I recently watched a 2009 TED Talk by Elizabeth Gilbert on the topic of nurturing creativity. It was every bit as gushy as you might expect from the author of “Eat, Pray, Love.” There were dancers and elves and spirits. There was a poet and even a country singer. And for the entire eighteen minutes I was haunted by visions of Julia Roberts’ smile.
But in her very interesting speech, Ms. Gilbert pondered the truth of the following statement: “Creativity and suffering are somehow inherently linked. Artistry in the end will always ultimately lead to mental anguish.” Somehow, she says, society has grown comfortable with the idea that creative geniuses simply are tormented souls. Why is this so? Why are there so many David Foster Wallaces, Alexander McQueens, Mark Rothkos, and Virginia Woolfs? Of course, the scientist in me wonders if there is a physiological link between the two conditions; perhaps an abnormality in the brain results in a lack of emotional grounding, which then gives rise to artistic gifts. (The part of Einstein’s brain responsible for mathematical thought was 15% larger than normal, at the expense of areas responsible for speech and language.)
After the remarkable success of her book, Ms. Gilbert’s personal quest to protect herself from this seemingly unavoidable mental anguish provides an alternative to this chicken-or-the-egg dilemma. She argues that despair is not a cause but a product of the creative process. Particularly following a successful work, she must cope with the pressure to maintain the same level of excellence in her craft. There is also the ever-present possibility of future failure, which is entirely beyond her control.
Seeking protection from the “inherent emotional risks of creativity,” Ms. Gilbert finds comfort in history. Apparently, the ancient Greeks and Romans believed that a person’s inspiration is divined from an external being; to the Greeks, a daemon, and to the Romans, a genius. “Creativity was a divine attendant spirit that came to human beings from some distant and unknowable source for distant and unknowable reasons.” An artist’s creation could then be viewed as an externality – something that literally had a mind of its own. Creative achievement was therefore a product of both the self and the genius, and praise (or disappointment, as the case may be) was not entirely heaped upon the human individual.
Although I personally cannot jump on this ancient spiritual bandwagon, I find this to be beautiful idea. I am all for truthy psychological constructs that reduce blood pressure. But the speaker confines her discussion to her own craft – the creative arts. Somewhat serendipitously, she contrasts hers with her father’s profession of chemical engineering. “Got chemical engineering block?” she quips.
To me, science is in many ways a creative struggle. Although we operate within rigid rules of conservation and thermodynamics, we divine hypotheses through the information before us, we create methods to collect and analyze data, and we craft illustrations that effectively communicate meaning. Most importantly, we conceive of explanations for that which we do not understand. I do, in fact, get chemical engineering block. Although our media are experiments, simulations, and grant proposals, research scientists (particularly tenure-track faculty) daily subject themselves and their creations to the sometimes harsh judgment of their peers. Scientists are our ideas and our results, and it is exceedingly easy to pin one’s sense of self-worth to academic accomplishments, even when they are inherently tied to the whims of reviewers and of Mother Nature, which both operate beyond our control. In the end, we are – more or less – in the same boat as artists.
Whereas for artists these struggles manifest themselves as deep emotional troubles, for scientists it more often becomes a deep, personal obsession with success. As scientists are judged on increasingly unforgiving scales, they are driven to break the cardinal rule of our profession – they present false data. I cannot adequately express my alarm at the frequency and scale of recent episodes of falsified data and its downstream effects. As Ms. Gilbert suggests, surely our community could use an adjustment of attitude. A noteworthy career in science requires much, much more than one good brain.
There will be times in our careers when our confidence, our reviewers, our imaginations, or our experiments fail us. To Ms. Gilbert, science is much more of a creative effort than you might think. To my fellow scientists, we should remove ourselves from the pressure cooker that we have created and accept science as an art which we purvey, rather than invent. Keep an eye open for a glimpse of your science genius!
— Laura E. Timmerman