6 ms·

Beautiful Minds: Relations between genius, creativeness and mental illness

43 points by fogus 17y ago

RiderOfGiraffes 17y ago
See also: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=797723 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=797723 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=101255 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=101255 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=121063 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=121063
tokenadult 17y ago
This issue is much discussed here on HN. The links RiderofGiraffes kindly shared didn't include either HN thread that submitted the Scientific American article mentioned in the blog post submitted here. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=788259 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=788259 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=795292 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=795292 As I noted in each of those threads, the issue of connections between creativity and mood disorders has been studied at book length. The most authoritative of the several books on that issue is by psychologist (and mood disorder patient) Kay Redfield Jamison, author of Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament, http://www.amazon.com/Touched-Fire-Manic-Depressive-Artistic-Temperament/dp/068483183X/ http://www.amazon.com/Touched-Fire-Manic-Depressive-Artistic... and co-author of the definitive text on manic-depressive illness http://www.amazon.com/Manic-Depressive-Illness-Disorders-Recurrent-Depression/dp/0195135792/ http://www.amazon.com/Manic-Depressive-Illness-Disorders-Rec... who has thought out loud in her writings over the years about whether treatments for depression that help suffering people may also deprive society of creative output. Her current thinking on the issue--and she takes lithium herself every day--is that the best-evidenced mood-stabilizing treatments for mood disorders are helpful to patients and increase rather than decrease their ability to contribute useful work product to society. Her co-author, Frederick K. Goodwin, M.D., is still deeply skeptical of some antidepressant medications (e.g., the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors) because of their capacity for inducing mania in many bipolar patients. P.S. The illness of game theorist John Nash, the subject of the wonderful book A Beautiful Mind, was almost surely manic-depressive illness rather than schizophrenia. At the time he was diagnosed, American physicians misdiagnosed about 50 percent of cases of manic-depressive illness as schizophrenia, because of the mistaken diagnostic criteria used in Freudian psychiatry. Patients started getting better sooner in America as their diagnosis and treatment improved based on ideas from Europe (Kraepelin's diagnostic categories), Australia (lithium treatment for mood disorders), and America itself (cognitive talk therapy as pioneered by Aaron Beck, a former Freudian who found out that Freudian views of depression were incorrect). There seems to be a seasonal surge of interest in this subject on HN right now. Hm.
- fogus 17y ago
  Thanks for the great run-down! I had no idea that it was such a hot topic on HN when I submitted it, I know where my time is going today. ;)
arijo 17y ago
If one thinks of evolution not in terms of human beings as the evolving unit but in terms of groups of humans, depression - caused by a feeling of inadequacy and causing isolation and eventual death of the depressed person - might be explained by an higher likelihood of group survival chances and gene pool preservation.
- tokenadult 17y ago
  Explanation, please, with more detail? I've just been reading Jerry Coyne's book Why Evolution Is True, and that doesn't sound like a mechanism of natural selection I've seen proposed in any writing by a professional evolutionary scientist. But maybe I'll have a better understanding of what you are saying if you show more steps of your reasoning.
  - arijo 17y ago
    It's not a common perspective on evolution, to my knowledge. That's why I submitted it to the discussion by brighter minds than my own. Don't you think the group as the last in a succession of units of evolution (gene, cell, multi-cellular organism, vertebrate, primate, group of primates?) is a plausible - even if not much debated yet - conjecture? Research has shown the existence of mirror neurons (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_neuron http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_neuron) in our brain - which I interpret as humans being hardwired to function as a group. It could explain depression, for example.
    - lucifer 17y ago
      The higher order unit (e.g. Bee Hive) for the humans is very compelling. But all n-th level units exhibit a pattern that is not immediately evident for the human group unit. 1 - Body. Every unit has a distinct physically cohesive component, that can symbolically be represented as a Circle. 2 - Nucleus. Every body has a distinct Center. (Queen Bee in the Hive.) 3 - Metabolic Network. Every unit is organized through the means of a metabolic network. (Bees use chemical signals.) So if there is a 'higher' human, we need to identify these characteristic features. Of course, the cyber utopians would (plausibly) propose that it is machine mediation that will (finally) give rise to the higher human unit. [edit/add: And Mystics, rejecting the black box model of Mind, would argue that meditation and group formation (e.g. Sufis and the Dance) that activates the higher man.]
YuriNiyazov 17y ago
I suspect that there is significant sample/perception bias in noticing the mental illnesses and suicides of famous people, because they are famous and attract attention. There are probably a lot of uncreative people who have significant mood disorder issues.
simplegeek 17y ago
