What's Going On in Brains of Creative People?
What is creativity?
This question has long fascinated Nancy
Andreasen, M.D., Ph.D., the Andrew H. Woods Chair of Psychiatry at the
University
of Iowa, she acknowledged at the APA annual meeting in
Honolulu in May. Andreasen obtained a doctorate in English literature
before becoming a psychiatrist. Moreover, she has
conducted studies on the subject of creativity since becoming a
psychiatrist.
Creativity, Andreasen believes, is "the
ability to perceive or produce novel ideas or products that are useful
to society."
And it seems to start, she said, by a person plunging
into a state of deep concentration, of dissociation. She once
interviewed
the American playwright Neil Simon, and he reported
that he goes into a dissociative-like state when he creates his plays.
Once people descend into that state of
dissociation, they then probably experience heightened activity in the
association
cortices of the brain, such as certain frontal regions
and inferior temporal regions, Andreasen reported. She came to this
conclusion after conducting a brain-imaging study of
people in a resting state that showed that the association cortices of
their brains were especially active at this time.
Further evidence, she suggested, comes from a study she and her
colleagues
conducted that used neuroimaging to examine the brains
of highly creative artists and scientists and of a group of
not-so-creative
subjects during an experimental task (a
word-association task). That study indicated a lot more activity in the
association
cortices of the former group than in the latter.
Once the association cortices are activated, Andreasen is not sure what happens next in the creative process. But the cortices
probably send messages back and forth to each other and produce new ideas, she conjectured.
The reason why certain people tend to be
more creative than others is not due to I.Q., Andreasen pointed out.
Many years ago,
a Stanford University scientist conducted a landmark
longitudinal study in which he followed high-I.Q. subjects at 10-year
intervals. He found that while the subjects tended to
possess numerous positive attributes—for example, good marriages, good
income, and good mental health—"they did not
actually make creative contributions." Yet brain characteristics other
than intelligence
level explain why certain people are especially
creative, she said. For example, creative people may have larger right
brain
hemispheres than noncreative people, and creative
people are often ambidextrous or left-handed.
Indeed, a number of people with mental illness are also ambidextrous or left-handed (Psychiatric News, March 20, 2009), which raises this question: If both creative people and people with mental illness more often tend to be
ambidextrous or left-handed, are creative people also more often mentally ill?
The answer may be yes, Andreasen said. For
example, she once recruited 30 well-known writers from the Iowa
Writers' Workshop
and 30 control subjects (hospital administrators) and
compared mood disorders among the writers and their relatives with mood
disorders among the control subjects and their
relatives. She found far more instances of mood disorders in the writers
and
their relatives than in the control subjects and
theirs.
Anecdotal evidence also links creativity
with schizophrenia, she pointed out. For example, the English
mathematician and philosopher
Bertrand Russell had many family members with
schizophrenia. The English mathematician Isaac Newton was chronically
suspicious
and had a psychotic breakdown. Physicist Albert
Einstein "clearly had schizotypal traits. He was aloof and cold and had a
son with schizophrenia." The co-discoverer of the
structure of DNA, James Watson, has a son with schizophrenia. And then
there
is the Nobel Prize-winning mathematician John Nash,
Ph.D., who has schizophrenia and a son who suffers from the illness as
well (Psychiatric News, July 6, 2007).
The link between creativity and mental
illness should not be surprising, since both offer new or unique views
of the world,
Andreasen noted. Or as Nash once said, "The ideas I
had about supernatural beings came to me the same way my mathematical
ideas did. So I took them seriously."
So, just as some people who are creative
tend to be a little different, so are some people who are mentally ill.
And they
may often be one and the same, Andreasen said. And
this conclusion, she added, raises an important question: Could treating
creative, mentally ill individuals with psychotropic
medications stifle their creativity? Not necessarily, she replied. For
instance, the American poet Robert Lowell continued to
write great poetry after receiving lithium for his bipolar disorder
and was grateful to have a treatment that seemed to be
a miraculous cure after years of suffering. "I think most mentally
ill creative people are grateful to be treated with
medications if the medications improve their lives," Andreasen declared.
Are you creative?)))
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