Tale, watercolor and acrylic, 2016.
Lighting the Lamps in the Mind and Heart
Sticking point #4: “I hyper-caffeinate to fend off chronic lethargy. Even when there’s time to create, I don’t always feel mentally or emotionally up to it.”
Google “creativity” and “diet” and you’ll find a series of articles promising optimal brain performance if you eat from their recommended list of “superfoods.” All kinds of berries. Nuts and seeds. Whole grains like oats, quinoa, barley, and amaranth. Avocados. “Sulforaphane for the brain,” as raw-food coach Karen Ranzi says: cruciferous greens like broccoli, kale, brussels sprouts, and spinach. Cauliflower and broccoli sprouts are especially rich in this cognition-boosting (and cancer-fighting) phytochemical.
The only animal foods nutritionists ever seem to recommend for brain health are eggs and salmon (or cold-water fish in general). When I was a kid, my father often quoted a doctor on the radio who asserted that eggs are “nature’s perfect food,” but clinical researcher and professor of medicine Dr. Neal Barnard has since dubbed them “the incredibly inedible egg,” noting that one egg has as much cholesterol as a Big Mac. Eggs make the list only because they’re high in choline, a vitamin essential for brain and liver health, but you can get adequate doses of choline from collards, broccoli, cauliflower, brussels sprouts, asparagus, tofu, quinoa, and other plant sources instead.
As for salmon, the fish flesh you purchase at the supermarket most likely comes from intensive-confinement farming operations in which the poor creatures are forced to swim in their own feces. The types of omega-3s for which fish consumption is touted—DHA and EPA—actually come from the algae the fishes eat, and the human body converts a certain amount of ALA to DHA and EPA. So even if we’re not sure we’re getting all the omega-3 fatty acids we need from ALA-rich walnuts, flax, leafy greens, and other land sources, we can use algae supplements for DHA and EPA instead of fish oil, which tends to go rancid (and may be tainted with mercury).
Scientists have found that a traditional Mediterranean diet—high in vegetables, fruit, beans, and nuts—may lower your risk of Alzheimer’s and cognitive decline in general. “When researchers tried to tease out the protective components, fish consumption showed no benefit, neither did moderate alcohol consumption,” writes Dr. Michael Greger, a medical doctor who specializes in clinical nutrition. “The two critical pieces appeared to be vegetable consumption, and the ratio between unsaturated fats and saturated fats, essentially plant fats to animal fats.” Greger recommends a vegan diet in bestselling books like How Not to Die.V
When you live by the standard Western diet—with super-high cholesterol and saturated fat from red meat, poultry, eggs, and dairy—all that gunk has to go somewhere, so over time it turns into plugs in your arteries and plaque in your brain. The effect is the same even if you consume these foods in moderation. So, if you want to keep coming up with brilliant ideas well into your golden years, quitting animal products is the best decision you can make. Mind you, I am not a nutritionist, but I have been vegan for seven years now and my thinking has never been clearer.
Kerry Lemon, a very talented and prolific illustrator from the UK, reports the same since going vegan four years ago, and she also experienced a more consistent energy level. “I no longer have the three o’clock slump, and heavy feeling after meals,” she wrote me. “I used to have to plan creative activities for the mornings when I was at my best but am now able to work creatively at any time.” Artist and vegan lifestyle coach Vicki Brett-Gach concurs: “I have more creative energy (and feel it more consistently) than I had before I was vegan…now, I practically bounce out of bed in the morning and cannot wait to dive into my creative work. And I long for it like I never had before on the days when my schedule doesn’t permit [it].”
Physiological recalibrations occur whenever you make a long-term change in your diet, but when you go vegan, the cognitive shift is even more remarkable. “Not only did I lose weight, I also noticed better mental clarity,” Adama Maweja writes in her essay “The Fulfillment of the Movement.” “My mind opened up. It was as if I’d been in a dark room or tunnel, when suddenly a bright and brilliant light was turned on. I went to class, paid attention, and understood things at another level. I no longer had to labor over my books as before. I began to ask questions and make points that could not be countered. I could hear what wasn’t being said and could read between the lines.”
My experience was much like Maweja’s, especially the light I saw above my head during that pivotal conversation with my friend Jamey; though in my case, it felt more like Dorothy stepping out of her black-and-white farmhouse into a world of technicolor. I felt like I’d been given a neurological upgrade: a brand-new mind, bright and clean. Ideas, good ideas, came rushing forth as they never had before—a leveling-up of what midcentury psychologist and creativity expert J.P. Guilford called the “fluency factor”: “the person who is capable of producing a large number of ideas per unit of time, other things being equal, has a greater chance of having significant ideas.” Guilford also wrote that a creative act requires a change in thought or behavior and that creativity flourishes through mental flexibility, or a willingness to consider new ideas. In researching this book, I’ve shaken my head time and again at the wisdom we’re encouraged to apply to every aspect of human life except the torture and consumption of animals.
But the clarity I experienced was primarily psychological. I began to notice all the myriad little lies we tell ourselves and each other. I only eat animals that lived good lives. May all beings everywhere be happy and free, except those destined for my dinner. My diet is healthy because I want to believe it’s healthy. Feedback loops and confirmation bias became too obvious to ignore, like a spaceship landing in a public park in broad daylight. Over the past seven years, I’ve channeled these new insights into my writing, and while one could argue that my recent work is more fully realized simply because I am older and therefore more practiced, there is no other explanation for this sustained level of productivity when I once languished in those year-long troughs.
Put another way, the quality and quantity of my output increased with the quality of my input. When poet and musician Saul Williams taught a class at Stanford called “The Muse, Musings, & Music,” he stipulated that each student had to go vegetarian for the semester in order to pass. Some were furious—they’d registered for the class expecting a famous slam poet to read their poems and pile on the praise. What the hell was this BS? Williams told the complainers,
Oh, you want me to monitor your creative output? Why would I want to dig through your shit if you’re not paying attention to what’s creating your shit? Why should I monitor what comes out of you if you’re not monitoring what goes into you? You think there’s no connection? What you read is your diet. What you watch is your diet. Channels? Dumb shit? That’s your diet. What you listen to is your diet. What you talk about, what you allow to be talked about in circles around you? That’s your diet. That’s what you’re ingesting…So you’re digesting all this shit and trying to come up with something original? You’re not surrounded by originality. How do you expect it to come out of you?
I suppose someone who cares too much for propriety might be put off by the scatological nature of this argument, but Williams is spot on, in art and in general: owning our waste means taking responsibility for what we’ve chosen to put in our mouths (or let into our consciousness) to begin with. The old notion of passively waiting for the Muse to bless your efforts is now a matter of readying oneself by eating and otherwise living well.
In a piece called “Unleashing Creativity” in Scientific American, Ulrich Kraft offers “Steps to a Creative Mind-Set,” chief among them being “Intellectual courage. Strive to think outside accepted principles and habitual
