Slashdot Mirror
Creativity Potentially Linked To Schizophrenia
mcgrew writes "New Scientist is reporting that creativity may be linked to schizophrenia via a common gene. Szabolcs Kéri, a researcher at Semmelweis University in Budapest, Hungary, carried a study of creative people. 'Kéri examined a gene involved in brain development called neuregulin 1, which previous studies have linked to a slightly increased risk of schizophrenia. Moreover, a single DNA letter mutation that affects how much of the neuregulin 1 protein is made in the brain has been linked to psychosis, poor memory and sensitivity to criticism. About 50 per cent of healthy Europeans have one copy of this mutation, while 15 per cent possess two copies. People with two copies of the neuregulin 1 mutation — about 12 per cent of the study participants — tended to score notably higher on these measures of creativity, compared with other volunteers with one or no copy of the mutation. Those with one copy were also judged to be more creative, on average, than volunteers without the mutation.' They hypothesize that people with this gene with high IQs are creative, while those with lower IQs are simply prone to the hallucinations that characterize the disease."
No one said natural selection was kind.
This was on the menu of my favorite Restaurant throughout the 1990s in Beaverton, OR (It died when Tektronix scaled back):
Eight out of ten people are normal
One maybe genius,
One maybe crazy,
I hesitate to call myself genius,
That leaves only one choice
Easily the most creative Japanese/American fusion chef I've ever met.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
"Moreover, a single DNA letter mutation that affects how much of the neuregulin 1 protein is made in the brain has been linked to psychosis, poor memory and sensitivity to criticism. About 50 per cent of healthy Europeans have one copy of this mutation, while 15 per cent possess two copies."
This explains perfectly the past 250 years of European history.
I'm not very creative.
The voices have much better ideas than me.
Funny may not give karma, but +5 Informative never made anyone snort coffee out their nose.
Smart people can tell the voices in their head are their own thoughts, while the less intelligent think they are hearing disembodied voices, not their own?
My sister is diagnosed with Paranoid Schizophrenia, started with a lower iq due to learning disabilities. I'm pretty creative and intelligent. I always thought there was a link between the two. Still, its only partially genetic. It needs a stress trigger as well. There are identical twins, with one developing the disorder and the other not. The odds of one with the syndrome passing it to a direct descendant are also pretty low ~ 1% chance.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
They hypothesize that people with this gene with high IQs are creative, while those with lower IQs are simply prone to the hallucinations
Why do they hypothesize that? There are plenty of geniuses with mental health issues. Take John Nash.
If someone is smart and really creative, there's a decent chance their IQ is keeping them from becoming schizophrenic? There's a decent chance my mom, my brother and I all fall into that category, and that's both a little weird to imagine and a little spooky.
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
this study proves it! See... only stupid people are prone to suffer from schizophrenia. Smart guys like us don't have anything to worry about says the smug scientist... It's the academic version of NIMBY
All the more reason to eschew eugenics.
Health Freedom is almost as popular as Freedom itself.
IQ, schizophrenia, creativity, all vague concepts linked together with "hard numbers" of primitive statistics.
Interesting information, to be sure, but let's not push that and turn it into another psychobabble.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
Look at what it takes to get ahead in the Corporate World: A huge ego, a shitload of apathy and the never-wavering pursuit of unlimited growth margins(at any cost). Apply that criteria to politics and you can see what a brave new world it really is.
Imagination drew in bold strokes, instantly serving hopes and fears, while knowledge advanced by slow increments...
Maybe I should cease all that "outside the box" thinking my associates always compliment me on, in the interest of sanity. /wink
...As I think I am!
I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered. My life is my own.
0 copies:
http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/f4506t.pdf?portlet=3
1 copy:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/15/opinion/15dowd.html
2 copies:
http://pdfoxy.com/8986-excerpt-from-harry-potter-and-the-sorcerers-stone-pdf.html
.
.
.
256 copies:
http://timecube.com/
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I thought it was known for a long time that there is a link between creativity and schizophrenia. Seems perfectly natural to me.
Stephan
http://stephan.sugarmotor.org
. . . and many of us have suspected that there are more such links between conditions which may be pathological at one extreme, and extremely beneficial at another extreme. The schizophrenia versus creativity duality is one (and long known - we have all heard that "there is a fine line between genius and insanity"), and the whole area surrounding Asperger's Syndrome is likely another.
What about John Forbes Nash Jr.? [He's the genius they based the movie A Beautiful Mind on.
