I think perhaps that been manic depressive merely acts as a whip to spur follow through on a specific idea and that gets the output out. Otherwise the road to creation is remarkably simple. First it is critical to train the mind to a high level in the first place. In my case i mastered the corpus of applicable mathematics and Relativity as per Einstein's Understanding. Thus you are prepared.
At the same time you must absorb masses of data. I do not mean that you memorize the data so much as understand it and put is aside. In that way if there are dots to connect, you can rely on your subconscious to throw something useful at you. For me that has included the recollection of a chemical teacher's words in high school fifty years ago. That is often enough to take you forward.
It took me twenty years to connect the necessary dots to piece together a method of building the Great Pyramid, on time and on budget using only Bronze Age technology. { Hint - It can be Done - Arclein }
Secrets of the Creative Brain
A leading neuroscientist who has spent decades
studying creativity shares her research on where genius comes from,
whether it is dependent on high IQ—and why it is so often accompanied by
mental illness.
Nancy Andreasen
He was intermittently depressed, but that was only the beginning. His
mother had suffered from depression and committed suicide on Mother’s
Day, when Kurt was 21 and home on military leave during World War II.
His son, Mark, was originally diagnosed with schizophrenia but may
actually have bipolar disorder. (Mark, who is a practicing physician,
recounts his experiences in two books, The Eden Express and Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So,
in which he reveals that many family members struggled with psychiatric
problems. “My mother, my cousins, and my sisters weren’t doing so
great,” he writes. “We had eating disorders, co-dependency, outstanding
warrants, drug and alcohol problems, dating and employment problems, and
other ‘issues.’ ”)
While mental illness clearly runs in the Vonnegut family, so, I
found, does creativity. Kurt’s father was a gifted architect, and his
older brother Bernard was a talented physical chemist and inventor who
possessed 28 patents. Mark is a writer, and both of Kurt’s daughters are
visual artists. Kurt’s work, of course, needs no introduction.
For many of my subjects from that first study—all writers associated
with the Iowa Writers’ Workshop—mental illness and creativity went hand
in hand. This link is not surprising. The archetype of the mad genius
dates back to at least classical times, when Aristotle noted, “Those who
have been eminent in philosophy, politics, poetry, and the arts have
all had tendencies toward melancholia.” This pattern is a recurring
theme in Shakespeare’s plays, such as when Theseus, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream,
observes, “The lunatic, the lover, and the poet / Are of imagination
all compact.” John Dryden made a similar point in a heroic couplet:
“Great wits are sure to madness near allied, / And thin partitions do
their bounds divide.”
Compared with many of history’s creative luminaries, Vonnegut, who
died of natural causes, got off relatively easy. Among those who ended
up losing their battles with mental illness through suicide are Virginia
Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, Vincent van Gogh, John Berryman, Hart Crane,
Mark Rothko, Diane Arbus, Anne Sexton, and Arshile Gorky.
My interest in this pattern is rooted in my dual identities as a
scientist and a literary scholar. In an early parallel with Sylvia
Plath, a writer I admired, I studied literature at Radcliffe and then
went to Oxford on a Fulbright scholarship; she studied literature at
Smith and attended Cambridge on a Fulbright. Then our paths diverged,
and she joined the tragic list above. My curiosity about our different
outcomes has shaped my career. I earned a doctorate in literature in
1963 and joined the faculty of the University of Iowa to teach
Renaissance literature. At the time, I was the first woman the
university’s English department had ever hired into a tenure-track
position, and so I was careful to publish under the gender-neutral name
of N. J. C. Andreasen.
Not long after this, a book I’d written about the poet John Donne was
accepted for publication by Princeton University Press. Instead of
feeling elated, I felt almost ashamed and self-indulgent. Who would this
book help? What if I channeled the effort and energy I’d invested in it
into a career that might save people’s lives? Within a month, I made
the decision to become a research scientist, perhaps a medical doctor. I
entered the University of Iowa’s medical school, in a class that
included only five other women, and began working with patients
suffering from schizophrenia and mood disorders. I was drawn to
psychiatry because at its core is the most interesting and complex organ
in the human body: the brain.
I have spent much of my career focusing on the neuroscience of mental
illness, but in recent decades I’ve also focused on what we might call
the science of genius, trying to discern what combination of elements
tends to produce particularly creative brains. What, in short, is the
essence of creativity? Over the course of my life, I’ve kept coming back
to two more-specific questions: What differences in nature and nurture
can explain why some people suffer from mental illness and some do not?
And why are so many of the world’s most creative minds among the most
afflicted? My latest study, for which I’ve been scanning the brains of
some of today’s most illustrious scientists, mathematicians, artists,
and writers, has come closer to answering this second question than any
other research to date.
The first attempted examinations of the connection between genius and insanity were largely anecdotal. In his 1891 book, The Man of Genius,
Cesare Lombroso, an Italian physician, provided a gossipy and expansive
account of traits associated with genius—left-handedness, celibacy,
stammering, precocity, and, of course, neurosis and psychosis—and he
linked them to many creative individuals, including Jean-Jacques
Rousseau, Sir Isaac Newton, Arthur Schopenhauer, Jonathan Swift, Charles
Darwin, Lord Byron, Charles Baudelaire, and Robert Schumann. Lombroso
speculated on various causes of lunacy and genius, ranging from heredity
to urbanization to climate to the phases of the moon. He proposed a
close association between genius and degeneracy and argued that both are
hereditary.
Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, took a much more rigorous approach to the topic. In his 1869 book, Hereditary Genius,
Galton used careful documentation—including detailed family trees
showing the more than 20 eminent musicians among the Bachs, the three
eminent writers among the Brontës, and so on—to demonstrate that genius
appears to have a strong genetic component. He was also the first to
explore in depth the relative contributions of nature and nurture to the
development of genius.
As research methodology improved over time, the idea that genius might be hereditary gained support. For his 1904 Study of British Genius, the English physician Havelock Ellis twice reviewed the 66 volumes of The Dictionary of National Biography.
In his first review, he identified individuals whose entries were three
pages or longer. In his second review, he eliminated those who
“displayed no high intellectual ability” and added those who had shorter
entries but showed evidence of “intellectual ability of high order.”
His final list consisted of 1,030 individuals, only 55 of whom were
women. Much like Lombroso, he examined how heredity, general health,
social class, and other factors may have contributed to his subjects’
intellectual distinction. Although Ellis’s approach was resourceful, his
sample was limited, in that the subjects were relatively famous but not
necessarily highly creative. He found that 8.2 percent of his overall
sample of 1,030 suffered from melancholy and 4.2 percent from insanity.
Because he was relying on historical data provided by the authors of The Dictionary of National Biography rather than direct contact, his numbers likely underestimated the prevalence of mental illness in his sample.
A more empirical approach can be found in the early-20th-century work
of Lewis M. Terman, a Stanford psychologist whose multivolume Genetic Studies of Genius
is one of the most legendary studies in American psychology. He used a
longitudinal design—meaning he studied his subjects repeatedly over
time—which was novel then, and the project eventually became the
longest-running longitudinal study in the world. Terman himself had been
a gifted child, and his interest in the study of genius derived from
personal experience. (Within six months of starting school, at age 5,
Terman was advanced to third grade—which was not seen at the time as a
good thing; the prevailing belief was that precocity was abnormal and
would produce problems in adulthood.) Terman also hoped to improve the
measurement of “genius” and test Lombroso’s suggestion that it was
associated with degeneracy.
In 1916, as a member of the psychology department at Stanford, Terman
developed America’s first IQ test, drawing from a version developed by
the French psychologist Alfred Binet. This test, known as the
Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scales, contributed to the development of
the Army Alpha, an exam the American military used during World War I to
screen recruits and evaluate them for work assignments and determine
whether they were worthy of officer status.
Terman eventually used the Stanford-Binet test to select high-IQ
students for his longitudinal study, which began in 1921. His long-term
goal was to recruit at least 1,000 students from grades three through
eight who represented the smartest 1 percent of the urban California
population in that age group. The subjects had to have an IQ greater
than 135, as measured by the Stanford-Binet test. The recruitment
process was intensive: students were first nominated by teachers, then
given group tests, and finally subjected to individual Stanford-Binet
tests. After various enrichments—adding some of the subjects’ siblings,
for example—the final sample consisted of 856 boys and 672 girls. One
finding that emerged quickly was that being the youngest student in a
grade was an excellent predictor of having a high IQ. (This is worth
bearing in mind today, when parents sometimes choose to hold back their
children precisely so they will not be the youngest in their grades.)
These children were initially evaluated in all sorts of ways.
Researchers took their early developmental histories, documented their
play interests, administered medical examinations—including 37 different
anthropometric measurements—and recorded how many books they’d read
during the past two months, as well as the number of books available in
their homes (the latter number ranged from zero to 6,000, with a mean of
328). These gifted children were then reevaluated at regular intervals
throughout their lives.
“The
Termites,” as Terman’s subjects have come to be known, have debunked
some stereotypes and introduced new paradoxes. For example, they were
generally physically superior to a comparison group—taller, healthier,
more athletic. Myopia (no surprise) was the only physical deficit. They
were also more socially mature and generally better adjusted. And these
positive patterns persisted as the children grew into adulthood. They
tended to have happy marriages and high salaries. So much for the
concept of “early ripe and early rotten,” a common assumption when
Terman was growing up.
But despite the implications of the title Genetic Studies of Genius,
the Termites’ high IQs did not predict high levels of creative
achievement later in life. Only a few made significant creative
contributions to society; none appear to have demonstrated extremely
high creativity levels of the sort recognized by major awards, such as
the Nobel Prize. (Interestingly, William Shockley, who was a 12-year-old
Palo Alto resident in 1922, somehow failed to make the cut for the
study, even though he would go on to share a Nobel Prize in physics for
the invention of the transistor.) Thirty percent of the men and
33 percent of the women did not even graduate from college. A surprising
number of subjects pursued humble occupations, such as semiskilled
trades or clerical positions. As the study evolved over the years, the
term gifted was substituted for genius. Although many
people continue to equate intelligence with genius, a crucial conclusion
from Terman’s study is that having a high IQ is not equivalent to being
highly creative. Subsequent studies by other researchers have
reinforced Terman’s conclusions, leading to what’s known as the
threshold theory, which holds that above a certain level, intelligence
doesn’t have much effect on creativity: most creative people are pretty
smart, but they don’t have to be that smart, at least as measured
by conventional intelligence tests. An IQ of 120, indicating that
someone is very smart but not exceptionally so, is generally considered
sufficient for creative genius.
