Behavior

Madly Creative

Make no mistake, we are a wildly talented lot.

To see a world in a grain of sand/ and a heaven in a wild flower,
hold infinity in the palm of your hand/and eternity in an hour.

- William Blake

Making the Creativity Connection

Nancy Andreasen MD, PhD is a professor of psychiatry at the University of Iowa. She is an expert on neuroimaging and schizophrenia, is editor in chief of the American Journal of Psychiatry, and has been awarded the National Medal of Science. She also conducted the first extensive empirical study of creativity, and was the first to spot a correlation between bipolar disorder and creativity. Her most recent book is "The Creative Brain: The Science of Genius."

In a lecture entitled, "The Creating Brain: The Neuroscience of Genius" to an overflowing house at the 2007 APA annual meeting, Dr Andreasen observed out that Newton "probably had something in the schizophrenia spectrum. "He was born prematurely, was single his entire life, lived alone most of his life, was chronically suspicious, had all kinds of unusual interests and beliefs, and had a clear psychotic break at age 40.

Einstein was eccentric with schizotypal traits and had a son with schizophrenia, and James Watson also has a son with schizophrenia.

"So we can say that three of the most important discoveries in modern science were done by men who had association with schizophrenia," Dr Andreasen pointed out. "What’s the odds that occurred by chance? There must be something there."

James Joyce and Bertrand Russell also had schizophrenia in their families. With this in mind, in the 1970s, Dr Andreasen interviewed participants in the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, expecting to run across a percentage of well-adjusted individuals with schizophrenia in their families, only to find herself "absolutely astounded" to encounter instead 80 percent of them with some form of mood disorder, as well as increased rates of mood disorder and creativity in their first-degree relatives.

Confessed Dr Andreasen: "This is a great example of starting out with the wrong hypothesis and coming up with a completely different answer."

So what is going on in the brain? Dr Andreasen explained that there are 100 billion neurons in the cerebral cortex, as many as the stars in the Milky Way, with an almost infinite capacity to make connections.

All humans have creative capacity, Dr Andreasen was quick to point out. For instance, when people talk to each other, each individual is saying something he or she has never said before. But then there is extraordinary creativity, involving those who have a greater capacity to see and create new things.

In nature, there are non-linear and dynamic self-organizing systems, where small causes may have large outcomes (think butterfly effect). Birds that take off in flight create a formation, then change places to maintain their formation. Similar dynamics can be found in the ecosystem and in the economy. No one is in charge. The whole is greater than its parts. The parts spontaneously self-organize to create something new.

Creativity is probably an unconscious process. The Romantic poet, Coleridge, in writing "Kubla Khan," (subtitled, "A Vision in a Dream"), recounted how he sank into an opiate-induced sleep while reading a book about the Orient. Wrote Coleridge (with reference to himself in the third person) "all the images rose up before him as things with a parallel production of the correspondent expressions, without any sensation or consciousness of effort."

Says Neil Simon: "I step into a state that is apart from reality." And Mozart: "Whence and how [ideas] come, I know not; nor can I force them … Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successively, but I hear them, as it were, all at once. And Poincare: "Ideas rose in crowds; I felt them collide until pairs interlocked, so to speak, making a stable combination."

As Dr Andreasen explained: "Most people who are creative will say, ‘It happens unconsciously, I can’t explain it.’" Writers literally don’t know where their next sentence is coming from. Yet teachers demand that their students make an outline first. Dr Andreasen confessed to surreptitiously writing her school papers first, then submitting an outline of the paper she had already written.

At the neural level, these unconscious processes play out in our association cortices (frontal, temporal, parietal, occipital). These cortices have no specific function (such as moving a limb). "Their whole role is to facilitate making connections between one part of the brain and another." When we are thinking creatively, these cortices are running wild. "Initially, it just might be gobbledygook." Then something locks together. Gook to gobbledygook to E=MC2. "In a way, the brain disorganizes to self-organize to produce a new idea."

A study that Dr Andreasen is working on involves scanning the brains of artists and scientists (including Nobel Laureates) as they perform simple tasks. (Capturing a creative thought as it occurs is not feasible.) Dr Andreasen is working on the idea that highly creative people will have more activity in their association cortices while performing the tasks than noncreative people. Very early results on a small population so far bear out her hypothesis.

Regarding personality traits, Dr Andreasen noted that, among other things, creative individuals have very little rigidity and have trouble seeing boundaries. Because of this, they often do not perform well on standard tests, in that they see so many solutions, instead of the single right one.

