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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Creativity | 9/14 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creativity | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T07:11:10.173371+00:00 | kb-cron |
==== Studies ==== A study by psychologist J. Philippe Rushton found creativity to correlate with intelligence and psychoticism. Another study found creativity to be greater in people with schizotypal personality disorder than in people with either schizophrenia or those without mental health disorders. While divergent thinking was associated with activation of both sides of the prefrontal cortex, schizotypal individuals were found to have much greater activation of their right prefrontal cortex. That study hypothesized that such individuals are better at accessing both hemispheres, allowing them to make novel associations at a faster rate. Consistent with this hypothesis, ambidexterity is also more common in people with schizotypal personality disorder and schizophrenia. Three studies by Mark Batey and Adrian Furnham demonstrated the relationships between schizotypal personality disorder, hypomanic personality, and several different measures of creativity. A study of 300,000 persons with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or unipolar depression, and their relatives, found overrepresentation in creative professions of those with bipolar disorder as well as for undiagnosed siblings of those with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. There was no overall overrepresentation, but overrepresentation for artistic occupations, among those diagnosed with schizophrenia. There was no association for those with unipolar depression or their relatives. Another study, involving more than one million people, conducted by Swedish researchers at the Karolinska Institute, reported a number of correlations between creative occupations and mental illnesses. Writers had a higher risk of anxiety and bipolar disorders, schizophrenia, unipolar depression, and substance abuse, and were almost twice as likely as the general population to kill themselves. Dancers and photographers were also more likely to have bipolar disorder. Those in the creative professions were no more likely to have psychiatric disorders than other people, although they were more likely to have a close relative with a disorder, including anorexia and, to some extent, autism, the Journal of Psychiatric Research reported. Nancy Andreasen was one of the first researchers to carry out a large-scale study of creativity and whether mental illnesses have an impact on someone's ability to be creative. She expected to find a link between creativity and schizophrenia, but her research sample (the book-authors she pooled) had no history of schizophrenia. Her findings instead showed that 80% of the creative group previously had some episode of mental illness in their lifetime. When she performed follow-up studies over a 15-year period, she found that 43% of the authors had bipolar disorder, compared to 1% of the general public. In 1989 another study, by Kay Redfield Jamison, reaffirmed those statistics, with 38% of her sample of authors having a history of mood disorders. Anthony Storr, a prominent psychiatrist, remarked:
The creative process can be a way of protecting the individual against being overwhelmed by depression, a means of regaining a sense of mastery in those who have lost it, and, to a varying extent, a way of repairing the self-damaged by bereavement or by the loss of confidence in human relationships which accompanies depression from whatever cause.
==== Bipolar disorders ==== People diagnosed with bipolar disorder report themselves as having a larger range of emotional understanding, heightened states of perception, and an ability to connect better with those in the world around them. Other reported traits include higher rates of productivity, higher senses of self-awareness, and greater empathy. Those who have bipolar disorder also understand their own sense of heightened creativity and ability to get immense numbers of tasks done all at once. In one study, of 219 participants (aged 19 to 63) diagnosed with bipolar disorder, 82% of them reported having elevated feelings of creativity during their hypomanic swings. A study done by Shapiro and Weisberg also showed a positive correlation between the manic upswings of the cycles of bipolar disorder and the ability of an individual to be more creative. The data showed, however, that it was not the depressive swing that brings forth dark creative spurts, but the act of climbing out of the depressive episode that sparks creativity. The reason behind this spur of creative genius could come from the type of self-image that the person has during a time of hypomania. A hypomanic person may feel a bolstered sense of self-confidence, creative confidence, and sense of individualism.
==== Opinions ==== Vaitsa Giannouli believes that the creativity a person diagnosed with bipolar disorder feels comes as a form of "stress management". In the realm of music, one might be expressing one's stress or pains through the pieces one writes in order to better understand those same feelings. Famous authors and musicians, along with some actors, would often attribute their wild enthusiasm to something like a hypomanic state. The artistic side of society has been notorious for behaviors that are seen as maladapted to societal norms. Symptoms of bipolar disorder correlate with behaviors in high-profile creative personalities such as alcohol addiction; drug abuse including stimulants, depressants, hallucinogens and dissociatives, opioids, inhalants, and cannabis; difficulties in holding regular occupations; interpersonal problems; legal issues; and a high risk of suicide. Robert Weisberg believes that the state of mania sets "free the powers of a thinker". He implies that not only has the person become more creative, but they have fundamentally changed the kind of thoughts they produce. In a study of poets, who are especially highly afflicted with bipolar disorders, over a period of three years those poets would have cycles of creating really creative and powerful works of poetry. The timelines over the three-year study looked at the poets' personal journals and their clinical records, and found that the timelines between their most powerful poems matched that of their upswings in bipolar disorder.