article: "Is Genius a Disease?"

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Is genius a disease?
Michael McDuffie, Cavalier Daily Science Columnist

Whether it is one general ability "g" or a variety of context-dependent intelligences, the nature of intelligence has been an elusive concept to clearly define. What about Einstein, Van Gogh and Nietzsche makes them remarkable? As human beings, we exalt their feats often without a thought as to what it is to be "genius." The question remains: What composes genius? Throughout history there has been an echo of one maxim in this regard: There is a fine line between genius and madness.

Anecdotally, one can easily conjure examples of those who exhibit genius and generalized psychopathologies: Poe, Dickenson and Schumann. One such pathology is that of hypomania, where cycling periods of depression and mania occur. This state of mania is associated with euphoria, elevated self-esteem, flight of ideas, reduced need for sleep, disregard for social convention and an increase in goal-directed behavior sometimes with short-term distractibility. In the cases of Dickenson and Schumann, the periodicity of their intellectual production has been correlated with perceived changes in state. It is worth noting, however, that retroactive diagnosis is a subjective exercise making meaningful analysis difficult.

In corroboration with these findings, Kay Jamison, a professor at Johns Hopkins University, has produced correlation studies on the relation between hypomania and creative pursuits such as art and writing. Jamison's findings suggest that there is a higher prevalence of hypomania in such fields, strengthening a potential link between hypomania and creative genius. Although Jamison's studies have been questioned on methodological grounds, it is clear there is an association of uncertain strength.

A similar association exists between a high functioning form of autism known as Asperger's syndrome and genius. Asperger's symptoms are lack of general social skills, obsessive behavior with regard to certain items or subjects, advanced rote memorization and deficient motor skills. Like hypomania, subjects often have an increase in the experience of having ideas, have decreased awareness of social norms, and show high affinities for certain objectives; these characteristics seem conducive for intellectual achievement. This evidence, however, is only circumstantial as it is exceedingly difficult to gather concrete, statistically significant data to support such a phenomenon, but the association is undeniable considering the case of idiot savants.

Clearly, there is some association between certain mental disorders and enhanced intellectual capacity, but a mechanism is necessary to support such an association. One such mechanism could be evolution. This highly speculative view, championed by David Horrobin, suggests that certain mental disorders, such as schizophrenia could have contributed to the development of higher cognitive functioning. Such developments include theory of mind, reason, language, and the ability to make connections between apparently unrelated events. The suggestion is that the development of such characteristics may have required degrees of mental instability or plasticity. Alternatively, schizophrenia could just be a deleterious by-product of the development of such characteristics.

What can be suggested is that the traits that human beings find advantageous in what we term "genius" like obsessive devotion to a single area, disregard for convention and increased flurries of ideas can also be the same symptoms of psychological disorder; perhaps differing in social acceptance and magnitude. These mental disorders are clearly a product of evolution, but in what manner is simply a matter of speculation. This connection has interesting implications for the pharmacological treatment of mental disorder.

Although there has been much success in the treatment of mental disorder, the majority of effective medications used for treatments such as lithium, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors and Ritalin have poorly understood mechanisms of action. Further, despite the best efforts of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders and the cognitive science movement in psychology, the diagnosis of mental disorder remains mostly a subjective task. Could it be possible that the drugs used to treat common mental disorders like bipolar, depression and Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) suppress mechanisms for mental plasticity necessary for creative insight? The answer is yes, but there is no way of knowing the actualities of such a claim without a more thorough understanding of the action of these drugs. Until such a time when there is greater understanding, it would behoove psychiatrists to demonstrate judicious restraint in prescription of such drugs.

Michael McDuffie can be reached at michaelmcduffie@cavalierdaily.com.

from the University of Virginia's "The Cavalier Daily"

Oh, I can't understand half of the words they are not in my dictionary. I am sooo addicted to dictionaries.
But this is a cool article, I agree with it(the questions raised) I am totally against drugs, and I think they would make me less creative for sure.

I use the FireFox web browser. It has an on-line dictionary plug-in (extension) that allows you to right-click on a word on a web page and open a new window with the dictionary entry automatically loaded into it.

Being a genius is a disease, especially if you're the only normal guy in a family of 3 genius brothers...

One of the smartest people I've ever known has PDD-NOS, ADHD, OCD and ODD.

Antidepressants and antipsychotics certainly inhibit creativity. I'm a scientist and when I am in a good mood (maybe hypomania to a certain extent), I can think of new ideas and do many things at once - generally better and more efficiently than most other people. When I'm depressed I can only do routine things with no interaction with other people. Antidepressants/antipsychotics make it easier to interact with other people, but take away both my creativity and my drive to work harder, and as a result I barely did anything for the year I was on them (and the memory loss they cause mean I can barely remember what I did do). I have the impression that they make me more 'normal', but I find myself incredibly boring and my general view is that I'd rather be dead than like that for more than a very short period of time.

Since coming off them I have gone back to mild cycles of depression and happiness, but they are fairly stable, not too far off normality and generally very productive (even in the depressive stages where I can spend a lot of time doing routine tasks where I don't have to interact). The problem is if they become more severe then I stop being able to work effectively at all, and instead of a happy productive hypomania I start having a more unstable sort of active depression which is even worse than the usual passive depression and makes me mute, unpredictable and very unhappy and anxious.

This is well known... the same genetics that cause disability also cause genius. The two things run in the same families. After all, isn't genius "being able to think of things most people can't think of"? That's atypical, by definition. Nobody defines it as genius when somebody processes the subtext beneath somebody else's words to deduce he's being sarcastic; but it's every bit as processing-intensive as composing music or solving a physics problem. It's just more common--as in, most people can do it. When most people can't do it, that's genius. To do things most people can't do, you have to have a brain that's different from most people's. Atypical is not necessarily pathological, but typical is never pathological, so atypical is much more likely to cause problems--and create genius...