Water on the brain

Quotes from A Director Prepares by Anne Bogart, pages 127-129.
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"Two scoops, please, on a waffle cone." Picture from the lecture slides of a class I'm taking.

Artistic types, I think, like to say how similar their ventures can be to science, and vice versa. But artistic types need to be careful.

"The part of your brain that can easily divert you from your path is commonly called the frontal lobe. It generates the constant buzzing in your head that wants to censure you and is out to ambush your every move. In order to find a creative flow you have to give the frontal lobe something else to do so that it will stay out of your way. "

The brain is lobular and lateralized, as Bogart alludes to (I know; I learned so in High School AP Psych). But the functions ascribed to the separate lobes and hemispheres by artistic types (and by middle-management training, and the popular media, and anybody who wants an easy way to say ‘this is how and why I’m different from you’) are not so clear as they hope—not clear to them and not, even, to the neurophysiologists who devote their lives to studying the brain’s rococo architecture. How disrespectful it is to co-opt, misrepresent, and dumb down another’s life-work to suit one’s own argument! How distasteful, and what misperceived dysmorphia, to so enthusiastically vilify a part of one’s own body.

We teach young women to hate their bodes, and something like 5 million now have eating disorders. Do we want intellectually anorexic artists?

"Busywork! My one weakness!"

I have heard in acting classes, and I most stubbornly refuse, to 'get out of my head. ' If we must be thus symbolic, I’d much prefer to 'use my head through my body,' or some other phrase that doesn't disenfranchise the mound of pinky-gray ricotta inside my head (or the quicksilver neuron threads running throughout my body). And I hate this idea that we need to trick ourselves into good acting (or writing, or whatever):

“You have to engage that part of your brain ['that wants to censure you and is out to ambush your every move'] with busywork so that it will be otherwise engaged.”

Is my brain a delinquent child, that I must distract it and lie to it to get what I want? Or rather--to be a good parent--if my brain is delinquent, how have I made it so and how can I discipline it while still treating it like a human?