brandknewmag.com
18
Creative professionals are a bit more likely than others
to suffer from bipolar disorder. The healthy relatives of
schizophrenics tend to enter creative fields. A genetic variant
of some psychoses may be related to creative achievement.
Some dimensions of schizotypy--personality traits that may
make a person more vulnerable to schizophrenia--predict a
person’s creativity. The list goes on.
A neuroscience group out of Austria, led by Andreas Fink of
the University of Graz, recently took the study of schizotypy
and creativity a step further. Fink and collaborators recruited
study participants who were low or high in schizotypy
measures. While inside a brain scanner, the participants
completed an idea-generation task that asks people to
come up with original uses for everyday objects--a common
assessment of creativity.
COGNITIVE DISINHIBITION MAY MAKE
SCHIZOTYPAL PERSONALITIES MORE
PRONE TO DELUSIONAL THOUGHTS.
IT COULD ALSO MAKE CREATIVE
MINDS MORE FERTILE.
Fink and the others found some key similarities in the brain
patterns of people who scored well on originality and those
who measured high in schizotypy. These groups both showed
reduced deactivation in the right precuneus, an area of the
brain that helps us gather information. In the September
issue of Cognitive, Affective, and Behavioral Neuroscience,
Fink and the others conclude that perhaps creative and
schizotypal people share an inability to filter out extraneous
or irrelevant material.
“The finding that creativity and schizotypy show similar effects
at the level of the brain would thus support the idea that
similar cognitive processes may be implicated in creativity as
well as in psychosis proneness,” they write.
The new work enhances a theory by Shelley Carson, a Harvard
psychologist and author of the book Your Creative Brain,
which says that creativity and mental illness share a process
called “cognitive disinhibition.” The term is a mouthful, but
essentially cognitive disinhibition describes a failure to keep
useless data, images, or ideas out of conscious awareness.
This failure may make schizotypal personalities more prone
to delusional thoughts or mental confusion; on the flipside, it
could make creative minds more fertile.
“[Y]ou have more information in conscious awareness that
could be combined and recombined in novel and original
ways to come up with creative ideas,” Carson tells Co.Design.
Cognitive disinhibition is part of Carson’s larger model of
“shared vulnerability” between creativity and psychopathology.
The idea here is that the presence and power of various
cognitive factors will influence whether a person becomes
creative, mentally unstable, or a little of both. These factors
MOST CREATIVE PEOPLE DON’T
EXHIBIT SEVERE MENTAL PROBLEMS
AT ALL, IT’S JUST THAT THE NOTABLE
EXAMPLES STICK IN OUR MINDS.
include cognitive disinhibition, of course, but also IQ, working
memory, attention style, novelty preference, and more.
What’s important to keep in perspective when considering
the “shared vulnerability” model is that two people can share
behavioral and biological vulnerabilities without being alike.
That’s why not all creative people are a bit crazy and why
not every mentally ill person is especially creative. “It’s not a
one-on-one correspondence,” says Carson. In fact, she says,
most creative people don’t exhibit severe mental problems at
all; rather, the notable examples stick in our minds.
Which brings us back to our list of eccentric artists through the
ages. Perhaps genes contributing to mental problems have
persisted across humanity in part because they also contribute
to superior creativity. “Even though we know mental illness
in and of itself is not conducive to survival of the individual,
there may be aspects of mental illness that promote survival
in the overall species,” Carson says. If that’s true, the idea
that very creative people are also a little crazy will be around
for a long time to