Loading summary
Transcript53 lines
- [00:21]
A
Monica Auch is an extraordinary person. Both a trained doctor and a weaver, she set out to answer a question that down the centuries has perplexed the great philosophers.
- [00:35]
B
Well, I hoped to find out what really is creativity and if you can actually measure creativity. Of course, a lot of people had been trying to pin down what is creativity, but I know from doing medical research that you, you just have to frame your question. So what really interested me is how hand and brain cooperate in creativities.
- [01:01]
A
What I like about Monika is that she approaches this from an utterly practical angle, but also an artistic one. This is a marriage between her scientific and artistic backgrounds. And because of that, she works in a different way.
- [01:21]
B
The unmeditated way I worked, which was a mixture of intuition, but as well, just making, and of course, technical and material knowledge, which I just already had. So that again made me thinking about that combination between my brain, the knowledge, the memory of materials and what my hands were doing. So I decided to look into this much more.
- [01:46]
A
Welcome to Haptic and Hughes Tales of Textiles. I'm Jo Andrews, a handweaver interested in what textiles tell us about ourselves and our communities. Stories that go far beyond the written word and often explore the lives of those who had little or no voice. This episode is about one of the great questions that lies at the heart of being human. Our creative intelligence. This is not the kind of intellect that we can test for on any exam or IQ assessment, and yet it is the sort of tacit knowledge that has been fundamental to our survival down the long centuries of our presence on Earth. Trying to understand it, though, is not easy. Preparing this episode at times reminded me of being in a university library many years ago and reaching for a philosophy textbook to find another perplexed student had got there before me. And written in the margin. Man, this is so far out. It's, it's coming back. I'll do my best. And Monica is a reassuringly practical guide.
- [03:10]
B
I come from a working class background and very strong women who always kept everything going. So instilled in me was the idea that you have to be able to earn your own livelihood and as well to explore your potential. But while I was studying medicine, these five years of theory are really tough. It's a lot of book knowledge you have to put into your head. And I really, really missed to do something with my hands. And this friend of mine said, maybe you should take up weaving. And I, I laughed because at crafts at school, I always just about passed because I made these really weird things that my teacher did not Approve of. So I was absolutely working outside of the box all the time. I didn't really care about that. So I thought weaving really. But just for a lark I started and I absolutely got hooked in weaving. So I went on in two different ways to study tissue in a medical setting and as well in a textile setting. And I thought there's quite a lot of similarities.
- [04:15]
A
Monica had a medical career specializing in women's health and she says that her hand skills served her well.
- [04:23]
B
You had to perform sensitive procedures, but if you have good hands, it helps the patient and yourself. So this sort of went parallel to each other.
- [04:34]
A
So you were using your hand skills both in the medicine and in the weaving?
- [04:41]
B
Yes, absolutely. This was the time before we had all the devices to do medical investigations. I mean, we did not have MRI scans then we had CAT scans and this kind of, or X rays or whatever. So you had to really rely on your hands and your senses as well, your sense of smell and hearing and palpating, which I really, really enjoyed as well. And I enjoyed stitching up people. That sounds a bit gross, but I mean, it's nice to do neat work.
- [05:12]
A
Later she took a four year textile degree in Amsterdam and decided to try to combine her scientific and creative backgrounds and design a research product to see if she could measure or at least understand more about creativity and the relationship between our brains and our hands.
- [05:34]
B
So then of course I had to define creativity. It's my own research, so it's my own definition. I can do whatever I want. So I defined creativity as the moment when you make a mistake and when you have to learn and you have to step on to doing something new, which, as a lot of artists know, is. Is very often the moment that you.
- [05:57]
A
Get a sort of epiphany, that moment when it all goes wrong and you realize that this piece of work isn't going to turn out as you thought unless you intervene in weaving, which is the craft I know best. They say every piece needs at least two mistakes. One to let the God of weaving in and another to. To let her out. But Monica isn't, I think, talking about those kinds of mistakes. These are, if you like, errors. What she's talking about is something more fundamental, something that needs a proper fix, where you have to use your brain to come up with a workaround that will solve the problem. So often that's the moment of inspiration.
- [06:48]
B
I think creativity is really what makes us human, to always driven by curiosity or whatever or playfulness. I like playfulness very much. I think play is very Important, but to experience and to develop what is there already, hopefully to something more positive.
