Salvador Dali once remarked that the only thing that distinguishes him from a madman is that he is not mad. Does madness give birth to genius or, on the contrary, do all talented people go crazy?
Start of discussion
The work of the French psychiatrist Jacques Joseph Moreau de Tour, published in the middle of the 19th century, can be considered the starting point of the discussion of the question of the compatibility of genius and madness. The work on "altered states", which, according to the author, can affect intellectual abilities, has caused a storm of criticism in the scientific community. In particular, the physiologist Marie-Jean-Pierre Flourens, who was convinced that genius cannot be the result of mental pathology, categorically denied the Frenchman's hypotheses.
Lombroso's theory
One of the most significant and at the same time scandalous was the book "Genius and Insanity" by the Italian neuropathologist Cesare Lombroso, published in 1863. In it, the researcher not only analyzes the behavior and activities of great people suffering from neuroses, but also gives a fair number of examples illustrating how mentally ill people discovered amazing abilities that they never knew existed.
Cesare Lombroso saw a "complete resemblance" between a seizure madman and a creative genius. To prove his theory, Lombroso collected a large number of facts describing facial features, character traits, examples of atypical behavior and anomalous skull structure. The scientist discovered one more similarity: both geniuses and madmen throughout their life "remain lonely, cold, indifferent to the duties of a family man and a member of society."
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Creative chaos
Lombroso's contemporaries perceived his theory ambiguously, because the author encroached on traditional ideas about the essence of talent. And in the 90s of the last century, Russian researcher Nikolai Goncharenko harshly criticized Lombroso's theory. First of all, he reproached the Italian for a tendentious interpretation of the life of great geniuses. “Yes,” wrote Goncharenko, “many great people were obsessed to the point of fanaticism. There were cases when they went crazy, but on this basis it is impossible to conclude that from genius to madness is one step. " Goncharenko believed that geniuses are characterized by "healthy madness", and the chaos that they bring into the usual course of thought is "creative chaos." The author explained the stereotypical perception of geniuses as insane by the fact that their abnormality becomes "public property"while ordinary people go crazy unnoticed by most.
Contemporary psychologist Arne Dietrich from the American University of Beirut also offers his vision. He emphasizes that the connection between genius and insanity is not at all so obvious, because many creative personalities are not mentally ill, and not all geniuses are crazy.
High IQ increases chances
High intelligence levels can lead to bipolar disorder. This conclusion was made by American researchers from Johns Hopkins Medical University, led by clinical psychologist Kay Redfilm Jamison. In a large-scale experiment that lasted 10 years, 700 thousand (!) Adolescents aged 16 years took part.
At the first stage, in the course of routine testing, scientists determined the level of intelligence of the subjects, at the second, they established which of the participants in the experiment developed mental illness years later. The results of the study, published in 2010, shocked the public: adolescents with high IQ levels were four times more likely to fall prey to bipolar disorder, which is characterized by mood swings ranging from unreasonable happiness to black depression.
About creativity
James Fallon, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Irvine, has found the answer to another question: Can bipolar disorder trigger creative thinking, and if so, how? According to the scientist, people with bipolar disorder often have creative ideas when they come out of deep depression. Improving mood leads to a switch in brain activity: it fades in the frontal lobes and moves to the upper lobes. The same process, Fallon says, is observed in moments of creativity.
Delusional thoughts do not exist
Elin Sachs, a world-renowned psychology professor at the University of Southern California, is convinced that psychotic patients are not able to weed out delusional thoughts, just like healthy people do. But they have the unique ability to simultaneously accumulate conflicting ideas and notice details that the brain of a healthy person will consider unimportant and unworthy to take a place in consciousness. Of course, the expert notes, the redundancy of delusional thoughts in the mind makes it destructive, but at the same time very creative.
For example, patients with bipolar disorder, on a standard test, come up with, on average, three times as many associations for a word. The brain of a mentally ill person gives rise to many ideas that are not suppressed by consciousness and can be extremely valuable. At the same time, scientists note that the overflow of creative energy is impossible at the stages of severe depression or schizophrenia, which are not only painfully painful, but also threaten human life.
We are all brilliant
In the series of articles "Clinical archive of genius and giftedness," Doctor of Medicine Grigory Segalin put forward a number of interesting hypotheses in the 30s of the last century. Based on the analysis of factual material, including the study of biographies and case histories of geniuses, as well as their relatives, he established that, without exception, one line of ancestors is represented by geniuses, and the other by the mentally ill.
The scientist also believed that the giftedness of geniuses is manifested only thanks to their mental illnesses, inherited. He was sure that any outstanding personality has deviations from the norm, while the more genius a person is, the more inadequate he is. Segalin's conclusion is paradoxical: every person is potentially genius, but being healthy, he is not able to fulfill his potential.
Soon after the publication, the "Clinical Archive" was banned, and Segalin's hypotheses could have been given up, if not so long ago the professor and head of the psychodiagnostics room at the Burdenko hospital Anatoly Kartashov had not continued to study the issue. In the course of his research, he found that the body of people with a damaged chromosome 11, which is responsible for the mental state of a person, works in an intensive mode, strengthening, among other things, intellectual abilities. Commenting on his research, Kartashov notes that by learning how to treat mental illness, humanity will forever get rid of genius.