The Edge of Me
‘The Edge of Me’ offers a personal perspective of what it is like to live inside a mind that is both brimming with creativity yet sometimes at the mercy of overstimulated and self-destructive thought patterns. The piece explores some of the possible neurological bases of these experiences, looking at the brain as a predicting machine and the role of the Default Mode Network in creative thinking, negative rumination and possible links to ADHD.
I. Eruption
It’s late, I’m tired and I’m trudging down the path between the retail park and the housing estate. Across the rail tracks tower block windows throw soft yellow light into the deepening blue of night. Somewhere nearby the Ravensbourne flows in its concrete channel strewn with shopping trolleys and drinks cans. I’m pushing my son in his buggy, ladened with bags that threaten to spill cauliflowers and ketchup bottles at every bump or turn. The sky darkens like an angry bruise and the first spots of rain prickle on my cheeks. The external world is tuned to greyscale, but on the inside, my mind is glowing.
A whole universe is erupting into my imagination; forcing itself into existence seemingly of its own accord. A story reveals itself in dizzying technicolour. Characters and plotlines and settings appear. There is a boy. The boy is dead. He lives in a tree outside his house and tries to protect his parents from ghosts. There is a talking crow and a Victorian lady who lives in a greenhouse and tends to her ghostly blooms. There is a procession of spirits and a strange man with silver hair and a little girl who lives in the Bonelands (whatever the hell they are) who I think might also be dead. Oh, and the tree is an ash tree and there is a conifer forest that is dark and scary and probably full of ghosts. Oh, and I think the girl died in the English civil war. Oh and… oh and…
It just keeps coming and coming. Every few steps as we trudge through the gloom I have to stop and tap notes furiously into my phone most of which, when I look back on them later, read like the ravings of a madman. And yet in all their madness they are coherent. They are not yet a story, but they are the stuff of story. I’m almost paralysed by the flow. I keep pushing the pushchair, trying not to spill the groceries, trying not to stumble and send my poor child rolling down the muddy bank then launching into the river. At one point I’m pretty sure Josh, in what could only be an act of wishful thinking on his part, points to a random man walking past and calls him daddy.
When I was little, I drew pictures; patterns and people, maps of places that don’t exist. I wrote stories and I painted small lead models of dragons and orcs, although most of the paint went over my hands or the bedroom carpet. There was music too. Guitar first, then synthesizers and drum machines and hours lost in endlessly captivating universes of sound.
My school books were filled more with doodles than with actual work. I once kept our GCSE history teacher off topic for a whole double lesson rattling on about Irish mythology when we should have been doing something “important” like the Treaty of Versailles. He was a nice man with uncombable hair and was as easily distracted as me. The rest of the class were more than happy to talk amongst themselves. I got a D in the exam. Sometimes I was too distracted by the world around me to pay attention to my school work. At other times I was too engrossed in the weird creatures I created in my sketchpads to notice as things like GCSEs and A Levels slipped past like clouds across the sky. These imagined worlds were my home, my sanctuary. But they could also become a prison.
Throughout my childhood I did not know where my boundaries were. I was erratic and chaotic. Often too much for the other kids around me who didn’t know how to react. My emotions were wild and unmanageable, blowing up like storm clouds and washing me away. Sometimes I found school so overwhelming that I would pretend to be ill so I could stay at home, begging my mum not to send me in then lying in my room with the curtains closed listening to story tapes in the dark. And then, of course, there was the fear.
I was born in 1982 which led to the powerful cosmic alignment of me being seven years old at the UK cinematic release of Ghostbusters II. For my seven-year-old brain EVERYTHING now revolved around that film. I pleaded with my mum to go see it for my birthday, and she dutifully took my friends and I down to the mildew scented Odeon on the high street to see the film. From the moment the opening credits rolled something happened in my brain. My nervous system was no match for the blend of big budget Hollywood special effects and the cast of ghostly creatures. I couldn’t have been more traumatised if she had taken us to see the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. I barely slept for the next two weeks, but that film wasn’t just a one off. My mind would amplify fear beyond all proportions, and I would be at the mercy of my imagined demons. Other things that induced near apoplectic levels of terror included rabies, people turned mad after rabid dog bites, mad people in general, organ donation and the plague. Arguably none of these were legitimate concerns for a child living in a sleepy market town in Shropshire in the early 90s.