But if high IQ does not indicate creative genius, then what does? And how can one identify creative people for a study?
One approach, which is sometimes referred to as the study of “little c,”
is to develop quantitative assessments of creativity—a necessarily
controversial task, given that it requires settling on what creativity
actually is. The basic concept that has been used in the development of
these tests is skill in “divergent thinking,” or the ability to come up
with many responses to carefully selected questions or probes, as
contrasted with “convergent thinking,” or the ability to come up with
the correct answer to problems that have only one answer. For example,
subjects might be asked, “How many uses can you think of for a brick?” A
person skilled in divergent thinking might come up with many varied
responses, such as building a wall; edging a garden; and serving as a
bludgeoning weapon, a makeshift shot put, a bookend. Like IQ tests,
these exams can be administered to large groups of people. Assuming that
creativity is a trait everyone has in varying amounts, those with the
highest scores can be classified as exceptionally creative and selected
for further study.
While this approach is quantitative and relatively objective, its
weakness is that certain assumptions must be accepted: that divergent
thinking is the essence of creativity, that creativity can be measured
using tests, and that high-scoring individuals are highly creative
people. One might argue that some of humanity’s most creative
achievements have been the result of convergent thinking—a process that
led to Newton’s recognition of the physical formulae underlying gravity,
and Einstein’s recognition that E=mc2.
A second approach to defining creativity is the “duck test”: if it
walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it must be a duck. This
approach usually involves selecting a group of people—writers, visual
artists, musicians, inventors, business innovators, scientists—who have
been recognized for some kind of creative achievement, usually through
the awarding of major prizes (the Nobel, the Pulitzer, and so forth).
Because this approach focuses on people whose widely recognized
creativity sets them apart from the general population, it is sometimes
referred to as the study of “big C.” The problem with this
approach is its inherent subjectivity. What does it mean, for example,
to have “created” something? Can creativity in the arts be equated with
creativity in the sciences or in business, or should such groups be
studied separately? For that matter, should science or business
innovation be considered creative at all?
Although I recognize and respect the value of studying “little c,” I am an unashamed advocate of studying “big C.”
I first used this approach in the mid-1970s and 1980s, when I conducted
one of the first empirical studies of creativity and mental illness.
Not long after I joined the psychiatry faculty of the Iowa College of
Medicine, I ran into the chair of the department, a biologically
oriented psychiatrist known for his salty language and male chauvinism.
“Andreasen,” he told me, “you may be an M.D./Ph.D., but that Ph.D. of
yours isn’t worth sh--, and it won’t count favorably toward your
promotion.” I was proud of my literary background and believed that it
made me a better clinician and a better scientist, so I decided to prove
him wrong by using my background as an entry point to a scientific
study of genius and insanity.
The University of Iowa is home to the Writers’ Workshop, the oldest
and most famous creative-writing program in the United States (UNESCO
has designated Iowa City as one of its seven “Cities of Literature,”
along with the likes of Dublin and Edinburgh). Thanks to my time in the
university’s English department, I was able to recruit study subjects
from the workshop’s ranks of distinguished permanent and visiting
faculty. Over the course of 15 years, I studied not only Kurt Vonnegut
but Richard Yates, John Cheever, and 27 other well-known writers.
Going
into the study, I keyed my hypotheses off the litany of famous people
who I knew had personal or family histories of mental illness. James
Joyce, for example, had a daughter who suffered from schizophrenia, and
he himself had traits that placed him on the schizophrenia spectrum. (He
was socially aloof and even cruel to those close to him, and his
writing became progressively more detached from his audience and from
reality, culminating in the near-psychotic neologisms and loose
associations of Finnegans Wake.)
Bertrand Russell, a philosopher whose work I admired, had multiple
family members who suffered from schizophrenia. Einstein had a son with
schizophrenia, and he himself displayed some of the social and
interpersonal ineptitudes that can characterize the illness. Based on
these clues, I hypothesized that my subjects would have an increased
rate of schizophrenia in family members but that they themselves would
be relatively well. I also hypothesized that creativity might run in
families, based on prevailing views that the tendencies toward psychosis
and toward having creative and original ideas were closely linked.
I began by designing a standard interview for my subjects, covering
topics such as developmental, social, family, and psychiatric history,
and work habits and approach to writing. Drawing on creativity studies
done by the psychiatric epidemiologist Thomas McNeil, I evaluated
creativity in family members by assigning those who had had very
successful creative careers an A++ rating and those who had pursued
creative interests or hobbies an A+.
