
The myth of ‘mad’ genius - baddash
https://aeon.co/essays/is-there-any-evidence-linking-creativity-and-mood-disorders
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commandlinefan
I've always wondered if a lot of "eccentric" people aren't just behaving the
way everybody would naturally behave if they could get away with it. I say and
do a lot of things because I have to if I want to have food to eat and a place
to sleep, but I'll never know how different my behavior _might_ have been if I
were rich enough or brilliant enough that people would just put up with
whatever I happened to feel like doing at any given moment.

~~~
majos
On a related note, I think this idea explains the appeal of smart jerk god
characters (Doctor Who, Doctor House, Rick Sanchez, Sherlock Holmes...) to a
sizeable portion of nerds (including me). "So smart they can't help but need
you" is not a healthy goal, but damn if it isn't seductive.

~~~
Ntrails
To me it's not so much "So smart they can't help but need you", as it is
"being right is more important than anything else". The world doesn't work
like that (often), but it's an attractive ideal in some ways

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toomanybeersies
As much as I like to joke that the greatest artists were all deeply flawed
people, so I'm trying to become an alcoholic arsehole in order to become a
better author, as the article states, there are a lot of good and great
artists/creatives who are not substance abusing wife beaters.

I think there are a couple of factors at play here. The first is that you
never hear about how normal an artist was. Nobody talks about how Ansel Adams
didn't beat his wife and wasn't an alcoholic, because that's just normal. We
only talk about Hemingway's alcoholism, or Van Gogh's mental condition. So
we're conditioned to believe that artists are flawed people.

The second factor is that people want to justify why they're not a great
artist. "I'm not a great writer, but at least I don't emotionally abuse
everyone I know and I'm not a raging alcoholic".

~~~
darawk
That's a reasonable theory, but it doesn't explain why this phenomenon is
(somewhat) unique to art. The explanation you gave applies equally well to
say, Basketball players and business tycoons. And for the most part, there's
no social wisdom i'm aware of that says you have to be a drug addicted asshole
to be one of those things.

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toomanybeersies
I think that it does apply to sports, it's a common trope that athletes
(especially in contact sports) are domestic abusers. Business tycoons are
often stereotyped as sociopaths.

Plus there's doping in athletics. People love to criticise Lance Armstrong for
doping (among his other flaws), but there's no way, even with doping, that the
average person would be able to compete in pro cycling, all the steroids,
clenbuterol, EPO, and other PEDs in the world couldn't dope you up enough to
be competitive at that level.

People love to justify their mediocre existence (not that there's anything at
all wrong with mediocrity). They could be a businessman if they were more
sociopathic, they could be an athlete if they used steroids, they could be an
artist if they took drugs or were more eccentric.

~~~
watwut
Then again, there are people who dropped out of sport, because they thought
they would have to take doping or were pressured to. There are people I know
personally who refused jobs that required them do something they found
unethical - despite higher pay and benefits. It is profoundly unfair to label
them as mediocre just because they have moral or ethical lines they don't
cross. Doing that is nothing but rationalization of bad acts.

Maybe the _average mediocre_ person is not just _justifying their mediocre
existence_.

Maybe you are rationalizing bad acts bad on idea that being socially
celebrated matters more then ethics and moral.

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krageon
Being socially celebrated gets you all the things people teach you mean
success as you're growing up: Money, probably a beautiful wife, the admiration
of your peers. I agree with you that doesn't have to matter but I don't think
you should underestimate how much that flies in the face of what most people
have been taught matters most.

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watwut
Which is why I am objecting against knee jerk labeling of people who resisted
the temptation as "mediocre" and knee jerk celebration of those who did not
resisted as "the others are mediocre anyway". It is tempting even without
that.

The beautiful wife will get old as any other women, unless you exchange her
ever few years. Being wife merely as a social status trophy is not the kind of
relationship I would find attractive at all. I know that some girls are raised
to believe that is what they are supposed to be, but that is another category
of things I would rather avoid.

