A Glimpse of Tommy McHugh's Brain

It bothers me a bit to try to sketch out Tommy’s brain this way. My dry scientific diagram is just a gray shadow of Tommy’s vividness. But scientific accounts of creative brains, though they may fall short, don’t destroy creativity or cheapen Tommy’s achievements. With Tommy, it’s a little easier than with most creative people to see how his brain underlies his perceptions and actions: his injury was a crack that let the light in. But the rest of us are no different from Tommy. It is through our brains that we feel and love and make art or war. Understanding how our brains work and don’t work only deepens our wonder at their complexity, and gives us powerful ways to help us create more.

PRWI 2008 Lead, is a neurologist at the Massachusetts General Hospital and assistant professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School. She also has an independent career as a writer. She heads MGH Neurology’s Brain Stimulator Unit, where she uses deep brain stimulators to treat psychiatric as well as neurological disease. Her research focuses on how our brains represent our bodies, a factor that helps drive suffering in depression, Parkinson’s, and somato¬form disorders. She is the author of The Massachusetts General Hospital Hand¬book of Neurology, which received a national award for its innovative approach and has been multiply translated.

Dr. Alice Flaherty,

During her research fellowship, she wrote The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer’s Block, and the Creative Brain an award-winning nonfiction book about the way the brain drives creativity. The Washington Post and The San Francisco Chronicle named it one of the best books of 2004.

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A strong media advocate for the abilities of the mentally ill, she has appeared as an expert on documentaries and news stories for the ABC, BBC, CBC, NBC, and PBS, as well as productions in Japan, Germany, and the Middle East. Her writing has crossed a number of genre boundaries, from scientific papers to general audience writing on the origins of literature, humorous essays, lyrical writing on the nature of loss, a picture book about the Loch Ness Monster, and a libretto for Jacob vs. Angel, an organ work by Graham Gordon Ramsay that toured six Scandinavian cities this summer. Dr. Flaherty completed her A.B., M.D., internship, residency, and fellowship at Harvard. She also completed a Ph.D. at MIT.