What is Creative Genius?

By Dov Michaeli MD, PhD August 30, 2015

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Creative genius is not just about IQ, its how the

brain is wired
When I was a senior in high school, we had to solvewhat was for me
incredibly difficult differential equations for our math homework. The solution to
one problem could take a full page or two, and several hours to complete. The
next day in class, the teacher would call on one of us who would have to stand
up and read the solution to a problem from his notebook.
One nerdy-looking kid, lets call him U, never did any homework. But when
called upon, he would stand up and read the correct solution off a blank page!
The kid was a math whiz and everybody was sure he was going to end up a
professor somewhere.

The creative genius saw patterns that ordinary people did not
Y, another classmate, also solved the problems (in a few minutes, I might add),
sometimes coming at them from a completely unexpected angle that was
breathtaking in its originality. How did he see this solution so clearly when the
rest of us, including the teacher, saw only the conventional path to the solution?
We didnt really know.
Y went on to become an internationally renowned mathematician, while U ended
up a lab technician. Both boys had superior IQs. But one was closer to a savant
who could perform incredible math feats, while the other saw patterns that
ordinary people did nothe was a creative genius.

What do we know about genius and creativity?

Lewis Madison Terman, author of Genetic Studies

of Genius | via Wikipedia
Lewis Terman, the creator of the IQ scale, initiated the longest-running
longitudinal study of genius in the world. In 1921, he recruited the creme de la
creme, the top 1%, of third to eighth graders in California schools. In total 857
boys and 672 girls, all having IQ scores between 135 and 200, participated in
the study, being re-evaluated at regular intervals throughout their lives. The
results are published in Termans book, Genetic Studies of Genius, now running
at five volumes as well as a monograph, and dozens of articles.
And the results? Well, The high IQ people didnt do too badly in life. Physically,
they were taller, healthier, and more athletic than their non-genius peers; the
only physical deficit that was more common was myopia. They were also more
socially mature and generally better adjusted. And, they had happy marriages
and, in general, they earned high salaries.
But 30% of the men and 33% of the women didnt graduate from college. A
large number of them ended up in semi-skilled trades and clerical positions.
Importantly, by and large, high IQ did not predict creative achievement in later
life.

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When the cohort of 757 individuals who were available for follow-up at mid-life
were evaluated, the researchers found that only three were engaged in creative
activities. One was an Oscar-winning film director and two were successful
writers.
Conversely, several studies have shown that groups of highly creative people
(e.g., well-known writers, successful architects), have mean IQs in the 120
range. An IQ in this range is considered to be superior, but it is not in the
genius range.
So what does it take to be creative? Before we answer that, we have to take a
look at where and how the brain thinks.

Where does the brain think?

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Nancy Andreasen is the chairwoman of the Dept. of Psychiatry at the University
of Iowa Medical School. In 2000, she was awarded the Presidents National

Medal of Science for pioneering use of brain imaging to study cognitive

processes and mental illness. Being at the University of Iowa, where the
famed Writers Workshop is located, she had a rich source of creative subjects
to study creativity. She summarized her seminal work on the subject in 2011,
and in an article in Atlantic magazine in 2014.
In an intensive case-control study, each subject in her study was interviewed in
depth for two days. Everything was explored: their personal history, family
history, mental illnesses in the family, their history of creative accomplishments,
their work habits, the ways they develop their ideas and complete their work,
and their own thoughts as to how their creative process works.
They were then instructed, while they were in an MRI machine, to take 3
association tests. One is a word association test, during which the subject
silently reads a word and then responds with the first word that comes to mind.
The other is a picture association test, during which the subject looks at a
picture and responds with the first thought about the picture that comes to
mind.
These two tasks tap into the process of making verbal and visual associations. A
third task was selected in order to examine brain activity during abstract
pattern recognition, a process similar to that occurring during some aspects of
scientific creativity.
Unsurprisingly, during the word association test, the word association regions of
the brain became activated. Likewise, during the picture association test, the
visual association regions lit up. And during the pattern recognition test, the
visual-spatial association regions became active.