- [07:07]
A
We're a privileged generation compared to our ancestors in that we have some idea of what our brains look like from drawings and MRI scans. This is data most of us will be familiar with from TV shows, if not from personal experience. But although each MRI scan is unique, it tells us nothing about who we are. As the contemporary artist Susan Aldworth says, you can look into my brain and, but you will never find me. She describes the enigma of invisible thoughts arising from material structures. If Monica wanted to discover more about what those brains were thinking, imaging wasn't going to help her.
- [08:00]
B
And I think that's the whole main point, is that we all have brains. We, as humans, we are very, very similar if you just look at the brains and the structures, but at the moment when emotions enter the whole thing, then we become individuals.
- [08:20]
A
And here is a paradox that has been recognized by philosophers and thinkers down the ages, that if we want to reflect on our thinking, it helps to work with our hands. The great artist and inventor Leonardo da Vinci could not think without drawing. At the same time, the philosopher Descartes said, while I write, I understand the activity of thinking and using. Our hands are closely connected to each other. Working with our hands is a profoundly creative and explorative act with a subtlety and depth we have found hard to explain. So to get people to think about their own creativity, Monica asked them to stitch a brain.
- [09:11]
B
So people were sent a template with a printed midsection of a brain on it and yarns and a needle, and they were asked to stitch a brain, and they could do with those scanned materials whatever they wanted. The point about setting up a good research is that you, especially something like that, where you want the cooperation of many people as possible, is to leave it open, but at the same time define it so it doesn't go into a vacuum. But the next step was that if people sent me a photograph, I offered them the service that I set up a website and I put up a photograph of their stitched brain. And after that, I invited them to fill in a questionnaire with 15 easy questions, which was about how old are they? Were they brought up in a craft environment or not? And in the end, they could fill in personal remarks about the project.
- [10:12]
A
Monica was asked to present the project at a number of symposia, and the idea of stitch your brain simply exploded. She found herself handing out around a thousand kits.
- [10:26]
B
What happened as well is that people started to send me the actual works. I only wanted the questionnaires and the photograph, but all these packages arrived in the post and. And I realized the idea really took hold of people and they really got triggered, which actually is what I wanted. I wanted people to use their creativity and just only to trigger them to make something. So the whole awareness about what the brain is has become very much common knowledge and was relatable for people. And the big thing as well is that if you ask people to stitch your brain, just imagine if I had asked them stitch your heart. That would have given completely different results because stitch your brain, we identify with our brain, our brain is what we are. And this ended up in everybody sort of in the end, stitched a self portrait of themselves.
- [11:28]
A
Many of the brains have been gathered together into a book that was published earlier this year as a collection of art. The brains are utterly beguiling. They're beautifully realized in many different techniques and forms. The sheer complexity of the way people expressed connections, emotions, the. The multitude of information that the brain holds, the balance between creativity and chaos. All of this is breathtaking. They seem to me to embody creative thought. I've posted pictures on Haptic and Hughes website and also a link to Monica's webpage.
- [12:09]
B
Quite a lot of people took it as an invitation to share quite really personal and intimate thoughts, which is really interesting. I'm talking about what I call the Amsterdam brain collection, which has 102 stitched brains. There's only eight people who actually tried to make a visualization of the brain and there's just one. Just one. And she's a neuroscientist who stitched something that was like an MRI scan. And the other seven who said they were actually trying to image the brain, they did it in the most artistic way. They stitched five birds which represented the different areas of the brain, or they stitched flowers, or they made a tangle of threads to show the connections. So that's the interesting thing, that of all of the brains, and as well all most of the other ones that are on the website, there's hardly anybody who relates Stitch youh Brain to an MRI scan.
- [13:20]
A
One of the most important things Monika learnt from the project was how fundamental recollections and experiences are to creativity.
- [13:31]
B
A thing that struck me most is how important memory is. Memory is a gift. It lies dormant within us and it just needs a trigger to come out. And very often it. It takes years and years and years until something comes out. And my own memory at the moment is about all the sculptures I make, really have a connection with the photographs my father took as a steel worker, which are the same sort of constructions. So I think, and that works for a lot of the participants as well, that they really go back to memories and they visualize them as well in a very material way, which I think is interesting because it shows that our memories very often are connected, for example, sensory input, smells or sounds, but very often as well to textiles, especially to textiles.
