Many people assume that there is a fine line between creativity and insanity, and some may cite examples to support their case, such as Van Gogh or possibly Beethoven. But this article from Scientific American looks into this assumption much more closely.
The Real Link Between Creativity and Mental Illness
October 3, 2013
“There is only one difference between a madman and me. I am not mad.”
—Salvador Dali
The romantic notion that mental illness and
creativity are linked is so prominent in the public consciousness that
it is rarely challenged. So before I continue, let me nip this in the
bud: Mental illness is neither necessary nor sufficient for creativity.
The oft-cited studies by Kay Redfield
Jamison, Nancy Andreasen, and Arnold Ludwig showing a link between
mental illness and creativity have been criticized on the grounds that
they involve small,
highly specialized samples with weak and inconsistent methodologies and
a strong dependence on subjective and anecdotal accounts.
To be sure, research does show that many eminent creators– particularly in the arts–had harsh early life experiences (such as social rejection, parental loss, or physical disability) and mental and emotional instability.
However, this does not mean that mental illness was a contributing
factor to their eminence. There are many eminent people without mental
illness or harsh early life experiences, and there is very little
evidence suggesting that clinical, debilitating mental illness is
conducive to productivity and innovation.
What’s more, only a few of us ever reach eminence. Thankfully for the rest of us, there are different levels of creativity.
James C. Kaufman and Ronald Beghetto argue that we can display
creativity in many different ways, from the creativity inherent in the
learning process (“mini-c”), to everyday forms of creativity
(“little-c”) to professional-level expertise in any creative endeavor
(“Pro-c”), to eminent creativity (“Big-C”).
Engagement in everyday forms of creativity– expressions
of originality and meaningfulness in daily life– certainly do not
require suffering. Quite the contrary, my colleague and friend Zorana Ivcevic Pringle found that people who engaged in everyday forms of creativity–
such as making a collage, taking photographs, or publishing in a
literary magazine– tended to be more open-minded, curious, persistent,
positive, energetic, and intrinsically motivated by their activity.
Those scoring high in everyday creativity also reported feeling a
greater sense of well-being and personal growth compared to their
classmates who engaged less in everyday creative behaviors. Creating can
also be therapeutic for those who are already suffering. For instance,
research shows that expressive writing increases immune system functioning, and the emerging field of posttraumatic growth is showing how people can turn adversity into creative growth.
So is there any germ of truth to the link between creativity and mental illness? The latest research suggests there is something to the link, but the truth is much more interesting. Let’s dive in.
The Real Link Between Creativity and Mental Illness
In a recent report based
on a 40-year study of roughly 1.2 million Swedish people, Simon Kyaga
and colleagues found that with the exception of bi-polar disorder, those
in scientific and artistic occupations were not more likely to
suffer from psychiatric disorders. So full-blown mental illness did not
increase the probability of entering a creative profession (even the
exception, bi-polar disorder, showed only a small effect of 8%).
What was striking, however, was that the siblings of patients with autism and the first-degree relatives of
patients with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and anorexia nervosa
were significantly overrepresented in creative professions. Could it be
that the relatives inherited a watered-down version of the mental
illness conducive to creativity while avoiding the aspects that are
debilitating?
Research
supports the notion that psychologically healthy biological relatives
of people with schizophrenia have unusually creative jobs and hobbies
and tend to show higher levels of schizotypal personality traits compared to the general population. Note that schizotypy is not schizophrenia. Schizotypy consists of a constellation of personality traits that are evident in some degree in everyone.
Schizotypal traits can be broken down into two types. “Positive”
schizotypy includes unusual perceptual experiences, thin mental
boundaries between self and other, impulsive nonconformity, and magical
beliefs. “Negative” schizotypal traits include cognitive disorganization
and physical and social anhedonia (difficulty experiencing pleasure
from social interactions and activities that are enjoyable for most
people). Daniel Nettle
found that people with schizotypy typically resemble schizophrenia
patients much more along the positive schizotypal dimensions (such as
unusual experiences) compared to the negative schizotypal dimensions
(such as lack of affect and volition).
This has important implications for creativity. Mark Batey and Adrian Furnham
found that the unusual experiences and impulsive nonconformity
dimensions of schizotypy, but not the cognitive disorganization
dimension, were significantly related to self-ratings of creativity, a
creative personality (measured by a checklist of adjectives such as
“confident,” “individualistic,” “insightful,” “wide interests,”
“original,” “reflective,” “resourceful,” “unconventional,” and “sexy”),
and everyday creative achievement among thirty-four activities (“written
a short story,” “produced your own website,” “composed a piece of
music,” and so forth).
