences the chills. And that’s a goal worthy of all the practice hours it demands.