From: Randall <rvh40@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: September 13, 2005 11:09:29 AM PDT
To: Dave <dave@xxxxxxxxxx>
Cc: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Tis a Fine Line Indeed ...
<http://tinyurl.com/dzahc>
Fine Line Revealed Between Creativity and Insanity
Ker Than
LiveScience Staff Writer
LiveScience.comWed Sep 7, 4:00 PM ET
History suggests that the line between creativity and madness is a
fine
one, but a small group of people known as schizotypes are able to walk
it with few problems and even benefit from it.
A new study confirms that their enhanced creativity may come from
using
more of the right side of the brain than the rest of us.
In the spectrum between normal and insane, schizotypes generally fall
somewhere in the middle. While they do not suffer many of the symptoms
affecting schizophrenics, including paranoia, hallucinations and
incoherent thoughts, schizotypes often exhibit their own
eccentricities.
"They may dress or carry themselves in a strange way," says Bradley
Folley, a graduate student in clinical psychology at Vanderbilt
University in Tennessee and the lead author of the study. "They're not
abnormal, they live normal lives but they often have idiosyncratic
ways
of thinking. Certain things may have special meaning for them or they
may be more spiritually attuned."
Problem solving
The link between creativity and psychosis has largely been based on
anecdotal evidence and correlation studies. The Vanderbilt study is
the
first to investigate the creative process experimentally using
brain-imaging techniques.
The researchers defined creativity as the ability to generate
something
new and useful from existing products or ideas.
"Creativity at its base is associative," Folley told LiveScience.
"It's
taking things that you might see and pass by everyday and using
them in
a novel way to solve a new problem."
The researchers conducted two experiments to compare the creative
thinking processes of schizotypes, schizophrenics and normal control
subjects.
In the first experiment, subjects were shown a variety of household
objects and asked to come up with new functions for them.
For example, all three groups would be asked to come up with possible
uses for a needle and thread. While the normal and schizophrenic
controls came up with pretty typical responses like sewing or
stitching,
one schizotype said that if a person was poor but wanted to get
engaged,
he could use the thread to make a ring and use the needle to write "I
Love You," in the sand.
Picture this
In the second experiment, the three groups were again asked to come up
with creative uses for everyday objects, but this time their brains
were
monitored using a brain-imaging technique called near-infrared optical
spectroscopy.
The scans showed that both sides of the brain in all three groups were
active when making novel associations. However, in the brains of
schizotypes, the activation of the right hemisphere was much higher
compared to brains of the control subjects.
Folley speculates that what may be happening is that schizotypes may
either have more access to the right hemisphere than the average
population or there may be more efficient communication between the
two
hemispheres.
The finding is detailed online in the journal Schizophrenia Research.