When I gaze back across the years it’s almost like I’m looking at two children. There’s the one who was wild and happy, surrounded by friends and bursting with creativity. But then there’s the one who was completely overwhelmed by the process of daily life. The one who got bullied for being weird and different. The one who began self-medicating from the age of thirteen, partly in an attempt to dull the racing of my underregulated mind. And I want to know where that all came from. What was the source deep within my brain circuitry where these two sides of me come from? What brain regions harbour the angels of creativity? Which neural pathways lead to the place where the demons dwell? Because when you look closely, I believe we can find reasons for the way we are. Everything has a cause. And when I look back at my walk home in the gloom of that November evening, what at first seems to be a spontaneous mental eruption, has more of a cause than I first thought.
~
Earlier that day, before I loaded my son into his pushchair and set off for the shops, I pulled out a pad and jotted down some notes. To say I had an idea would be an overstretch. I had a glimmer of an idea. Some scraps of scattered thought that might be the precursor to an idea. I had impressions. Ghosts of emotions that hung around the back of my awareness; haunting me, nagging at me. The few possibilities that pushed their way into my mind were unoriginal, derivative, wholly uninspiring. Yet this cloud of associations wouldn’t let me go. So, I jotted some vague notes, put it all out of my mind and went out to do the shopping. Then somewhere between my front door and the canned vegetable aisle, something happened that was hidden from me. Some strange alchemy took place, down in the depths of the subconscious, that took these fragments of idea, stitched them into a story, then sent them whooshing up into my conscious mind like a firework display.
These moments of creative revelation are wild. They are exhilarating and breathless. When they happen, it feels like every synapse in my brain is singing with possibility. But these moments of epiphany are also a mystery to me. The plots and characters that flood my mind feel like they are coming from somewhere else. Somewhere separate from the jumble of sensation, memory and emotion that, for better or worse, I equate with my “self”.
But this separateness doesn’t sit well with me. In the past people had a much healthier relationship with this sense of unknowing. At its root the word inspiration literally means to breathe in – it is a beckoning of some external thing from beyond our physical boundaries. In days gone by the epic poet would invoke the muses before embarking on their tale, comfortable with the knowledge that they are only the vessel though which the story is told. And how much simpler that would be! I imagine sitting down at my desk shouting “Thalia! Calliope! Come on ladies let’s get cracking. I haven’t got all day!”
But I grew up in the world of secular modernity, and happily bought into the nuts and bolts, atoms and molecules mode of reality. When I last checked the scaffolding of rational secularism is still largely in place, propping up the sagging ceiling of my mind, so how do I account for these moments of dizzying magic? I’m supposed to be the author of my stories and yet I have no idea where they come from. But this is not how it’s supposed to be. The well-used adage states that we write in an attempt to find ourselves. So how can it be that through creative practice we seem to reach the edge of self? The place where our boundaries blur and fade, then melt away to nothing?
If we are to have any chance of answering these questions, maybe we need to look first not at the source of creativity itself, but at the stream through which it flows.
II. The Story of Me
There is a patch of wall in my parents’ house outside the downstairs toilet, which my mum has started referring to as “The Gallery”. This is where they hang the photo frames, with silent faces gazing patiently out from each little wooden square. There’s a picture of my mum’s parents perching on a wall beside the sea. There’s the holiday snap of me in a sombrero and my dad looking like 1980s Miami drug dealer with his moustache and red rimmed aviators. There’s me and my brother dolled up in suits, grinning on his wedding day. Then, of course, there are the baby photos.
When I look into the eyes that squint out from beneath that mess of straw-blond hair, it’s almost impossible to imagine that the kid in the photo is at the other end of the same stream of consciousness as the one I inhabit now. Somehow that chubby toddler became the little boy spilling paint on his carpet, who became the annoying teenager distracting his teacher, then eventually this man teetering past forty with a toddler of his own. Our mental lives unfurl in one unbroken brush stroke. Messy, evolving, sometimes incongruous and often contradictory, but undeniably continuous no matter how distant the eyes seem that gaze back from the wall outside the downstairs loo.
