Is A Creative Genius Normal?

Speaking about a genius man, here is a quote from Napoleon Hill, Think and Grow Rich-“a person who wears long hair, eats queer food, lives alone, and serves as a target for the jokes makers.” I once thought that way. But Napoleon was citing some wiseacre. He then went on to give his own definition: “a man who has discovered how to increase the intensity of thought to the point where he can freely communicate with sources of knowledge not available through the ordinary rate of thought.” The genius communicates with the Infinite Intelligence  through the sixth sense, the creative imagination, the sense you and I, may not be using today. We often perceive the genius as the abnormal person. I would even say, mentally challenged. I had a friend back in Africa. He was a brilliant student at University. When he got some mental health problems, everyone said:” it happens to people who become extremely intelligent.” Now my question is: is the genius a healthy person?

Stephanie Pappas is telling us more in Why Creative Geniuses Are Often Neurotic-Sir Isaac Newton formulated the laws of gravity, built telescopes and delved into mathematical theories. He was also prone to bouts of depression and once suffered a mental breakdown.

In this sense, Newton was like many other creative, driven individuals. Charles Darwin, for example, struggled with nausea and gastrointestinal distress in response to stress, so much so that modern psychologists have suggested that he may have had a panic disorder. Winston Churchill referred to his dark moods as his “black dog,” leading to speculation that he might have had episodes of depression.

Whatever the truth behind these prominent men’s mental health, multiple studies have found a link between creativity and neuroticism — a tendency toward rumination and negative thinking. Now, British researchers have proposed a possible reason for the connection: Creativity and neuroticism could be two sides of the same coin. [Creative Genius: The World’s Greatest Minds]
Overthinking it

Neuroticism is a personality trait that lends itself to worry, anxiety and isolation. Highly neurotic people are more susceptible to mental illness than happy-go-lucky types; they’re also worse at high-risk professions like military aviation or bomb disposal, which require coolness under pressure. On the other hand, neuroticism seems linked to creative pursuits. Studies have found, for example, that artists and other creative people score higher on tests of neuroticism than people who aren’t in creative fields.

“This is something that bothered me for a long time,” said Adam Perkins, a lecturer in the neurobiology of personality at King’s College London. Perkins is the co-author of a new opinion piece published Aug. 27 in the journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences that lays out the possible links between neuroticism and creativity in the brain.

Perkins was listening to a lecture by Jonathan Smallwood, a psychologist and expert on daydreaming at the University of York in England, when Smallwood mentioned that people who report high levels of negative thoughts show lots of activation in a brain region called the medial prefrontal cortex, even when they’re just resting in a brain scanner. This area, which sits behind the forehead, is involved in the appraisal of threat.

“It’s quite a simple leap to think they’ve got a sort of internal threat generator in their heads,” Perkins told Live Science. “They can be lying down in bed or sitting in an armchair in a perfectly neutral environment, and yet they’re feeling as if they’re under threat.”

Self-generated thoughts

These “self-generated thoughts” can obviously make people miserable, Perkins said. In essence, people are imagining problems that don’t exist. Studies show that neurotic people have sensitive amygdalae, the almond-shaped brain structures involved in processing fear and anxiety. So, neurotic people not only invent problems, but tend to become very stressed by them.

But self-generated thoughts are also linked to planning skills and the ability to delay gratification. Perkins realized that the brain’s internal threat generator might have pros as well.

“Neurotic people feel sort of miserable spontaneously, and they also tend to be better at coming up with creative solutions for things,” he said. Isaac Newton, for example, once wrote that he solved problems by chewing over them incessantly. “I keep the subject constantly before me,” he said, “and wait till the first dawnings open slowly, by little and little, into a full and clear light.”

Thus, the neurotic tendency to dwell on things might be the very root of creativity and problem solving, Perkins said. [Mad Geniuses: 10 Odd Tales of Famous Scientists]

Anxiety and genius

According to Perkins and his colleagues’ hypothesis, the brains of neurotic people might have a particularly persistent “default mode network,” which is the circuit in the brain that becomes activated when people are doing nothing in particular. The medial prefrontal cortex is part of that system. If neurotic people have trouble turning off this thought-generating network, it might make them more prone to overthinking, dwelling and otherwise mulling over problems — real and imagined.

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