Someone over at Quora posed the question: Why do so many comedians have issues with mental health? https://www.quora.com/unanswered/Why-do-so-many-comedians-have-issues-with-mental-health

I make a reference in Listening for the Light (pp. 253-4)to the trouble some people have controlling their imaginations and to the way some actors who apply “The Method,” i.e., the submerging of their personalities in a character following the instructions of Konstantin Stanislavski, lose track of their former personality.  This is large enough for a book. What role does the imagination and our ability or inability to control it have in our lives? What I have posted at Quora follows.

It’s not just comedians; people in theatrical performance often have the characteristics that make some aspects of that kind of work easier, such as extraordinary access to memory. We have two brains, the left, rational brain and the right, emotional brain. Normally — under a strong right ear that provides enough high-frequency sound energy to keep the left-brain and its language center dominant over the right-brain and its store of memories — people have to work to embed memories. That work we call “memorization” reinforces pathways of recall from the left-brain to the right-brain and back to the left-brain. However, people with weakness in the right-ear have extraordinarily easy access to their right-brain memories. For that reason, they often are considered geniuses. Some geniuses apply their ability to numbers and become mathematicians or computer whizzes. Some such people can read a script once and remember it word-perfect. Desi Arnaz would read a script once and be able to coach all of the actors in I Love Lucy on their lines from his one-time reading. It’s a handy ability for an actor or director. However, it implies less ability by the left-brain to control the emotions in the right brain. And the emotional instability can be great enough to carry a label of bipolarity, associative identity disorder, or even schizophrenia. Add alcohol and/or drugs to the situation and you have an extremely labile person who also is predisposed to addictions. Such a person is capable of incredibly rapid repartee, which brings to mind Robin Williams and Dana Carvey and Jim Carrey and Paula Poundstone and many others. Along with that instantaneous access to memory and the creative joining of thoughts, images, and ideas comes instantaneous access to emotions, which can useful to an actor but becomes extremely burdensome if you cannot escape from it. Normal people enjoy the blessing of being able to forget, forgive, put pain behind them, and regard the future optimistically. People with hyper-access to their memories have intrusive thoughts that keep them preoccupied with the past. The usual kinds of advice you give to people about handling upsetting memories just don’t work for them. What might work is the technique of Focused Listening that has been used to cure those mental illnesses I listed. Stimulating the right ear strengthens the stapedius muscle that controls the flow of high-frequency sound into the brain. Increasing that flow gives the person the ability to learn more self-control, including over addictions, and the ability to slow down the “chatter” from the right-brain. Then, the person has a choice about how much access she or he wants with the creative side of consciousness.