I didn't come across that Scientific American article before (which this link discusses) but it indeed is one of the best explanations I've found so far--imho.
10ren 17y ago
But what do rats use the 5HT1A receptor for? Assuming that we humans do in fact use it for rumination, are they doing the rat equivalent? Do they... ponder?
10ren 17y ago
I did not know that the founder/inventor of Kodak film committed suicide. “My work is done. Why wait?”
- angelbob 17y ago
  There's a great analysis of his suicide, I think in the book "The Moral Animal". It made a lot of sense, when viewed from his point of view. Eastman was an energetic, engaging and vivacious young man who had been brought low by a series of illnesses -- including severe back problems such that he could hardly walk from room to room without pain. That prevented him from going out and photographing, which was his lifelong passion. His children were grown, and his company had succeeded past the point of needing him day to day. His summary of the situation was a pretty good one.
jlees 17y ago
The more I read articles like this, the more I start thinking my manic depressiveness is somehow cool. (If not even required for a successful entrepreneurial or creative career.) At least it's a step above freak, I guess.
zoba 17y ago
I found an article about Existential Depression in Gifted Individuals. It talks about this a bit. Part of what I took from the article is that gifted individuals have the capacity to appreciate things more than non gifted people. Therefore, when a depressing thing is being understood by a gifted person, it hits the person much harder than a non gifted because they can really understand all of what it means. http://www.sengifted.org/articles_counseling/Webb_ExistentialDepressionInGiftedIndividuals.shtml http://www.sengifted.org/articles_counseling/Webb_Existentia...
- tokenadult 17y ago
  I've had a lot of discussions with parents of gifted children about this, as I am now the state president of an association dealing with gifted education. And I have attended a conference of the national organization that hosts the link you kindly shared. I have two comments: a) There is some indication in some studies that high IQ is correlated with (that is, is a "risk factor" for) depressive illness. It is not at all clear what the causal mechanism may be, as correlation is not necessarily a sign of causation. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_causation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_caus... There is still ongoing research in various world cultures to confirm and explicate this finding of some studies. b) Some parents who talk about "existential depression" are just engaging in euphemism. Their children have regular, everyday depression, just like some kids who are not gifted. There is no carefully controlled study at all http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html suggesting much uniqueness in the expression of depressed mood in high-IQ persons as contrasted with average-IQ persons. Everyone who feels depressed deserves and needs compassion. (A fairly robust study finding is that persons who experience depression tend to experience less compassion from persons near to them than do persons who do not experience depression.) And gifted learners most definitely need educational provisions different from typical school programs. High-IQ adults may or may not feel they have a supportive social circle, depending crucially on their paths to higher education and the careers they pursue. Gifted people in general have special needs, and depressed people in general have special needs, and there may be a special intersection of needs in gifted people who are depressed, but it is not clear yet what role, if any, giftedness has in mood disorders.
alan-crowe 17y ago
Sometimes genius is about breaking through to sanity despite being surrounded by collective insanity. For example, Galileo's work on kinematics required a break through in attitude: that the discussion of quantitative phenomena required measurement and calculation. Given the limitations of metrology at the time any-one who strayed away from adjectives and blather was doomed to confuse themselves with experimental error. Galileo had to break through the insanity of simply accepting those limitations and cultivate the sanity of plugging away at improving your experimental set up until you got usable numbers. As a more modern example, the happy few who have made fortunes anticipating the current financial crisis have a claim on the title "financial genius". The insanity is believing that you cannot be too highly leveraged because house prices never fall. The genius lies in not getting sucked into the madness at the time; it looks unimpressive later, after the bubble has burst. "Unimpressive later" but how did it look at the time? If you break through to sanity despite being surrounded by collective insanity, your contempories look at you askance before delivering their verdict: it is you that is mad. This does horrible things to our ability to look at the realtion between genius and mental illness. Even if the route to genius lies in cultivating sanity, us mundane onlookers will still come away with the idea that geniuses are mad and be tempted to go in the opposite direction. People love that Niels Bohr quote "We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question which divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct. My own feeling is that it is not crazy enough." but quantum mechanics does not need to be invented twice. The usual nature genius is to see through the turbid intellectual drama of one's own time to grasp ideas that will one day seem plodding and obvious.
elblanco 17y ago
This is a fascinating subject for me. I have an uncle who by all accounts was a 1st-rate genius until he got to college, went mad and now spends most of his days sleeping from all the medication he takes.

