Editor's Note
The Arts and the Mind-full Doctor
The physician’s mind is an intricate structure. It absorbs facts, digests concepts, and integrates them to make diagnostic and therapeutic decisions. It must blend people knowledge with scientific truth and come out with something useful. Sometimes after a day filled with dozens of patient visits, scores of phone calls, and hundreds of decisions, it seems like nothing more can be stuffed into or spit out of that brain. So is there room for the arts? Aren’t novels, poems, art, or music mere add-ons that threaten to overload our already-strained minds? This month’s issue of Minnesota Medicine suggests we physicians need to make space in our brains for the arts.
I am constantly looking for ways to add space to my brain and my day. I’ve streamlined my note-making process. I’ve tweaked my phone call protocols. I’ve fiddled with cell phones and pagers to improve my efficiency. And I constantly use the Internet, which allows me to contact patients by email, read journals instantaneously, and perform Google searches to find answers to almost all the questions I encounter during the course of a work day. Yet although I think I’ve got it down to a science, I wonder what all these multitasking, efficiency-driven, Internet-immersed days are doing to my mind. Can I still read a book or savor a symphony after 10 hours of internal medicine practice in a world ruled by computers?
In a July 2008 Atlantic Monthly article provocatively titled “Is Google Making us Stupid?” Nicholas Carr looks at the Internet and the 500-pound gorilla corporation Google and muses about whether they are changing not just how we do things but how we think. As an entrenched Web user, Carr applauds the instant access to endless troves of information, but he has noticed that he now thinks differently and may have even lost certain abilities: “My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.” Carr worries that a generation of Internetters will no longer be able to read deeply because they’ve spent so much time in the Web’s contemplation-free zone. For historical proof that changes in media change thought, he invokes Socrates, who worried that writing would cause minds reared in an oral tradition to lose memory skills; Gutenberg, who mass-produced words and altered not just human history but human consciousness; and Nietzsche, who developed his aphoristic style when he started writing with a typewriter. Now Google is methodically organizing the sea of information in our world to the point of creating artificial intelligence. Indeed, one of Google’s founders, Larry Page, said “The ultimate search engine is something as smart as people—or smarter.”
Maybe all physicians need is information and logic, but I don’t think so. Of what use is poetry to harried, Internet-reared practitioners? Ask Nancy Baker, who is creating podcasts about poetry and practice, or this year’s writing contest winner Marilyn Aschoff Mellor. Of what use is music to scientific doctors or suffering patients? Ask family physician Stanley Woolner, who makes time for composing, or ICU patients who have experienced music’s therapeutic magic.
I don’t believe Larry Page or fellow Google founder Sergei Brin will design tomorrow’s world completely. No matter how much quick information we can access, we will always need literature, poetry, music, and art to reach that part of us that the Internet can’t tap. I believe it so much I’m building bookshelves.
Charles R. Meyer, M.D., editor in chief
Dr. Meyer can be reached at
cmeyer1@fairview.org