Nobel laureate John Forbes Nash, whose life inspired the movie "A Beautiful Mind", the great musician Ludwig van Beethoven, Edgar Allan Poe writer, the painter Vincent Van Gogh, the scientist Isaac Newton.
Some of the greatest geniuses of mankind have been classified as "crazy". Also, some scientific studies suggest that poets, painters, musicians, writers and general creative character, are more affected by bipolar disorder in a much higher percentage than the general population and creativity and madness.
Attest to this phenomenon where some of the most prolific artistic minds and famous writers such as Virginia Woolf and Ernest Hemingway, the composer Sergey Rachmaninoff, and the painters Paul Gauguin and Jackson Pollock, who have suffered, with certainty or high probability, also called manic-depressive.
Creativity and Madness
An investigation by the University of Toronto (Canada) has found that creative people have little or no "latent inhibition", ie the unconscious ability to reject unimportant or irrelevant stimuli creativity and madness..
Normally, an ordinary person classifies an object and then forgets it, although it might be more complex and interesting than you think. In contrast, creative individuals remain in contact with the additional information that comes to the environment constantly and are always open to new possibilities, according to Canadian experts creativity and madness.
Other studies have pointed to a possible link between certain mental disorders such as psychosis or schizophrenia, with increased activity and creative and artistic predisposition creativity and madness..
According to a group of researchers from the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, who has been studying the functioning of the human mind with the help of different brain imaging, the processes of neurons in highly creative people who are saved "striking similarities" with those of individuals who suffer from some form of schizophrenia.
Shadows of dementia and madness
According to the Swedish study, led by Professor Frederik Ullén, both groups of people, both the creative as suffering from a mental illness, lack of important receptors (brain structures that interact with some substances also brain called neurotransmitters) involved in the filtering and channeling of thought creativity and madness..
Professor Ullén believed that the presence of fewer dopamine receptors in the brain's thalamus, likely to result in a lower degree of filtering of signals and stimuli from abroad and, therefore, a greater flow of information.
Apparently, this glut of unfiltered information that could favor the occurrence of unexpected connections of different ideas that are at the base of creative and artistic processes. Although this same phenomenon also plays an important role in some mental disorders such as schizophrenia, according to Swedish researchers.
According Ullén and his group, free of inhibitions "processing" of information is what enables some people to turn the spark of creativity, discovering unexpected connections between very different elements, trying to solve problems.
People with schizophrenia share the creative, that remarkable ability to make novel associations, but in case of patients the result is strange and disturbing ideas.
