Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 17 Number 2, August 2016
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Platt, Carole Brooks. In Their Right Minds: The Lives and Shared Practices of Poetic Geniuses. Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2015
Reviewed by
Carole Brooks Platt’s book, In Their Right Minds: The Lives and Shared Practices of Poetic Geniuses, takes us squarely into the place where mental illness, stroke, genius and divine bliss all connect to or stem from the right and left hemispheres of the brain. From pre ice-age art to Sylvia Plath a large history of examples are drawn upon to demonstrate the uncanny connection between poetic and artistic genius and behaviour of the right and left brain hemispheres. Drawing on neuroscientists including Damasio and Persinger and psychologists such as Maslow, Platt neatly weaves a powerful landscape of human beings who call on the ‘gods’, experience strokes, suffer schizophrenia, injury to the brain, are shamans, mystics or mediums, poets, writers and artists; placing them all in relationship to the brain in such a way that we are left breathless by the work. Platt’s ability to present scientific evidence, scholarship and analysis in a down to earth easy to read way is one of the strengths of this book.
Platt writes ‘ordinary people, under exceptional circumstances, can experience the divine when relations between the hemispheres are altered in some way’ (35). It is not only through trauma, strokes, gifted insight or a past of sexual abuse that might alter this relationship between the left and right hemispheres but also ‘man made’ inventions such as writing and I suspect also the industrial revolution and technology. ‘The right hemisphere is dominant before the advent of writing’ (40) potentially resulting in a privileging of the left hemispheric functions (analytic thought, logic, reasoning, science and math) throughout Western history, whereas the right hemisphere functions (awareness, creativity, intuition, insight) have since been relegated to less desirable groups such as mentally ill, witches or fortune tellers and mediums. Platt’s work is a call for another understanding of the function of the right hemisphere via the work of many great creative artists, thinkers and writers including, Kierkegaard, Pascal, Newton, Dante, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Robert Louis Stevenson, Muhammad, Yeats, Hughes, Plath and Joan of Arc. Many if not most of these outstanding people conferred with a ‘voice’ only they could hear, a voice that often manifested as ‘a second self…’objectified as a separate person’ (47). Parallel lines between schizophrenia and genius, trauma and creativity often occur in this far reaching book. No matter what walk of life you are on it is most definitely worth a read