The term stream of consciousness was popularised by the American psychologist William James in his seminal 1890 book The Principals of Psychology. In his analysis of the nature of mental states he concludes that “a “river” or a “stream” are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described.” The mind is always moving, flowing from moment to moment. Our attention skips from the dishes we’re scrubbing, to the song on the radio, then back through the years to the first time we heard it, suddenly lost in a haze of memory, before jolting back into the present as the smell of dinner burning in the oven hits our olfactory system like a sledgehammer.
For James one of the main functions of consciousness is to weave together “the teeming multiplicity of objects and relations, and what we call simple sensations,” into a coherent sense of self. A story of self. And that story is defined as separate from the external world and all of the other minds in it. When talking about the gap between our thoughts and other people’s he says “the breaches between these thoughts are some of the most absolute in nature.” Reading between the lines we can maybe sense a hint of sadness underlying this statement. The natural order that gives rise to each of our minds so full of hope and wonder and pain has also left us entirely marooned from each other. We are stranded on our own desert island of subjectivity, waving across to each other with tattered rags over the shark infested waters.
This, then, is maybe where the universal human urge to create art comes from. Each song or poem or painting is an attempt to reach out across that empty space and for one moment, no matter how clumsily or approximate, experience a feeling together. We crave the ability to let our streams merge, if only for a fleeting moment. But where do these streams flow from in the first place?
~
The interior of the human skull is a place for dizzying numbers. Each brain contains approximately 128 billion neurons arranged into a complex network of up to 500 trillion synaptic connections[i]. Every single neuron is a miracle of organisation. It is a teeming city of biochemical components working in harmony; a wonder in its own right. And yet each one has on average 7000 synaptic connections to other neurons around the brain and they pulse and dance together in an intricate electrochemical ballet. And from these local connections larger networks form, firing together in synchronisation as they share information in dynamic, self-organising patterns of activity. This process was beautifully described in 1942 by the neuroscientist Charles S Sherrington as “an enchanted loom where millions of flashing shuttles weave a dissolving pattern, always a meaningful pattern, though never an abiding one; a shifting harmony of subpatterns.”
This dance gives rise to everything we experience. We move in an escalating procession of tiny steps from atom to molecule to cell to brain to mind to minor meltdown on the way home from the supermarket. From these teeming connections the river of consciousness flows. It weaves a narrative of self from the myriad threads of sensation, emotion and memory that build up over our lives. It creates a story of the physical world we inhabit from the flood of sensory data. And yet, for all its solidity, it turns out these stories may not be as trustworthy as we think.
The neuroscientist Lisa Feldman-Barrett tells us that the reality we inhabit isn’t the real thing. It’s a fake. And not a particularly good one either. Our common-sense view of how the brain constructs reality might go something like this: information about the world arrives via our sensory organs and is ushered to the respective brain centres for processing. These streams are then stitched into a high resolution, surround sound and smell-o-vision feed. We compare this against our memory banks, then decide on our actions accordingly. But in her 2021 book Seven and a Half Lessons about the Brain, Feldman-Barret throws this whole sequence into confusion.
The brain she describes is a predicting machine that creates a controlled hallucination of our environment. But the unnerving truth is that the hallucination is generated almost entirely from past experience. Our perceived reality only updates when the data coming from our senses differs from the predictions our brains have already made. As move through my flat I’ve walked through a thousand times my brain is making up my experience almost entirely without bothering to check the data because it’s seen it all before. I’m running on re-runs. Only if I encounter something unexpected will my senses override these predictions. “A bunch of neurons make their best guess about what will happen in the immediate future,” she tells us. And the sense data from your environment “injects itself into the conversation, confirming (or not) the prediction that you’ll experience as your reality.”
So, our brains are prediction machines that construct reality using only the minimal amount of actual data they need to survive. We live in a cloud of possibilities created by the complex interplay of brain chemistry. “Brains aren’t wired for accuracy,” she tells us. “They’re wired to keep you alive.” So, it appears the story of self has an inherently unreliable narrator.
