There exists an association between creativity and major mental disorders known since antiquity. In this article, both questions are addressed. Although the proposed origin and mechanism of the brain function of creative geniuses is novel, empirical evidence is available to support this theory.
Empirical evidence demonstrates that creativity and major mental disorders share a common pool made up of individuals with an extreme temperamental variant who, if endowed with other qualities eg, high intelligence, tenacity, curiosity, energy and live in a nurturing and complementary zeitgeist, can be creative geniuses.
On the other hand, persons with a similar temperament but who do not have the additional qualities form a common pool of individuals who are at increased risk for a major mental disorder.
A few remarks regarding temperament are warranted, since they are cogent and relevant to the discussion in this article. Temperament is defined as the particular inborn behavioral propensities for each individual, which ultimately represents the final brain structural reality. It not only acts as an unfinished scaffold upon which the personality of the individual is formed, but it also guides the significance of environmental influences that are eventually embedded in the scaffold.
Both constitute, along with learned attitudes and ethos, the final personality of the individual. Temperamental components appear to originate from two areas from our evolutionary past and are expressed in distinct clusters. The first cluster originates from the evolutionary pressures on the individual, expressed as selfishness, inner directness, aloofness, and self-serving calculations.
These two unamalgamated clusters make up human nature. From an evolutionary standpoint, the normally occurring small temperamental variability, or traits, confers flexibility and resilience for the survival of the tribe as a whole, irrespective of advantage or even disadvantage to the individual.
Importantly, the mix of the temperamental components are often not distributed evenly but appear as clusters originating mainly from one or the other part of our human nature. This creates the often lopsided temperamental types eg, the extrovert and the introvert. In creative geniuses, there exists a major variation from the norm of the inborn temperament.
This variant lies beyond the normally occurring variability. Findings from clinical empirical evidence indicate that this extreme variant originates mainly from evolutionary pressures and is shared by potential geniuses and other vulnerable individuals. Schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and obsessive-compulsive disorder are the 3 conditions that develop most frequently in vulnerable individuals.
These conditions can overlap or switch from one to another. Relapses have traditionally been attributed to comorbidity; however, each syndrome might be considered as a different phase of the same disorder. Clinical evidence points to a common neurodevelopmental origin for all three. These individuals are to various degrees less social, more self-centered, and aloof. Enrolled at Oxford University aged 12, she dropped out of her course before taking her finals and started waitressing.
She later worked as a call girl. Constant worrying may, in fact, be a sign of intelligence — but not in the way these armchair philosophers had imagined. Interviewing students on campus about various topics of discussion, Alexander Penney at MacEwan University in Canada found that those with the higher IQ did indeed feel more anxiety throughout the day.
Credit: Thinkstock. Probing more deeply, Penney found that this seemed to correlate with verbal intelligence — the kind tested by word games in IQ tests, compared to prowess at spatial puzzles which, in fact, seemed to reduce the risk of anxiety.
He speculates that greater eloquence might also make you more likely to verbalise anxieties and ruminate over them. The harsh truth, however, is that greater intelligence does not equate to wiser decisions; in fact, in some cases it might make your choices a little more foolish. Keith Stanovich at the University of Toronto has spent the last decade building tests for rationality, and he has found that fair, unbiased decision-making is largely independent of IQ. The more enlightened approach would be to leave your assumptions at the door as you build your argument — but Stanovich found that smarter people are almost no more likely to do so than people with distinctly average IQs.
That is, they are less able to see their own flaws, even when though they are quite capable of criticising the foibles of others. The fallacy has been the ruination of roulette players planning for a red after a string of blacks, and it can also lead stock investors to sell their shares before they reach peak value — in the belief that their luck has to run out sooner or later.
A tendency to rely on gut instincts rather than rational thought might also explain why a surprisingly high number of Mensa members believe in the paranormal; or why someone with an IQ of is about twice as likely to max out their credit card.
Indeed, Stanovich sees these biases in every strata of society. Yet, it turns out that a high IQ is also associated with various mental and immunological diseases like depression, bipolar disorder, anxiety, ADHD as well as allergies, asthma, and immune disorders.
Why is that? A new paper published in the journal Intelligence reviews the literature and explores the mechanisms that possibly underlie this connection. The researchers turned to the field of psychoneuroimmunology PNI to look for some of the answers.
PNI examines how the chronic stress accumulated as a response to environmental factors influences the communication between the brain and the immune system. On the one hand, this gives people with high IQ heightened awareness that helps their creative and artistic work. This hyper-reactivity, however, can also lead to deeper depressions and poor mental health.
Although the reasons are not fully understood, they also tend to live longer , healthier lives, and are less likely to experience negative life events such as bankruptcy. In a study just published in the journal Intelligence, Pitzer College researcher Ruth Karpinski and her colleagues emailed a survey with questions about psychological and physiological disorders to members of Mensa.
For most intelligence tests, this corresponds to an IQ of about or higher. The average IQ of the general population is The survey covered mood disorders depression, dysthymia and bipolar , anxiety disorders generalized, social and obsessive-compulsive , attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder and autism. It also covered environmental allergies, asthma and autoimmune disorders. Respondents were asked to report whether they had ever been formally diagnosed with each disorder or suspected they suffered from it.
With a return rate of nearly 75 percent, Karpinski and her colleagues compared the percentage of the 3, respondents who reported each disorder to the national average. The biggest differences between the Mensa group and the general population were seen for mood disorders and anxiety disorders. More than a quarter The differences were smaller, but still statistically significant and practically meaningful, for most of the other disorders.
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