Crazy Creativity?

Is there a connection between mental illness and creativity? A blog by Renee Hopkins Callahan started me on this line of thinkering. In a previous episode, I commented on Bipolar, ADHD, creativity. I’ll get back to that and, as promised, talk about span of attention. But I get bored if I stay on one task very long, so I’ll shift to another subject under the same question.

In the same blog, she suggested that creative people are more open to input from the environment and that this condition, if badly managed, might be associated with psychosis. She mentioned a study that seemed to support that idea. That study used methodology I would call quaint. The modern method for investigating this question is clearly fMRI or some other noninvasive measure of brain activity. Here is something I got from Google.
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New research on individuals with schizotypal personalities – people characterized by odd behavior and language but who are not psychotic or schizophrenic – offers the first neurological evidence that they are more creative than either normal or fully schizophrenic individuals, and rely more heavily on the right sides of their brains than the general population to access their creativity.

The work by Vanderbilt psychologists Brad Folley and Sohee Park was published online last week by the journal Schizophrenia Research.
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Schizotypes are not psychotic. Just weird. Or at least weird as judged by psychologists. (I know people who think psychologists are weird.) But anyway, some psychologists think they can assign people to the schzotype category with some “personality” tests. As you can guess, the psychologists who invented the category thought it way related to schizophrenia.

The researchers in this study measured creativity and brain activity (NIRS) in normals, schizotypes, and schizophrenics. NIRS is not fMRI, but is another method for locating brain activity. The researchers used a common psychological measure of creativity: they showed the subjects common household objects and asked them to make up new ways to use them. The schizophrenics and the normals were about equal on this measure. The schizotypes were more “creative”. That means they thought of more novel ideas. The NIRS results showed that in doing this task, the schizotypes generated greater activity in the right hemisphere, as compared to the others.

I am not going to endorse the category of schizotype here. But I consider it useful if it can be associated with distinctive patterns of brain activity and behavior under specific conditions. Nor am I going to endorse the “fixed category” view of creativity that is apparent in this line of thinking.

Consider, for example, “normal” people. That is, people who would be considered normal by psychologists. There is abundant evidence that such people can increase their creativity by practicing the relevant skills. Brainstorming is the best studied of these methods, but the Thinkerer suggests others: Ideator.

Or to put it existentially, why do you care whether people with mental illness tend to be more creative than “normal” people? What you really care about is what you, here, now, in this moment, can do to achieve the kind of creativity that is of use to you. Is that a crazy idea? You decide.