My final challenge was selecting a control group. After entertaining
the possibility of choosing a homogeneous group whose work is not
usually considered creative, such as lawyers, I decided that it would be
best to examine a more varied group of people from a mixture of
professions, such as administrators, accountants, and social workers. I
matched this control group with the writers according to age and
educational level. By matching based on education, I hoped to match for
IQ, which worked out well; both the test and the control groups had an
average IQ of about 120. These results confirmed Terman’s findings that
creative genius is not the same as high IQ. If having a very high IQ was
not what made these writers creative, then what was?
As
I began interviewing my subjects, I soon realized that I would not be
confirming my schizophrenia hypothesis. If I had paid more attention to
Sylvia Plath and Robert Lowell, who both suffered from what we today
call mood disorder, and less to James Joyce and Bertrand Russell, I
might have foreseen this. One after another, my writer subjects came to
my office and spent three or four hours pouring out the stories of their
struggles with mood disorder—mostly depression, but occasionally
bipolar disorder. A full 80 percent of them had had some kind of mood
disturbance at some time in their lives, compared with just 30 percent
of the control group—only slightly less than an age-matched group in the
general population. (At first I had been surprised that nearly all the
writers I approached would so eagerly agree to participate in a study
with a young and unknown assistant professor—but I quickly came to
understand why they were so interested in talking to a psychiatrist.)
The Vonneguts turned out to be representative of the writers’ families,
in which both mood disorder and creativity were overrepresented—as with
the Vonneguts, some of the creative relatives were writers, but others
were dancers, visual artists, chemists, architects, or mathematicians.
This is consistent with what some other studies have found. When the
psychologist Kay Redfield Jamison looked at 47 famous writers and
artists in Great Britain, she found that more than 38 percent had been
treated for a mood disorder; the highest rates occurred among
playwrights, and the second-highest among poets. When Joseph
Schildkraut, a psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School, studied a group
of 15 abstract-expressionist painters in the mid-20th century, he found
that half of them had some form of mental illness, mostly depression or
bipolar disorder; nearly half of these artists failed to live past age
60.
While my workshop study answered
some questions, it raised others. Why does creativity run in families?
What is it that gets transmitted? How much is due to nature and how much
to nurture? Are writers especially prone to mood disorders because
writing is an inherently lonely and introspective activity? What would I
find if I studied a group of scientists instead?
These questions percolated in my mind in the weeks, months, and
eventually years after the study. As I focused my research on the
neurobiology of severe mental illnesses, including schizophrenia and
mood disorders, studying the nature of creativity—important as the topic
was and is—seemed less pressing than searching for ways to alleviate
the suffering of patients stricken with these dreadful and potentially
lethal brain disorders. During the 1980s, new neuroimaging techniques
gave researchers the ability to study patients’ brains directly, an
approach I began using to answer questions about how and why the
structure and functional activity of the brain is disrupted in some
people with serious mental illnesses.
As
I spent more time with neuroimaging technology, I couldn’t help but
wonder what we would find if we used it to look inside the heads of
highly creative people. Would we see a little genie that doesn’t exist
inside other people’s heads?
Today’s neuroimaging tools show brain structure with a precision
approximating that of the examination of post-mortem tissue; this allows
researchers to study all sorts of connections between brain
measurements and personal characteristics. For example, we know that
London taxi drivers, who must memorize maps of the city to earn a
hackney’s license, have an enlarged hippocampus—a key memory region—as
demonstrated in a magnetic-resonance-imaging, or MRI, study. (They know
it, too: on a recent trip to London, I was proudly regaled with this
information by several different taxi drivers.) Imaging studies of
symphony-orchestra musicians have found them to possess an unusually
large Broca’s area—a part of the brain in the left hemisphere that is
associated with language—along with other discrepancies. Using another
technique, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we can watch
how the brain behaves when engaged in thought.
Designing neuroimaging studies, however, is exceedingly tricky.
Capturing human mental processes can be like capturing quicksilver. The
brain has as many neurons as there are stars in the Milky Way, each
connected to other neurons by billions of spines, which contain synapses
that change continuously depending on what the neurons have recently
learned. Capturing brain activity using imaging technology inevitably
leads to oversimplifications, as sometimes evidenced by news reports
that an investigator has found the location of something—love, guilt,
decision making—in a single region of the brain.
And what are we even looking for when we search for evidence of
“creativity” in the brain? Although we have a definition of creativity
that many people accept—the ability to produce something that is novel
or original and useful or adaptive—achieving that “something” is part of
a complex process, one often depicted as an “aha” or “eureka”
experience. This narrative is appealing—for example, “Newton developed
the concept of gravity around 1666, when an apple fell on his head while
he was meditating under an apple tree.” The truth is that by 1666,
Newton had already spent many years teaching himself the mathematics of
his time (Euclidean geometry, algebra, Cartesian coordinates) and
inventing calculus so that he could measure planetary orbits and the
area under a curve. He continued to work on his theory of gravity over
the subsequent years, completing the effort only in 1687, when he
published Philosophiœ Naturalis Principia Mathematica. In other
words, Newton’s formulation of the concept of gravity took more than 20
years and included multiple components: preparation, incubation,
inspiration—a version of the eureka experience—and production. Many
forms of creativity, from writing a novel to discovering the structure
of DNA, require this kind of ongoing, iterative process.
