Haunted by Ourselves: The Muse in the Cerebellum

Anatomizing the Muse: The Bodily Underpinnings of Creativity, Part Two

Dear Living Dark reader,

Today’s post is too long for some email services to show its full text. If you’re reading it in email, you may need to click through to the web version for the whole essay.

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Though this essay can be read on its own, it starts in medias res, leading in directly from the first post in the series, so it may be more meaningful if you start with that one.

As I stated in the introduction to that post, the focal question here is: What are the physical aspects, and more specifically the neurological ones, of the experience of the daemon muse? And how does looking into this contribute to answering, or at least informing, the question of creativity’s ontological status and point of origin in our lives?

But beyond that—and I probably should have said this at the outset—my purpose in these essays is simply to elevate, illuminate, and clarify the subjective experience of creative inspiration itself. What’s really going on, phenomenologically speaking, when the sense of daemonic flow and communication from the muse is active? How does it feel to hear that inner voice, to feel that creative compulsion, to sense that spark of inspiration? What is it like to do our work in service to and in collaboration with this intelligence, force, or source? Those are the real buttressing points, the thing I’m getting at. We’re not looking for “the answer” to “where” the muse experience is physically “located” in our anatomy or physiology. Note the overabundance of scare quotes. This whole matter inhabits and calls attention to the boundary line, or rather the liminal zone, between fact and myth, literal and metaphorical. Throughout these essays, the former shades and bleeds into the latter, and vice versa.

If perchance you come away with a sense of having been pleasantly engaged by interesting speculations about the biology of creativity and some of the people involved in studying and thinking about it, and/but in such a way that concrete answers really don’t matter compared to the mere and sheer focus on the subject itself and the way this information and these speculations heighten both attention to the experience of inspiration and appreciation of its inherent mystery, then I will have succeeded at my self-appointed task.

Warm regards,

HAUNTED BY OURSELVES: Stan Gooch and the Cerebellar Muse

1. You and your two brains

In addition to serving as a possible muse location in its own right, the pineal gland, which was our focus in the previous installment, helps us transition to our next speculative/interpretive “lens” via its relationship to the cerebellum. Let’s allow the late psychologist and paranormal theorist Stan Gooch (1932–2010) to launch the discussion:

[W]e have two brains: the cerebrum (the front brain) and the cerebellum (the back brain). The ancestor of all mammals had two pairs of eyes—one pair on top of the head and connected to the cerebellum. The second pair was in the front of the head and connected to the cerebrum. Originally, the cerebellum was the main brain. But in the course of time the pair of eyes on top of the head fused together and sank down into the skull to form what is today called the pineal gland, which is still actually light sensitive (of course the pineal gland is the “third eye” of ancient Hindu mysticism). Now the cerebrum and its pair of front eyes became the main brain. But when did you ever hear these astonishing evolutionary facts discussed? The pineal is located directly above the cerebellum, whose name is Latin for “little brain.” This is a structure beneath the forebrain.¹

But although this passage does serve a transitional function by touching on matters that we looked at last time, it effectively slams us into the new subject of the cerebellum instead of easing us into it. We need to do some backtracking to set the stage for explaining the cerebellar muse hypothesis, which is simply the idea that the muse is located in, or perhaps simply is, the cerebellum. This was the proprietary theoretical creation of Gooch himself.