- [14:29]
A
She believes that people begin to build up a vital understanding of touch from birth.
- [14:36]
B
I just think materials are just so important in our lives. And it starts from the very beginning when. When babies start to explore, first with their mouth, but then with their hands, what material is like. I think materials can be really, really inspiring. And in that way, children nowadays are too much involved on screens. I think this might hamper their development of building up your own personal material library, because you have a material library through your fingertips. You explore the world through your fingertips, and all of that is stored in your brain. So I think even sometimes looking at material can definitely trigger to make something, to touch it. I mean, just looking with your eyes at something, you can feel the sensation of, oh, this is wool, or this is metal. So this obviously is a sort of very direct connection between our sensory tips, fingertips, and our brain. And it can be a really strong impulse to start making then.
- [15:46]
A
Not everyone who took part in the project stitched healthy brains. Some created their experience of depression, a neurological disorder.
- [15:56]
B
The main body of people who took part in the project were women older than 50. So very often they were as, well, carers. So there are stories stitched mainly of carers who show the difference between a diseased brain and a healthy brain, or other ways to show what happens if the brain is not functioning. One thing is that you try to visualize that in the stitched brains. You. You read it in the comments. And the interesting thing is that these are the great life events. If you care for somebody you love and who will eventually die, and I mean, this is what art is about, that you try to get hold of the great life events and to put it into material and to put it into a form, a visual form, not just in words, but into threads. Textiles, again, means as well that if it bears you down the moment, you get all the dark thoughts about the terrible things you are witnessing and. And you're taking part in the moment, you can, you can get them out of your head and give them a form, a material form. It will lighten your life. And that's something that once a patient from psychiatry set against me And I thought that was a marvelous way to, to say it. Like he said, I can still hear the ravens circling around my head, but I can prevent them building a nest in my head.
- [17:25]
A
And that is an incredibly important part of what working with material, any kind of material can do.
- [17:33]
B
I mean, that's just what making with your hands does as well. And there's the meditative aspect. And of course, in psychiatry and in therapies, this is being used as well as a therapy to help people to get dark thoughts out of their head and to put them into form, which makes them in some way manageable and lighter.
- [17:55]
A
When I read the notes that went with the pictures of the brains, I was struck by how many people said that they started their pieces not really knowing what they were going to do. They let the hands lead them. And Monica says that one of the principal things that the project taught her is that there is a dialogue that goes on between our hands and our brains when we make things.
- [18:20]
B
I got one of the technical art historians and I employed her to analyze all of the brains for materials and techniques and so forth. And she, Mane van Feldhausen, I have to name her, she wrote an excellent article in the book about material knowledge. And she introduced the term of affordance of materials, which is that you start working with a material, but the material will answer back and will show you what is possible. So then you realize that in your brain and you see what with your hands you can stretch that material to, and then the material will answer back in a way it's possible or not, or you can do this or that or the other. So there's this constant dialogue going on between your brain and your hands.
- [19:07]
A
And the material here is tacit knowledge, a form of wisdom that has to be experienced through our senses and cannot be put into words. It's far easier to tell the difference between fabrics like a thick wool or a vintage silk by touch than to try to explain it in words. This is how your sense of touch informs your brain and the two start to work together. But unless we have the memory of having felt both fabrics, we have no knowledge to draw on. And Monica strongly believes that tactile deprivation amongst today's children has a strong impact on their well being and health.
- [19:53]
B
Well, my mission really is that I wanted to have facts to show how important it is to have good craft education. I'm just completely frustrated by the way our governments keep cutting all the expenses. And that started with when my two children were at primary school. All of a sudden the craft teacher was gone and they had to do these really stupid tasks. And I just thought you have to prove in numbers how important it is to educate people about what they can do with their hands because it gives them a sort of self reliance and an idea about what they can do and independence which is just incomparable to anything else.
- [20:40]
A
If you want to try your hand at stitching a brain, Haptic and Hue will be giving away nine of the kits with this month's Friends of Haptic and Hue. We'll also post details of where you can buy your own kit on the webpage. For this episode, those of us who weave, spin, knit, quilt and sew will take part in any of the myriad of textile crafts. Use more than just our hands. Our bodies are involved as well. Sore muscles and creaky joints come with the territory. And this is where brain imaging in the form of electroencephalography can tell us more about what is going on in terms of the connection between the brain, the hands and the body. Here's Mark Schramm Christiansen from the University of Copenhagen.