With functional magnetic resonance imaging, the best we can do is
capture brain activity during brief moments in time while subjects are
performing some task. For instance, observing brain activity while test
subjects look at photographs of their relatives can help answer the
question of which parts of the brain people use when they recognize
familiar faces. Creativity, of course, cannot be distilled into a single
mental process, and it cannot be captured in a snapshot—nor can people
produce a creative insight or thought on demand. I spent many years
thinking about how to design an imaging study that could identify the
unique features of the creative brain.
The images on the left show the brain of a creative subject (top) and a
matched control subject during a word‐association task. The images on
the right show brain activation as the subjects alternate between an
experimental task (word association) and a control task (reading a
word). The line representing the creative subject’s brain activation
moves smoothly up and down as the task changes, reflecting effective use
of the association cortices in making connections. The control
subject’s activation line looks ragged by comparison.
Most of the human brain’s high-level
functions arise from the six layers of nerve cells and their dendrites
embedded in its enormous surface area, called the cerebral cortex, which
is compressed to a size small enough to be carried around on our
shoulders through a process known as gyrification—essentially, producing
lots of folds. Some regions of the brain are highly specialized,
receiving sensory information from our eyes, ears, skin, mouth, or nose,
or controlling our movements. We call these regions the primary visual,
auditory, sensory, and motor cortices. They collect information from
the world around us and execute our actions. But we would be helpless,
and effectively nonhuman, if our brains consisted only of these regions.
In
fact, the most extensively developed regions in the human brain are
known as association cortices. These regions help us interpret and make
use of the specialized information collected by the primary visual,
auditory, sensory, and motor regions. For example, as you read these
words on a page or a screen, they register as black lines on a white
background in your primary visual cortex. If the process stopped at that
point, you wouldn’t be reading at all. To read, your brain, through
miraculously complex processes that scientists are still figuring out,
needs to forward those black letters on to association-cortex regions
such as the angular gyrus, so that meaning is attached to them; and then
on to language-association regions in the temporal lobes, so that the
words are connected not only to one another but also to their associated
memories and given richer meanings. These associated memories and
meanings constitute a “verbal lexicon,” which can be accessed for
reading, speaking, listening, and writing. Each person’s lexicon is a
bit different, even if the words themselves are the same, because each
person has different associated memories and meanings. One difference
between a great writer like Shakespeare and, say, the typical
stockbroker is the size and richness of the verbal lexicon in his or her
temporal association cortices, as well as the complexity of the
cortices’ connections with other association regions in the frontal and
parietal lobes.
A neuroimaging study I conducted in 1995 using positron-emission tomography, or PET,
scanning turned out to be unexpectedly useful in advancing my own
understanding of association cortices and their role in the creative
process.
This PET study was designed to examine
the brain’s different memory systems, which the great Canadian
psychologist Endel Tulving identified. One system, episodic memory, is
autobiographical—it consists of information linked to an individual’s
personal experiences. It is called “episodic” because it consists of
time-linked sequential information, such as the events that occurred on a
person’s wedding day. My team and I compared this with another system,
that of semantic memory, which is a repository of general information
and is not personal or time-linked. In this study, we divided episodic
memory into two subtypes. We examined focused episodic memory by
asking subjects to recall a specific event that had occurred in the past
and to describe it with their eyes closed. And we examined a condition
that we called random episodic silent thought, or REST:
we asked subjects to lie quietly with their eyes closed, to relax, and
to think about whatever came to mind. In essence, they would be engaged
in “free association,” letting their minds wander. The acronym REST
was intentionally ironic; we suspected that the association regions of
the brain would actually be wildly active during this state.
This suspicion was based on what we had learned about free
association from the psychoanalytic approach to understanding the mind.
In the hands of Freud and other psychoanalysts, free
association—spontaneously saying whatever comes to mind without
censorship—became a window into understanding unconscious processes.
Based on my interviews with the creative subjects in my workshop study,
and from additional conversations with artists, I knew that such
unconscious processes are an important component of creativity. For
example, Neil Simon told me: “I don’t write consciously—it is as if the
muse sits on my shoulder” and “I slip into a state that is apart from
reality.” (Examples from history suggest the same thing. Samuel Taylor
Coleridge once described how he composed an entire 300-line poem about
Kubla Khan while in an opiate-induced, dreamlike state, and began
writing it down when he awoke; he said he then lost most of it when he
got interrupted and called away on an errand—thus the finished poem he
published was but a fragment of what originally came to him in his
dreamlike state.)
Based on all this, I surmised that observing which parts of the brain
are most active during free association would give us clues about the
neural basis of creativity. And what did we find? Sure enough, the
association cortices were wildly active during REST.
I realized that I obviously couldn’t capture the entire creative
process—instead, I could home in on the parts of the brain that make
creativity possible. Once I arrived at this idea, the design for the
imaging studies was obvious: I needed to compare the brains of highly
creative people with those of control subjects as they engaged in tasks
that activated their association cortices.