Free as in "the Truth shall set you..."
To be fair, schizophrenia does come from the Greek for "split mind". The fact that it's used to label a disorder characterized by a distorted perception of reality rather than dissociative identity disorder (which may or may not be a real disorder anyway), is rather unhelpful in trying to emphasize the difference.
They made that story up to fool us. Don't you see? They want us to link Schizophrenia to creativity because they know that it will cause us to support them. And what's wrong with that? It's because the they're not real people. Real people don't behave that way. What you call "schizophrenia" is really the result of behavioral differences among the class of people who we've come to differentiate as the Nordic type, as opposed to greys, hairies and the other classes. They can live nominally among us as they appear generall to be caucasian. Some counter that they can't be the Nordics, and this isn't entirely untrue because they are just as often offspring between Nordics and humans. Also, time dilation effects from the trasnport mechanisms used to transport them back and forth from Earth to their home worlds cause them to be smaller. Thus, they really are the Nordics and would be tall, blonde and attractive to you; but appear differently due to an effect akin to Doppler shift in their frame of reference. So when you see one of these Nordics on the street you just think they're crazy, but those are actually the social conventions in their culture and I have to go becaue I've already said too much. Just don't believe them becauese if you believe them then things can happen like when I started believing them and then you will believe them too and it will all happen. Now do you see? It's already happening and it's happening because it's too late and it's possibly even later than you think because there is a frame of reference between these Nordic types and the Grays and what you call schizophrenics.
Obligatory link...
"Screwed Up People Make Great Art" by Groovelily
Well, it's obligatory for me at least.
--You will rephrase your request for me to go to hell. Goto statements are not acceptable programming constructs
No wonder my designers are crazy!
So I wonder if this a connection, however tenuous, between Inspiration--that is, the phenomenon by which creativity manifests, e.g. hearing that improvised lick, seeing that unpainted painting, the "pop" of a boundary pushing idea--and hearing voices or hallucinating? "God" is an alteration of reality via an alteration of perception, which is itself a result of genetic mutation.
How's that for logical leaps.
schizophrenic != multiple personalities
Creative/artistic type people have active imaginations?! Holy News Flash Batman! I can't wait for the story about how librarians have a gene that has been tied to OCD.
Well,
1) I have schizophrenia (paranoid delusional, no visual or auditory hallucinations).
2) I am not creative, at all...in any artistic sense. Except maybe with words, poetry, scrabble.
3) I have an extremely vivid and active imagination.
4) My nervous system is very sensitive, I have to take meds to 'turn them down' so I'm relaxed.
5) I have an IQ of 133 and an interest in math and science; degrees in physics and computer science.
The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky
I think a lot of people have conversations with imaginary personalities in their heads. I know I tend to spontaneously test out ideas that way, and I'm not the only one I know who does that. What language the conversation happens to be in depends mostly on what language I've been using recently. It is handy in terms of learning languages, of course, since you quickly run into things you want to say and don't know how to, so you find out.
History and my personal experience are full of manic-depressive artists. No substitute for statistics, of course.
Maybe the connection is just that society drives creative people crazy.
YOU CAN HAVE A SECTION OF ALL CAPS if it is balanced against a larger section that is normal case
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I don't know much about genes but I am rather familiar with different forms of psychosis experienced by positive-type shizophrenics, schizoaffectives and type one manic depressives alike and I can say with some authority that there is indeed a correlation between one's creativity and one's proximity to psychosis. Problem is, the super-psychotics among us are just too messed up to make it through the day (the affliction afflicting the patients in the most hospital beds is schizophrenia) that they are unable to unleash their creativity in contained forms that can be digested, documented and enjoyed by the rest of the world. You don't hear too many names you'd recognize except for the Pink Floyd drummer on the lists of famous people with schizophrenia.
But you do with manic depression probably because the treatment success rate, that is the chance you've got of getting a manic depressive patient to function in society, is in the nineties versus 40% [citation needed] for schizophrenia. Manic depressives, type one bipolar to be specific, get to shoot up into the same forms of psychosis positive typed schizophrenics perpetually are locked into, write an opera or a poem or whatever, come down from mania (either naturally or with drugs) and then try to market their psychotic product to whoever's interested. Or bipolar twos who ride just below the manic border, known as hypomania (think cocaine high), and can kind of do both at the same time (with the right handlers) like ODB and DMX and Axl Rose.