43 points by fogus 17y ago

See also: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=797723 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=797723 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=101255 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=101255 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=121063 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=121063

tokenadult 17y ago

This issue is much discussed here on HN. The links RiderofGiraffes kindly shared didn't include either HN thread that submitted the Scientific American article mentioned in the blog post submitted here. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=788259 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=788259 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=795292 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=795292 As I noted in each of those threads, the issue of connections between creativity and mood disorders has been studied at book length. The most authoritative of the several books on that issue is by psychologist (and mood disorder patient) Kay Redfield Jamison, author of Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament, http://www.amazon.com/Touched-Fire-Manic-Depressive-Artistic-Temperament/dp/068483183X/ http://www.amazon.com/Touched-Fire-Manic-Depressive-Artistic... and co-author of the definitive text on manic-depressive illness http://www.amazon.com/Manic-Depressive-Illness-Disorders-Recurrent-Depression/dp/0195135792/ http://www.amazon.com/Manic-Depressive-Illness-Disorders-Rec... who has thought out loud in her writings over the years about whether treatments for depression that help suffering people may also deprive society of creative output. Her current thinking on the issue--and she takes lithium herself every day--is that the best-evidenced mood-stabilizing treatments for mood disorders are helpful to patients and increase rather than decrease their ability to contribute useful work product to society. Her co-author, Frederick K. Goodwin, M.D., is still deeply skeptical of some antidepressant medications (e.g., the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors) because of their capacity for inducing mania in many bipolar patients. P.S. The illness of game theorist John Nash, the subject of the wonderful book A Beautiful Mind, was almost surely manic-depressive illness rather than schizophrenia. At the time he was diagnosed, American physicians misdiagnosed about 50 percent of cases of manic-depressive illness as schizophrenia, because of the mistaken diagnostic criteria used in Freudian psychiatry. Patients started getting better sooner in America as their diagnosis and treatment improved based on ideas from Europe (Kraepelin's diagnostic categories), Australia (lithium treatment for mood disorders), and America itself (cognitive talk therapy as pioneered by Aaron Beck, a former Freudian who found out that Freudian views of depression were incorrect). There seems to be a seasonal surge of interest in this subject on HN right now. Hm.

fogus 17y ago
Thanks for the great run-down! I had no idea that it was such a hot topic on HN when I submitted it, I know where my time is going today. ;)

arijo 17y ago

If one thinks of evolution not in terms of human beings as the evolving unit but in terms of groups of humans, depression - caused by a feeling of inadequacy and causing isolation and eventual death of the depressed person - might be explained by an higher likelihood of group survival chances and gene pool preservation.

tokenadult 17y ago
Explanation, please, with more detail? I've just been reading Jerry Coyne's book Why Evolution Is True, and that doesn't sound like a mechanism of natural selection I've seen proposed in any writing by a professional evolutionary scientist. But maybe I'll have a better understanding of what you are saying if you show more steps of your reasoning.
- arijo 17y ago
  It's not a common perspective on evolution, to my knowledge. That's why I submitted it to the discussion by brighter minds than my own. Don't you think the group as the last in a succession of units of evolution (gene, cell, multi-cellular organism, vertebrate, primate, group of primates?) is a plausible - even if not much debated yet - conjecture? Research has shown the existence of mirror neurons (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_neuron http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_neuron) in our brain - which I interpret as humans being hardwired to function as a group. It could explain depression, for example.
  - lucifer 17y ago
    The higher order unit (e.g. Bee Hive) for the humans is very compelling. But all n-th level units exhibit a pattern that is not immediately evident for the human group unit. 1 - Body. Every unit has a distinct physically cohesive component, that can symbolically be represented as a Circle. 2 - Nucleus. Every body has a distinct Center. (Queen Bee in the Hive.) 3 - Metabolic Network. Every unit is organized through the means of a metabolic network. (Bees use chemical signals.) So if there is a 'higher' human, we need to identify these characteristic features. Of course, the cyber utopians would (plausibly) propose that it is machine mediation that will (finally) give rise to the higher human unit. [edit/add: And Mystics, rejecting the black box model of Mind, would argue that meditation and group formation (e.g. Sufis and the Dance) that activates the higher man.]

YuriNiyazov 17y ago

I suspect that there is significant sample/perception bias in noticing the mental illnesses and suicides of famous people, because they are famous and attract attention. There are probably a lot of uncreative people who have significant mood disorder issues.

simplegeek 17y ago

I didn't come across that Scientific American article before (which this link discusses) but it indeed is one of the best explanations I've found so far--imho.

