Writers and Athletes Brains

The more we know about the workings of the brain, the more surprising some of the conclusions are. Here is something from the New York Times:

Neuroscientists are finding surprising similarities in the brain activity of writers and athletes, reports Carl Zimmer in The New York Times (6/28/14). The scientists, "led by Martin Lotze of the University of Greifswald in Germany," are using "scanners to track the brain activity of both experienced and novice writers." Dr. Lotze started by having 28 novice writers "copy some text" to provide a baseline, and then gave them a few lines from a story to finish on their own — giving them time to brainstorm a bit first, and then write.

He and his team found that the vision-processing part of the brain lit up during brainstorming, perhaps because they were "seeing the scenes they wanted to write." This changed when the trials turned to more experienced writers, whose "brains appeared to work differently even before they set pen to paper." Their brains activated "regions involving speech," rather than vision. One theory is "that the novices are watching their stories like a film inside their heads, while the writers are narrating it with an inner voice." 

Also unlike the novices, the brains of the experienced writers lit up "a region called the caudate nucleus," which "plays an essential role in the skill that comes with practice, including activities like … playing basketball," or a musical instrument. However, Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker is skeptical that the experiments provide a clear picture of creativity, pointing out, among other things, that the "very nature of creativity can make it different from one person to the next." "Creativity is a perversely difficult thing to study," he says.