The only difference between me and a madman is that I am not mad.
-- Salvador Dali
Flow -- the mental state of being completely present and fully immersed in a task -- is a strong contributor to creativity. When in flow, the creator and the universe become one, outside distractions recede from consciousness and one's mind is fully open and attuned to the act of creating. Since flow is so essential to creativity and well-being across many slices of life -- from sports, to music, to physics, to religion, to spirituality, to sex -- it's important that we learn more about the characteristics associated with flow so that we may all learn how to tap into this precious mental resource.
In a recent study reported in Schizophrenia Bulletin, Nelson and Rawlings propose that a mild form of schizophrenia called schizotypy may be positively associated with the experience of flow. Schizophrenia is a debilitating mental illness that affects roughly 1 percent of the population and involves altered states of consciousness and "abnormal" perceptual experiences. Schizotypy, which is a watered-down version of schizophrenia, consists of a constellation of personality traits that are evident to some degree in everyone.
High levels of schizotypy are typically found in relatives of individuals with full fledged schizophrenia. Some researchers have proposed that the genes that underlie schizophrenia may remain in the human gene pool because of the benefits those with schizotypy receive in terms of creativity; those with schizotypy have the genes that that may contribute to creativity without the debilitating genes that would prevent them from achieving their maximum potential.
Research confirms a link between schizotypy and creative achievement. In particular, "positive" schizotypal traits such as unusual perceptual experiences and magical beliefs tend to be elevated in artists, and "negative" schizotypal traits such as physical and social anhedonia (a feeling of emotional emptiness) and introversion tend to be associated with mathematical and scientific creativity. (Of course, there are scientists with positive schizotypal traits and artists with negative schizotypal traits -- I'm only talking relative numbers.)
But what about the connection between schizotypy and flow? Nelson and Rawlings make the intriguing suggestion:
Positive schizotypy is associated with central features of "flow"-type experience, including distinct shift in phenomenological experience, deep absorption, focus on present experience and sense of pleasure.
Similarly, in her fascinating and informative book, "Writing in Flow," Susan K. Perry comments:
It shouldn't play into any of your anxieties about the loss of control that comes with flow if I share with you that looseness and the ability to cross mental boundaries are aspects of both schizophrenic thinking and creative thinking.
To examine the connection between schizotypy and the experience of flow, Nelson and Rawlings had a sample of 100 artists from a wide range of artistic fields (including music, visual arts, theatre and literature) report aspects of their personality, their experiences of creativity and their levels of "postitive" schizotypal traits such as affective disturbance and mental boundaries.
Their "Experience of Creativity Questionnaire" measured the following components:
Consistent with prior research, they found that their sample of artists scored higher than the average population (based on norm data) on the schizotypal traits of unipolar affective disturbance (depression) and thin boundaries, as well as the personality traits of openness to experience and neuroticism.
Interestingly, they didn't replicate research showing elevated levels of bipolar mood disorder in artists. As a possible explanation, the researchers point out that their sample consists of mainly contemporary artists. As they point out, "creativity is a construct that varies not only across fields, but also across styles and artistic movements."
Indeed, clinical psychologist Louis A. Sass notes in his article, "Schizophrenia, Modernism and the 'Creative Imagination': On Creativity and Psychopathology," that most of the prior work on the link between bipolar and artistic creativity has been based on eminent classical artists from earlier periods, particularly the Romantic period. In his book, "Madness and Modernism: Insanity in the Light of Modern Art, Literature and Thought," Sass further makes the case that modernistic and postmodern artists report psychotic or schizotypal experiences.
According to Nelson and Rawlings:
These affinities include an adversarial stance, perspectivism and relativism, a certain fragmentation and passivization of the ego, loss of the ''worldhood of the world,'' rejection or loss of the sense of temporal flow or narrative unity, forms of intense self-reference and extreme and pervasive detachment or emotional distancing.
Most interestingly, Nelson and Rawlings found that the schizotypal traits of unipolar affective disturbance and thin boundaries were significantly associated with four components from their "Experience of Creativity Questionnaire": distinct experience, anxiety, absorption and power/pleasure. Note that three of these components (distinct experience, absorption and power/pleasure) are directly related to the experience of flow.
These findings are fascinating and beg the question: What mechanism or set of mechanisms account for the association between schizotypy and the experience of flow? The researchers argue that latent inhibition is of particular relevance to understanding this association (also see "Why Daydreamers Are More Creative").