As for negative typed schizophrenics, catatonics, don't expect to get much Hemingway and Liszt out of them -- or their kids /if/ there is any specific heredity between the subtypes of schizophrenia. I don't know that part. But I will tell you this, more love should be shown to the crazies' diseases whose work you appreciate and enjoy regularly, work you admire and see in museums and have no idea that the artist behind it wasn't around before asylums turned into psychiatric hospitals and the drug lithium was born and applied to treating psychosis and soon after Thorazine and all the rest and they had a disaster of a life which in many cases ended in suicide. :(
Medicine has progressed much since those two drugs which might be a shame if you think that the medicines will squelch more creative genius from being contributed to the world's vault of precious art into the future.
Calling out bogus battery capacity claims.
Have you not witnessed the volume of creative yet at times contradicting posts all from me?
Creatively Schizoid Anonymous Coward
mirc download http://www.mircbul.net/
http://www.masaldiyari.net/
Comment removed based on user account deletion
http://www.mircsite.com/ & http://www.turku.tk/
Goodness, first depression, now creativity linked to schizophrenia? What next? It's becoming like stress, you will soon be able to attribute it to anything.
I hate to make this claim without being able to cite my sources, but my access to research databases has been cut off since graduating...
But this flies against the past 20 years of research. Nearly all studies show a strong NEGATIVE correlation between nearly all types of mental illness and creativity (as measured using a variety of scales). Schizophrenia and depression are the two that leap to mind. I know there's this popular idea that the crazies are more creative (or vice versa), but it's simply not true...
http://www.mircsite.com/ indir
"There is no great genius without a mixture of madness" - Aristotle (384 BC - 322 BC)
If you can't beat them, embrace and extend them.
One of the most striking examples was their speech patterns, where in certain cases they would say things that had the timbre and cadence of normal English speech, but if you actually paid attention it didn't make any sense - it was just nonsensical syllables strung together in a pattern that superficially sounded like English.
So in other words, they were speaking Dutch.
The subject line says it all.
Creativity is the only thing that should be rewarded exorbitantly. Creativity. What the hell is that? The ability to make things that did not exist already. In the software business, it's called innovation. In the artistic fields, it's called authorship.
Linked is a slippery word. It implies causation. Correlated is more like it, meaning that we judge many people with schizophrenia as being also creative at the same time. What kind of creativity?
It could be as simple as this: persons with the diagnosis of schizophrenia choose to cope by creating.
Therefore, it does not imply that you must have schizophrenia to be creative. Creative people see new combinations, new possibilities, what-if mixtures that can change the world.
Creative people see a device such as the iPhone and come up with the killer app. Their idea was there for any other person to see but they did not.
So, creativity is not necessarily linked to schizophrenia. Instead, by coincidence, schizophrenic people are often creative.
I think a lot of people have conversations with imaginary personalities in their heads.
Sure do. Not really different personalities, but
Yeah. Would you choose a neurosurgeon who pokes around people's brains in his spare time? I wouldn't.
How about being an antisocial knob? Does that make me special?
Equine Mammals Are Considerably Smaller
Hi Tom Cruise!
Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
Its easier to solve a problem when you put two people on it. Even if they're both in my head.
Have gnu, will travel.
"Can't you see i'm burnin', yearnin'?"
""implants in their skulls""
I bet Dr. Gaius Baltar would want a retake of his MRI, even if it pisses of Doc Cottle to no end. ("WILL YOU STOP GOING **CRAZY** IN THERE???!!!!")
As for speaking Dutch, the drug dealers in the downtown Portland area using cells on the buses to make rendezvous or deal on the buses and getting busted by the cops listening in on the hidden/(im)planted microphones, the dealers SHOULD speak Dutch. They can probably drive the cops crazy, til they hired Dutch speakers. Then, maybe we can have a fast-tracked patented tribute to the Double Ductch "Bust". Anyone hiding crack in their butts will face the bubble butt bust on the bubble butt bus...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjBicU0oPZk
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Wow - that is one of the most blatant pieces of PR bullshit I have ever read! Excellent use of "scientists from XYZ" say this, without any reference to a specific person or even university. The use of the second person plural in the middle though really ruins the illusion that the article is a well researched independent piece of journalism. Then to finish off with such an obvious link to the website after saying that both Chinese athletes and the mysterious "scientists from Cambridge" recommend it, was really too over the top.