This picture of the brain weaving a perceived experience from a web of possible realities goes a little way in dissolving the mystery of my mental eruption on the way home from the shops. The circuitry with which the brain constructs reality can also be put to work creating imagined worlds filled with emotional resonance and meaning in an attempt to share our complex mental states with our fellow human beings. But my cat Raymond is also very complex, although you might not think that to meet him. I have no doubt that his brain also weaves a stream of consciousness of some sort, however different from my own. But why then has he never, to my knowledge, written a poem or painted a still life or directed an arthouse film? I suspect the reason might be that, however rich and varied the stream of his consciousness is, it doesn’t flow all the way to the ocean.
III. Dredging the Ocean
In 1857 a team of engineers were dredging the riverbed a few miles upstream of the City of London, during the construction of the predecessor of the Chelsea Bridge. The Thames mud has long been a source of the debris of human life, but on that day the river would offer up a treasure greater than any that had come before.
Out of the mud of the dredging tackle slipped a shield boss made of bronze. It can’t have looked all that special at first sight. Maybe the worker who pulled it from the sludge presumed it to be a regular bit of scrap metal. But indifference must have turned to awe as the mud oozed off to reveal the beautiful curvilinear design worked in glinting bronze, with red enamel glass glowering from the centre of the spiral whirlpools.
The shield is believed to have been a votive offering, placing it in a tradition of throwing valuable objects into watery places that dates back at least 10,000 years, and lives on today every time someone throws a coin into a wishing well. For thousands of years we have seen water as a sacred thing. A membrane between our world and a more fluid reality beyond. And while the late Iron Age Britons might have dressed differently and spoke different tongues to the Londoners of today, we’re all the product of the same complex minds. We yearn for the same things. We struggle and we hurt and we let each other down. We tell stories and perform rituals. We reach out beyond our boundaries in hope of connection with each other, with something more.
The shield now hangs in the British Museum a short walk from where I work. When I stand in front of the presentation case and let my eyes follow the spiral patterns I feel part of a human experience that goes well beyond the edge of me. Through human culture, each of our streams of consciousness flows into this collective ocean.
When I look back at the images that erupted into my mind on the way home from the shops, I can see familiar themes emerging like artefacts dredged out of the ocean of consciousness. There are themes which are personal to me. Disrupted childhoods. Difficult relationships with parents and the world at large. But there are also themes that seem to link to stories older than time. The tree where the boy in my story lives becomes Yggdrasil, the tree of life from Norse Mythology. Is there a mythic tree rooted deep inside each of us that connects us to the universe? Or is it more to do with the fact that there is an ash tree outside my spare room window, and I read more Norse Mythology than might be considered healthy during my formative years?
The net of creativity trawls that collective ocean pulling a piece from here, a piece from there, and hauls it up into the rational daylight of our conscious minds. At first these artefacts seem like a strange and incongruous collection, but on closer inspection they often link up in surprisingly meaningful ways. Anyone engaged in creative endeavours relies on this time and again, but what is the specific architecture in the brain responsible for this process?
Brains are busy places; always on the go. Our three pounds of cranial porridge works overtime as it makes connections, completes tasks, processes information, regulates homeostasis, and generally keeps the ship moving. It’s exhausting just thinking about it. So, when our poor, overworked brains finally grab a little downtime, we might expect that it would do its own equivalent of putting its feet up and watching Bargain Hunt. Activity would decrease. Connectivity would relax. Brain regions would take a well-earned breather. But it turns out this is not the case.
In the early 2000s researchers discovered, completely by accident, that when the brain is awake but not engaged in a specific task, there is still a surprising amount of activity going on. The unexpected activity was focussed on a few interconnected regions, which collectively became known as the Default Mode Network (DMN)[ii].
The DMN might also be described as the daydream network. When we’re not focussing on a task, the DMN takes over and our attention wanders through the rolling landscape of our minds. We flow through memories and possible futures; we follow flights of fancy and wonder who will win when swans and geese inevitably declare war on each other. But it turns out it’s not all idle daydreaming.
A study by researchers at Tel Aviv University[iii] suggests that the DMN actually plays a crucial role in creative thinking. The picture they paint is one where the DMN is associated with the ability to pull together seemingly unrelated pieces of information to generate new ideas in a surprising and exciting way. The DMN is a kid in a candy store, grabbing a scrap of memory from here and merging it with a concept from there and shaking it all up together. But they go on to suggest that just gathering a hodgepodge of novel concepts together isn’t particularly useful in and of itself. The DMN needs collaborators to turn it into something worthwhile.
