Robin Shapiro, my wife, is one of the smartest people I know, and she has been watching my process for a long time. She's been reading a lot on neuroscience lately, and has some ideas about what our brains are doing when we get into the zone and make photographs. This audio file is a 15 minute snippet of our conversation on the topic.
http://www.dougplummer.com/slide_shows/brain/brain.mp3
Background on Robin: she is a psychotherapist in private practice, and a consultant to other therapists. She is the editor of a "best selling" (by professional book standards) book on clinical application of various EMDR techniques, EMDR Solutions: Pathways To Healing, published by W. W. Norton. Her blog is at Trauma & Attachment Therapy.
I wonder if geeks are people for whom there is less competition between the right and left brain? Or in whom the right brain is less powerful than the left? I am geek. When I am excited, I can feel the energy flow directly into a technological response (I want to fix something, I want to create something, I want to build something, I want to engineer something). Most arousal -- except for shame or terror -- seems to then flow directly into the left-brain performance side. Interestingly, when I am excited, I immediately see shapes and visualize systems. Words are harder to access, so I often sketch my ideas and later turn them into words. Not everyone thinks of engineering as creative, but I do. I love working in high stress, emergency situations.
Posted by: Karen | November 09, 2007 at 07:51 PM
I'm mixed dominant in handedness, so the left-right dichotomy is pretty much a non-starter with me. I think what is going in with you is that arousal and creativity are linked in exactly the way Robin describes. I don't happen to agree with Robin that language is a key component to the witness state. She's extremely verbal, it's her route. For me its visceral, I truly feel it in my body.
Posted by: Doug Plummer | November 09, 2007 at 08:30 PM
Karen,I don't think it's a competition. You're talking about an optimum kind of arousal state, when the two hemispheres are working together. And I imagine your solutions jump back and forth across the corpus colosum: For step-by-step procedural solutions, it's more left-brained. More wholistic schemas are more right-brained. And shame inhibits activity and terror puts you in too aroused a state to think well.
My brain is wired weirdly--lots of feeling and lots of thought, simultaneously. Doug is tuned into deep visceral states while shooting, but pops back into left-brained thought very quickly, when appropriate.
Posted by: Robin Shapiro | November 09, 2007 at 09:20 PM