Reduced latent inhibition represents an inability to screen out from awareness stimuli that have previously been tagged as irrelevant. Prior research has shown an association between reduced latent inhibition and psychosis. However, emeritus Professor David R. Hemsley at King's College, London argues that while this loosening of expectations based on previous experience may cause a disruption in sense of self, this mental process may also confer advantages for creativity. Recent research showing common genetic and neurotransmitter linkages (particularly dopamine) between both schizophrenia and creativity support this association at a biological level.
As the researchers note, the million dollar question is this: What distinguishes the person who, in the Philosopher Søren Kierkegaard's phrase, "drowns in possibility" from the person who is able to use his or her reduced latent inhibition in a way that enables heightened levels of creativity?
Some researchers have argued that intelligence and working memory may be factors that protect the individual with creative potential from falling over the edge into madness. Factors such as working memory and high executive functioning (which tend to show activations in the prefrontal cortex of the brain) may enable the individual with reduced latent inhibition to not go mad from the influx of emotions and sensations and make good use of the broad range of novel input. Indeed, researchers have found that the combination of high I.Q. and reduced latent inhibition is associated with creative achievement.
So how would reduced latent inhibition be associated with the phenomenology of flow? Nelson and Rawlings reason that the reduced latent inhibition's failure to precategorize stimuli as irrelevant would "result in immediate experience not being shaped or determined by preceding events." In addition:
it is precisely this newness of appreciation, and the associated sense of exploration and discovery, that stimulates the deep immersion in the creative process, which itself may trigger a shift in quality of experience, generally in terms of an intensification or heightening of experience.
I reckon that it is this openness to experience aspect (and associated functioning of the dopaminergic neurotransmitter system) that is crucial to understanding the schizotypy/flow connection. Self-reported openness to experience is in fact related to reduced latent inhibition, suggesting that openness to experience is a phenotype that is related to actual information processing.
Hopefully more research on the experience of flow conducted on both artists and scientists (flow is also important among scientists) will allow for a deeper appreciation of the potential for creativity in those who are prone to psychosis. Many creative folk who think in a certain way are annoyed by stereotypical associations between creativity and madness. And rightly so. While debilitating mental illness is certainly not conducive to creativity, exciting new research is starting to point to the conclusion that some mental mechanisms and dispositions that are associated with full-blown psychosis may also be present in varying degrees in everyone and may confer tremendous advantages to flow, creativity and what makes life meaningful.
Follow Scott Barry Kaufman, Ph.D. on Twitter: www.twitter.com/sbkaufman
Toni Emerson: The Creative Side of Love
Robert Leahy, Ph.D.: Inside the Manic Mind
Bill McKibben: Seizing Our Power: Why Now Is the Time for Creative, Courageous, Nonviolent Action
Creativity and mental illness - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Biological Basis For Creativity Linked To Mental Illness
The Mad Gene: Creativity and Mental Illness | Serendip's Exchange
I understand the idea of flow and being lost in it. Many times after writing for hours, I feel the need to decompress, before engaging with my family. It's almost like I have a hang over. I always called it "being in the zone".
But what I find so fascinating by this article, is the comparisons with schizophrenia. My brother is schizophrenic and we are very close. His mental illness has often made me wonder about my own mental health: the differences between he and I and our likenesses, the idea that schizophrenia could be genetic...
I am saving this article to research more of what you have mentioned. Thank you.
What can I say about flow other than when it arrives it's a cosmic horse I must ride into the ground?
I don't need IQ & "external" attention (WM) to shield me from madness. My internal WM & executive function control memories bubbling to the surface, daydreaming for 9 hrs straight with 0 fatigue. Haven't gone mad yet bc I don't seek Jonah Lehrer's disdractibility, "People unable to focus...look everywhere." Like the afflicted Russian mnemonist w/the cluttered brain.
Blessed be the child
who endured ridicule
after her soul’s reflection
turned yellow from jaundice and died.
Where was the future?
Could she survive with her tormentor
in No Exit hell?
The Grand Inquisitor made a lead room
and locked the door.
Would that child ever have her own identity?
Or, would abuse imprison her decisions in madness?
She didn’t know,
but one day she left.
Desire, inspiration, and innovation soared.
