“Think Different” says the slogan of the world’s most creative company — the firm that imagined what would happen if you combined touchscreens with mobile phones then blew them up into the most mobile of computers. With hindsight the success of the iPhone and the iPad looks stunningly obvious but you can have a lot of fun trawling the Internet for those with a lack of foresight. But what does thinking different really mean? Where does that difference come from and what costs, if any does creativity bring to those who like to think out of the box?
One person who’s been trying to answer those questions is Nancy Andreasen, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist who also has a doctorate in literature. Professor Andreasen has conducted two major studies on the science and biology of creativity. The first took place in the 1960s when she was able to conduct her research on the participants of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her subjects then included Kurt Vonnegut, Richard Yates and John Cheever, as well as 27 other renowned writers.
The study looked for correlation between creativity and mental illness, and Professor Andreasen did see a very high occurrence of mood disturbance among her participants.
“A full 80 percent of them had had some kind of mood disturbance at some time in their lives, compared with just 30 percent of the control group—only slightly less than an age-matched group in the general population,” she wrote recently in The Atlantic.
Creative Types Suffer From Mental Illness
The list of highly creative types who had suffered from severe mental illness is long and includes Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, Mark Rothko and of course, Vincent Van Gogh, all of whom committed suicide so Professor Andreasen had expected to see a great deal more illness, particularly incidents of schizophrenia.
What she found was that highly creative types are indeed likely to suffer from depression or bipolar disorder but while the kind of debilitating schizophrenia that led to the hospitalization of mathematician John Nash may sometimes be present in creative people, it’s less common than other forms of mental illness.
Other studies have had similar results. An examination of 47 writers and artists in the UK found that that 38 percent had been treated for a mood disorder, with playwrights and poets the most stricken. A Harvard study of fifteen abstract-expressionist artists discovered that half suffered from mental illness, usually either depression or bipolar disorder. Nearly half that group failed to live beyond 60.
Participants in Professor Andreasen’s study were also intelligent but their IQs didn’t reach the levels of intellectual genius. Intelligence, she writes in The Atlantic, has little effect on creativity.
[M]ost creative people are pretty smart, but they don’t have to be that smart, at least as measured by conventional intelligence tests. An IQ of 120, indicating that someone is very smart but not exceptionally so, is generally considered sufficient for creative genius.
Eureka Moments Come During Rest
One problem in studying the nature of creativity is defining and identifying creativity itself. Professor Andreasen’s study is usually defined as “big c”; it uses people who have already been recognized for some sort of creative achievement, whether in the arts or in the sciences, as subjects.
The alternative approach, “little c,” is to identify creativity through quantitative tests that measure how individuals approach particular problems. Asked to list uses for a brick, for example, most people might be able to suggest home construction and window-breaking; more creative types would use divergent thinking to produce longer lists that could include holding up shelves or displaying art. It’s an approach that’s easy to measure — the people who produce longest lists are the most creative — but broad lists of uses might not be the most accurate or the best way to predict creativity.
Professor Andreasen uses as her definition of creativity “the ability to produce something that is novel or original and useful or adaptive” and notes that that production is often a complex process that includes preparation and incubation as well as the inspiration of the “eureka” moment in which it all comes together.
In her own eureka moment, she came to the realization that
creative people are better at recognizing relationships, making associations and connections, and seeing things in an original way—seeing things that others cannot see.
That realization provided a breakthrough. Connections are physical, so by observing brain activity using an MRI scanner during moments of creativity, such as free association, Professor Andreasen believed that she might be able to see creativity in action in the brain. For this second study, she interviewed and tested recognized creative talent from both the arts and sciences, including film-maker George Lucas and six Nobel science laureates, and compared them to control subjects.
Professor Andreasen did indeed find that brain activity increased when the mind is relaxed. It’s at those moments — in the bath, while driving or even watching television or reading a book — that creative people have their eureka moments. And again, she found a higher than average incidents of mental illness.
Other findings included a higher prevalence of auto didacticism; creative people tend to teach themselves even if they use idiosyncratic methods to do so. They’re also polymaths with a broad range of interests. Scientists described their love of literature and artists discussed their fascination with the sciences. George Lucas, Professor Andreasen notes, won the National Medal of Arts in 2012 but had previously won National Medal of Technology in 2004. They work hard, in part because they enjoy so much the work they do, and they’re persistent, even when their unusual ideas are met with rejection or skepticism. Creativity also often runs in the family with one participant describing quiet evenings as a child in which the parents would both be working on reports and papers while the children read or did their homework. There was no television.
That sort of different thinking might be harder to maintain in an age of cable television and Internet access — not to mention in a period when thinking different has given us the iPhone and iPad.
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