How Does the Brain of Novel and Experienced Writers Work?
Insights to the concept “dream-storming”
Neuroscience has allied itself with creative writing and is preparing to reveal the ins and outs of our curious, imaginative, story-telling mind. To this end, the group of scientists led by Martin Lotze, from the University of Greisfwald in Germany, has carried out functional image tests (fMRI) on the brains of both novice and experienced writers while writing fiction stories. These studies allow us to observe which areas and neural networks are activated while performing a specific task. As he explains in his article in the journal NeuroImage, novice writers activated the visual areas of the brain, while experts showed more activity in the regions related to spoken language.
The leading scientist from the group explains that the two groups probably use different strategies. The novice writers are “watching their stories” like a movie inside their heads, while the experts are telling them in their own voices.
This, can remind us of those creative writing courses you take. The teachers insist that the hardest thing was “finding your own voice”. Once you got it, it was all over the place. Deep down they were just saying: practice, practice, practice.
Moreover, in the expert writers the caudate nucleus was also activated, which remained “silent” in the novels. This nucleus plays a fundamental role in the development of the skills that are achieved through practice. When we start learning any new activity (playing an instrument, playing football) we make a great conscious effort. With practice, these actions become more automatic: the trained core begins to coordinate them like a conductor.
Despite the great appeal of these studies, much remains to be known. Does this pattern of brain activation correspond only to creative writing, or could it also be found by performing other tasks, such as writing an article on history or mathematics? Creativity is a difficult subject to unravel.
How to improve your writing skills then?
The best thing about writing is that feeling of letting go. Going into a free-floating orbit. It’s a perception very similar to that of running effortlessly. When you’re training, your muscles, and with them the rest of your body, move forward on their own, as if driven by an automatic motor. You just have to let yourself go at that pace and notice the breathing, look around you or immerse yourself in your thoughts. This set of emotions appears in a similar way when the writing flows. It is the fingers, little wild animals, that move forward to your understanding. The rest of the body becomes a faithful follower of the phalanges.
There is a technique described by R. Olen Baten : “dreamstorming” (not “brainstorming”). In it, the writer is invited to surrender to this state of floating, to freely associate words and ideas and to let history take you by the hand and guide you to its will.
From the point of view of neuroscience, the soul of those dancing fingers is a brain freed from the bonds of our old limbic system. If the limbic system is activated because we are stressed, tired or very self-critical and punish ourselves by thinking everything is wrong, we do not release our cortex. Creativity is put aside and we prioritize being safe and secure, which is the main function of our instinctive brain, an evolutionarily older brain. The cortex, our modern brain, seeks novelty, it needs to be creative.
Letting our most modern brain fly (and probably connecting it in some way to our oldest brain), should be a daily practice exercise. Just as we need to eat or sleep to live, practicing creativity should be a regular activity in our “survival” process. This is also a form of evolution.
Music is a fantastic ally of writing and helps that sense of freedom. “Last Leaves of Autumn” by Beth Orton is a beautiful piece to exercise our necessary dreamstorming.
