Here are some relevant claims which track a line of thought from cancer to a problem for professional philosophy.
(1) Aromatase inhibitors, very commonly used in post-op treatment for breast cancer patients, lower available estrogen.
(2) Lower estrogen means less available dopamine.
(3) Less available dopamine creates some cognitive problems.
You can find these three discussed on this blog here One thing I had discovered before learning about aromatase inhibitors is that dopamine gives you your get-up-and-go. Losing dopamine can bring you to a halt, at least in some ways. I give an example in the earlier post. I also note that a recent long list of side-effects of aromatase inhibitors does not list any cognitive deficits, unless one counts depression and mood swings.
Another cognitive role dopamine has is giving one focus. Less dopamine means less focus and filtering; more signals reach the frontal lobes where ‘executive functioning’ is located. There’s more to think about, more to consider possibly relevant. More technically, having fewer dopamine receptors in the thalamus means less filtering. And that appears to be a central grounding for divergent thinking and creativity.
This grounding for creativity is not unproblematic, since in this respect schizophrenia appears to be caused in much the same way. As a comment on recent work has it:
Now research from the Karolinska Institute has shed light on a possible connection to dopamine. Looking at the dopamine receptors (D2 receptors) of ‘highly creative’ people, they found that the dopamine systems were similar to those observed in people suffering with schizophrenia in particular. The researchers postulate that dopamine receptor genes may be linked to the capacity for ‘divergent thought’.
The study, which was led by one Dr Ullen and used psychological tests to measure divergent thinking, found specifically that ‘highly creative’ types, as with schizophrenics, demonstrated a low density of D2 receptors in the thalamus. The role of the thalamus, among other things, is as a ‘filter’ which decides which thoughts and which information should make it to the cortex for reasoning to take place.
Having fewer D2 receptors then might cause less signal ‘filtering’ meaning that you have more information available to the cortex and are better able to come up with ‘novel’ solutions as a result and to ‘think outside the box’. On the negative side however, these sometimes illogical associations and connections could also be partly responsible for the kind of thinking seen in schizophrenic patients.
As the original research paper has it, highly creative types think outside a less intact box. And I think we should ask what will be the fate of such types in today’s academic philosophy. One part of the question concerns what journal referees will think of a paper with a number of original ideas commending different ways of looking at what the writer may think of as one topic, but the referees may not. One might find the reports say things like “I just don’t get this,” or “Too implausible to publish.” It may be very difficult for such a person to amass enough for a tenure case, given today’s stress on quantity of peer-reviewed items. As someone remarked to me very recently in discussing this sort of situation, there may not be any peers for the work in question.
Hopefully the person in question will get help from grad school mentors. In a more extreme case, if one or more powerful figures, recognising the creativity, get the person tenure despite a thin record, then the problem will be the lesser one of the resentment felt by others who cannot understand the work and don’t see why tenure was possible. I know of one case like this.
One might want to say to the floundering scholar, picking up a paper with five significant new ideas, “Just pick one and developed complete arguments for it”. That’s just what may be outside the person’s ability. To use a vivid but regrettably unflattering analogy: A very creative landscape artist might continually mess up colouring books.
Here’s the bottom line: Some valuable philosophers may find our current standards of number of peer reviewed publications excessively difficult to meet. One can now be almost too creative to be a professional philosopher.
Concluding comment: I’ve sat in a number of discussions of why “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” doesn’t have any good arguments in it. What would its fate be today? Probably it would be foolish to try to answer this question, but we are fortunate to have it in the canon, since it’s got a number of great ideas in it.
Feminist Philosophers 