For
years, I had been asking myself what might be special or unique about
the brains of the workshop writers I had studied. In my own version of a
eureka moment, the answer finally came to me: creative people are
better at recognizing relationships, making associations and
connections, and seeing things in an original way—seeing things that
others cannot see. To test this capacity, I needed to study the regions
of the brain that go crazy when you let your thoughts wander. I needed
to target the association cortices. In addition to REST,
I could observe people performing simple tasks that are easy to do in
an MRI scanner, such as word association, which would permit me to
compare highly creative people—who have that “genie in the brain”—with
the members of a control group matched by age and education and gender,
people who have “ordinary creativity” and who have not achieved the
levels of recognition that characterize highly creative people. I was
ready to design Creativity Study II.
This time around, I wanted to examine a
more diverse sample of creativity, from the sciences as well as the
arts. My motivations were partly selfish—I wanted the chance to discuss
the creative process with people who might think and work differently,
and I thought I could probably learn a lot by listening to just a few
people from specific scientific fields. After all, each would be an
individual jewel—a fascinating study on his or her own. Now that I’m
about halfway through the study, I can say that this is exactly what has
happened. My individual jewels so far include, among others, the
filmmaker George Lucas, the mathematician and Fields Medalist William
Thurston, the Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Jane Smiley, and six Nobel
laureates from the fields of chemistry, physics, and physiology or
medicine. Because winners of major awards are typically older, and
because I wanted to include some younger people, I’ve also recruited
winners of the National Institutes of Health Pioneer Award and other
prizes in the arts.
Apart from stating their names, I do not have permission to reveal
individual information about my subjects. And because the study is
ongoing (each subject can take as long as a year to recruit, making for
slow progress), we do not yet have any definitive results—though we do
have a good sense of the direction that things are taking. By studying
the structural and functional characteristics of subjects’ brains in
addition to their personal and family histories, we are learning an
enormous amount about how creativity occurs in the brain, as well as
whether these scientists and artists display the same personal or
familial connections to mental illness that the subjects in my Iowa
Writers’ Workshop study did.
To participate in the study, each subject spends three days in Iowa
City, since it is important to conduct the research using the same MRI
scanner. The subjects and I typically get to know each other over dinner
at my home (and a bottle of Bordeaux from my cellar), and by prowling
my 40-acre nature retreat in an all-terrain vehicle, observing whatever
wildlife happens to be wandering around. Relaxing together and getting a
sense of each other’s human side is helpful going into the day and a
half of brain scans and challenging conversations that will follow.
We begin the actual study with an MRI scan, during which subjects perform three different tasks, in addition to REST: word
association, picture association, and pattern recognition. Each
experimental task alternates with a control task; during word
association, for example, subjects are shown words on a screen and asked
to either think of the first word that comes to mind (the experimental
task) or silently repeat the word they see (the control task). Speaking
disrupts the scanning process, so subjects silently indicate when they
have completed a task by pressing a button on a keypad.
Playing word games inside a thumping, screeching hollow tube seems
like a far cry from the kind of meandering, spontaneous discovery
process that we tend to associate with creativity. It is, however, as
close as one can come to a proxy for that experience, apart from REST.
You cannot force creativity to happen—every creative person can attest
to that. But the essence of creativity is making connections and solving
puzzles. The design of these MRI tasks permits us to visualize what is
happening in the creative brain when it’s doing those things.
As I hypothesized, the creative people have shown stronger
activations in their association cortices during all four tasks than the
controls have. (See the images on page 74.) This pattern has held true
for both the artists and the scientists, suggesting that similar brain
processes may underlie a broad spectrum of creative expression. Common
stereotypes about “right brained” versus “left brained” people
notwithstanding, this parallel makes sense. Many creative people are
polymaths, people with broad interests in many fields—a common trait
among my study subjects.
After the brain scans, I settle in with subjects for an in-depth
interview. Preparing for these interviews can be fun (rewatching all of
George Lucas’s films, for example, or reading Jane Smiley’s collected
works) as well as challenging (toughing through mathematics papers by
William Thurston). I begin by asking subjects about their life
history—where they grew up, where they went to school, what activities
they enjoyed. I ask about their parents—their education, occupation, and
parenting style—and about how the family got along. I learn about
brothers, sisters, and children, and get a sense for who else in a
subject’s family is or has been creative and how creativity may have
been nurtured at home. We talk about how the subjects managed the
challenges of growing up, any early interests and hobbies (particularly
those related to the creative activities they pursue as adults), dating
patterns, life in college and graduate school, marriages, and
child-rearing. I ask them to describe a typical day at work and to think
through how they have achieved such a high level of creativity. (One
thing I’ve learned from this line of questioning is that creative people
work much harder than the average person—and usually that’s because
they love their work.)
One of the most personal and sometimes painful parts of the interview
is when I ask about mental illness in subjects’ families as well as in
their own lives. They’ve told me about such childhood experiences as
having a mother commit suicide or watching ugly outbreaks of violence
between two alcoholic parents, and the pain and scars that these
experiences have inflicted. (Two of the 13 creative subjects in my
current study have lost a parent to suicide—a rate many times that of
the general U.S. population.) Talking with those subjects who have
suffered from a mental illness themselves, I hear about how it has
affected their work and how they have learned to cope.
