You can shine with madness

A few years ago, the National Geographic Channel asked me to express on record the things I was very curious to explore. I gave them several but if I had to pick only one, it would been this: Is creativity in some measure, always tinged with madness? If so, how much madness would make you creative and how much would just make you, well, simply mad?

Even as a child, “odd” people attracted my attention and inquiry. I had an army of cousins on my father’s side but I was closest to the one who had a passionate engagement with a strange triad of things: chemicals, martial arts and the piano. Kuya R gave me childhood days where, instead of flowers and dolls, I handled glass bubbles he constantly made for me. He also made me watch Bruce Lee films with him as often as they were shown in cinemas and taught me my first piece — “Speak Softly Love” on the piano without a sheet, when I was seven years old. He pursued those three enterprises with such intensity at that time that I thought then that it was what being “grown-up” meant so I eagerly watched and participated. If he had taken each further, spent at least 10,000 hours on each, he would have been a master of at least one. Instead, he ended up quite the opposite, doing various jobs he did not seem to really love or able to keep. I thought then and I still think it now, that my cousin was one of the most creative people I have known in my life. But he was also easily, one of the madmen I have come to know. Was he unique in being stretched by those two slants of mind?

Apparently, these two slants are found, significantly often enough, in the same mind. I was looking at published scientific studies on the relationship between creativity and mental illness and indeed, scientists have been investigating the links.

The latest study on it by researchers from the Karolinska Institute in Sweden was recently published in the Journal of Psychiatric Research. They looked at 40 years worth of records of 1.2 million patients and their relatives. They found that mental illness, particularly bipolar disorder, was common among the “notoriously” creative humans — the artists and scientists. In a previous study published in 2010 in PLoS One, scientific investigators looked at the brains of schizophrenics and highly creative people, and they found that they both had lower distribution of those receptors called D2 that process dopamine, the “feel good” hormone” in the thalamus — the relay center of the brain. They are not yet certain of how exactly this is linked with “creativity” but the scientists are guessing that less D2 would allow more “raw” signals to pass “unchecked” by receptors. Perhaps these “raw” signals are what enable creative people to think of novel ideas and jump out from humdrum solutions. These raw signals are also probably what makes schizophrenics sense “extra” things not present in common perception. However, it is still largely unknown as to how thin this army of receptors has to be to spell the difference between being creative and mentally ill.

So yes, creativity and madness are like day and night moving across the planet that is your mind. At what time do we call it madness and at which point do we praise it as creative genius? No one can tell yet but we just learned something crucial about this established relationship. Having an illness like bipolar disease should not confine you to looking at yourself (if you are diagnosed as bipolar) or others who are bipolar as possessing pure “negatively” stained minds. In the Journal of Affective Disorders published last April, a study revealed that there are people who are bipolar who consider it as much a gift as it is a problem. They mentioned that being bipolar intensified their perception of life experiences which probably gives them more to draw from when they need to come up with new approaches to things.

These findings do not lend a shadow of romance to mental disorders. Most often, we never really volunteer to be mentally ill (those who willingly abuse substances that cause mental damage are volunteers). Genes and circumstances usually recruit us to these states. Science here has shown that the mind is not “clean” in the sense that there is one clear state for creativity which we all welcome and another for mental illness, which is always a bummer. Apparently, the creative mind is naturally “stained” with tendencies to pull you down as it is with extraordinary tendencies to seize opportunities for novelty and brilliance. Madness and creativity seem to conquer and surrender to each other in maps of flickers inside our heads like shifting sands defining our state of mind. I think of my cousin and the glass bubbles of my childhood and wonder if these insights from science now could have changed anything for him. How I wish it had.

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