Carolyn Jack
Editor and CEO, Geniocity.comA project of The Genius Group LLC
Creative Nerve
It’s a thin line between rave and create
Update in the research on similarities between creative people and schizophrenic people: Their dopamine systems look alike.
For centuries, people have equated extreme creativity and artistry with madness – or at least weirdness – in ways that have allowed societies to stigmatize and marginalize those whose powerful imaginations gave them conceptual ability and vision very different from others’.
So I have to wonder if this research will reinforce that prejudice or eventually show us that the difference between mental illness and the capacity for great creativity is one of some slight but detectable physiological quirk, like being born with synesthesia because the nerves of your color-perception and mathematical-understanding regions of the brain happened to cross.
And could doctors undo it? Would the “sufferers” want them to?
June 1st, 2010 at 3:38 pm
This makes complete sense to me and it doesn’t even scare me. My most creative moments in life have happened when I wasn’t grounded in the everyday’s of life. You look at some of the great actors and read there bio and many of them suffered some kind of trauma in their lives. Maybe in order to escape that they “created” a world of escape and therefore are able play play such significant roles on screen. Gene Hackman for one!