Exploring the Link Between Arts and Sciences : ‘Artistic Creativity Enhances Scientific Imagination,’ L.A. Biochemist Claims

What do Albert Einstein and Pablo Picasso have in common? Or Louis Pasteur and Johann Sebastian Bach? Despite the commonly held notion that scientists and artists inhabit two distinct worlds, a Los Angeles biochemist claims that these eminent thinkers may have had much in common.

Robert Root-Bernstein, 32, a MacArthur Prize fellow, has nearly completed a study of 150 scientific biographies. His findings about the inner lives of innovative men and women may be a bit startling to those educators calling for more emphasis on the sciences.

“Almost all of the great scientists and inventors are also artists, poets, musicians or writers,” said Root-Bernstein, an amateur painter and cellist. “Their artistic creativity enhances their scientific imagination.

“Furthermore,” he said, “I think it may be possible to show how their creative skills are reflected in their discoveries and in how they go about their work.”

Educators Are Listening

To his critics, who still believe in science as the sole road to truth and in art as an extracurricular activity, this is close to heresy. But these days, when Root-Bernstein talks, educators listen. Recently he spent a week at MIT consulting with three deans about curriculum reform.

As a consultant for the fine arts department at UCLA, he is writing a paper on the role of the arts in the sciences.

Pending approval, he will teach a course on the creative process in January, 1987.

Jack Morrison, assistant for special projects to fine arts Dean Robert H. Gray, expressed enthusiasm for Root-Bernstein’s ideas. “Education needs to include the arts as ways of knowing alongside words and numbers. This young man’s view that creativity unifies the two cultures--the arts and sciences--would make a radical change in higher education.”

If his research gains wide acceptance, some scientists may take a second look at how they do their work; art, too, may be redrawn. “Science is not dry-as-dust facts and immutable logic, but insight into the causes and shapes of unknown things,” Root-Bernstein said.

Imagination Learned

To perceive these unknown things takes practiced imagination, he said. How is imagination learned? Through the arts. “The fine arts are not just a source of values. They are useful because they embody tools of thought that help us learn how to perceive, order and understand our world.”

Nonverbal forms of thought, especially visual thinking, are more important to most scientists than language, he said. “The most influential scientists have always imagined a simple, new reality before they have proven its existence through complex logic or produced evidence through complicated experiments.”

New Realities

Root-Bernstein suggests that the ability to imagine new realities corresponds with what are traditionally thought to be non-scientific skills--playing, abstracting, imagining ideals, building models and recognizing patterns.

Einstein, whose passion for the violin is well known, may have developed his visual imagination through many years of doing jigsaw puzzles, Root-Bernstein said. Psychoanalyst Carl Jung wrote that his art was a way of thinking about the problems he addressed in therapy.

“Many scientists appear to have learned as much by exploring through hobbies such as painting, sculpting and building, as they did through book study.”

Root-Bernstein is vice president of the nonprofit Institute for Disease Research in Los Angeles where he seeks the control systems for hormones and neurotransmitters. “I do art, such as painting, graphs and modeling, to train myself for this work.”

Seeing World Differently

Any educational system that does not teach these tools is negligent, he said. “I’m making a call for arts in the curriculum, not as academic art history or theory, but as a way of training seeing . We don’t just want students to be able to go to a museum and identify a Van Gogh. We want art to make them see the world differently.”

Tools can be provided for educating the “eye of the mind” more fully, he said, or students can be sent into the world blinkered or blind. “Educational stress on verbal and math skills alone limits the types of problems students can raise and solve.”

Yet counselors continue to advise students to take “hard” courses like math and physics. “If students want to study music or painting, they are told that this won’t further their careers,” he said. “But my research indicates that an A in art is good for learning how to invent things.”

Root-Bernstein sees the creative process as the bridge connecting art to science. He asks, “What are the correlations between scientific imagination and other forms of creativity?” For example, why do some scientists synthesize, others specialize? Why do some prefer visual thinking, others verbal?

Against the Grain

Although Root-Bernstein’s idea of linking the arts and sciences goes against the popular grain, it is not entirely new. In 1878, J.H. van’t Hoff, a poet and the first Nobel laureate in chemistry, studied more than 200 early biographies. “Van’t Hoff found that of all the traits a scientist must have, imagination was the most important.”

Newton, Van’t Hoff pointed out, was an artist and a poet. Galileo was a poet and literary critic; Kepler was a musician and artist.

Contemporary physicists Murray Gell-Mann (a poet), Victor Weisskopf (a pianist) and Robert Wilson (a sculptor) tend to agree. They all have said that scientific and artistic problem-solving involve a similar process.

Others, such as UC Santa Cruz mathematician Ralph Abraham, point to music as a great teacher for the hard sciences. “Music trains the mind to see how complexity, as in a Bach fugue or a physiological process, results from simple rules and patterns.”

For Root-Bernstein, the key to creativity may be the ability to take a problem--”How do mountains form?”--and translate it into another form, such as an analogy, a model or picture, that is more easy to manipulate mentally. Then it can be translated back into some verbal or mathematical form.

“The ability to translate between modes of intelligence may be essential,” Root-Bernstein said. “It’s not just that a scientist is an artist, but that he or she works as an artist when doing science.”

For investigators working in conventional research settings, this artistic style is difficult to achieve, Root-Bernstein said. “My research confirms the old adage, ‘No one discovers something by looking for it.’ ”

“The current cultural split does not lie between scientists and everyone else,” said Root-Bernstein. “It lies between those who create and those who do not. Innovators and the process of innovation must become the focus of study. It is the lifeblood of cultural change.”