These collaborators come in the form of two other brain networks; the Salience Network and the Executive Control Network. The DMN is the network that pulls together the wild and exciting ideas. Then the salience network filters out the dross and looks for something useful. This information is then forwarded to the Executive Control Network which constrains the stream of ideas towards a specific goal. And when all three of these networks are working in harmony, life is sweet. But when the balance is disturbed, that sweetness turns to ash.
Underregulated activity in the DMN has been strongly linked with depression and negative thought spirals[iv]. The brain regions that give rise to free-flowing creativity can quickly turn in on themselves, generating spiralling patterns of negative rumination where the mind becomes a prison, and the stream of consciousness becomes a whirlpool of pain.
IV. Little Steps
It’s August 2019 and I’m walking along the isthmus that connects the rocky island of Monemvasia to the Greek mainland. I’m on holiday with my wife in those footloose days before pandemics and parenthood did to holiday plans what the Russian winter did to Napoleon’s army. We’re winding our way down the coast in a hire car, hopping from town to town, from beach to beach. We’re staying in an apartment in an old Byzantine monastery with cobbled alleyways lined with sleepy restaurants where the only traffic is other tourists and the occasional passing donkey. Down the slope beneath the road the crystal waters lap gently between the rocks. Across the bay the dusty mountains of the Peloponnese melt into the haze. The world around me seems to be made exclusively of light, but on the inside, my mind is trying to kill me.
My brain feels like it’s accelerating to a million miles an hour. A torrent of anger and self-loathing tosses me like a leaf in a hurricane. A procession of friends, relatives and half-forgotten acquaintances line up inside my skull to tell me I am useless and worthless and I would be better off dead. These imagined figures crowd me out of my own mind like a chorus line of demented harpies. Their screams ricochet across every synapse in my skull. This episode is the culmination of weeks of building turbulence that has crept across the tipping point and become a mental storm. It is creating a blizzard of imagined futures, each one negative, relentlessly attacking my sense of self like some kind of mental autoimmune disease. My mind is telling me a thousand times a minute that I should just kill myself.
I stop walking and look out over the rocks to the gently lapping sea. I’m desperately trying to stay afloat while my mind goes into hyperdrive. I can’t think. I can’t breathe. My heart is pounding in my chest. I look into the water, glittering in the sun. I wish I could let go. Just slip under the waves to where it’s cool and still.
I need to be absolutely clear here; there is no chance that I will do it. This is not that moment. I have never had that moment; although I have been with people in that moment and desperately fought to bring them back from the edge. But this is something I have experienced time and again, where my brain is screaming at me that I’d be better off dead, and when I see that clear water all I see is peace.
I long to give in, but I don’t. I turn and I keep walking. Keep straining to hang on and not be washed away. I place one foot in front of the other. A halting procession of little steps lead me away from that place. Back to the apartment where Tamsin is waiting. Where her humour and easy companionship lifts me up like a life ring, and pulls me back into the cool simplicity of the present moment. She had no idea how much her presence helped me that day. Kept me sane. Brought me back from that edge.
I can’t remember the exact moment I began to wonder if I had ADHD. It was an idea that filtered up though my mind until one day while procrastinating at work did quick Google search which led to a questionnaire on an ADHD charity’s website. I clicked some multiple-choice answers and watched as the results loaded on the screen. My score was well over the threshold to indicate that I should seek a referral for formal assessment. Seeing that score didn’t really have much of an emotional impact. I was just an online questionnaire, probably no different to the ones who tell you which character off EastEnders would be your ideal romantic partner. But it piqued my curiosity. Then I clicked onto a YouTube video of a psychologist calmly describing the typical symptoms of adult ADHD. I felt like this person was reading out the story of my life. The erratic childhood. The hopeless organisation skills. The substance abuse problems and debt problems and underachievement at work. I closed my laptop, stood up from my desk and walked from room to room not knowing what to do with myself.
As with all forms of neurodivergence, the neurological basis of ADHD is far from clear cut. Our brains are staggeringly complex systems that are the product of a lifetime’s interplay between genetics and environment. But one of the key underlying factors of the condition is the disruption in the dopamine pathway, one of the many neurotransmitters that conduct the orchestra of brain circuitry which performs the symphony of the self. Dopamine is involved in directing attention, pulling us out of the free-flowing DMN stream of consciousness to focus on a specific task.