- [21:46]
C
My own background is in experimental psychology and cognitive neuroscience. I'm associate professional professor in cognitive psychology and psychological methods. And I'm really interested in looking at this intricate interaction between mental processes and how we use our bodies.
- [22:05]
A
He set up an experiment with the center for Textile Research to see if the learning processes that take place when you spin a piece of yarn were visible.
- [22:16]
C
When we compared novices and skilled spinners, what we could see was actually that the way that the, the brain communicates with the muscles that are doing some of the very intricate parts of spinning a yarn. So pulling out the wool from a lumber wool to actually create the yawn. We could actually see that novices, they seem to have a much tighter communication between the brain and the muscles, indicating that there is some kind of learning process taking place when they, for the first times are actually doing this, whereas our expert spinners, that didn't seem to be the case. So we could actually have some early indications that there is a difference between whether you are a skilled spinner or you are a novice. And that gave us an indication, okay, maybe we can actually use that also to differentiate between the use of different tools in skilled spinners. So we could actually start to think about the fact that you use different tools, whether that is something that you, you can just shift between those tools or whether it requires an additional effort in learning to use a new tool.
- [23:24]
A
One of the tests he carried out was with Eva Anderson Strand, one of the founders of the center for Textile Research in Copenhagen. She's an archaeologist who specializes in textile tools. He recorded her using a drop spindle to spin two kinds of yarn. One session went well and the other not so well. On the brain scans, it produced greatly different results. Here's Eva.
- [23:53]
D
Well, the first test we did was feeling very well. I was very happy to see that there was an activity in my brain for the first to see. And I also thought it was fascinating to when then Mark analyzed the the data that we got, that he could not just see that there were activities, but also when I was doing the different processes, which is in spinning, when you pull out the yarn, when you turn the spindle around, and so on. And that is actually visible in the data. And I think that was also why I was so frustrated the second time that I choose the wrong material, because the wool I choose was not good to spin with a tiny, small spindle. I would have needed a much larger spindle to spin it, and I didn't have that.
- [24:48]
A
So Eva had two tests. One where she was spinning very happily and the second where everything went wrong. Her frustration showed up quite clearly in her brain scan, but it ended well.
- [25:02]
D
It was interesting also how we could see when you put the graph beside each other, the graph when I could see how my brain looked like when it was working, and the other graph when it was not working, that was quite interesting.
- [25:16]
A
Mark picked out part of her brain activity from just one electrode above her motor cortex and looked at a time frequency plot from the spinning session that didn't go so well. You can see there are certain frequencies where Ava's brain oscillates more, much more. And as a present for her, the staff at the center for Textile Research turned Mark's brain plot into a wonderful tactile tapestry that hangs on Ava's office wall. A picture of her brain struggling to spin with unfamiliar material.
- [25:56]
D
Today, there is a lot of effort put into what we call craft therapy. Craft is very healthy. Many people enjoy craft. We have a flow. You can concentrate, you get relaxed, and so on. But there is also the backside of it, like when it's not working. What is happening then? How long time does it take to learn craft from when you were the beginner to the skilled one. What happens when you get older? Can you still perform the craft the same way you did when you were young? And also this, yes, it's nice to have a flow, but you also got this very romantic shimmer, so to say, of it. But when you have to do the craft, when you really have to perform it for spinning all the yarn. For a sailcloth, for example, Viking age sailcloth, you need to spin around more than 100, maybe 150, 200,000 meters of yarn. Yes, it's nice if you have a flow, but do you really enjoy it? How does it affect the body? The challenge is that I have so far never worked with a craft person that don't have problems with her body. It's either the hand of the spinning or the shoulder after weaving. And that is something that we can learn more about.
- [27:27]
A
As well as using brain imaging, Eva and Mark have also used motion capture technology, mocap, the process of digitally recording human movement to create animation. Neither project has been able to continue for lack of funding, but they hold out the possibility of greater understanding for archaeologists.