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Semirhage
The article focuses exclusively on mood disorders, which frankly isn’t what
most people think of or mean by “mad” in any case. Nikola Tesla for example
was mad as a hatter, but it appears to have been a delusional disorder. While
depression for example can be psychotic, it tends not to be, and I think
psychosis or at least delusional beliefs are the hallmark of what is commonly
meant when the public talks about “madness.”

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eigenstuff
You're on the money. Tesla, Emily Dickinson, and likely Van Gogh all had
schizotypal personality disorder. Which is not so much a personality disorder
in the sense most people think of them so much as it's the Aspergers analog of
the schizophrenia spectrum. I've seen it suggested that Einstein may have had
it, which I find a lot easier to believe than the notion that he had Aspergers
given that his son had schizophrenia and these things tend to run in families.
(He may well have had nothing, though.) I strongly suspect that Edwin Land,
the inventor of Polaroid, was schizotypal.

There IS actually a proven connection between schizotypal traits and
creativity where there really isn't with mood disorders (except bipolar to an
extent), since you're "mad" but not so much so that you can't function well
enough to execute your ideas. It's worth googling about.

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jpeg_hero
Article and “meta-research” distinctly not related to genius.

Genius is a distinctly one-in-a-million phenomenon, this is about people of
above average creativity and how they relate to those of below average
creativity. And very dubious categorization at that.

~~~
aje403
I don't know why you're getting downvoted, you're right (although the
definition of 'genius' is always up for debate). This is just one of a million
opinion articles on the same questions which happens to have a regression line
behind it.

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TangoTrotFox
Speaking of the stereotype of 'mad genius', as opposed to the eccentric
creative which this article is about, I would hypothesize that 'mad' is simply
a mislabeling of the fact that those who are more intelligent are _generally_
going to be less guided by social norms and more by their own logic and views.
Being able to follow your own logic, without bounds, is something that is most
people, for some reason, do not tend to do.

Einstein is the best example of this. Relativity, and its implications, are
intuitively insane and absurd. Yet his logic led him there and he invested an
immense amount of effort and energy trying to prove it. And it turned out he
was correct. In a parallel universe where the laws of physics are more sane,
Einstein would have been labeled as insane for even imagining such an 'absurd'
idea might be reality.

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salty_biscuits
James Joyce said

"To say that a great genius is mad, while at the same time recognizing his
artistic merit, is no better than to say he is rheumatic or diabetic"

His daughter had mental health issues. She went to see Jung and the exchange
allegedly went

“Doctor Jung, have you noticed that my daughter seems to be submerged in the
same waters as me?” to which he answered: “Yes, but where you swim, she
drowns.”

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swayvil
I used to be nuts. And you know what, I went with it.

I could focus on a project 24-7-365. That's how great projects get done. And
people who get great projects done are what we call "geniuses".

I'm better now. Sometimes I think of the great projects that I could do but
then I think, "no thanks, life is bigger than that".

~~~
kizer
Good that you're better. Maybe try to work lightly (2 hours a day) on a
project someday and see if you can complete it without herculean focus or
dedication.

~~~
rabidrat
It's not like that, in my experience at least. I can do amazing things in 6
weeks, but it involves eating, breathing, and sleeping the
system/problem/project. It turns out there are 1000 hours in 6 weeks
(including sleep time), and if you have the problem loaded into your brain as
its 'default mode network', then it takes over and you can get massive cross-
functional efficiencies (including dreaming up solutions in your sleep).
Working the equivalent for 2 hours/day would take years and does not generate
anywhere close to the kind of energy or output that the parent is referring
to.

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ggm
An article about the status/role/context of insanity and society which doesn't
mention Foucault's work? Published in the year of my birth (1961), which I
like to think is a coincidence...

Foucault M. History of Madness. Khalfa J, editor, translator & Murphy J,
translator. New York: Routledge; 2006. ISBN 0-415-27701-9.

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LifeLiverTransp
Yes, why should a shizophreniac who wildly connects everyday experiences to
form strange conspiracy theories would have a natural advantage when it comes
to wildly recombining seemingly unconnected ideas, to leap over boundaries
every 100 recombination?

Of course, if there is a birth advantage there- all the meritocratic idealism
and work wont get you or your kids there.

So its very very anti-equalizism. Its okay, though, if that "benefit" messes
up someone elses life and strands him/her living in a box. That is just how
the world is supossed to work. Sick people must suffer, if they do not fit
into the world tailored for average people by average people. No sense in
protesting gods wanted order. Move along.