Free-association

Then, a fourth task was added. The subjects were told to just relax and let
their brains free-associate. They were told that they could think about whatever
pops up. This is what is called the default state. Andreasen refers to this as
REST or Random Episodic Silent Thoughts. But the fMRI showed something far
different from resting.
The process of free-association allows the association cortices of the human
brain to converse with one another in a free and uncensored manner! And, as
one would guess, the difference between the creative subjects and the
comparison group was the intensity of the interactions between the association
cortices. In creative people, there is simply more of it.

How does thinking happen?

The current models of the brain conceptualize it as being made up of
distributed circuits comprised of nodes that mutually share the responsibility
for creating its outputs
This study tells us where thinking happens. But not how it happens. One answer
to the question is that the prefrontal cortex, the executive center of the brain,
filters out the noise, integrates the relevant input, and voila, a thought is born.
However, this is misleading. The current models of the brain conceptualize it as
being made up of distributed circuits comprised of nodes that mutually share
the responsibility for creating its outputs. If that is the case, then how do we go
from chaotic babble to coherent thought?

Chaos theory

In 1987, James Gleick published a best-seller called, Chaos: Making a New

Science. Chaos in the biblical sense meant just that: Total disorder.
But chaos theory is also called complexity theory. It is the study of dynamic and
nonlinear processes and of self-organizing systems. If you are feeling
intimidated by this description, then just imagine a kaleidoscope. As you turn it,
the colorful little pieces inside self-organize into beautiful patterns.
Self-organization occurs in a variety of biological systems. We see selforganization in the flocking of birds and in the seemingly sudden organization of
millions upon millions of solitary grasshoppers to form a well-organized army of
locusts.
All of these things produce a form of organization in which the control is not
centralized, but rather is distributed throughout the entire system. The system
is dynamic, and changes arise spontaneously and frequently produce something
new. Again, think of the kaleidoscope. Every once in a while a more coherent
pattern emerges, like a perfect polygon of some incredible color combination.
The human brain is the ultimate self-organizing system. Creativity is one of its
most important emergent properties.

Creative, but crazier?

John Forbes Nash, Jr. | by Peter Badge |

viaWikipedia | CC BY-SA 3.0
The stereotypical image of creative geniuses is that they are just not
completely normal. Just think of Van Gogh who severed his ear. Or Willian
Styrons description of his suicidal depression in his bestseller,Darkness Visible:
A Memoir of Madness. Or Robert Schumann suffering from debilitating, and
ultimately fatal, manic-depression as he wrote his third symphony.
In her first Iowa study, Andreasen found that 80% of her creative subjects had
had some kind of mood disorder at some time of their lives, compared with
30% of the control group. Conversely, there is evidence that high scorers on
neuroticism tend to be more creative than low scorers. One study of 257
professional painters and sculptors living in Germany, found that the male
artists were significantly more neurotic than the male non-artists. Similarly,
individuals working in creative roles in the advertising industry tend to score
significantly higher on neuroticism than employees in noncreative roles.

So what gives? Why are they more prone to paranoia, obsessive-compulsive

disorder, bipolar disease, and schizophrenia?
In her Atlantic magazine article, Andreasen quotes from A Beautiful
Mind, Sylvia Nasars biography of John Nash, the mathematician who saw
patterns that others could not and, among other things ( like developing the
mathematical foundation for game theory), proposed a cryptography machine
(disclosed by the NSA) that was based on computational hardness. John Nash
was schizophrenic.
A fellow mathematician who visited him while he was institutionalized at McLean
Hospital, asked him How could you, a mathematician, a man devoted to reason
and logical truth, believe that you are being recruited by aliens from outer
space to save the world? To which Nash replied: because the ideas I had
about supernatural beings came to me the same way that my mathematical
ideas did. So I took them seriously.
As Andreason concludes,

Some people see things others cannot, and when they are right, we call them
creative geniuses. Some people see things others cannot, when they are
wrong, we call them mentally ill. Some people, like John Nash, do both.