On Campus
Oliver Sacks muses on creativity to a rapt Rutgers audience
A passerby happening upon the lengthy queue on College Avenue on a recent evening might have thought he had stumbled upon a rock concert. But no – the people lining up outside the Rutgers Student Center had turned out to hear the wisdom of a 75-year-old physician.
Oliver Sacks, neurologist and celebrated author, had come to the New Brunswick Campus by invitation of the Office of the Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs and the Writers at Rutgers Reading Series to deliver the Mason Welch Gross Memorial Lecture. Sacks is the first Mason Gross lecturer – the series is named for the 16th president of Rutgers – since the Dalai Lama, who visited Rutgers in September 2005.
The October 29 lecture on creativity and the brain drew more than 2,000 students, staff, faculty, and members of the public. For those who couldn’t squeeze into the multipurpose room – many stood or sat on the floor – the lecture was broadcast in an adjoining lounge. Still, 600 attendees had to be turned away.
Wearing a tie bedecked with light bulbs (one of Sacks’s two favorites -- the other sports the periodic table), Sacks spent the evening conversing on topics ranging from how ideas are born to autistic savants to the particular genius of creative thinkers like Darwin, Crick, Melville, and Pinter. He told the audience that during his Rutgers tour that day he had been enchanted by the university’s Geology Museum, which reminded him of the Natural History Museum in London, where he had spent his boyhood. “I didn’t like school very much,” Sacks admitted. “Museums and libraries were my teachers.”
Sacks, a professor of neurology and psychiatry at Columbia University, as well as Columbia’s first “University Artist,” has spent the last 40 years chronicling the mysteries of the brain and illuminating a host of neurological disorders through the compassionate telling of his patients' stories. His many best-selling books include The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat; Awakenings, which became an acclaimed film; and, most recently, Musicophilia, an exploration of music’s connection to the workings in the brain.
Rutgers President Richard L. McCormick, who spoke at a reception at the Zimmerli Art Museum prior to the lecture, called Sacks “an inspiration to both faculty and students for his extraordinary and unique accomplishments in medicine and in writing,” his interdisciplinary work, and its ability to reach a large audience. He said that the university has made a special effort to encourage a bridge between the sciences and humanities and that many Rutgers students major and minor in both.
Among Sacks’s many honors, as Executive Vice President of Academic Affairs Philip Furmanski noted in his introduction, is a citation from the Committee of the Small Body Nomenclature of the International Astronomical Union naming an asteroid “Oliversacks,” and the title of Commander of the British Empire bestowed upon him by Queen Elizabeth II.
Ideas, like lightbulbs, don't simply 'turn on'
Inquisitiveness and playfulness are an essential part of human nature, Sacks said, and most children are born curious. But it is not enough to have a creative disposition. Curiosity can be stifled – or encouraged by parents and teachers of “the right sorts,” whom he described as “those who don’t straitjacket the growing mind or let it go wild or anarchic.”
As for the birth of great ideas, it’s unusual for a light bulb to simply “turn on.” Often, a period of unconscious work and synthesis takes place before creative people find their authentic voice or an adequate vehicle for the imagination, Sacks said. This can be seen in the works of Einstein, Pope, Shakespeare, Bellow, Melville, and Wagner. (Although, Sacks admitted, he finds Wagner’s music “horrible.”)
The leap from talent to genius, however, is not always
appreciated. Sacks noted that Melville’s South
Sea yarns, like Taipei, were all the rage; but when he showed
his virtuosity in the writing of Moby
Dick, the novel wasn’t popular with the public, and Melville was forced to
support himself as a customs officer.
Sacks stressed that creativity that brings fresh ideas, innovation, and new technologies is ultimately a human endeavor that needs nurturing. It requires an investment of time, energy, and capital, and the commitment is always a gamble. Many years can go into incubating an idea, and nothing may come of it. “Even the most solitary thinker needs support,” said Sacks, ending his talk with a plea for more research funding to increase the understanding of brain function in creativity and in neurological disorders.
A role model and inspiration
Rutgers Professor Ralph Siegel of the Center for Molecular and Behavioral Neuroscience in Newark has known Sacks for 35 years. He said that Sacks’s call for funding was a departure for the physician, who tends to stay apolitical. Siegel met Sacks as a teenager through his uncle, who worked with Sacks at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and the two have gone on to coauthor papers. Sacks and Siegel recently copublished a letter in Nature, and Siegel contributed research to several of Sacks’s books.
Sacks’s strength is a “unique and humane perspective that combines his expertise in medicine, science, and storytelling,” Siegel said. “Oliver’s primary data is his notebooks, and [he] always has two or three journals running at the same time. His creativity overflows in the hundreds of volumes he has filled over the years. Through his extraordinary and seemingly inexplicable case studies,” Siegel added, “he is able to synthesize neurology [and] neuroscience to explain what makes each of us exceptional, creative individuals.”
Aleksandra Sherman, a Rutgers senior majoring in cognitive science, attended Sacks’s talk with her adviser, Professor Thomas Papathomas, associate director of Rutgers’ Laboratory of Vision Research, to whom she had recently given Musicophilia as a gift.
“I loved the lecture,“ said Sherman, whose senior thesis examines how humans recognize ambiguous structures across three domains: hearing, vision, and language. “At first, I thought it would be more about the brain, but I really liked that his talk addressed creativity in a more inspiring way. It helped me think about issues related to fostering my own creativity.”
Norain Siddiqui, a junior majoring in journalism and public health who also enjoyed the talk, views Sacks as a role model. She is passionate about writing, but is also premedicine and knows that she wants to be a doctor. “I don’t want to compromise one for the other,” Norian said, “and the career of Dr. Sacks shows that you don’t have to.”