Denny Culbert
Dr. Charles Richard, producer of the in-progress film In The Mind of the Maker, contemplates the abilities of his brain in the Louisiana Immersive Technology Enterprise center in Lafayette.
“The art of the science of the folklore”—that’s the nutshell explanation Associate Professor Charles Richard and I hammered out for his in-progress documentary In the Mind of the Maker. The folklore in question is the art of Cajun boatbuilding, the still-practiced tradition of hand-crafting the boats still very much a part of life for many who make their livelihoods in the Louisiana swamps. The science is the incredible mental capacity of these boatbuilders, which allows them to create an entire vessel without plans—and in many cases, with minimal measurement. Art comes into play because Richard, director of the Center for Moving Image Arts at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, plans to make a film as visually appealing as it will be informative. (After all, what better venue for creativity than a film about creativity?)
The result promises to be a fascinating look at a unique Louisiana folkway and the complex, surprising brain functions that make it possible. Edward Couvillier, the boatbuilder on whom Richard will focus his documentary, spends weeks “just thinking” about the boat he plans to make, mentally rendering in exquisite detail a three-dimensional model of the craft he plans to create. By rotating his imagined plan and zooming in on different areas, he then can see, in his mind’s eye, each part of the boat in advance of actually making it. While very impressive, this ability is not unique, and many of the older boatbuilders share this astounding faculty.
When I spoke to Richard about his project, he reminded me of a Cajun axiom: “Every Cajun kid had to have a horse or a boat.” Not any boat would do, either; the shallow swamps of Louisiana, punctuated with treacherous cypress roots and home to some dangerous fauna, required vessels adapted for the purpose. Cajun boat makers responded by creating a class of boats unique in American shipbuilding, with every type of vessel well suited to the terrain-less terrain of the Atchafalaya basin. Generally, this resulted in lighter, shallower boats that could be easily beached and relaunched without damage. Boats that required the oarsman to face the stern were reconfigured to allow forward-facing, looking-out-for-snakes-and-roots operation by pushing instead of pulling the oars through the water. These boats, as adapted to their native region as any animal species (to use Richard’s analogy) and adorned with evocative names like the ‘oyster lugger’ and the’ Jean Lafitte skiff,’ became deeply ingrained in the heritage of the area.
The people who built these boats, like many rural Southerners until recent times, rarely had the benefit of much formal education. They didn’t draw plans or blueprints, and often they made just one measurement—the overall bow-to-stern length of the boat. Using only this measurement along with their imaginations and their memories, these craftsmen constructed seaworthy vessels.
Couvillier continues working in his eighties and recently recreated a bateau, a type of boat he hadn’t seen in thirty years, purely from memory. While this feat sounds almost like a superpower, everyone has some measure of the abilities required—men like Couvillier have simply honed theirs through years of practice.
One key to understanding the brain processes that make up creative power is to appreciate how very attuned to the senses the brain and its imaginative functions are. Dr. Stephen Kosslyn, a neuroscientist and researcher on creativity and visualization at Stanford with whom Richard consulted for the film, said that there are about thirty different areas of the brain involved with visual perception. In capuchin monkeys (who, as the subjects of extensive laboratory experiments, have suffered much that we may know more), about sixty percent of the brain’s activities deal with vision; the proportion for human beings is thought to be similar. Sensory data—particularly visual data—is, in a manner of thinking, the language the brain uses to understand the world and to explore possible futures.
It’s also important to realize that the brain is not simply a receptacle for information but is constantly generating information itself. The brain can be mistaken for a passive receptor, simply processing the input it’s given; but according to Kosslyn, this isn’t accurate.
When you see something—for the sake of cuteness, let’s say a pug dog—the image of the dog doesn’t travel straight from eye to nerve to brain. The brain, in a sense, reaches out to meet the nerve signals as they travel toward the brain (and between different areas of the brain) with signals of its own, supplementing the actual input with memories and expectations. The brain constantly generates information like this, generally without our noticing. This action is strongest with vision because sight is by far the dominant human sense; but the phenomenon is active for the other senses as well.
