The mad scientist. The mad composer. The mad poet. Is it coincidence that madness and creative genius often seem to go hand in hand? A recent study by U of T and Harvard researchers provides a clue: highly creative individuals and those who are prone to psychotic behavior may share similar modes of thought, suggesting a shared neurobiological basis.
The study, published in the September issue of The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, shows that creative individuals tend to have lower levels of latent inhibition-the capacity to ignore what has been previously learned as irrelevant information. In other words, creative individuals tend to keep their eyes and ears open to more things than most individuals would at any given time.
But how do you quantify creativity? Researchers measure it in several ways. There is a test of divergent thinking, in which subjects complete a task like naming alternate uses for a common object. They also describe themselves by checking off adjectives from a list, indicating how creative they consider themselves to be. There is also an objective measure of creative achievement. “You have to check off actual things you’ve done, not creative thoughts you’ve had,” says U of T psychologist Dr. Jordan B. Peterson, co-author of the study. If you were a musician, for example, you would check off whether you have written music, whether your music has been published and sold, and so on.
Subjects are then put through something called a latent inhibition test. In stage one of this experiment, researchers play a recording of nonsense syllables, and subjects have to keep track of how many times they hear a certain syllable. In the background is a recording of random bursts of white noise, which has nothing to do with the task.
In stage two, subjects look at a monitor with circles appearing one after another, and have to figure out what predicts their appearance. They no longer need to listen to the syllables, but the soundtrack, along with the white noise, keep playing. “We force you to learn to ignore the white noise in [stage one], and then we test [in stage two] to see if you’ve learned to ignore it,” says Peterson.
Most people learn to ignore it, because they have decided it is irrelevant to the syllable task. However, what precedes the appearance of each circle in the monitor during stage two is precisely this burst of white noise. If you did not ignore it in stage one, you would pick it up right away. That is what most of the creative individuals do, showing they have been paying attention to the syllables while keeping an ear out for the so-called irrelevant noise.
“Creative people are not as good at learning to ignore things,” says Peterson.
However, he adds that when reduced latent inhibition is coupled with high IQ and good working memory, individuals can make original and creative use of the extra information. If you have fifty creative ideas in a day, they cannot all be worth pursuing. Your IQ and working memory are like editors. They pick out the good ones.
Individuals who suffer from schizophrenia are not as good at learning to ignore things, either. The mind of a paranoid schizophrenic, in particular, is incessantly flooded with information. Depending on individual differences in personality, as well as differences in factors such as IQ and working memory, reduced latent inhibition could be associated with creative temperament in one but psychotic behavior in another.
Yet Peterson thinks the factor common to both the psychotic state and the creative thought process is dopamine, one of our many brain chemicals that transmit nerve signals. If you give people cocaine or amphetamine (“speed”), both of which increase dopamine activity, people’s latent inhibition disappears. If these are given to paranoid schizophrenics, their symptoms get worse. “This is partly why we claim to have tapped into the biological basis of creativity,” reasons Peterson. “Because the [biochemical processes of dopamine] are pretty well understood.”
Studies on rodents-which have a brain structure very similar to ours-shed light on human brain chemistry and behavior. “It seems that high dopamine function leads to more novelty seeking and less attention to previous learning,” says Dr. John Yeomans, a U of T psychologist who studies dopamine systems in reward, exploration and latent inhibition in rodents.
Indeed, Peterson theorizes that when dopamine levels go up, individuals become more exploratory and more open to their surroundings, where “things get perceptually re-novelized” because the “inhibitory strength of old categories decreases.” His theory is that the associational networks in the prefrontal cortex loosen up, so that new ideas are triggered during exploration and new patterns are perceived. Originality in thought comes about.
“That’s what visual artists do to us. They make the old new,” he says.
Perhaps not surprisingly, reduced latent inhibition seems to better predict artistic creativity than scientific creativity. Peterson speculates it is because there is no methodology for art. There is, however, a method for science. A lot of scientific achievement is a result of straight conscientiousness, “You master the domain. You see the next problem. You work hard. Solid. One of the things that’s so remarkable about the scientific method is that it enables people who are not temperamentally creative to make discoveries.” He also points out economic patterns, ecological patterns, and social transformation patterns as examples of the kind of intangible phenomena that are not as “amenable to sensory analysis” but are more easily perceived by those who have reduced latent inhibition.
This does not mean that drugs which temporarily open doors of perception, such as cocaine and amphetamines, are a shortcut to creative achievement. “Drug effects are transient,” Peterson says. “They may decrease your latent inhibition and increase your creative associations, but there is a big space between that and actually producing something creative.”
