Creativity can be defined as a mental disorder somehow, recent study shows. People who are engaged in careers related to writing or visual and performing arts are inclined to carry genetic variations that predispose them to developing psychosis.
Psychosis can be defined as mild schizophrenia or bipolar disorder and that happens when the realm of thought touches the unbearable depths of imagination.
Four large studies conducted in Netherlands and Sweden, on a scale of 35.000 study subjects, concluded that mental illnesses can have a very strong link with high levels of creativity. People working in creative fields are 25% more exposed to carry a high level of risk in developing mental disturbances later in life compared to the general population that is inclined to concentrate on other career fields, not strongly tied to creativity.
This comes as no surprise, but rather as a confirmation of what history has already taught us. The most creative minds are the most twisted as well, because creativity requires some limits to be surpassed or outgrown, in order to make the mind think outside the box. And crossing lines of rationality implies taking some risks, namely developing madness at certain levels.
Vision and power to create come at the fairest of costs and most of the times people pay the price of adaptation to societies that don’t necessarily need people to be creative, because creative brains are harder to control. The mind field in creative people is something flexible that builds limits only to break them with others that reach further and take them to uncommon, unfamiliar and unknown grounds.
Working with the unknown, hence what is not created yet, forces the reason to go to distant places that are sometimes defined as madness. And madness happens when reality becomes unbearable, compared with the phantasm that our brains are capable of creating.
The creative brain doesn’t comply and adapt to method, doesn’t walk on common roads, it rather creates new methods and makes new ways that allow discovery and material for creation.
The study that comes to confirm that psychosis or a certain kind of madness is strongly linked to creative brains can be read in the journal Nature Neuroscience, emerged from Iceland’s DeCode Project.
However, based on scientific findings, creativity is easy to spot but very hard to define, as its universe is quite vast. The line between eccentricity and mental illness is pretty much unclear and always shifting from one landmark t another. Demonstrating with facts rather than flexible arguments that a link between creativity and mental illnesses actually exists can be a maddening task itself.
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