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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.
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.
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.
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.
Truly spoken like someone who shouldn't own pets.
Answer the following:
Which one produces the more fulfilling relationship, the person who "buys a dog and owns it" or the person who "adopts a dog and cares for him"?
Who has a more loving happily-trained pet? The person who treats their dog or cat like one of the family, or the person who treats their pet like something separate from their family?
We haven't lost the distinction. We've accepted the best metaphor for a mutually fulfilling relationship. My dog thinks I'm the leader of his pack. I'm happy thinking of my dog as my 3rd child, the one with all the fur. We both get to act naturally for the most part while those roles mesh perfectly. We both benefit.
If you don't understand that then please please do NOT become a pet owner. Your pet will feel lousy, act out, mope, resent you, and be a "bad pet".
In reality there are no bad pets, just bad owners.**
**Being a good owner starts with the decision of IF and then WHAT EXACTLY to buy. If for instance you buy a pet based solely on appearances, you're most likely to end up with a great looking pet that does not fit with your lifestyle at all. You're screwed before you even get it home. *Adopt* a pet that can become a valued member of your family, or else stay away please. Or maybe a goldfish or hermit crab would be your best choice.
Operator, give me the number for 911!
"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.
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.