An old saw says
that no one can be creative without a bit of madness.
Indeed, creative
individuals often report odd sensory and perceptual experiences, and cognitive
similarities have been observed between creative and schizophrenic individuals,
such as loose associations, broad attentional focus, ability to connect novel
information and so on.
Creativity has
also been linked to abnormal hemispheric lateralization, with increased
prevalence of non-right handedness among creative than among non-creative
people.
In a recent
study, Dr Antonio Preti and one of his former students, Dr Marcello Vellante,
compared 80 creative artists to 80 matched non-creative controls, and found
that creative artists were statistically more likely to admit the use of the
left hand, with more widespread left-hand use reported by artists involved in
the creative activities traditionally associated with the right hemisphere
(music and painting).
Creative
professionals also scored higher on measures of psychosis-proneness, but were
not more likely to report signs of mental disorder than non-creative matched pairs.
Neurological
studies suggest that there exist clear differences in the abilities involved in
artistic performances, putatively linked to the specific brain areas involved
in the creative process (areas of language, vision, hearing, and so on).
This study adds
to this evidence, showing that handedness, which is a proxy for hemispheric
specialization, is differently distributed between creative and non-creative
people: differences in hemispheric specialization could also explain the
greater propensity to report odds sensory and perceptual experiences by
creative artists.
This greater
propensity to psychotic-like subjective experiences, however, does not convert
into a greater prevalence of mental disorders among creative professionals.
Reference:
Preti A,
Vellante M.
Creativity and
psychopathology: Higher rates of psychosis-proneness and non-right handedness
among creative artists compared to same-age and -gender peers. Journal of
Nervous & Mental Disease, 2007, 195: 837-845.
Contacts:
Dr Antonio
Preti
SchizophreniaProject
e-mail: apreti@tin.it