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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."
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.
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.
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
It makes perfect sense.
If you are smart enough to know when you have "weird thoughts", you can shrug your shoulders and go on with life, perhaps even putting those "creative notions" to some practical or artistic use.
If you are not too bright, you might believe all manner of crazy shit your mind comes up with and act on it. The worst cases might start a religion or live with the pigeons.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Yes, evolution does not care about the individual, just the result. I dare say all personality disorders - hell, all diseases of young age! - that have a genetic cause and have a prevalence of more than >1% increase the overall fitness of the species either directly or because the poor suckers that get the two copies of it don't outweigh the advantage for the others.
I even expect the cancer rate to be fine tuned between making a species too static in an ever changing world and killing too many individuals. Some species, IIRC crocodiles, practically never get cancer, so it probably is not a limitation of the eukaryotic cell.
Another example is of course homosexuality, understanding went from "It can't be natural - it is the end of the line for the individual's genes!", to finding more and more animal species enjoying it to actually being able to explain that it (male h.) benefits the female line. Dawkin's The Selfish Gene comes to mind again.
schizophrenic != multiple personalities
I seems to me that you are confusing schizophrenia with psychopathy.
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
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.
"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.
Hi Tom Cruise!
Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
Personality disorders aren't genetic. There may be an underlying predisposition to stress or poor coping mechanisms, but personality disorders are not genetic in nature. They're caused primarily by environmental factors and they're definitely not mental illness in a technical sense. They aren't treatable via medication and even the as yet unproven brain chemistry explanation of mental illness doesn't apply. Medications aren't likely to ever help out much.
Personality disorders are better thought of as a culture that's unique the the person and not to the people around which the person is living. It's a systematic adjustment that the brain makes to cope with adverse conditions and it's not something which can be readily separated from the individual's self. As opposed to mental illnesses where people will frequently have periods, however brief, of remission.
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.
Personality disorders aren't genetic. There may be an underlying predisposition to stress or poor coping mechanisms, but personality disorders are not genetic in nature. They're caused primarily by environmental factors
Right, and the notable differences in brain morphology are merely due to "environmental" factors.
and they're definitely not mental illness in a technical sense.
How about this and this? Those are extremely technical.
They aren't treatable via medication
...
Medications aren't likely to ever help out much.
Have you ever been diagnosed for a mental disorder and prescribed medication? I have, and it makes a world of difference. I know other people who have, and they concur. The meds can mean the difference between being able to live a productive life and being locked down in a padded cell. You don't know what you're talking about.
and even the as yet unproven brain chemistry explanation of mental illness doesn't apply.
...
Personality disorders are better thought of as a culture that's unique the the person and not to the people around which the person is living. It's a systematic adjustment that the brain makes to cope with adverse conditions and it's not something which can be readily separated from the individual's self. As opposed to mental illnesses where people will frequently have periods, however brief, of remission.
Citations, please. Otherwise you're just talking out of your ass.
Excuse me, wtf r u doin?
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.
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.