How can brain science explain a state of mind? That depends how you define the state of mind. There is a large difference between explaining, for example, that mirror neurons underpin imitative reflexes and speculating, from there, that mirror neurons are the brain-basis for empathy. What is empathy? You may feel it when Oliver Twist asks for more gruel, though you may not when a banker demands a bonus. There is desire in each case, yet empathy occurs not merely by mirroring the desire. It involves character assessment and social judgment too. Perhaps the banker has risked everything to reduce debt in a third-world country. Perhaps you find the characterisation of Oliver laughably sentimental. To describe the neural correlates of empathy, it is necessary to describe the neural correlates of multiple cognitive and emotional processes, not one.
In Jonah Lehrer's previous book, The Decisive Moment, he argued that a psychopath, lacking empathy, suffers from a "broken amygdala" a part of the brain normally responsible for "propagating aversive emotion". That may be a passable description of the amygdala, but what of the psychopath? By medical definition, psychopathy is a personality type involving not one characteristic, but 12.
And if it is difficult to ascribe specific neural circuits to empathy or psychopathy, what of even more fluid concepts such as love, or evil, or the subject of Lehrer's new book "creativity"?
As it happens, Lehrer makes a very impressive fist of nailing even this most nebulous of concepts. A remarkably prolific and inventive 30-year-old journalist, his writing for American newspapers and magazines includes a column for the Wall Street Journal in which he is sceptical of the overblown claims of neuroscience to explain complex psychological or cultural phenomena. Yet he is himself capable of speculating convincingly from the available science, picking up from where Malcolm Gladwell leaves off in bridging the two-cultures divide. More than psychology and the social sciences, Lehrer seeks to illuminate the exterior world of culture from within the dark interiors of the brain.
An enthusiast, equally, for what cultural thought can teach the sciences as vice versa, his first book, Proust Was a Neuroscientist, was an essay in the way artistic ideas anticipated strictly scientific ones. He begins this new one by going in search of the neurological source codes of the imagination.
Lehrer does not fall into the trap of lesser pop-neuroscience: grandiose cultural claims extrapolated from shards of brain function. Rather, the trick of Imagine is to start with details and stories and to compose a broad definition through the compounding of examples. He writes case histories. Whether it is the invention of a new floor-cleaner, or the way Bob Dylan wrote "Like a Rolling Stone", Lehrer is a thrillingly multifaceted narrator. His anecdotes of artists, designers, musicians, athletes and entrepreneurs give the impression that he has intimately understood the processes of connection and recombination that took place when they made breakthrough discoveries. A definition of creativity seems to emerge with sufficient clarity to justify the insertion of some neural correlates.
It is with persuasive chutzpah that Lehrer describes right-hemisphere operations in Bob Dylan's brain releasing him from the constrictions of early fame to recombine multiple musical influences into a revolutionary new song. Lehrer talks to a brain researcher who explains that the right hemisphere helps you see the forest, while the left is better for identifying the trees. The left handles denotation, he clarifies, the right deals with connotation.
This is Lehrer in speculative rather than critical mode. He does not pause to analyse the mind-brain problem, or what can really be known about the distinctions between right- and left-hemisphere operations. His gift is for fluency and plausibility. He leapfrogs topics, delighting in the connections as he goes. He gives neat examples of riddles that need to be solved by lateral thinking and remote analogies. He brilliantly describes the potential of depression in persisting with a creative problem. He cites research from Nancy Andreasen and Kay Redfield Jamison on madness and artistic productivity. He tells us where we can find the "neural correlate of insight" in the anterior superior temporal gyrus (aSTG) and how improvisational musicians need to silence their dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) to free their inhibitions.
It is eerie and lovely to imagine your brain at work, even as you are using it to ask how it works. Triggering this contemplative loop is what the neuroscientific fairy dust in Imagine achieves. But the difficulty of definition lags not far behind. What explanatory mechanism does Lehrer really bring to his inventors and jazz musicians by citing the aSTG and the DLPFC as neural correlates of insight and inhibition? What is insight? Is it one thing or many things? The links between rudimentary knowledge of brain circuits (we are stuck with computer metaphors) and the language of the mind are inevitably stretched beyond capacity.
The second half of the book seems to suggest as much. After his midway explanation of the DLPFC, Lehrer largely drops the neuroscience and strikes out in a mode that would be more familiar to readers of Malcolm Gladwell. A chapter on the working methods of Pixar studios provides an account both of how inventive people worked together and how office design encouraged them to network ideas in a peculiarly creative way. A chapter on Shakespeare explores the critical cultural mass of Elizabethan England. Neural correlations are not provided to back these up nor are they necessary. The neuroscience may be illustrative, but it is not instrumental.
What Lehrer achieves in the book overall is a roaming yet cohesive description of the creative process, applied across disciplines. Creativity, as he writes, is "a catch-all term for a variety of distinct thought processes". With as much inventiveness as he reveals in his subjects, he turns up examples of risk-taking, innovation, connectivity, recombination, disinhibition, migration, urban and cultural density and distractibility competing with concentration.
"Once we know how creativity works," he writes, "we can make it work for us." That second claim may be overreaching. Lehrer's self-help prescriptions embrace risk, fail big, innovate innovation appear somewhat thin next to his richly nuanced accounts of creative people at work. But it is quite an achievement to have answered the first proposition convincingly.
He explains how the mind works creatively. He gives a vivid sense of the brain at work. If he can't provide a model of how the two ultimately merge, it is because neuroscience does not, as yet, have one.
