Isaac Newton, Friedrich Nietzsche, Vincent Van Gogh, Nikolai Gogol, Innokenty Smoktunovsky … What unites these people? As you can see, the title of the article is about the mental illness – schizophrenia. Geniuses are always close to madness. And also – to the limitlessness of thinking, which is confirmed by a peculiar attitude towards the world around us, a special vision and creativity. Not every schizophrenic is a genius, but almost every genius is a little crazy.
Why is creativity beyond the ordinary bordering on madness so much? The great Spanish painter Salvador Dali said: “Great psychologists and they could not understand where genius ends and madness begins.” Both are difficult to analyze, and in either case, the reasons remain a mystery to this day.
Why does the ability to create new and extraordinary works of art, to build hypotheses, to make discoveries depend?
Scientists from Harvard University recently conducted an interesting study on this matter. Selecting 163 subjects, neuroscientists asked them to take a test for divergent thinking. By asking the test to solve the same problem in several different ways. The subjects were given ordinary objects with a request to come up with an unusual format for their use.
During the tests, the participants in the experiment underwent an MRI scan, which revealed that during the tests the following areas of the brain were most active: the left anterior insular lobe, which is responsible for perception and self-awareness; right dorsal-lateral prefrontal cortex (its functions are self-control, selection of optimal thoughts); the cortex of the posterior cingulate gyrus, which controls attention switching.
Scientists have concluded that creative thinking has one feature – these three brain regions cannot function simultaneously. Those. when analyzing ideas and assessing the situation, another area can no longer be responsible for reproducing something new.
This feature can explain, at times, the asocial behavior of gifted people who make a discovery or have completed a work on which they have been working for a long time. The mechanism responsible for self-control in this case is turned off and, probably, that is why such individuals are often unrestrained in expressing their emotions. Remember, when Archimedes jumped out of the bathroom, having discovered the law of hydrostatics, he ran naked into the street shouting: “Eureka!”
Is it possible for a patient with a mental disorder to control himself at such moments and generally coexist peacefully with society?
If the manic-depressive psychosis of Sergei Yesenin did not give him such an opportunity, the poet committed suicide, then Nobel laureate John Nash found a way to teach, lecture and create scientific articles. He succeeded when he learned to separate the wheat from the chaff, i.e. separate delusional ideas and reality and ignore the former.
Focusing on details is another indirect sign of genius. According to one study, the higher a subject’s IQ, the more attention they pay to little things and details. That is why the term “absent-minded professor” is familiar to everyone.
Once Albert Einstein met his friend, absentmindedly inviting him to his place: “Come to me in the evening, I will have Professor Stimson.” To which his friend, puzzled, replied: “But I am Stimson!” Einstein replied, “It doesn’t matter, come anyway!”
One way or another, our mental characteristics are often those differences that give us the opportunity to show our unique individuality, even if it is expressed in non-standard behavior.
Alexey Geger, Development Director of the St. Petersburg Regional Branch of the All-Russian Public Organization of Disabled People “New Opportunities”, Ph.D. in Sociology: “Yes, indeed, many talented people suffered from Bipolar Affective Disorder, or as it used to be called Manic Depressive Psychosis (MDP). So, for actors, this is a constant training of acting skills in life itself. With bipolar disorder, a person can go from a state of unbridled fun to the deepest melancholy up to several times a day. That is why such people, having, of course, acting skills, it is not difficult to play these transformations in the frame or on stage. Arriving in such a permanent unstable state, such people often resort to alcohol or even drugs to regulate their mood.
The brain functions in a completely different way, the regime of the day changes upside down. Such people do at night, and during the day they either sleep or are in unrestrained melancholy. The lines from Alexander Vasiliev, the leader of the “Splin” group, immediately come to mind: “I live at night, and during the day I want to die.”
Indeed, the brain works differently, there is no stability. It is possible that this is the source of the firm belief that creativity ends when a person “calms down”. And what does “calms down” mean? This means stability – a stable job, a stable family on the one hand. On the other hand, this is a stable work of the brain, the brain no longer “twists”, there are no more abrupt changes from delight to wild sadness, up to suicidal thoughts; and creativity is gradually fading away, ”the specialist believes.
