Why Mad Scientists Are Mad

Friday, June 30th, 2006

Sharon Begley, the science columnist of the Wall Street Journal, examines the cognitive nature of creativity in Why Mad Scientists Are Mad: What’s Behind the Creative Mind? :

There is little doubt that screening from conscious awareness that which is irrelevant to your immediate needs helps focus concentration. It may also be good for mental health, since paying attention to every little sight, sound, and thought can drive you batty. Indeed, reductions in this filtering mechanism, called latent inhibition, have long been linked with a tendency to psychosis. But Carson wondered whether that “failure” might also spur original thinking. To find out, she and colleagues had 182 Harvard students undergo tests in which they listened to repeated strings of nonsense syllables, heard background noise, and saw yellow lights on a video screen. The students also filled out questionnaires about their creative achievements (which is how Carson identified all those composers, scientists, and the rest), and took standard intelligence tests.

Comparing the measures of the students’ latent inhibition (how many of those noises and lights they noticed) with their IQ scores and creativity, the scientists found that the more creative had significantly lower scores for latent inhibition than the less creative. The truly eminent creative achievers, such as those who had achieved commercial success in the art or music world before the age of twenty-two, were seven times more likely to have low rather than high scores for latent inhibition. Low latent inhibition, it seems, increases the available “mental elements” — thoughts, memories, and the like, or what Carson calls “bits and pieces in the cognitive workspace” — that supply the raw material for originality and novelty.

“Getting swamped by new information that you have difficulty handling may predispose you to a mental disorder,” Carson says. “But if you have high intelligence and a good working memory, you are more likely to be able to combine bits of new information in creative ways.”

Just how closely linked are genius and madness?

In the largest study ever conducted of the connection between creativity and madness, Arnold Ludwig analyzed the biographies of about one thousand eminent men and women. He found that mental illness occurred more frequently in this group than it did in the general population. Specifically, 60 percent of the composers had psychological problems, as did 73 percent of the visual artists, 74 percent of the playwrights, 77 percent of the novelists and short-story writers, and 87 percent of the poets. But only about 20 percent of scientists, politicians, architects, and business people had even mild mental illness. In a similar study at the University of California, Berkeley, creative people were given psychological evaluations. Again, creativity was associated with psychopathology. Writers, for instance, scored higher than the general population on measures of depression, schizophrenia, paranoia, and other mental illnesses. As UC Davis’s Simonton concludes, “The genius-madness link may be more than myth.”
[...]
Another mental illness recently linked to creativity is bipolar disorder. In this illness, people experience alternating episodes of depression and mania, the latter characterized by intense bursts of energy, and, perhaps, creativity. Among the poets and writers suspected of suffering from bipolar disorder are John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe and Robert Louis Stevenson, and playwright Eugene O’Neill. Psychologist Kay Redfield Jamison has found that 38 percent of the artists she studied had been treated for an emotional illness, either simple depression or bipolar disorder. In contrast, 1 percent of the general population suffers from bipolar disorder, and about 10 percent from depression.

Leave a Reply