~~~
darkmighty
Have you ever experienced or met someone with schizophrenia?

It is hell.

Not only for them but often for those who care about them. It's not about a
rosy, whacky persons that the society whimsically outcasts. It's often
legitimately tortured people that almost always need serious treatment and
constant care, otherwise they risk falling into a very dark abyss.

They often wind up hobos or sometimes in prisons/asylums because they don't
have treatment and a very supportive family available, falling in disrepair,
not because an evil plot of society.

If this condition were the price to pay for breakthroughs, I'd consider the
price too high. But indeed it isn't -- there are no examples of seriously ill
paranoid schizophrenics that put out meaningful work. It's a massive
hindrance, fogging your view of the world and yourself. Often cited cases like
John Nash actually stopped being able to conduct any good work once the
disease got hold of them. There are countless examples of extremely brilliant
people productive through their lives that never showed signs of delusion, and
almost no cases of delusional persons doing good work.

This disease largely embodies the obscurantism, mysticism, fear, distrust,
that scientific enlightenment was idealized to fight against. I can't wait for
its root causes to be found and it completely eradicated (along with MS,
Alzheimer's Disease and Dementia, please).

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Mediterraneo10
> there are no examples of seriously ill paranoid schizophrenics that put out
> meaningful work.

I daresay Adolf Wölfli is one counterexample. Institutionalized for most of
his life, beleaguered by paranoid delusions (some of which found their
expression in his work) but it was under the circumstances of that illness
that he produced the art he is so acclaimed for.

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fladrif
Creativity seems to stem from being outside of the "mainstream" mindset, of
going down paths not taken and trying unconventional strategies. Most of the
time these don't work out putting an emphasis on the tried and true, but when
it does it get labeled as a spark of genius, of creativity. I think it takes a
certain type of person to continually beat down these paths and blaze
unconventional trails and may be a mark of a 'mad' man/woman, but it may just
take those kinds of people to not try and conform with conventional wisdom.

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cbanek
It's interesting that there was no talk of anxiety. In talking about the
availability heuristic, which is refereneced a lot in Daniel Kahneman's
_Thinking Fast and Slow_, they also talk about how anxiety tends to activate
System 2 (which is the one for deep thinking), as opposed to the intuitive and
nearly autonomous System 1.

Creativity and intelligence are considered different, but related, and
Kahneman talks about how the activation of System 2 allows people to make more
well informed (smarter) decisions.

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askl56
I've always believed that "genius" is simply mental illness with an audience.

People such as Mozart were known for feeling nervous anxious etc, until they
wrote music which was cathartic, which nowadays I'm sure would be diagnosed as
some sort of mental illness.

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themodelplumber
This is part of the reason why "mental illness" is a broken term for certain
applications. Unevenly-matched skill (coping, etc) vs. circumstance (group
psychology, social standards) is one alternate POV that better explains why a
"mentally-ill" person could create genius works. They have become conditioned
to exploring extremes by dint of circumstance and personal history; their
liabilities, struggles, and even periodic victories in these contexts allow
them to produce works the likes of which are rarely seen or even contemplated
in "non-genius" company. The audience knows intuitively that they are
experiencing some fundamental truth, though they cannot in a small number of
steps arrive at the sequence that allowed the truth to emerge.

~~~
humbleMouse
That last sentence is profound, nice comment +1

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8bitsrule
_The Romantic stereotype that creativity is enhanced by a mood disorder_

That's postulated as a given. If it's not a given, then it's a red herring.
The author supplies no evidence that it's a given. As far as I got, the phrase
'mood disorder' was undefined.

 _... But is there any scientific reason to believe in a connection?_

Science doesn't believe, science constructs and improves models based on
repeatable observations. That which cannot be observed cannot be modelled.
People can choose to 'believe' those models ... which is 'faith'. Which
science was invented to get away from.

So in the first two paragraphs, the author prepares us for the illucid neo-
phrenology which follows.