10ren 17y ago

But what do rats use the 5HT1A receptor for? Assuming that we humans do in fact use it for rumination, are they doing the rat equivalent? Do they... ponder?

10ren 17y ago

I did not know that the founder/inventor of Kodak film committed suicide. “My work is done. Why wait?”

angelbob 17y ago
There's a great analysis of his suicide, I think in the book "The Moral Animal". It made a lot of sense, when viewed from his point of view. Eastman was an energetic, engaging and vivacious young man who had been brought low by a series of illnesses -- including severe back problems such that he could hardly walk from room to room without pain. That prevented him from going out and photographing, which was his lifelong passion. His children were grown, and his company had succeeded past the point of needing him day to day. His summary of the situation was a pretty good one.

jlees 17y ago

The more I read articles like this, the more I start thinking my manic depressiveness is somehow cool. (If not even required for a successful entrepreneurial or creative career.) At least it's a step above freak, I guess.

zoba 17y ago

I found an article about Existential Depression in Gifted Individuals. It talks about this a bit. Part of what I took from the article is that gifted individuals have the capacity to appreciate things more than non gifted people. Therefore, when a depressing thing is being understood by a gifted person, it hits the person much harder than a non gifted because they can really understand all of what it means. http://www.sengifted.org/articles_counseling/Webb_ExistentialDepressionInGiftedIndividuals.shtml http://www.sengifted.org/articles_counseling/Webb_Existentia...

tokenadult 17y ago
I've had a lot of discussions with parents of gifted children about this, as I am now the state president of an association dealing with gifted education. And I have attended a conference of the national organization that hosts the link you kindly shared. I have two comments: a) There is some indication in some studies that high IQ is correlated with (that is, is a "risk factor" for) depressive illness. It is not at all clear what the causal mechanism may be, as correlation is not necessarily a sign of causation. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_causation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_caus... There is still ongoing research in various world cultures to confirm and explicate this finding of some studies. b) Some parents who talk about "existential depression" are just engaging in euphemism. Their children have regular, everyday depression, just like some kids who are not gifted. There is no carefully controlled study at all http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html suggesting much uniqueness in the expression of depressed mood in high-IQ persons as contrasted with average-IQ persons. Everyone who feels depressed deserves and needs compassion. (A fairly robust study finding is that persons who experience depression tend to experience less compassion from persons near to them than do persons who do not experience depression.) And gifted learners most definitely need educational provisions different from typical school programs. High-IQ adults may or may not feel they have a supportive social circle, depending crucially on their paths to higher education and the careers they pursue. Gifted people in general have special needs, and depressed people in general have special needs, and there may be a special intersection of needs in gifted people who are depressed, but it is not clear yet what role, if any, giftedness has in mood disorders.

alan-crowe 17y ago

Sometimes genius is about breaking through to sanity despite being surrounded by collective insanity. For example, Galileo's work on kinematics required a break through in attitude: that the discussion of quantitative phenomena required measurement and calculation. Given the limitations of metrology at the time any-one who strayed away from adjectives and blather was doomed to confuse themselves with experimental error. Galileo had to break through the insanity of simply accepting those limitations and cultivate the sanity of plugging away at improving your experimental set up until you got usable numbers. As a more modern example, the happy few who have made fortunes anticipating the current financial crisis have a claim on the title "financial genius". The insanity is believing that you cannot be too highly leveraged because house prices never fall. The genius lies in not getting sucked into the madness at the time; it looks unimpressive later, after the bubble has burst. "Unimpressive later" but how did it look at the time? If you break through to sanity despite being surrounded by collective insanity, your contempories look at you askance before delivering their verdict: it is you that is mad. This does horrible things to our ability to look at the realtion between genius and mental illness. Even if the route to genius lies in cultivating sanity, us mundane onlookers will still come away with the idea that geniuses are mad and be tempted to go in the opposite direction. People love that Niels Bohr quote "We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question which divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct. My own feeling is that it is not crazy enough." but quantum mechanics does not need to be invented twice. The usual nature genius is to see through the turbid intellectual drama of one's own time to grasp ideas that will one day seem plodding and obvious.

elblanco 17y ago

This is a fascinating subject for me. I have an uncle who by all accounts was a 1st-rate genius until he got to college, went mad and now spends most of his days sleeping from all the medication he takes.