Why Creative Geniuses Are Often Neurotic

[Buster's Uncle]

Why Creative Geniuses Are Often Neurotic
LiveScience.com
By Stephanie Pappas  September 2, 2015 7:46 AM



One of the last photographs taken of Charles Darwin.



Sir Isaac Newton formulated the laws of gravity, built telescopes and delved into mathematical theories. He was also prone to bouts of depression and once suffered a mental breakdown.

In this sense, Newton was like many other creative, driven individuals. Charles Darwin, for example, struggled with nausea and gastrointestinal distress in response to stress, so much so that modern psychologists have suggested that he may have had a panic disorder. Winston Churchill referred to his dark moods as his "black dog," leading to speculation that he might have had episodes of depression.

Whatever the truth behind these prominent men's mental health, multiple studies have found a link between creativity and neuroticism — a tendency toward rumination and negative thinking. Now, British researchers have proposed a possible reason for the connection: Creativity and neuroticism could be two sides of the same coin.


Overthinking it

Neuroticism is a personality trait that lends itself to worry, anxiety and isolation. Highly neurotic people are more susceptible to mental illness than happy-go-lucky types; they're also worse at high-risk professions like military aviation or bomb disposal, which require coolness under pressure. On the other hand, neuroticism seems linked to creative pursuits. Studies have found, for example, that artists and other creative people score higher on tests of neuroticism than people who aren't in creative fields.

"This is something that bothered me for a long time," said Adam Perkins, a lecturer in the neurobiology of personality at King's College London. Perkins is the co-author of a new opinion piece published Aug. 27 in the journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences that lays out the possible links between neuroticism and creativity in the brain.

Perkins was listening to a lecture by Jonathan Smallwood, a psychologist and expert on daydreaming at the University of York in England, when Smallwood mentioned that people who report high levels of negative thoughts show lots of activation in a brain region called the medial prefrontal cortex, even when they're just resting in a brain scanner. This area, which sits behind the forehead, is involved in the appraisal of threat.

"It's quite a simple leap to think they've got a sort of internal threat generator in their heads," Perkins told Live Science. "They can be lying down in bed or sitting in an armchair in a perfectly neutral environment, and yet they're feeling as if they're under threat."


Self-generated thoughts

These "self-generated thoughts" can obviously make people miserable, Perkins said. In essence, people are imagining problems that don't exist. Studies show that neurotic people have sensitive amygdalae, the almond-shaped brain structures involved in processing fear and anxiety. So, neurotic people not only invent problems, but tend to become very stressed by them.

But self-generated thoughts are also linked to planning skills and the ability to delay gratification. Perkins realized that the brain's internal threat generator might have pros as well.

"Neurotic people feel sort of miserable spontaneously, and they also tend to be better at coming up with creative solutions for things," he said. Isaac Newton, for example, once wrote that he solved problems by chewing over them incessantly. "I keep the subject constantly before me," he said, "and wait till the first dawnings open slowly, by little and little, into a full and clear light." 

Thus, the neurotic tendency to dwell on things might be the very root of creativity and problem solving, Perkins said.


Anxiety and genius

According to Perkins and his colleagues' hypothesis, the brains of neurotic people might have a particularly persistent "default mode network," which is the circuit in the brain that becomes activated when people are doing nothing in particular. The medial prefrontal cortex is part of that system. If neurotic people have trouble turning off this thought-generating network, it might make them more prone to overthinking, dwelling and otherwise mulling over problems — real and imagined.

This can be a problem because neurotic people also have oversensitive amygdalae. The tendency to become panicked over imagined problems can make neurotic people quite miserable, Perkins said.

On the other hand, neuroticism could have benefits, he said. "If you dwell on problems for a long time, when those problems are not in front of you … it seems quite obvious that you'll be more likely to come across a solution than one of those happy-go-lucky people who live their life in the moment," Perkins noted.

It's a tantalizing notion, but no one has yet done the experimental work that would prove that the same processes cause neurotic worrying and creative genius.

And finding proof will be difficult, Perkins warned. It's difficult to measure creativity in the lab. Most tests involve giving participants an ordinary object and asking them to come up with as many uses for that object as they can. That's not really the same thing as laying out the theory of evolution or inventing the jet engine, Perkins said. (Frank Whittle, inventor of the jet engine, also suffered several nervous breakdowns during his life.)

"Really creative people are rare," Perkins said. "It just seems that a lot of them are neurotic."

One concrete step toward proving the link could be to study medial prefrontal cortex activity in people with high levels of neuroticism, Perkins said. However, it might take a neurotic genius to come up with other ways forward.

"We just hope this will give some impetus to people who are cleverer than us to come up with some good tests," Perkins said.

http://news.yahoo.com/why-creative-geniuses-often-neurotic-114639473.html

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The two DO have excess attention to details in common...