The astonishing upshot of this is that the brain doesn’t really need to see something to “see” it. Close your eyes and imagine the pug dog. Even though you are only imagining the dog, your brain has activated ninety percent of the brain pathways that would normally be active if you actually saw the pup. The signal will be weaker—how much weaker varies from person to person—but in many ways, the act of imagining is eerily similar to the act of seeing.
The same principle holds true for imagined physical actions; the brain behaves the same way whether or not you raise your fist or envision raising your fist, with the difference being that with the imagined action, the signal is inhibited from reaching the muscles. (So yes, you’ve come closer to pushing your mother-in-law into traffic than you realized.)
As with anything, practice helps. Remember the urban legend about the POW who kept his sanity in a Vietcong prison by imagining, in exquisite detail, eighteen holes of golf every day, and who returned home to find he’d shaved six strokes off his handicap? While not as good as physical practice, repeated “imaginings” of an action do aid performance because neural pathways are made stronger and faster by frequent use.
This also holds true for complex visualizations like the ones needed for no-plans boatbuilding. Richard consulted Dr. Sheryl Sorby, an engineer and Ohio State professor now in Dublin on a Fulbright, who indirectly proved this when teaching introductory engineering courses at Michigan Tech earlier in her career. Sorby noticed that women were disproportionately washing out of the program, often due to trouble with the spatial reasoning aspects of the course. She remembered similar struggles from her own education and looked for a way to help otherwise strong students with spatial skill deficits become more successful. She designed a course for these students in which they practiced sketching objects from different angles, visualizing rotations, and repeating other actions thought to develop these spatial skills.
It worked like gangbusters, and students who successfully completed Sorby’s new class scored higher in later math and science courses and graduated from engineering programs in considerably higher numbers than their peers who also had weak spatial ability but did not actively address it. While inborn ability is certainly a component, Sorby’s work has shown that targeted practice can greatly improve an individual’s spatial prowess; and her courses are now taught at several engineering schools across the country.
Richard has set out to explain this all in a beautiful film, intending to explore similar ideas of creativity in interviews with cooks, musicians, and others who regularly manifest their imaginings. Perhaps most intriguing is the work of a blind sculptor who must plan the feel of his future piece as opposed to the look.
The recursive aspect of this film—an artist making an artwork about how artists make artwork—is not lost on Richard; he looks forward to making a documentary that’s not only informative, but visually appealing—a true artwork that will live up to its subject matter.
Richard is also working with advanced visual effects to show his audience what Couvillier “sees” when he works on his boats, planning to superimpose construction steps over the partially completed boat. He will also introduce viewers to Louisiana Immersive Technology Enterprise (LITE), a research facility in Lafayette dedicated to immersive visualizations, which Richard compared to the holodeck of Star Trek fame. Richard points out that the emergence of facilities like LITE, and indeed the special effects companies like Lafayette-based Pixel Magic, which has been contracted to provide the visualizations for In the Mind of the Maker, show that there is a keen and growing curiosity, both culturally and academically, about how the mind functions creatively to build images and how those images can most effectively be shared with others.
Using cutting-edge technology and advanced research to illuminate a very old craft, In the Mind of the Maker will celebrate Louisiana’s past while pointing forward to exciting developments in its future. It’s an ambitious project, but Richard’s energy and enthusiasm for his topic will undoubtedly carry the day and result in an intriguing film.
Richard compares this documentary to a surfer’s “perfect wave”; he’s been waiting for it a long time, and as it emerges he becomes more confident and eager to see it through. Tentatively, he hopes to complete filming in the spring and has already spoken with distributors in the United States, Canada, and Europe. Look for In the Mind of the Maker to soon emerge fully from the mind of its maker and blow the minds of its audiences.
Author’s note: Special thanks to Dr. Stephen Kosslyn and Dr. Sheryl Sorby for agreeing to be interviewed for this article.
Details. Details. Details.
The makers of the film are holding an online fundraising drive to raise an honorarium for Edward Couvillier for his graciousness in allowing the crew to film the construction of what will likely be his last boat. To contribute, visit indiegogo.com/projects/in-the-mind-of-the-maker.
Curious readers who care about this topic or who are interested in helping with the effort may contact Dr. Charles Richard at various online locations:
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