Twelve years later, mental illness
kindly wrapped her in destitution.
———————————
The little girl screams.
The world goes to work.
“It’s been 38 years since your father died.
You’ll never find that love again.”
The adult must make her understand
or all of them will die.
A dinner party with ruby glasses and red velvet chairs is held.
Black type on ivory linen place cards read
the little girl, who is the artist
the obsessive compulsive who fears loss
the ingenue, a sociopath’s dessert
the noble daughter of a great man
the soul, an abusive mother broke
the fighter
the dreamer
the maker
the poet
the soldier, friend, and lover…
While ordering everyone about, a green butler announces,
“The white rabbit will be late.”
Meow-filled condescension engulfs the Cheshire Cat.
“Change your hat!”
The red-eyed guest obeys, subserviently,
While maroon roses scent the room, darkly.
“United we stand, divided we fall,”
everyone says.
And so unted I’ll stand, and become me.
Great piece.
Einstein famously said “Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.” yet he had the discipline to reconcile the fruits of his imagination with his scientific knowledge. The satellites that inform a GPS device are time-corrected in accordance with Einsteinian relativity, and would not be accurate otherwise.
Mere chance in conjunction with “the prepared mind” is also a well known driver of scientific discovery or artistic inspiration. Schizophrenics tragically lose their capacity for reality checking. Some, with no such affliction, choose not to reality-check. Others overly distrust imagination.
In the life of an artist, creative maturity arrives at last, sometimes after years of honing the craft, when one is able to rise outside of oneself, gaining the ability to juxtapose the work against finely tuned measurements designed to keep that creation in the world of the real, the relevant and the resonant, no matter how original it is. Otherwise, this work is no different, ultimately, from the mental gyrations a madman might spurt.
What these measurements are exactly, I still can't say; after all, though I consider myself an avatar of fine and creative things, I do not for instance relate to the "Mona Lisa" or "Starry Night" or even to "Anna Karenina" despite the fact that the intelligentsia has deemed them worthy of canonical status. I do however consider these works powerful and relevant in themselves, even if they cast no shadows in my sphere of existence.
The late poet, Ted Hughes once said, paraphrasing, "It is possible to be totally disciplined and yet totally free."
I find your work interesting. There are a number of areas here, that I think need to addressed however. When talking about the line between schizophrenia and regular creativity, I think that another area needs to be examined. I call this Emotional IQ. It's the sum of a person's wisdom, maturity and spirituality. A high E-IQ would be manifested by above average tolerance, acceptance and compassion, (in a wide range of areas) and a realistic view of oneself. A low E-IQ would be manifested by intolerance, generalized anger and lack of empathy and a skewed view of oneself. I did a blog article on this:
http://weilerpsiblog.wordpress.com/2010/07/04/wisdom-and-maturity-your-emotional-iq/
The creative people that I have known have exhibited a high E-IQ and the schizophrenics a low one. (My uncle is a schizophrenic and I am highly creative.)
The explanation that makes the most sense to me is this: The creative/schizophrenic population is somehow wired to receive information in far less filtered fashion than the general population. Creative people learn how to assimilate this overload, and schizophrenics don't.
I would argue that this overload of information is psychic in nature, but that, of course, is forever being argued. (130 years and counting.)
There is a small part of me that doesn't want to hear that so much re: creativity can be explained by brain chemistry / structure / etc. Being in the Flow feels like such a unique experience that when it's really going well it is almost magical. So, I find that I'm struggling a bit to... come to terms with the science behind it. Reconcile might be a better word.
The anhedonia information reminds me of the complaints re: mental illness medication - that the drugs often make a person feel emotionally empty. I was put on an anti-depressive as an attempt to treat migraines, and w/in a week it was if someone had flipped a switch inside and turned off my feelings. It was horrible. And -- there was no way I could be creative, not with any hope of producing something resonant, and maybe not at all. That switch was turned off, too. So it makes complete sense to me that the schizotypal trait of Anhedonia would probably not be present in a majority of creative people.
You've given me a lot to think about. Thank you!
I do a blog for psychic people and depression and migraines come up a lot. I don't know why, but it seems to be common for psychic/creative people. I know I used to suffer from depression, but I've gotten past it. What worked for me was facing my fears. I think migraines are from shutting out something important that you need to face.
Like your new lolcat avatar btw ... :)