{"id":5716,"date":"2014-06-28T14:19:47","date_gmt":"2014-06-28T21:19:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/?p=5716"},"modified":"2014-07-07T14:26:39","modified_gmt":"2014-07-07T21:26:39","slug":"5716","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/2014\/06\/28\/5716\/","title":{"rendered":"“The lunatic, the lover, and the poet…”"},"content":{"rendered":"

from The Atlantic<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Secrets of the Creative Brain<\/h1>\n

A leading neuroscientist who has spent decades studying creativity shares her research on where genius comes from, whether it is dependent on high IQ\u2014and why it is so often accompanied by mental illness.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

by\u00a0Nancy Andreasen<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"Kyle Bean<\/em><\/p>\n

As a psychiatrist\u00a0and neuroscientist who studies creativity, I\u2019ve had the pleasure of working with many gifted and high-profile subjects over the years, but Kurt Vonnegut\u2014dear, funny, eccentric, lovable, tormented Kurt Vonnegut\u2014will always be one of my favorites. Kurt was a faculty member at the Iowa Writers\u2019 Workshop in the 1960s, and participated in the first big study I did as a member of the university\u2019s psychiatry department. I was examining the anecdotal link between creativity and mental illness, and Kurt was an excellent case study.<\/p>\n

He was intermittently depressed, but that was only the beginning. His mother had suffered from depression and committed suicide on Mother\u2019s Day, when Kurt was 21 and home on military leave during World War\u00a0II. His son, Mark, was originally diagnosed with schizophrenia but may actually have bipolar disorder. (Mark, who is a practicing physician, recounts his experiences in two books,\u00a0The Eden Express<\/i>\u00a0and\u00a0Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So<\/i>, in which he reveals that many family members struggled with psychiatric problems. \u201cMy mother, my cousins, and my sisters weren\u2019t doing so great,\u201d he writes. \u201cWe had eating disorders, co-dependency, outstanding warrants, drug and alcohol problems, dating and employment problems, and other \u2018issues.\u2019\u2009\u201d)<\/p>\n

While mental illness clearly runs in the Vonnegut family, so, I found, does creativity. Kurt\u2019s father was a gifted architect, and his older brother Bernard was a talented physical chemist and inventor who possessed 28 patents. Mark is a writer, and both of Kurt\u2019s daughters are visual artists. Kurt\u2019s work, of course, needs no introduction.<\/p>\n

For many of my subjects from that first study\u2014all writers associated with the Iowa Writers\u2019 Workshop\u2014mental illness and creativity went hand in hand. This link is not surprising. The archetype of the mad genius dates back to at least classical times, when Aristotle noted, \u201cThose who have been eminent in philosophy, politics, poetry, and the arts have all had tendencies toward melancholia.\u201d This pattern is a recurring theme in Shakespeare\u2019s plays, such as when Theseus, in\u00a0A Midsummer Night\u2019s Dream<\/i>, observes, \u201cThe lunatic, the lover, and the poet\u00a0\/ Are of imagination all compact.\u201d John Dryden made a similar point in a heroic couplet: \u201cGreat wits are sure to madness near allied,\u00a0\/ And thin partitions do their bounds divide.\u201d<\/p>\n

Compared with many of history\u2019s creative luminaries, Vonnegut, who died of natural causes, got off relatively easy. Among those who ended up losing their battles with mental illness through suicide are Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, Vincent van Gogh, John Berryman, Hart Crane, Mark Rothko, Diane Arbus, Anne Sexton, and Arshile Gorky.<\/p>\n

[ click to continue reading at The Atlantic<\/a> ]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

from The Atlantic Secrets of the Creative Brain A leading neuroscientist who has spent decades studying creativity shares her research on where genius comes from, whether it is dependent on high IQ\u2014and why it is so often accompanied by mental illness.\u00a0 by\u00a0Nancy Andreasen Kyle Bean As a psychiatrist\u00a0and neuroscientist who studies creativity, I\u2019ve had the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5716","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture-art"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5716","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5716"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5716\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5716"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5716"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5716"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}