Kay Jamison Weighs In

Is there any artist or writer or composer who DOESN'T have a mood disorder? Well, Shakespeare and Vermeer and the highly prolific Anonymous, but only because next to nothing is known about them, especially Anonymous. Rest assured, there are forgotten trunks sitting in musty attics somewhere brimming with evidence that the first two were mad as hatters. As for Anonymous, the sheer immensity of his oeuvre constitutes proof ipso facto of the most productive manic streak in history.

Kay Jamison's 1993 book, "Touched with Fire: Manic Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament," put the issue front stage center. Says Dr Jamison, in her introduction:

"The fiery aspects of thought and feeling that initially compel the artistic voyage - fierce energy, high mood, and quick intelligence, a sense of the visionary and the grand, a restless and feverish temperament - commonly carry with them the capacity for vastly darker moods, grimmer energies, and, occasionally, bouts of 'madness.'"

Individuals with bipolar disorder, she maintains, possess the rare ability to think along unrelated tangents, then put the pieces together ("making connections between opposites") into a grand visionary whole. Unbridled self-assurance and manic energy fuel the creative fire.

Mild melancholia, she maintains, allows a deeper tapping into emotional pools.

Dr Jamison's artistic bipolar poster child is the great Romantic poet Lord Byron, who wrote:

"... the mind's canker in its savage mood,/When the impatient thirst of light and air

"Parches the heart; and the abhorred grate/Marring the sunbeams with its hideous shade,

"Works through the throbbing eyeball to the brain/With a hot sense of heaviness and pain."

Madness and suicide ran in both sides of Byron's family. Suicide was a frequent conversational topic, while his episodic promiscuity, violent rages, and sheer reckless behavior made him a walking talking DSM. At Trinity College, Cambridge, when rules forbad him to keep a dog, he acquired a tame bear, which he kept in a tower and walked through the streets of town. In Greece, during his grand tour, he wrote, "I have outlived all my appetites and most of my vanities."

Wrote fellow poet Shelley, Byron was "an exceedingly interesting person, but as mad as the wind." In Venice, where equines were only evident in statue form, Byron became the talk of the town by galloping his horses along the water. Years of alternating reckless behavior, debauchery, and melancholia continued, until he consumed himself in the Greek independence movement, only to die at age 36 of the treatment from a fever he had contracted.

Dr Jamison cautions against focusing exclusively on Byron's psychopathy, but does acknowledge "he was not alone among writers and artists in having to play out the cards of a troubled inheritance."

Defying Gravity

A 1998 book, "Manic Depression and Creativity" by D Jablow Hershman and Julian Lieb MD provides further insight into our warped and twisted muse. The book zeros in on Isaac Newton, Ludwig Van Beethoven, Charles Dickens, and Vincent Van Gogh, whose words and activities form Exhibit A.

"As for me," Beethoven wrote, "I am in despair so often and would like to end my life." That is when he wasn't feverishly testing the limits of his new hi-tech pianoforte, bashing it for hours on end, composing in a white heat, often on walls and shutters if he could find no paper, and dousing himself with water that ran down through the floor into the apartment below.

And so we begin to see four famous lives from a viewpoint many of us know too disturbingly well: Newton, whose existence alternated between that of the hypomanic life-of-the-party to dysphoric manic feuding with his colleagues to long spells of depressive seclusion. Beethoven who so desperately lived for those ultimate highs that he sought to freeze into music. Dickens whose inexhaustible manic engine ultimately wore the rest of him out, and Van Gogh who was fated to be Van Gogh.

Manic depression, the authors are quick to note, is as much a hindrance as a muse: Newton kept delaying publication of his Principia for no apparent reason. Painful mood changes would stop both Beethoven and Dickens in their tracks, and suicide felled Van Gogh at age 37.

Rounding out the book are the author's passing insights on creative minds as disparate as Michelangelo, Mozart, Marilyn Monroe, Nikola Tesla, Pablo Picasso, Chopin, and Elvis.

In the end, that long list of wildly diverse and singular characters provides us with the ultimate affirmation of ourselves. We are not just our illness any more than we are clones. We are individuals, each of us with highly unique temperaments. How we channel our moods is a matter of personal choice. We can write a Choral Symphony or open an animal shelter or make our loved one an omelet. Our contradictory capacity for passion and despair is as confusing to us as outsiders. Far from being mere puppets on a string, we all have personality in abundance, tons of it. Some or most of us would trade it away in a heartbeat, with just cause. But at what price?

That is the never-ending question.

Updated Feb 10, 2008