So far, this study—which
has examined 13 creative geniuses and 13 controls—has borne out a link
between mental illness and creativity similar to the one I found in my
Writers’ Workshop study. The creative subjects and their relatives have a
higher rate of mental illness than the controls and their relatives do
(though not as high a rate as I found in the first study), with the
frequency being fairly even across the artists and the scientists. The
most-common diagnoses include bipolar disorder, depression, anxiety or
panic disorder, and alcoholism. I’ve also found some evidence supporting
my early hypothesis that exceptionally creative people are more likely
than control subjects to have one or more first-degree relatives with
schizophrenia. Interestingly, when the physician and researcher Jon
L. Karlsson examined the relatives of everyone listed in Iceland’s
version of Who’s Who in the 1940s and ’60s, he found that they
had higher-than-average rates of schizophrenia. Leonard Heston, a former
psychiatric colleague of mine at Iowa, conducted an influential study
of the children of schizophrenic mothers raised from infancy by foster
or adoptive parents, and found that more than 10 percent of these
children developed schizophrenia, as compared with zero percent of a
control group. This suggests a powerful genetic component to
schizophrenia. Heston and I discussed whether some particularly creative
people owe their gifts to a subclinical variant of schizophrenia that
loosens their associative links sufficiently to enhance their creativity
but not enough to make them mentally ill.
As in the first study, I’ve also found that creativity tends to run
in families, and to take diverse forms. In this arena, nurture clearly
plays a strong role. Half the subjects come from very high-achieving
backgrounds, with at least one parent who has a doctoral degree. The
majority grew up in an environment where learning and education were
highly valued. This is how one person described his childhood:
Our family evenings—just everybody sitting around working. We’d all be in the same room, and [my mother] would be working on her papers, preparing her lesson plans, and my father had huge stacks of papers and journals … This was before laptops, and so it was all paper-based. And I’d be sitting there with my homework, and my sisters are reading. And we’d just spend a few hours every night for 10 to 15 years—that’s how it was. Just working together. No TV.
So why do these highly gifted people experience mental illness at a
higher-than-average rate? Given that (as a group) their family members
have higher rates than those that occur in the general population or in
the matched comparison group, we must suspect that nature plays a
role—that Francis Galton and others were right about the role of
hereditary factors in people’s predisposition to both creativity and
mental illness. We can only speculate about what those factors might be,
but there are some clues in how these people describe themselves and
their lifestyles.
One possible contributory factor is a personality style shared by
many of my creative subjects. These subjects are adventuresome and
exploratory. They take risks. Particularly in science, the best work
tends to occur in new frontiers. (As a popular saying among scientists
goes: “When you work at the cutting edge, you are likely to bleed.”)
They have to confront doubt and rejection. And yet they have to persist
in spite of that, because they believe strongly in the value of what
they do. This can lead to psychic pain, which may manifest itself as
depression or anxiety, or lead people to attempt to reduce their
discomfort by turning to pain relievers such as alcohol.
I’ve been struck by how many of these people refer to their most
creative ideas as “obvious.” Since these ideas are almost always the
opposite of obvious to other people, creative luminaries can face doubt
and resistance when advocating for them. As one artist told me, “The
funny thing about [one’s own] talent is that you are blind to it. You
just can’t see what it is when you have it … When you have talent and
see things in a particular way, you are amazed that other people can’t
see it.” Persisting in the face of doubt or rejection, for artists or
for scientists, can be a lonely path—one that may also partially explain
why some of these people experience mental illness.
One interesting paradox that has
emerged during conversations with subjects about their creative
processes is that, though many of them suffer from mood and anxiety
disorders, they associate their gifts with strong feelings of joy and
excitement. “Doing good science is simply the most pleasurable thing
anyone can do,” one scientist told me. “It is like having good sex. It
excites you all over and makes you feel as if you are all-powerful and
complete.” This is reminiscent of what creative geniuses throughout
history have said. For instance, here’s Tchaikovsky, the composer,
writing in the mid-19th century:
It would be vain to try to put into words that immeasurable sense of bliss which comes over me directly a new idea awakens in me and begins to assume a different form. I forget everything and behave like a madman. Everything within me starts pulsing and quivering; hardly have I begun the sketch ere one thought follows another.
Another of my subjects, a neuroscientist and an inventor, told me,
“There is no greater joy that I have in my life than having an idea
that’s a good idea. At that moment it pops into my head, it is so deeply
satisfying and rewarding … My nucleus accumbens is probably going nuts
when it happens.” (The nucleus accumbens, at the core of the brain’s
reward system, is activated by pleasure, whether it comes from eating
good food or receiving money or taking euphoria-inducing drugs.)
As for how these ideas emerge, almost all of my subjects confirmed
that when eureka moments occur, they tend to be precipitated by long
periods of preparation and incubation, and to strike when the mind is
relaxed—during that state we called REST.
“A lot of it happens when you are doing one thing and you’re not
thinking about what your mind is doing,” one of the artists in my study
told me. “I’m either watching television, I’m reading a book, and I make
a connection … It may have nothing to do with what I am doing, but
somehow or other you see something or hear something or do something,
and it pops that connection together.”
