It seems a bit strange to blog about an article about what blogging does to our brains. It feels like attending a BA – Blogger’s Anonymous – meeting: “Hello, my name is Rachel and I blog.” Scientific American recently wrote about writing in blogs. As Timothy Wilson in Strangers to Ourselves observed, writing about our experience can have therapeutic effects. Blogging, of course, is a form of writing, a way to express our thoughts and emotions about what is going on in our lives (some of us try to tie this all in with the world at large but it’s still our own subjective rambling).

Here is what one researcher is proposing about writing as a creative outlet and how it is affects our brain. Alice Flaherty from Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, according to Harvard Brain,

argues against the oversimplified model of the right side of the brain as the seat of creativity and implicates additional areas for involvement, such as the temporal lobe and limbic system. She hypothesizes that creativity, the ability to produce innovative ideas of value, can be studied scientifically as series of interactions among different brain regions. When these interactions are modified or the areas are altered, the creative drive changes.

Although before we all set up multiple blogs, let’s remember that science is still very much in the guessing stage:

Scientists’ understanding about the neurobiology underlying therapeutic writing must remain speculative for now. Attempts to image the brain before and after writing have yielded minimal information because the active regions are located so deep inside.

And this isn’t really only about blogging. “Expressive writing” is what these researchers are studying, which can form the basis of a community, which also needs to include interpersonal contact in the real world, not just through electronic forums.

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