Creativity is hard to categorise. However, it also isn't completely random. When I'm working on a project, I can get myself into "daydream" mode and gently steer my creativity to find answers to the question or problem at hand, so I would guess that even if it is random firing of neurons, it is random firing of the neurons active at that moment. This means that it certainly is NOT random, because you can choose what to think about, and hence, steer that random firing to get a result. Evolution likes that.
With e.g. schitzophrenia, I think that people who have a double copy of the gene and have a high(er) IQ are more likely to find a way around the problem and deal with it. I would guess I'm one of the lucky guys with a double expression of the gene, but also with a good IQ. A lot of what was said was very recogniseable - I've fought with depression, burnout and more, and also had an immense war between myself and my own mind, and have seriously questioned my sanity, before I finally learned to detach from my thoughts and emotions, and stand behind them as it were instead of being dragged along with them on a very rough rollercoaster ride. Meditation, sports, the forced responsibility of having to run my own company and lots of research saved my sanity. Now my creativity is a tool, a part of my mind which can be accessed at will instead of a scary the-voices-say-the-universe-hates-you personal enemy you can carry everywhere you go. I am the eye of the storm, as it were, and it is no longer easy to rip me loose - I would guess that only a long, sustained depression combined with stress over a period of years could do that (because it means that slowly but surely your belief in yourself and your self-imposed structure will be eroded by the negative emotional flood from the amygdala).
I think the problem is compounded once you get depressed. It seems to me that creativity is rampant throughout the brain. When I was depressed, it seemed that my "logical" brain was less active and my "emotional" brain ran the show - all my reactions were negative and emo. This might be because the amygdala seems to "shout louder" at certain times than others, or maybe the rest of the brain is more overwhelmed by its "voice" during depression because it is less active, I don't know. At any rate, it means you are completely at the mercy of emotional reasoning and the torrent of feelings because you don't have your "logical net" to tell you "nah, I'm dramatizing again" and you simply shrug them off as an itch.
At any rate, I know a few others like myself and their stories are similar: mental override, take control, avoid pitfalls of deep feelings (unless they're positive, and even then keep an eye on them), and view the world as a statistical game instead of a personal interaction. The latter is probably the most important, because once you start trying to ascribe a (negative) personal meaning to the events that influence you - for example: "God made me lose my job because I'm bad / worthless / whatever", then you open Pandora's Box on your own mind. That's also one of my warning signs that I may be stressed out or in a downward spiral, and that I need to take more breaks and relax more: if I find my mind trying to reason like that, I know I'm in the danger zone, so I adjust for it. Not doing so probably means you'll end up creating another religion based on frustrated depression.
A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it well worth the effort.
It makes the "special" people feel better.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Studies show that in their pre-psychotic phases (i.e. before the onset of the first psychotic signs in late adolescence) schizophrenia patients show significantly more academic abilities. Also, first degree relatives of schizophrenia patients show a significant higher degree of academic scholarship. See e.g. Karlsson, Acta Psychiatrica Scandianavia 104 (2001), 466-468.
Similar studies find similar correlations with artistic capabilities. Both art and academic abilities tap creativity, so that shouldn't surprise.
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem delendam esse
I know that my language consists of a series of nonsensical syllables; it amazes me every day how we manage in my country to function without understanding each other.
It takes one to understand one.
To be fair, schizophrenia does come from the Greek for "split mind". The fact that it's used to label a disorder characterized by a distorted perception of reality rather than dissociative identity disorder (which may or may not be a real disorder anyway), is rather unhelpful in trying to emphasize the difference.
That may very well be true, but as a highly creative person myself, I can state categorically that my best ideas come from the voices in my head.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
True, but the properties of crocodile immune proteins are well documented. Here is a less idiotic link on the matter:
Abstract from Comparative Biochemistry and Physiology:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6T2R-49KSKF9-7&_user=10&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_sort=d&_docanchor=&view=c&_searchStrId=961247909&_rerunOrigin=scholar.google&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=a1d6189fa9fc622240974a24a20b098e
@YourSig:
The best part of waking up, is Linux in your cup.
Don't you dare compare living with pigeons to starting a religion! Living with pigeons is an honorable, peaceful lifestyle choice. It is nothing like the skullduggery of starting a religion.
I'm sorry. My point had nothing to do with schizoprhenia, or if I had it or not. My point could only be understood if you looked at strongly at my subject.
It was one of the most complicated summaries I've read in a long time. Maybe it's the subject matter. If they were talking about RAID levels or spanning trees, I would have had a better chance.
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins, for they are subtle, and quick to anger.