{"id":2279,"date":"2014-07-27T07:01:20","date_gmt":"2014-07-27T11:01:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=2279"},"modified":"2014-08-22T11:08:50","modified_gmt":"2014-08-22T15:08:50","slug":"creativity-and-the-brain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=2279","title":{"rendered":"Creativity and the Brain"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"brain,<\/a>

fMRI brain images (photo: en.wikipedia)<\/p><\/div>\n

Lots of articles about creativity in the current issue<\/a> of The Atlantic<\/em>, including a fascinating long report by neuroscientist and psychiatrist Nancy Andreasen who studies the origins of creativity in the brain and its association with mental illness. She started out in the 1960\u2019s studying people involved with the Iowa Writers\u2019 Workshop. Among them was Kurt Vonnegut, who had a multigenerational family history of mental disorders and suffered from depression. (Moving interviews with Vonnegut\u2019s son Mark were included in PBS News Hour\u2019s<\/a> coverage of Andreasen\u2019s research.) Indeed, for many of the writers she studied, \u201cmental illness and creativity went hand in hand.\u201d Suicide was not uncommon. We think Hemingway, Plath, now Williams. Philip Seymour Hoffman was also far down that self-destructive path.<\/p>\n

Andreasen began her academic career clutching a doctorate in literature, taught in the University of Iowa\u2019s English Department, and published a book about the poet John Donne. But she chose to return to school in the sciences, hoping that study of the brain would lead her to understand why authors she admired had gone off the rails\u2014and maybe even to help future writers.<\/p>\n

She\u2019s worked on two vital questions: \u201cWhat 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\u2019s most creative minds among the most afflicted?\u201d As in many areas of neuroscience, the development of scanning technology, including functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has enabled her to watch the brains of creative people \u201cat work,\u201d and these scans reveal tantalizing clues to her hitherto unanswerable questions.<\/p>\n

Earlier work has shown that high IQ is not particularly linked to creativity\u2014\u201cabove a certain level, intelligence doesn\u2019t have much effect on creativity,\u201d she says. If she couldn\u2019t predict creativity from IQ measurement (with all its flaws), she had to find other ways to find subjects for research. She looked for external recognition, which led her to the distinguished faculty of the Iowa Writers\u2019 Workshop. Interviews rather quickly revealed that mood disorders (depression, mostly) were common among the writers and often ran in families. In fact, about 80 percent of the writers she interviewed had such a mental health history, compared with about 30 percent in her control group and in the population at large.<\/p>\n

But how to measure creativity in the brain? After years of pondering this difficulty, Andreasen finally arrived at this insight: \u201cCreative people are better at recognizing relationships, making associations and connections, and seeing things in an original way\u2014seeing things that others cannot see.\u201d<\/p>\n

She has expanded her study to include creative individuals from the sciences as well as the arts. This inclusion has brought her George Lucas, mathematician William Thurston, and six Nobel laureates from the sciences, in addition to novelist Jane Smiley and a group of young creative achievers. Despite their diverse fields, all these individuals show similar brain processes, revealed in the scans, that differ from the workings of control group members\u2019 brains.<\/p>\n

Wearing her psychiatrist\u2019s hat, Andreasen talks with her subjects (creatives and controls) about their growing up, family life, relationships, and creative activities. From these interviews, she\u2019s learned that \u201cCreative people work much harder than the average person\u2014and usually that\u2019s because they love their work.\u201d She\u2019s studied 26 people so far\u201413 creative geniuses and 13 controls\u2014and validated the link between mental illness and creativity as well as the evidence that creativity tends to run in families, though it may not confine itself to a single field.<\/p>\n

Other traits of the creatives include a personality style that leads them to take risks, confront rejection, and persist. Of course, she says, \u201cPersisting in the face of doubt or rejection, for artists or for scientists, can be a lonely path,\u201d and may in itself contribute to mental illness. Many creative people are autididacts\u2014they love to teach themselves\u2014and polymaths, with a wide variety of diverse interests. This holds true despite out education system\u2019s persistent separation of the arts and the sciences. \u201cIf we wish to nurture creative students,\u201d Andreasen says, \u201cthis may be a serious error.\u201d<\/p>\n

She closes by referring to the case of John Nash, the Nobel prize-winning mathematician who has schizophrenia (and who lives around the corner from me), profiled in the book and movie A Beautiful Mind<\/em><\/a>. \u201cSome 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

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