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?
Are creative and crazy the same thing?
Back in January, I wrote about some theories related to the scientific causes of creativity. One of them was about a possible relation or similarity between schizophrenia and creativity - a study done three years ago found that the behavior of some highly creative people is rather like that of people with the mental illness.
Now comes a study that finds a certain gene mutation may result in intense creativity in some people and in schizophrenia or psychosis in others. The scientific community will probably want to see this mutation examined further before subscribing to this one study’s results, but the connection is intriguing. I just hope people don’t use it to reinforce the widely held notion that artists are nuts.
Read the story and see what you think.
Cat images painted by artist Louis Wain during the period when he became schizophrenic.