Nancy Andreasen's Insights on Creativity and Mental Disorder

Maria Popova of Brain Picking has another gem; this time illustrating life long work of Nancy Andreasen to discover the causes behind creativity which includes mental disorders such as Bipolar, Asperger's syndrome, depression, etc.

I have written many times over the years on depression and how it has helped me; especially in the past year after Max passed away. 

One of the benefits for evolution to "preserve" depression in us is to focus and reflect on "things" sans distraction to reach a solution. Perpetual busyness never helps to focus and reflect; hence people tend to outsource their questions and problems to cable news morons to positivity gurus. 

Here are some brilliant insights from Nancy Andreasen's book The Creating Brain: The Neuroscience of Genius: 

Although many writers had had periods of significant depression, mania, or hypomania, they were consistently appealing, entertaining, and interesting people. They had led interesting lives, and they enjoyed telling me about them as much as I enjoyed hearing about them. Mood disorders tend to be episodic, characterized by relatively brief periods of low or high mood lasting weeks to months, interspersed with long periods of normal mood (known as euthymia to us psychiatrists). All the writers were euthymic at the time that I interviewed them, and so they could look back on their periods of depression or mania with considerable detachment. They were also able to describe how abnormalities in mood state affected their creativity. Consistently, they indicated that they were unable to be creative when either depressed or manic.

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One point of view … is that gifted people are in fact supernormal or superior in many ways. My writers certainly were. They were charming, fun, articulate, and disciplined. They typically followed very similar schedules, getting up in the morning and allocating a large chunk of time to writing during the earlier part of the day. They would rarely let a day go by without writing. In general, they had a close relationship with friends and family. They manifested the Freudian definition of health: lieben und arbeiten, “to love and to work.” On the other hand, they also manifested the alternative common point of view about the nature of genius: that it is “to madness near allied.” Many definitely had experienced periods of significant mood disorder. Importantly, though handicapping creativity when they occurred, these periods of mood disorder were not permanent or long-lived. In some instances, they may even have provided powerful material upon which the writer could later draw, as a Wordsworthian “emotion recollected in tranquility".

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Many personality characteristics of creative people … make them more vulnerable, including openness to new experiences, a tolerance for ambiguity, and an approach to life and the world that is relatively free of preconceptions. This flexibility permits them to perceive things in a fresh and novel way, which is an important basis for creativity. But it also means that their inner world is complex, ambiguous, and filled with shades of gray rather than black and white. It is a world filled with many questions and few easy answers. While less creative people can quickly respond to situations based on what they have been told by people in authority — parents, teachers, pastors, rabbis, or priests — the creative person lives in a more fluid and nebulous world. He or she may have to confront criticism or rejection for being too questioning, or too unconventional. Such traits can lead to feelings of depression or social alienation. A highly original person may seem odd or strange to others. Too much openness means living on the edge. Sometimes the person may drop over the edge… into depression, mania, or perhaps schizophrenia.

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All human beings (and their brains) have to cope with the fact that their five senses gather more information than even the magnificent human brain is able to process. To put this another way: we need to be able to ignore a lot of what is happening around us — the smell of pizza baking, the sound of the cat meowing, or the sight of birds flying outside the window — if we are going to focus our attention and concentrate on what we are doing (in your case, for example, reading this book). Our ability to filter out unnecessary stimuli and focus our attention is mediated by brain mechanisms in regions known as the thalamus and the reticular activating system.