Anyone who has stared at a blank page trying to write knows the pain of writer's block. But for some, this barrier is devastating.
As this ScienCentral News video reports, researchers have found some nontraditional ways to unlock extreme writer's blocks.
Brain Freeze
Poet Eve Stern used to compete nationally in "poetry slams" and perform her work on television and radio. Then something changed in her brain and she fell to despair.
Diagnosed with a severe form of depression, Stern found some solace in her antidepressants, but the drugs affected her brain chemistry so much that she could no longer pen poetry. "I felt like I was imploding," describes Stern. "I felt like my mind was falling in on itself and I could not write one word of poetry." Her muse had vanished, snatching away her livelihood.
Stern's writer's block was a side effect of the more than 50 different types of medications her doctors prescribed to treat her depression. The drugs also produced a physical side effect— a spasm in her vocal cords, which made breathing difficult. No longer able perform her poetry, Stern went to see neurologist Alice Flaherty, who specializes in movement disorders. As Stern would soon learn, Flaherty also studies and treats writing disorders such as hypergraphia and writer's block.
You might call Flaherty a medical muse. An author herself, she understands a writer's needs. "Writer's block is not an inability to write in the sense that you just don't know how," she says. "It's a much more complicated problem with the motivation." She describes the condition as a "brain state," which may be fixable through a medical— instead of a psychological— approach, depending on the person.
To understand just what unlocks severe writer's block, Flaherty has to "get into" her patients' heads. "I've never had a doctor ask me such detail questions about my writing habits," says Stern. Her other doctors dismissed writing as a victim of her depression treatment, but Flaherty factored in writing as something worth saving.
Like many of Flaherty's patients, Stern suffered from severe writer's block resulting from a change in brain chemistry induced by an environmental element such as medication. "My goal was to get her off as many of her depression medicines as possible and combine them into one medicine that wouldn't produce the side effect," explains Flaherty, who says she stumbled on a solution for Stern's block. "It also greatly improved her mood and then when that happened, her writing came back in full force."
Out of the Rut
Certain brain functions could free people like Eve Stern from the shackles of writer's block.
Different parts of the brain interact with each other on a constant basis, making it nearly impossible to pinpoint exact spots where writer's block takes root. But Flaherty has narrowed down her search to some general areas. "Probably the two most important areas are the temporal lobe, which is behind the ear, and then the frontal lobe, which is right at the front of the brain," she says. "They seem to interact in a push-pull kind of way." Changes in the frontal lobe in particular produce symptoms seen in writer's block: the struggle to find words and meanings, coupled with depression and anxiety.
Through clinical work on seemingly unrelated brain disorders that cause anything from tics to Tourette Syndrome, Flaherty has witnessed a fog lifting from many frustrated writers' brains. One patient wrote a memoir and received accolades from her employer about her renewed creativity after Flaherty implanted a deep-brain-stimulation electrode used to help control Tourette Syndrome. Another story involves a woman who had a cancerous growth removed from her brain. "Writer's block had be plaguing her for years," says Flaherty. "Suddenly she got better and it turns out that the cancer was producing a substance that was making it hard for her to concentrate.
Flaherty cautions that her work focuses on extreme cases of writer's block, where people become debilitated and often lose their livelihoods. "As far as I know there is no average cure. If there was, I'd be hocking it on late night TV," jokes Flaherty. "You really have to tailor it to a particular chemistry and history and needs of the person." She also says that researchers have generally avoided the subject as something too unwieldy to approach scientifically, but Flaherty disagrees. Next, she plans to undertake brain scan studies of blocked writers' brains to see what parts light up when they do creative tasks. Finding the key to these brain functions could free more patients like Stern from the shackles of writer's block.
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