I've always wondered if a lot of "eccentric" people aren't just behaving the way everybody would naturally behave if they could get away with it. I say and do a lot of things because I have to if I want to have food to eat and a place to sleep, but I'll never know how different my behavior _might_ have been if I were rich enough or brilliant enough that people would just put up with whatever I happened to feel like doing at any given moment.
As much as I like to joke that the greatest artists were all deeply flawed people, so I'm trying to become an alcoholic arsehole in order to become a better author, as the article states, there are a lot of good and great artists/creatives who are not substance abusing wife beaters.<p>I think there are a couple of factors at play here. The first is that you never hear about how normal an artist was. Nobody talks about how Ansel Adams didn't beat his wife and wasn't an alcoholic, because that's just normal. We only talk about Hemingway's alcoholism, or Van Gogh's mental condition. So we're conditioned to believe that artists are flawed people.<p>The second factor is that people want to justify why they're not a great artist. "I'm not a great writer, but at least I don't emotionally abuse everyone I know and I'm not a raging alcoholic".
The article focuses exclusively on mood disorders, which frankly isn’t what most people think of or mean by “mad” in any case. Nikola Tesla for example was mad as a hatter, but it appears to have been a delusional disorder. While depression for example can be psychotic, it tends not to be, and I think psychosis or at least delusional beliefs are the hallmark of what is commonly meant when the public talks about “madness.”
Article and “meta-research” distinctly not related to genius.<p>Genius is a distinctly one-in-a-million phenomenon, this is about people of above average creativity and how they relate to those of below average creativity. And very dubious categorization at that.
Speaking of the stereotype of 'mad genius', as opposed to the eccentric creative which this article is about, I would hypothesize that 'mad' is simply a mislabeling of the fact that those who are more intelligent are <i>generally</i> going to be less guided by social norms and more by their own logic and views. Being able to follow your own logic, without bounds, is something that is most people, for some reason, do not tend to do.<p>Einstein is the best example of this. Relativity, and its implications, are intuitively insane and absurd. Yet his logic led him there and he invested an immense amount of effort and energy trying to prove it. And it turned out he was correct. In a parallel universe where the laws of physics are more sane, Einstein would have been labeled as insane for even imagining such an 'absurd' idea might be reality.
James Joyce said<p>"To say that a great genius is mad, while at the same time recognizing his artistic merit, is no better than to say he is rheumatic or diabetic"<p>His daughter had mental health issues. She went to see Jung and the exchange allegedly went<p>“Doctor Jung, have you noticed that my daughter seems to be submerged in the same waters as me?” to which he answered: “Yes, but where you swim, she drowns.”
I used to be nuts. And you know what, I went with it.<p>I could focus on a project 24-7-365. That's how great projects get done. And people who get great projects done are what we call "geniuses".<p>I'm better now. Sometimes I think of the great projects that I could do but then I think, "no thanks, life is bigger than that".
An article about the status/role/context of insanity and society which doesn't mention Foucault's work? Published in the year of my birth (1961), which I like to think is a coincidence...<p>Foucault M. History of Madness. Khalfa J, editor, translator & Murphy J, translator. New York: Routledge; 2006. ISBN 0-415-27701-9.
Yes, why should a shizophreniac who wildly connects everyday experiences to form strange conspiracy theories would have a natural advantage when it comes to wildly recombining seemingly unconnected ideas, to leap over boundaries every 100 recombination?<p>Of course, if there is a birth advantage there- all the meritocratic idealism and work wont get you or your kids there.<p>So its very very anti-equalizism. Its okay, though, if that "benefit" messes up someone elses life and strands him/her living in a box. That is just how the world is supossed to work. Sick people must suffer, if they do not fit into the world tailored for average people by average people. No sense in protesting gods wanted order. Move along.
Creativity seems to stem from being outside of the "mainstream" mindset, of going down paths not taken and trying unconventional strategies. Most of the time these don't work out putting an emphasis on the tried and true, but when it does it get labeled as a spark of genius, of creativity. I think it takes a certain type of person to continually beat down these paths and blaze unconventional trails and may be a mark of a 'mad' man/woman, but it may just take those kinds of people to not try and conform with conventional wisdom.
It's interesting that there was no talk of anxiety. In talking about the availability heuristic, which is refereneced a lot in Daniel Kahneman's _Thinking Fast and Slow_, they also talk about how anxiety tends to activate System 2 (which is the one for deep thinking), as opposed to the intuitive and nearly autonomous System 1.<p>Creativity and intelligence are considered different, but related, and Kahneman talks about how the activation of System 2 allows people to make more well informed (smarter) decisions.
I've always believed that "genius" is simply mental illness with an audience.<p>People such as Mozart were known for feeling nervous anxious etc, until they wrote music which was cathartic, which nowadays I'm sure would be diagnosed as some sort of mental illness.
<i>The Romantic stereotype that creativity is enhanced by a mood disorder</i><p>That's postulated as a given. If it's not a given, then it's a red herring. The author supplies no evidence that it's a given. As far as I got, the phrase 'mood disorder' was undefined.<p><i>... But is there any scientific reason to believe in a connection?</i><p>Science doesn't believe, science constructs and improves models based on repeatable observations. That which cannot be observed cannot be modelled. People can choose to 'believe' those models ... which is 'faith'. Which science was invented to get away from.<p>So in the first two paragraphs, the author prepares us for the illucid neo-phrenology which follows.
I don't get this article. As far as I can tell, it wants to prove (in spite of the headline) that mental illness and creativity are not really correlated. Then it goes on to say that measuring either mental illness or creativity is hard on its own -- in which case the meta-analysis done isn't terribly useful?<p>My own unempirical take on genius is it's not so much "you need some insanity to have groundbreaking genius-level ideas" but "some people are so into doing thing x that they will choose to do it almost all the time, and some of these people have talent and luck in thing x too, which is a potent combination that looks like what we'd call genius".
I taught gifted education at a prestigious middle school for five years. Over 300 kids came through my classroom during that time.<p>I saw it all. Seizures. Fistfights. One girl was pretty sure there were secret messages from the principal in the tests I gave. Lots of them started taking drugs early too.<p>The culmination happened in the Fall of 2012, when one girl convinced her friends that, if they killed themselves, they'd wake up already graduated from college, with school behind them. Luckily, they didn't succeed. And so, in a class of 30 people, I had 6 out and in a mental hospital.<p>Mad geniuses. They're real.
This article is trying to rebute David Horrobin idea that if everyone is creative then the world will soon be become crazy. It takes a geniuses to see a stick as a weapon. If Everyone starts becoming creative then the whole society will quickly devenigate.We need slme order. Horrobin arguement goes against the idea that everyone can be a creative genius. What is interesting about his idea is that how universal craziness is amongst a small proportion of the population, which means it is has been around a very long time.