Many subjects mentioned lighting on
ideas while showering, driving, or exercising. One described a more
unusual regimen involving an afternoon nap: “It’s during this nap that I
get a lot of my work done. I find that when the ideas come to me, they
come as I’m falling asleep, they come as I’m waking up, they come if I’m
sitting in the tub. I don’t normally take baths … but sometimes I’ll
just go in there and have a think.”
Some of the other most common findings my studies have suggested include:
Many creative people are autodidacts. They like to teach
themselves, rather than be spoon-fed information or knowledge in
standard educational settings. Famously, three Silicon Valley creative
geniuses have been college dropouts: Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Mark
Zuckerberg. Steve Jobs—for many, the archetype of the creative
person—popularized the motto “Think different.” Because their
thinking is different, my subjects often express the idea that standard
ways of learning and teaching are not always helpful and may even be
distracting, and that they prefer to learn on their own. Many of my
subjects taught themselves to read before even starting school, and many
have read widely throughout their lives. For example, in his article
“On Proof and Progress in Mathematics,” Bill Thurston wrote:
My mathematical education was rather independent and idiosyncratic, where for a number of years I learned things on my own, developing personal mental models for how to think about mathematics. This has often been a big advantage for me in thinking about mathematics, because it’s easy to pick up later the standard mental models shared by groups of mathematicians.
This observation has important implications for the education of
creatively gifted children. They need to be allowed and even encouraged
to “think different.” (Several subjects described to me how they would
get in trouble in school for pointing out when their teachers said
things that they knew to be wrong, such as when a second-grade teacher
explained to one of my subjects that light and sound are both waves and
travel at the same speed. The teacher did not appreciate being
corrected.)
Many creative people are polymaths, as historic geniuses including Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci were.
George Lucas was awarded not only the National Medal of Arts in 2012
but also the National Medal of Technology in 2004. Lucas’s interests
include anthropology, history, sociology, neuroscience, digital
technology, architecture, and interior design. Another polymath, one of
the scientists, described his love of literature:
I love words, and I love the rhythms and sounds of words … [As a young child] I very rapidly built up a huge storehouse of … Shakespearean sonnets, soliloquies, poems across the whole spectrum … When I got to college, I was open to many possible careers. I actually took a creative-writing course early. I strongly considered being a novelist or a writer or a poet, because I love words that much … [But for] the academics, it’s not so much about the beauty of the words. So I found that dissatisfying, and I took some biology courses, some quantum courses. I really clicked with biology. It seemed like a complex system that was tractable, beautiful, important. And so I chose biochemistry.
The arts and the sciences are seen as separate tracks, and students
are encouraged to specialize in one or the other. If we wish to nurture
creative students, this may be a serious error.
Creative people tend to be very persistent, even when confronted with skepticism or rejection. Asked what it takes to be a successful scientist, one replied:
Perseverance … In order to have that freedom to find things out, you have to have perseverance … The grant doesn’t get funded, and the next day you get up, and you put the next foot in front, and you keep putting your foot in front … I still take things personally. I don’t get a grant, and … I’m upset for days. And then I sit down and I write the grant again.
Do creative people simply have more
ideas, and therefore differ from average people only in a quantitative
way, or are they also qualitatively different? One subject, a
neuroscientist and an inventor, addressed this question in an
interesting way, conceptualizing the matter in terms of kites and
strings:
In the R&D business, we kind of lump people into two categories: inventors and engineers. The inventor is the kite kind of person. They have a zillion ideas and they come up with great first prototypes. But generally an inventor … is not a tidy person. He sees the big picture and … [is] constantly lashing something together that doesn’t really work. And then the engineers are the strings, the craftsmen [who pick out a good idea] and make it really practical. So, one is about a good idea, the other is about … making it practical.
Of course, having too many ideas can be dangerous. One subject, a
scientist who happens to be both a kite and a string, described to me “a
willingness to take an enormous risk with your whole heart and soul and
mind on something where you know the impact—if it worked—would be
utterly transformative.” The if here is significant. Part of what
comes with seeing connections no one else sees is that not all of these
connections actually exist. “Everybody has crazy things they want to
try,” that same subject told me. “Part of creativity is picking the
little bubbles that come up to your conscious mind, and picking which
one to let grow and which one to give access to more of your mind, and
then have that translate into action.”
In A Beautiful Mind, her biography of the mathematician John
Nash, Sylvia Nasar describes a visit Nash received from a fellow
mathematician while institutionalized at McLean Hospital. “How could
you, a mathematician, a man devoted to reason and logical truth,” the
colleague asked, “believe that extraterrestrials are sending you
messages? How could you believe that you are being recruited by aliens
from outer space to save the world?” To which Nash replied: “Because the
ideas I had about supernatural beings came to me the same way that my
mathematical ideas did. So I took them seriously.”
Some people see things others cannot, and they are right, and we call
them creative geniuses. Some people see things others cannot, and they
are wrong, and we call them mentally ill. And some people, like John
Nash, are both.
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