Genius and madness, creativity and delirium, Salvador Dali and Mark Aurelius from Kashchenko - what connects them? Where is the line where creativity ends and nonsense begins? What is Cognitive Disinhibition? How much does the inability to throw useless things out of consciousness affects the characteristics of our psyche? Why do we need cognitive control? Neuroscience answers these questions.
When John Forbes Nash, a Nobel laureate in mathematics and a paranoid schizophrenic, was asked how he could believe he was hired by space aliens to save the world, he gave a simple answer:
John Forbes Nash.
Nash is hardly the only person in history that comes up when discussing the topic of "mad genius". Suicidal artists Vincent Van Gogh and Mark Rothko, writers Virginia Wolfe and Ernest Hemingway, poets Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath and many, many others also belong to this guild. Even without considering these great creators who committed suicide in a bout of deep depression, it's easy enough to compile a list of geniuses whose psychological deviations were well documented. Among them, for example, were the composer Robert Schumann, the poet Emily Dickinson, and Nash himself. Creative individuals who succumbed to alcoholism and other addictions are also legion.
The fact that genius and madness, creativity and psychopathology are interconnected, has been said for a very long time. This idea goes back to Plato and Aristotle ⓘ
Plato said that playwrights are expressive, and Aristotle noted that creative people are more prone to depression.
… Then there were the works of Louis Lelu, Paul Julius Moebius ⓘ
It was he who introduced the concept of "pathography" in psychiatry - the study of the life and work of an individual from the point of view of his psyche, the relationship between creativity and mental disorders.
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Cesare Lombroso and others. In the 20th century, a whole Soviet journal, "Clinical Archive of Genius and Giftedness," was even published, which was devoted to the analysis of the mental problems of representatives of Russian art. And when Michel Foucault's work "The History of Madness in the Era of Classicism" appeared, the dialectical connection between madness and creativity began to be taken for granted.
Michel Foucault.
However, it cannot be said that all of these works were strictly scientific in nature. Perhaps for this reason, there are many modern opponents who believe that all this hype around geniuses and madness is pure delusion. As arguments, they cite huge lists of creators who did not show visible signs of mental abnormalities, talk about a relatively small number of creative individuals in comparison with the number of mentally ill people, and draw attention to the fact that permanent residents of psychiatric hospitals, as a rule, do not create masterpieces. Even if we talk about the notorious Marquis de Sade, most of his sadistic works were written while he was imprisoned, and not when he was declared insane.
Is creative genius related to madness or not? Modern empirical research says it is unambiguously linked. According to the latest data, the most important feature of the psyche, found in both geniuses and madmen, is the so-called "cognitive disinhibition" - the inability to filter out and throw useless things, pictures or ideas from consciousness. It is this property that affects the appearance of delusional thoughts and confusion in people, but at the same time it makes creative minds more fertile.
If we talk about science, there can be countless examples. So, when Alexander Fleming noticed that blue mold began to kill a culture of bacteria in a Petri dish, he could not pay attention to it and just throw out the spoiled material to repeat the experiment, as most of his colleagues most likely would have done. However, Fleming studied the results in detail and was able to eventually discover penicillin, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize. Many people went for a walk in the woods and returned from there with annoying thorns attached to their clothes, but only George de Mestral in 1907 decided to examine the burr with a microscope, after which he came up with the basis for the Velcro.
Cognitive disinhibition is just as beneficial for art. Genius artists often tell how the idea for a major creative project came from a conversation or an observed incident during a trivial walk. For example, Henry James reported in the foreword to The Poynton's Trophies how he got the idea to write a novel after a hint from a woman sitting next to him at Christmas dinner. If you delve into the diaries of geniuses, you can find hundreds of cases when some insignificant event from the outside became the seed from which a masterpiece subsequently grew.
Guernica. Pablo Picasso.
Dr. Shelley Carson, a psychologist at Harvard University and author of the book Your Creative Brain, first spoke about this feature of the psyche of mad geniuses and genius madmen. At the same time, Austrian psychologists led by Andreas Fink from the University of Graz found that creativity and schizotypy are equally manifested at the level of brain activity (MRI results showed that when solving a creative task, subjects with high originality rates and those who had schizotypy is diagnosed, deactivation decreases in the right parietal region and the pre-wedge, the part of the brain that helps to collect information), and this, in turn, indirectly confirms that the same cognitive processes can be involved in creativity as well as in psychological disorders. Fink's findings were published in the September issue of the journal Cognitive, Affective and Behavioral Neurology. The main idea, which the scientists came to, largely coincided with the ideas of Carson: people with an increased tendency to schizophrenia and people with non-standard, creative thinking have the same inability to filter out "junk" information.
But in connection with such conclusions, one more question arises - is it possible to mix these two groups? According to Dr. Shelley Carson, creative people have a fairly high level of intelligence, and it is he who gives them the necessary cognitive control, which allows a person to separate the wheat from the chaff, to distinguish between bizarre fantasies and reality. According to her concept, high intelligence is important for a creator, but only insofar as it is associated with cognitive disinhibition. High intelligence alone is capable of giving birth to useful, but, most likely, unoriginal and unsurprising ideas.
Of course, some areas of creativity put more emphasis on utility than creativity. For example, exact sciences. In such cases, vulnerability is evenly distributed between genius and insanity and becomes much less critical. Perhaps, in this area, the exception is made by scientists who break the existing paradigm: in this activity they look like real rebels, exposing the truth of writers and artists. Let us recall, for example, Einstein, for whom the definition of mad genius was firmly entrenched.
Actually, this is where the real mystery lies: where is the line where genius ends and madness begins. Dr. Carson's research extends beyond the study of "cognitive disinhibition." Studying the general vulnerabilities of non-standard thinking and mental pathologies, she came to the conclusion that the development of creativity or the appearance of pathology is influenced by various cognitive factors, among which, in addition to disinhibition, IQ level, memory, attention, style and, of course, the presence / absence of traumatic social factors (loss of parents, economic hardship, minority status, etc.). According to Carson, it depends only on the conglomerate of these very different properties and characteristics of development whether a person who is characterized by "cognitive disinhibition" will become a genius or will go to insanity. The doctor noticesthat the interconnection of a large number of very different factors is the reason why not all geniuses are crazy, and not all psychos are creatively gifted:
However, the fact remains: a huge number of creative individuals walk on the verge of norm and madness. It's just that for them a flurry of impulses and ideas that they draw from their state is a storehouse of all creativity, without which they cannot imagine their existence. After a long period of delusional thinking, Nash said, his return to a more rational phase was "not too happy." To explain why, he gave another answer in his spirit:
It seems to be brilliant.