- [27:51]
D
I think what is really, really important here is that we produce when we are spinning, when we are doing the spinning text, we have a material that we can then compare with an archaeological material. We can look at the threads that the beginner spun, for example, compared with the threads that the experienced spinner spun, and that give us some idea that we can look at archaeological textiles and start to discuss, are these beginners or are they. How experienced are the spinners? Because we have also, in the materials, uneven and evenly spun yarn. But it's also more the bigger picture because we also thinking. The question you always get as an archaeologist working with craft, especially when you come to specialized craft, they say, how did I come up with this? How did I start to do it? And that is a very difficult question to answer. But the thing is that if you're producing something and that makes your body feel very good, well, when you're performing, that, of course, make you do perform even more and to continue and to develop. So I think that is also an interesting aspect of this project. And it's also, when do you stop to learn? When can you do everything?
- [29:22]
A
For Mark, the project goes to something fundamental about being a human being on this earth. When we move, he says, we are in constant interaction with our environment.
- [29:35]
C
The small, intricate sensory, perceptual experiences that we have when, for instance, we hold the yarn or we touch a piece of wood, is actually feeding into the online decisions that we are doing while we take actions. So we are not just creatures that think of a detailed plan and then we execute it. All those small, intricate sensory experiences that we have and sensory inputs that we get from all of our senses, from the vision, from our bodies, they actually influence the way that we make our movements and how we decide to do One movement compared to another movement. And it's not like necessarily a conscious decision that we make. It's. It's taking place extremely fast. And that I am really intrigued about. With these types of experiments that we can actually look at both how the body acts and we can then analyze the material that we're looking at afterwards. So my dream about this project is that we can really start to understand this closed loop between us as humans acting in a world that provides us with some sensory information. And we cannot really separate ourselves from acting with the external world. It's something where we are in constant interaction.
- [30:56]
A
The example he gives is working with wood.
- [30:59]
C
Let's say you were involved in carpentry or something like that. Then there is a small knot in the wood. You would have to sort of negotiate that and move around it in certain ways. And that ends up being then how we have actually, actually acts it on. On this piece of material. And that closed complex circuitry of interactions between us as human bodies and the external world. And then the processes that takes place in the brain while we do that is really where I could see that that using these crafts, processes, where we have this immediate feedback from the world is really important to understand because we as human humans have evolved with our bodies with certain capabilities. And that has probably also been decisive factors in how we form our lives in this closed interaction with the environment. So my ideal avenue in this field is that we can actually investigate this and we need these very close interactions where we immediately feel something from the external world that influences the decisions that we take.
- [32:13]
A
Stitch youh Brain and Mark and Ava's project, measuring how the body and brain work in harmony, are very different projects. One set out to measure creativity and the other skill and how we execute that skill. But both tell us an enormous amount about who we are and why textile crafts matter, not just in the past, but as a modern living practice and part of an interesting and fulfilling life. Getting your hands and brain to work together is an underrated form of intelligence that liberates us and extends us. And if you're contemplating a project and don't quite know where to start, start. Here's a final word from Monica Auch of Stitch your Brain.
- [33:05]
B
I did another little survey and I just asked a few people what they thought about the project. Now, in hindsight, there's a few people who said they are just so happy that they did this because they did realize how important it is to. To work with your hands and that you shouldn't be afraid that you will fail or whatever, because you just have to go on and you find a solution and you just get into a dialogue with a material and you do stuff. So I think that showed me that you have to trigger people. You have to find a good task or just a good impulse and give them the most ordinary materials in order to get them going going.
- [34:07]
A
Thank you for listening and thank you to Ava, Mark and Monica for their insight and input to this episode. If you if you'd like to see pictures of Stitch youh Brain or Ava's brain woven in tapestry, then head over to www.hapticandhue.com listen and look for series seven. Haptic and Hu is hosted by me, Jo Andrews. It's edited and produced by Bill Taylor and sound edited by Charles Lomas of D Darkroom Productions. It's an independent podcast free of ads and sponsorship, supported entirely by its listeners, who generously fund us through Buy Me a Coffee or by becoming a friend of Haptic and Hu. Friends get access to free textile gifts every month and an extra podcast hosted by me and Bill Taylor, where we cover interesting events and the textile news of the day. To join friends, go to www.hapticandhue.com join. We'll be back next month with a new episode about the extraordinary history of hooked rugs. Proddy, Clutie, Clippy, Hooky, Tattit and Peggy Rugs. Just some of the names for these wonderful homemade mats. But until then, it's goodbye from me and enjoy whatever you are making.