The ADHD brain is often at the mercy of the DMN. It is a mind that can be swept along in streams of joyful creativity. But it can also get drowned in the torrents of negative rumination. It is a brain that gets stuck in the pinball machine of possibilities generated by the prediction machine brain described by Lisa Feldman-Barret. A few days after my realisation I called my GP and started the process of getting a diagnosis. A process that may take years due to our chronically under resourced health system. This wait feels at first disheartening, but even so, just the act of self-realisation is a crucial first step towards finding a less chaotic way to be.
~
I get home from the shops on that November evening and real life comes crunching back like a multi-carriageway pile up. I unpack the shopping and get Josh’s dinner ready. I try in vain to make sure at least some food goes into his mouth rather than across the living room floor. There are baths to run and bedtime stories to read. Tam and I dance around each other in the intricate ballet of parenthood in our cramped South London flat. The vivid universe of ghost boys and talking crows now seems a million miles away.
It’s 9pm. Josh is sleeping. Dinner is done and the dishes have been washed. The flat is silent and I’m sat at my desk looking out the window. The block of flats across the road is a checker board of glowing lights. The leaves of the ash tree outside my window stir in the night breeze. I pull out my phone and look at the notes I tapped while walking back from the shops. They’re fragmented, garbled, badly spelled, but I can still feel that world hanging there in my imaginative space. It is lit up like neon lights on a shoreline as I’m floating on a midnight ocean, looking back towards land.
So, I take out a pen and open my notebook. I place one word onto the page, then another. I scribble them out, curse, but then I try again. Soon I have a sentence. Then a paragraph, then a page. I arrange my notes. I sketch out some scenes. I realise that bit doesn’t work but if I change this and move it over here things make a bit more sense. I keep going because this imaginary world is useless if it stays locked inside my skull. It needs to be pulled out onto a page, forced into the world. So, I take one little step followed by another. Each one is an oar stroke that rows me closer to that glowing shore.
And that idea slowly develops over time. It becomes one of the many ideas and stories that I work on every day. I write some chapters. Get frustrated. Write something else. Then pull it out and re-read what I’ve been doing. Have a spark, write some more. I creep slowly towards that goal where I can release it into the world to become part of the shared landscape of story, where we reach out to each other across the emptiness.
Because the spring from which my creativity flows is the same from which my mental breakdowns flow. If I do not take charge of that overstimulated circuitry then it takes charge of me and life becomes unliveable. Moments like the one in Greece now happen mercifully less and less. There was a time when I couldn’t function. I had no idea where the edge of me was. I was lost. Drowning. At the mercy of my brain circuitry and I would drink and take drugs for days on end until I collapsed upon the floor. But that was a long time ago. That version of me feels as distant as the toddler in the picture outside my parents’ downstairs loo. Little steps have taken me away from that helpless state. Step-by-step I have reclaimed my mental circuitry. Because the brain I have, no matter what acronyms are applied, is one that needs time and patience. It is a work in progress. Like a piece of writing. Draft after draft, iteration after iteration. Through the highpoints and the low-points and the endless dull points where I’m just tired and bored and want to go to sleep and there’s a toddler jumping up and down on my head.
With these little steps I move back from the water’s edge. I move forward; slowly, haltingly, through a series of iterations. A series of failures. Failing again and again, but failing a little better each time. Through these repeated iterations I find the edge of me. I walk my boundaries. I reach out beyond them, towards you, reading this now.
………………………………
1 Lisa Feldman-Barrett Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain (Pan MacMillan 2021)
2 Dingman M. Know Your Brain: Default Mode Network https://neuroscientificallychallenged.com/posts/know-your-brain-default-mode-network
3 Shofty, B., Gonen, T., Bergmann, E. et al. The default network is causally linked to creative thinking. Mol Psychiatry 27, 1848–1854 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41380-021-01403-8
4 Wise, T., Marwood, L., Perkins, A. et al. Instability of default mode network connectivity in major depression: a two-sample confirmation study. Transl Psychiatry 7, e1105 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/tp.2017.40
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