Recent neuroscience findings support the link between schizotypy and creative cognition. Hikaru Takeuchi
and colleagues investigated the functional brain characteristics of
participants while they engaged in a difficult working memory task.
Importantly, none of their subjects had a history of neurological
or psychiatric illness, and all had intact working memory
abilities. Participants were asked to display their creativity in a
number of ways: generating unique ways of using typical objects,
imagining desirable functions in ordinary objects and imagining the
consequences of “unimaginable things” happening.
The researchers found that the more creative the participant, the more they had difficulty suppressing the precuneus while engaging in an effortful working memory task. The precuneus is the area of the Default Mode Network that typically displays the highest levels of activation during rest (when a person is not focusing on an external task). The
precuneus has been linked to self-consciousness, self-related mental
representations, and the retrieval of personal memories. How is this
conducive to creativity? According to the researchers, “Such an
inability to suppress seemingly unnecessary cognitive activity may
actually help creative subjects in associating two ideas represented in
different networks.”
Prior research
shows a similar inability to deactivate the precuneus among
schizophrenic individuals and their relatives. Which raises the
intriguing question: what happens if we directly compare the brains of
creative people against the brains of people with schizotypy?
Enter a hot-off-the-press study
by Andreas Fink and colleagues. Consistent with the earlier study, they
found an association between the ability to come up with original ideas
and the inability to suppress activation of the precuneus during
creative thinking. As the researchers note, these findings are
consistent with the idea that more creative people include more
events/stimuli in their mental processes than less creative people. But
crucially, they found that those scoring high in schizotypy showed a
similar pattern of brain activations during creative thinking as the
highly creative participants, supporting the idea that overlapping
mental processes are implicated in both creativity and psychosis proneness.
It seems that the key to creative cognition is opening up
the flood gates and letting in as much information as possible. Because
you never know: sometimes the most bizarre associations can turn into
the most productively creative ideas. Indeed, Shelley Carson and her colleagues found that the most eminent creative achievers among a sample of Harvard undergrads were seven times more likely to have reduced latent inhibition. In other research, they found that students with reduced latent inhibition scored higher in openness to experience, and in my own research I’ve found that reduced latent inhibition is associated with a faith in intuition.
What is latent inhibition? Latent inhibition is a filtering mechanism that we share with other animals, and it is tied to the neurotransmitter dopamine. A
reduced latent inhibition allows us to treat something as novel, no
matter how may times we’ve seen it before and tagged it as irrelevant.
Prior research shows a link between reduced latent inhibition and
schizophrenia. But as Shelley Carson points out in her “Shared Vulnerability Model,”
vulnerable mental processes such as reduced latent inhibition,
preference for novelty, hyperconnectivity, and perseveration can
interact with protective factors, such as enhanced fluid
reasoning, working memory, cognitive inhibition, and cognitive
flexibility, to “enlarge the range and depth of stimuli available in
conscious awareness to be manipulated and combined to form novel and
original ideas.”
Which brings us to the real link between creativity and mental illness.
The latest research suggests that mental illness may be most conductive to creativity indirectly,
by enabling the relatives of those inflicted to open their mental flood
gates but maintain the protective factors necessary to steer the
chaotic, potentially creative storm.
© 2013 Scott Barry Kaufman, All Rights Reserved
Note: For much more on the real links between mental illness and
creativity, I highly recommend the upcoming book “New ideas about an old
topic: Creativity and mental illness,” edited by James C. Kaufman, due
out next year! I also recommend the following paper by Andrea Kuszewski:
“The Genetics of Creativity: A Serendipitous Assemblage of Madness.”
photo credit #1: creepypasta.wikia.com; photo credit #2: woman writing by valerie hardy; photo credit #3: searching for a baseline: functional imagining and the resting human brain; photo credit #4: istockphoto
About the Author:
Scott Barry Kaufman is a cognitive psychologist interested in the
development of intelligence and creativity. In his latest book, Ungifted: Intelligence Redefined, he presents a new theory of human intelligence that he hopes will help all people realize their dreams. Follow on Twitter @sbkaufman.
