Schizotypal creativity
Pretty much everyone is familiar with the phrase “There’s a fine line between genius and insanity.” Well apparently, this is truer than anyone previously thought. People characterized by odd behavior and language who are not fully psychotic or schizophrenic rely more heavily on the right sides of their brains than the rest of the population. This means that they are more likely to be creative than most people, leading to individuals like Mozart, Einstein, Newton, and van Gogh. (Whether van Gogh was sane is still open for discussion, though.)
It has been known for a long while that these “schizotypal” personalities are more creative, but no one has looked into the behavioral manifestations how they experimentally correlate to neurological function. Until now, that is. Brad Folley and Sohee Park of Vanderbilt University recently conducted two experiments to compare the creative thinking processes of schizotypes and schizophrenics, and used normal people as control subjects. The results were interesting: schizophrenics and normal people performed comparably to one another while performing creative tasks, while the schizotypes tended to excel at creative thinking.
In the first experiment, the researchers showed research subjects a variety of household objects and asked them to make up new functions for them. The results showed that the schizotypes were better able to creatively suggest new uses for the objects, while the schizophrenics and average subjects performed similarly to one another.
“Thought processes for individuals with schizophrenia are often very disorganized, almost to the point where they can’t really be creative because they cannot get all of their thoughts coherent enough to do that,” Folley said. “Schizotypes, on the other hand, are free from the severe, debilitating symptoms surrounding schizophrenia and also have an enhanced creative ability.”
The second experiment involved monitoring the prefrontal lobe of the brain while the same subjects were asked to identify new uses for household objects and perform a basic control task. The results showed that all groups used both brain hemispheres for creative tasks, but that the right side activity of the schizotypal personalities was far greater than the normal controls and the schizophrenics. The popular notion that people are “right-brained” if they are creative is largely bunk because creativity requires the use of both hemispheres to come up with anything coherent.
The “coherency” (for lack of a better term) stems from the left side of the brain which identifies objects with their common use, while the right brain might suggest a different use for a given object. To (over?)simplify things, it is up to the left brain to temper the right side’s suggestion to keep it within the bounds of reality.
From personal experience, this “thinking outside the box” behavior can be learned. I think that most people ignore most creative input, opting instead to do the normal thing with the normal tools at hand. Perhaps this is why children are so much more creative than adults most of the time: young children haven’t learned the social value of conformity. And it is this embraced creative input that schizotypal personalities exhibit that cause them to be labelled “abnormal.”
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[...] This struck me as an appropriate follow-up piece to the news post below regarding left and right brain activity. I mentioned that I thought that it was possible to learn to be both creative and utilitarian simultaneously. In fact, those that learn this skill tend to be more productive and come up with more innovative solutions that those who merely “think inside the box” (to reuse that horribly overused phrase). But I think I might have jumped the gun, and pre-emptied myself just a little bit. Children think creatively, using both sides of their brains; they are not bounded by an artificial reality — conformity to social standards dictating the use of a given object for a given task. [...]
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