Gadgetory

creativity inventiveness and genius composer Robert Schumann and painter Vincent van Gogh embody these concepts but they may have had something else in common some scholars think that they both had bipolar disorder a mental illness is characterized by an usual shifts in mood and activity levels and some scientists suggests that their mental health disorder was intimately linked to their genius that the same genes that code for creativity also code for bipolar disorder hence the concept of the mad genius there is some support for the idea of the mad genius in the scientific world in 2013 for instance researchers in Sweden found that writers were more likely to be diagnosed with either bipolar disorder or schizophrenia and more recently geneticists in Iceland found a genetic link between both these disorders and creativity I mean just look at these headlines researchers don't know sorry to burst your bubble but that study isn't as conclusive as those headlines suggest so the author's building on previous work have shown that if you take a collection of variants throughout the entire human genome you can show that this collection of variants explains about five or six percent of schizophrenia those exact same variants throughout the entire human genome also explain about a quarter percent of the variance in whether or not someone grows up to be a professional artist this is David Cutler I'm a human geneticist from Emory University he has another way of interpreting the study that brings us closer to what the findings actually mean let's imagine that the difference between the sort of least schizophrenic person in the most gets a frantic person is a mile these variants together for schizophrenia explain about 300 feet so you can sort of think of 300 feet out of a mile as you know a start but it's not telling you most of the story when looking at these same variants for whether or not you grow up to be a professional artist they explain about 13 feet out of the mile 13 feet is probably a lot less than taking a good art class rejection I suspect that one art class would move me a lot closer to being a professional artist than if I had been born these thirteen feet closer but there's another reason to question those headlines the definition for creativity that was used in this study was only based on whether somebody belonged to an artistic profession or society I think I think we all know that some people are creative outside of an artistic society there are probably plenty of people that don't have them as a professional artist by title so it's bacon defining creativity by profession might be the best definition that we have but it's also a really bad one some artists aren't all that creative and some coders are super inventive and none of that was captured in this study this kind of demystifies the whole idea of the mad genius you say well for some believing in this myth means avoiding treatment for their mental illness because they think it might jeopardize their creativity and in general it just perpetuates stigma either relating to being a creative individual or to having a mental illness it's just another way of other ring people because they deviate from the norm so the next time you look at starry night or listen to pep yawn think of these creators and people like them as geniuses in their own right their mental health was probably unrelated to their creativity