Madness and Magnificence

Researchers have long been tantalized by the question of whether the biological endowment of a genius also confers great setbacks. Greek philosopher Aristotle is reputed to have said, “Those who have become eminent in philosophy, politics, poetry and the arts have all had tendencies toward melancholia.” This idea received wide currency in the 19th and 20th centuries at the hands of psychiatrists and psychoanalysts. Among the great writers, Virginia Woolf, Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath all committed suicide. Vincent van Gogh did as well, and earlier he had cut off part of his ear to give to a prostitute. Newton sometimes suffered from extreme paranoia, and Galileo, possibly an alcoholic, was often bedridden with depression. Nevertheless, many psychologists have argued that such cases are the exceptions, not the rule. Some positive psychologists today consider creative genius a human strength or virtue.

My 2005 review of the literature, which summarized studies with varied methodologies, indicates that the association between genius and mental illness has considerable strength. Very creative writers tend to obtain higher scores on the psychopathology-related parts of the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, a widely accepted personality test. A study using another instrument, the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire, found that extremely creative artists—and high-impact psychologists, for that matter—tend to receive elevated scores on the test's psychoticism scale, meaning that they are, among other things, egocentric, cold, impulsive, aggressive and tough-minded. Last, highly eminent scientists score higher on sections of the Cattell 16 Personality Factor Questionnaire that signify they are withdrawn, solemn, internally preoccupied, precise and critical. All told, top performers are not a very normal bunch.

Psychiatric studies bolster these results. The rate and intensity of certain psychopathic symptoms, such as depression and alcoholism, are noticeably higher in very creative individuals than in the general population. Research also suggests that these divergent thinkers are more likely to come from family lines at higher risk for psychopathology. Even if an extraordinary innovator is “normal,” his or her family members may not be.

In line with these findings, in 2009 psychiatrist Szabolcs Kéri of Semmelweis University in Hungary found a genetic basis for both creativity and psychosis in a variant of the Neuregulin 1 gene. In this study, Kéri recruited a group of highly creative individuals and found that the participants who had this specific gene variant, which is linked with an increased risk of developing a mental disorder, also scored higher on measures of creativity.

Out-and-out psychosis, however, can shut down creative genius. This tragic reality was dramatically illustrated in the 2001 film A Beautiful Mind, the biopic about Nobel laureate John Forbes Nash and his struggles with schizophrenia. The costs and burdens of psychological dysfunction are also immediately apparent in the art of the mentally ill, such as the works preserved in the Prinzhorn Collection in Heidelberg, done by psychiatric patients in the early 20th century. Few if any of these artworks show signs of genius. Quoting Dryden again, “wits are sure to madness near allied, and thin partitions do their bounds divide.”

Recent research conducted by psychologist Shelley Carson of Harvard University and her colleagues has sought to identify these thin partitions. Creative achievement is positively associated both with cognitive disinhibition—openness to supposedly extraneous ideas, images or stimuli—and higher intelligence and greater working memory. These mental capacities can potentially ameliorate the negative effects of disinhibition and even channel them to more useful ends. This synergy may well constitute the cognitive basis for serendipity. Not everybody would be able to work out the profound implications of such humdrum events as water overflowing a bathtub or an apple falling from a tree. But Archimedes and Newton did. [For more on creativity and eccentricity, see “The Unleashed Mind,” by Shelley Carson; SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN MIND, May/June 2011.]