I wanted to understand psychiatry as he understands it, because he is the only modern psychiatrist to receive the Nobel Prize and is a world-renowned researcher.
He is Eric Richard Kandel, M.D.
He trained as a psychiatrist and practiced psychiatry for a short time. He devoted the majority of his career to research, writing, and teaching, giving psychiatry a stronger basis in neuroscience. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for his research on memory and co-edited a definitive text in neuroscience. He wrote several books for the general reader, including The Disordered Mind: What Unusual Brains Tell Us About Ourselves. I chose to read this book because it best captures Dr. Kandel's perspective on psychiatry in its entirety.
He begins his book, "I have spent my entire career trying to understand the inner workings of the brain and the motivation for human behavior. Having escaped from Vienna as a young boy soon after Hitler occupied it, I was preoccupied with one of the great mysteries of human existence. How can one of the most advanced societies on earth turn its efforts so rapidly toward evil? How do individuals, when faced with a moral dilemma, make choices? Can the splintered self be healed through skilled human interaction?"
Dr. Kandel initially thought he would be a practicing psychoanalyst, deciding rather early in his career to become a researcher. He understands psychiatry through clinical experience and knowledge of the research in genetics, brain imaging, and animal models of brain disorders.
A theme throughout his book is that a disordered mind can, in some ways, be an ordered mind, even as it is disordered. Order can bring creativity.
Dr. Kendal explains that various brain regions are recruited in the creative effort, depending on its nature. Parts of the right brain appear to be common to all our creative efforts. As we are open to the novel, the brain's right hemisphere becomes active.
Referring to the intersection of philosophy, cognitive psychology, and neuroscience, he discerns how the brain becomes the mind. "This unprecedented scientific study of the mind is based on the principle that our mind is a set of processes carried out by the brain, an astonishingly complex computational device that constructs our perception of the external world, generates our inner experience, and controls our actions."
Dr. Kandel has a passion for art and a lifelong fascination with his boyhood home of Vienna, as he conveys in The Quest to Understand Art, Mind, and Brain, from Vienna to the Present. He gave a wonderfully illustrative TED Talk, "Portraiture and the Beholder's Share: A Brain Perspective." In his talk, he places focus on the human face. The human face is capable of dozens of emotionally meaningful expressions, and a strong awareness of the emotions conveyed is essential for a psychiatrist to appreciate. In his chapter on creativity, he tells Chuck Close's story, bringing psychiatry, art, and the human face together.
The paintings of Chuck Close have sold for millions of dollars. Quite remarkably, as Dr. Kandel writes, "Chuck Close is dyslexic, and there were many things he couldn't do. One thing he could do, however - and do well- was draw. He particularly became interested in drawing faces, which is intriguing because Close is also face-blind: that is, he can recognize a face as a face, but he cannot associate that face with a particular person."
Close was a graduate of the University of Washington, and in a 1997 alumni magazine article entitled "Art and Resilience", his childhood was described as "pure hell". His supportive father died when Close was eleven. His mother fell ill with cancer. He spent a year in bed with a kidney disease. However, he began painting at five, using an easel his father built for him. He never stopped painting.
"But this is much more than just a story of a local boy who made good. On December 7, 1988, at the age of 49, Close was at the height of his career as a portrait painter when he was stricken with a spinal blood clot that left him a person with quadriplegia."
He continued to paint.
His new system of painting added a wide range of brilliant colors, and, according to an article in The New Yorker, "a ravaged artist has become, in a miracle, one of the great colorists and brush wielders of his time."
At the age of seventy-four, Chuck Close developed frontotemporal dementia. It changed his personality, and his executive functions waned. Yet he painted into the last year of his life. His final works were less defined, but in his unique style.
Dr. Kandel observes: "Creativity feels out of the ordinary to us. We all have imagination, and we all make use of it to solve problems and come up with new ideas. Yet there is something undeniably different about people who are capable of creating remarkable new things. Inner drive and hard work, while essential, don't seem sufficient to explain why some people are extraordinarily creative."
Close developed a unique style by placing plexiglass over a photograph, applying a minute grid over it, and coloring its tiny cells, allowing the thousands of parts to appear as a whole to the beholder.
Dr. Kandel explains, "Close exemplifies two important aspects of creativity in addition to lifting of inhibitions: the determination to work hard and overcome difficulty, and the enormous plasticity of our human brain."
He encourages us all by writing, 'The capability for creativity is universal. Each of us, in various ways and with varying degrees, expresses it."
I wish to support each of my patients in experiencing a creative life. In a personal vein, I see Dr. Kandel as an extraordinary human being, creative in his fusion of neuroscience and art; and a man to be emulated.
Comments