~~~
carlmr
>Science doesn't believe, science constructs and improves models based on
repeatable observations.

That's confusing the scientific ideal, with how actual scientists operate.
Actual scientists hope that they get something right, they feel strongly about
their research like the mother of a child, they're just as clouded by emotions
as any other human being. And if you add corruption into the mix, then yes,
what we call science is not as solid as it looks, but it still provides useful
results sometimes.

But we can still talk about a scientific reason to believe. Because the reason
might be scientific, but it still might be something which we can believe or
not. Because scientific reasons are about as flawed as their creators.

The replication problems in many fields are evidence that science is only as
ideal as the people producing it.

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majos
I don't get this article. As far as I can tell, it wants to prove (in spite of
the headline) that mental illness and creativity are not really correlated.
Then it goes on to say that measuring either mental illness or creativity is
hard on its own -- in which case the meta-analysis done isn't terribly useful?

My own unempirical take on genius is it's not so much "you need some insanity
to have groundbreaking genius-level ideas" but "some people are so into doing
thing x that they will choose to do it almost all the time, and some of these
people have talent and luck in thing x too, which is a potent combination that
looks like what we'd call genius".

~~~
taneq
Well, the general take is that average intelligence combined with well-above-
average drive (motivation, work ethic, etc.) has significantly better results
than "smart but lazy". So you'd expect someone who's smart and also fanatical
about something to get outstanding results in that field. Monomania also
generally comes across as 'mad'.

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dbxz
I taught gifted education at a prestigious middle school for five years. Over
300 kids came through my classroom during that time.

I saw it all. Seizures. Fistfights. One girl was pretty sure there were secret
messages from the principal in the tests I gave. Lots of them started taking
drugs early too.

The culmination happened in the Fall of 2012, when one girl convinced her
friends that, if they killed themselves, they'd wake up already graduated from
college, with school behind them. Luckily, they didn't succeed. And so, in a
class of 30 people, I had 6 out and in a mental hospital.

Mad geniuses. They're real.

~~~
toomanybeersies
I used to go to a gifted education class once a week when I was around 13
years old.

Probably half the class or more had some form of condition, Autism, ADHD,
depression, etc.

Looking back at it now, I don't think it was the case that gifted people are
generally "mad". I'm a fairly normal person, and so were a lot of other people
in the class. I think that rather, it was that these kids didn't integrate
well into conventional education, but this gifted education class was very
understanding and accepting of people's "quirks", and had a much more open
learning environment where people could grow in their own way. I ended up
there because I struggled with the structured nature of normal school.

I've met plenty of people over the years who could be considered gifted (in
this case, top 5% IQ), most of them are completely normal and probably just
dealt with the overly structured nature of normal school.

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uxhack
This article is trying to rebute David Horrobin idea that if everyone is
creative then the world will soon be become crazy. It takes a geniuses to see
a stick as a weapon. If Everyone starts becoming creative then the whole
society will quickly devenigate.We need slme order. Horrobin arguement goes
against the idea that everyone can be a creative genius. What is interesting
about his idea is that how universal craziness is amongst a small proportion
of the population, which means it is has been around a very long time.

~~~
Nasrudith
Reminds me of a differing but related idea. Society at large is already crazy
but nobody notices because it has been so normalized being rational is looked
upon as crazy.

The promoter of doctors handwashing wound up instituionalized. And it isn't a
in the past problem. I mean look at interviewing etiquette and ideals for one.
They distrust people who can't or won't put on a mask convincingly enough as
untrustworthy. Not even as "unsuited for a job where it is relevant like sales
or acting". That is frankly barking mad to only trust those capable of faking.