[Unorthodox]

expert on daydreaming

How does one get that job?

[Buster's Uncle]

You probably need to start with a psychology degree.


-Meanwhile, there's a whole class of buttons in Enterprise that I wanted to make gaudy bright clear resin-looking like on real Star Trek - but it turns out those colors are also the background colors in text entry boxes like the one I'm typing in.

So I tried creating little .gif buttons as a work-around to lay atop the light, bland, background colors I had to use.  Those showed up and lit up beautifully.  -But also showed up as the background in in the text boxes.

So, I have to take those back out and settle for florid borders.

-I think the New Thread buttons and the like don't need to match the main menu, though.  This will take a few hours...

[Lorizael]

While I don't mind the self-flattery these kinds of articles induce, I haven't seen a lot of evidence to to indicate that creative types are significantly more likely to be "neurotic" than non-creative types. The neurotic ones tend to stick out, though. So, you know, there are plenty of neurotic, non-creative people, too, as well as plenty of creative, non-neurotic people. /me shrugs

[Buster's Uncle]

...I have a lot of trouble with the neurotic, non-creative people, when I can't avoid them...

[Green1]

It is one of the sad facts that often the most fulfilling work also does not pay. Or, if they do pay, you are at the whims of a patron and what they want lest be cut off and left babbling to yourself at a bus stop laying on newspaper. The world does not profit on a society of geniuses and artists and there is constant downward pressure to do something "useful" to someone. Most of the time, something totally outside your talents. And, even if there is genuine talent there is nothing preventing someone doing an Edison like what happened to Tesla. Genius does not always equate with business.

That in itself would make one just a tad neurotic.

[Buster's Uncle]

It's... trying when almost no one can keep up.

[Elok]

I was given to understand that magnetic imaging of the brain was still in its infancy.  Most creative people I've met have been preeeetty weird, albeit not necessarily neurotic.  More unconventional in general than any one tendency you can put a name on.

Most aspies have an obsessive love for systems.  Usually one specific type, typically mechanical.  The stereotypical example is trains; we're all supposed to be obsessed with trains.  But any enormous database of interrelated facts can form an obsession.  I've read about kids who grew up spazzing over classic cars or the ways different artists depict Spider-man.  It's a way we compensate for the chaos of the world, by fixating on something neat and orderly.

My dad's is orchids.  I never properly had one in the full-fledged way, I simply absorbed tons of information in general.  But I've come to realize that much of my desire to write is essentially a desire to engineer my own obsession.  Every attempt at writing a book starts with a pointlessly intricate fantasy world I can stick together in my head, complete with scads of specialized terms.  I tend to get stuck on the actual book-writing part, even though I can write reasonably well, just because that's less compelling to me than jumping on to the next mess of ideas.  And the results are never as good as what I had in my head.

[Buster's Uncle]

At the most basic level, if the world-building is good, then simply come up with a pretext to tour it.  That's worked wonders for many from Tolkien to Niven, neither of whom exactly came up with 100% compelling and nuanced characters to do it with.

[Green1]

Most aspies have an obsessive love for systems.

True. But being aspie does not necessarily mean that such system is not rooted in delusion. One of my favorite drunken super villain hobbies is critiquing profiles and methodology on dreg places like Okay Cupid forums. You would think that such a love for systems, even mechanical, could overcome this where they could analyze components and use things to be successful.

But, genius and high function autism is not, I think, related. For every Temple Grandlin (pioneer in Animal husbandry who had serious, serious autism stuff to overcome), there is also random frustrated gamer aspie #34456 who will do little to better the lot unless he develops  Temple's ways of experimentation and throwing away crap and keeping what works instead of clinging to untested and debilitating clutter then waving a "look at my disability, people suck!" flag.

[benschwab]

At the most basic level, if the world-building is good, then simply come up with a pretext to tour it.  That's worked wonders for many from Tolkien to Niven, neither of whom exactly came up with 100% compelling and nuanced characters to do it with.

But I've never had a desire to read Niven...  now Clark on the other hand, his explorations (like in Rama) are great reads.  Maybe Clark knew his boundaries better than Niven and didn't, say, try to shoehorn a romance into a universe exploration piece.

[Buster's Uncle]

Niven's never been guilty of shoehorning a lot of people-issue ANYthing into his work.

[Lorizael]

Are you forgetting all the randomly interspersed sex scenes in Ringworld?

[Buster's Uncle]

They're not very sexy sex scenes, are they?

[Green1]

No. You want sex scenes, try the later Heinlein novels. Polyamory in detail up the wazoo. Also explains why there was always a huge proportion of poly/open folks at renfairs and sci fi cons.

He was also the influence for books like The Ethical [promiscuous] that came out in the late 90s that some in geek culture consider a Bible for relationships.